Successes of Combining Sales Acceleration and CRM Systems

What Used to Take Four Days, Now Takes 2 Hours

Winning! “It’s all about the sales team winning,” says James Tenner, president of Broadleaf Services. “They want to bring in sales and bring home compensation.” As president, it’s Tenner’s job to support and guide his team toward those wins. So, he made a decision which allowed them to be winners. He found a way to increase their speed, ease and efficiency with ConnectLeader’s sales acceleration technology. And once he realized how well these tools worked with Salesforce and his CRM system, Tenner embraced the entire ConnectLeader suite: the Team Dialer®, Personal Dialer®, ClickDialer® and Remote Coach®.

Broadleaf is an IT sales and consulting firm that works with mid-market companies to solve their IT and data storage needs. Due the highly technical nature of Broadleaf’s B2B sales, Tenner needs his sales reps to be a full cycle reps. He needs them to make the initial contact, identify the services or goods to be procured, accept the intended purchase, and make the transaction that completes the sale.

“As a full cycle sales person, I have limited time in the office,” says Chuck Mosca, Sales Consultant at Broadleaf. The job requires him to be out in the field working with engineers. As Mosca put it, “I need to set the appointments for next week, in the limited amount of time I have in the office this week.” Team Dialer® allowed him to maximize his efforts in a short period of time.

The Broadleaf sales team met weekly to conduct a ‘call blitz.’ They spent two hours on the phone with the agent-assisted auto dialer making calls to schedule appointments for the following week. The spirit of being together, being a team, created competition, fun and challenges between them, as they worked off each other’s energy. After a few sessions, it was clear to Tenner that these calling blitzes were keeping the pipelines full and even with their busy schedules.

“We’ve looked at numbers over the years,” says Tenner. “It takes about two hundred dials before we’re actually able to get a meeting with a customer. ConnectLeader’s phone dialer technology allows us to do those two hundred dials in less than two hour time frame, as opposed to taking three or four days.”

Once the contact was made, with the Personal Dialer®, Moska found that he had at his fingertips-- on single pane-of-glass--all the information he needed in order to be prepared for establishing a relationship with key prospects. “I was notorious before using ConnectLeader for not being very effective at translating notes and capturing them in the CRM system,” says Moska. “So, what I love about ConnectLeader is its seamless integration with Salesforce. It allows me to capture call notes in an automated way as part of the process.”

With the Remote Coach®, real-time guidance added the final touch to the winning process. While the team is making their calls, Broadleaf’s head of sales is able to listen to and also record them for further study. And at the end of each session, he could review the calls with the them, critiquing and offering suggestions for improvement.

“It’s a painful process, making outbound calls, cold calls,” says Moska. “Every sales leader will tell you that. What the ConnectLeader platform did for us was to automate it, make it a lot less painful, and much more efficient.”

The right players, good equipment and trusted guidance are needed ingredients for any winning team. Tenner realized he had his players, all he needed was the right equipment. Once he went with ConnectLeader’s platform powered by its predictive intelligence engine, Adaptylitics™, he realized that he now had all the pieces he needed in order to make a successful team. He now had the right equipment to make what used to be hard, easy. And it was this ease coupled with the speed under good guidance, which created a winning spirit among them -- a team spirit -- which today makes Broadleaf a company that just keeps winning.

Author: Senraj Soundar, CEO, ConnectLeader