Mobile and analytics highlight SAVO's summer release Analyst: Martin Schneider 17 Jul, 2012 SAVO Group has long been entrenched in some very large businesses as a sales-enablement tool. Over the years the company has built up a strong array of products married to an underlying platform. Its target market was primarily very large sales organizations with the goal of optimizing bland sales force automation deployments. As concepts like mobile sales, analytics and social selling continue to grow, SAVO has answered the charge. In addition, the company has divorced its core applications from its platform. Now, it can sell stand-alone applications such as mobile tools to smaller businesses, or use the modular apps to build a land-and-expand strategy inside larger organizations. The move should open up the addressable market and shorten the overall deal cycle for SAVO, bringing in recurring cash at a faster pace. The 451 Take All sales organizations need better tools, so SAVO is smart to widen its scope. The key for the company will be evangelizing how it can help both large and small businesses optimize their existing CRM spending ensuring that they do not lose out to vendors opting to rip and replace aging CRM tools. The mobile tools are ideally built for sales processes, something rare in the mobile CRM space, and SAVO's novel take on social selling could be a winner if presented well to the heads of sales in its target market. Strategy SAVO Group has had an interesting history. The company began as a consultancy, and then productized its sales-enablement methodology and tools as a SaaS offering over the past few years. Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 1
It tended to sell to large companies, but realized that even large sales organizations were looking to deploy in phased approaches, not huge all-you-can-eat projects. Also, SAVO wanted to better align its product lineup and pricing with the resource-constrained SMB sales organizations of the world. Therefore, the company spent the past six months or so re-architecting its offerings more as a platform. This way, it can build more modular applications (such as social-selling tools, mobile access apps and process-automation tools) on top of the platform, or sell the singular apps to smaller or more-focused sales teams. This makes sense: by working on one platform with a plug-and-play application model on top, SAVO can get its foot in many more doors. The company says it is ramping up separate marketing teams to test the waters for the midmarket for these point products. It is looking to build more telesales and inbound marketing models around these tools, since they offer faster sales cycles and higher deal volume. In addition, SAVO will be enhancing its channel network to sell the smaller modules, providing a referral fee to the partner, and then looking to convert enterprises directly on the larger SAVO platform. Technology Perhaps the most important aspect of SAVO's platform reinvention is the integration layer underneath the platform and apps. The company says businesses are doing more integration between marketing tools like Eloqua, core CRM like salesforce.com, ERP systems, and other methodology or data services and it can act as the glue or general front end to the sales agent. The benefit to sales agents is that SAVO can render data from CRM or ERP tools without lengthy login and searching, as well as write data back to these systems data entry long being the bane of a salesperson's existence. In terms of the mobile capabilities, the platform now fully supports Android, Blackberry, iphone and ipad access. Users can also access the tools inside custom mobile or other apps through an open API. The mobile tools present an interesting set of use cases. For example, new capabilities enable rich media-guided selling, allowing an agent in the field to quickly view a training or coaching video session on the road before a key meeting. Users can customize the presentation tools with their own logos, enabling custom-branded mobile sales presentations. A 'tribal knowledge' or social sales integration helps users reach the right knowledge (person or content) from their device. And a new 'asset kit' capability allows marketing (or sales) staff to create prebuilt or custom sets of marketing collateral that can be easily distributed to prospects via a mobile device. SAVO has also partnered with Jaspersoft to create Insight, a new BI analytics tool on top of the core Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 2
platform. Insight is designed to pull data from various systems (ERP, CRM, demand-generation tools, etc.) and combined with SAVO data provide more advanced and deeper sales intelligence to agents and managers. The idea is to use BI for leading-indicator not lagging-indicator usage. The tool will provide insight into which sales agents are using the tools provided (mobile capabilities, coaching, social collaboration, etc.) to the best advantage. The idea is to learn actual best practices not simply which sales rep will close the most deals and discover how to formalize methodologies accordingly. In addition, the company is relaunching its take on collaboration with SAVO Social. SAVO believes most 'social' tools do not fit well with the sales organization. Sales agents tend to exhibit less social behavior (in terms of using technology) and often do not seek out help or coaching until it may be too late to salvage a deal. SAVO Social is designed to use social media-like experiences to identify potential trouble spots in an agent's opportunity pipeline based on data in and around the interactions and then trigger a social experience. The social experience is essentially a custom workspace generated for the agent that is prepopulated with both coaching materials and access to the right knowledge workers to help move the deal along. The tool seems to require strong integration to the CRM system to trigger the creation of the SAVO Social workspace, but if effective could be an innovative take on bringing social to the sales process in a useful context. Competition SAVO competes on a number of levels, so to speak. At its core sales-enablement level, the company must evangelize that it is not competitive but rather complementary to a sales methodology, or tools like Qvidian or icentera. From a sales knowledge management and sales/marketing collateral management perspective, the company can vie with homebuilt portals or enterprise content management approaches using tools like Documentum or Alfresco. As the company moves into more cloud, social and mobile messaging, it may see social content collaboration plays like Huddle and even Box pop up. When it comes to the social-selling vision, enterprise social networking platform providers like Jive Software and Lithium Technologies might be a concern. But really, we are seeing a lot of the enterprise-focused CRM players themselves emerge with similar takes on reinventing the sales model in the age of mobile and social. SAP acquired SuccessFactors not simply for HR management, but rather as a new people-oriented and mobile-first front end to better engage, connect and push data to the end user. Also, salesforce.com has made many acquisitions and developed its Chatter platform to build out a more flexible, mobile and social experience for users and their customers. Battling for budget versus CRM providers might be the biggest issue. As many large enterprises Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 3
with large-scale Siebel (now part of Oracle) deployments are looking to get more modern, this represents a huge opportunity for SAVO but also has many other CRM vendors chomping at the bit for a piece of the action. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses SAVO thinks with the end user in mind, and has created a unique approach to social. It offers strong mobile options that push the right content to an agent's fingertips. Opportunities Threats Breaking up the platform and application layers should open up new downmarket opportunities for SAVO, and help it gain more visibility as its customer count rises. The company has played at the edges of CRM, and has yet to really crack into the mainstream. However, recent development in the area of social and mobile should help. SAP and salesforce.com are both pushing the mobile experience and social aspects of their updated CRM visions. Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 4
Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; 2011. This report was originally published within 451 Research s Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: www.451research.com Copyright 2012 - The 451 Group 5