Selling the New SunGard Way

How much is at stake in a sales transformation? According to extensive research by global sales and marketing consulting firm ZS Associates, companies that move their sales force effectiveness metrics from average to excellent as part of a sales transformation can increase profitable growth by 5 to 15 percent – and sometimes by 20 percent or more.

Those numbers would make almost any sales leader sit up and take notice. On the other hand, a sales transformation is a staggering endeavor. Not only does an overhaul of this scale take several months to plan and execute, it requires strategic and coordinated effort among a team of senior leaders whose priorities are tightly aligned. And, of course, successful change requires consistent, crystal-clear communication companywide. Everyone on the lowest to the highest rung on the ladder must be a stakeholder and understand how change will result in a better, brighter future.

A Transformation Journey Begins

In December 2011, Jim Neve was appointed senior vice president of global sales and marketing operations at SunGard. In February 2012, Neve brought Ken Powell on board as vice president of global sales enablement. The two had worked together on other successful, large-scale sales transformations, and their aim at SunGard was to create similar success. Neve and Powell understood that SunGard needed to address problems familiar to most enterprise sales organizations: globalization, the explosion of the Internet and its effects on buyers’ access to information, increased compliance requirements imposed by governments, and tighter budgets imposed on IT departments.

SunGard also faced some unique challenges, however. On the way to building its existing reputation as one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies, SunGard grew largely by acquisition. Since its founding in 1982, more than 160 acquisitions have taken place. When Neve and Powell came on board, SunGard’s go-to-market approach was highly fragmented, left to the individual businesses to define. Frequently, multiple sales reps pursued the same clients. The company had thousands of consultants engaged in professional services work, yet its main selling focus was licensed software.

“We were moving from a holding company to an operating company,” Powell says. “We needed to maximize our channels, sell the broadest set of solutions possible, and go to market in a coordinated manner. We needed to build a sustainable growth engine.”

Selling the SunGard Way

One of the primary goals for the initiative was to shift to what was branded internally as “Selling the SunGard Way.” SunGard leaders wanted reps who could understand the buyer’s journey, anticipate customer needs, and tailor interactions to meet shifting concerns. In sum, they wanted reps to be equipped to sell based on insight. In doing so, they hoped to create a sales force that could differentiate SunGard from competitors by leveraging knowledge, experience, and expertise.

It was vital that reps be capable of becoming long-term partners and trusted advisors for both current and prospective customers. The transformation would lead to selling solutions that combine leading technology and services from across all SunGard units, not just the product divisions. Moreover, sales presentations would deliver, not just product information, but also insight into improving each customer’s business. The SunGard rep’s ability to make the sales experience a beneficial one for the customer would rise above product functionality and price.

One of the key starting points was to administer a global sales-productivity survey to 500 sales associates to get insight on the current and desired state of sales readiness across the firm. Among many findings, the survey revealed that 80 percent of reps were concerned with getting better training, as well as good, competitive analyses and more effective sales campaigns. They also wanted better data, fewer administrative tasks, and a simplified Salesforce interface. This survey helped SunGard develop and shape a detailed transformation plan.

An Investment in Change

To support this plan for change, SunGard needed to overhaul a number of different practices. For example, in addition to improving and refining its value proposition with the assistance of Corporate Visions, SunGard also needed to alter how sales reps are selected, trained, managed, and compensated. Senior leaders determined that the plan would require an investment totaling in the millions – a steep price tag; however, the more senior executives realized the value of the proposed changes, the more eager they were to find ways to finance them. In some cases, they shifted budgets from ineffective programs and reallocated funds to projects related to the sales transformation. “The whole organization gravitated toward change,” Powell says. “[Everyone] knew it had to happen.”

This was in part thanks to the fact that key leaders spent months educating decision makers within the company and planting seeds for growth and change. As a partner company involved closely with SunGard’s sales transformation, ZS Associates was impressed by the groundwork already laid.

“What was unusual about SunGard is that Neve and Powell had architected the transformation well before they ever brought us in,” notes Ashish Vazirani, leader of ZS’s high-tech practice. This architecture made it easier for ZS Associates to bring its own expertise to the table and help SunGard better segment its markets (in part by heightening focus on major accounts). The collaboration improved SunGard managers’ understanding of different types of customers and what additional products each type might buy, and this understanding thus empowered them to make better strategic decisions about which prospects to pursue.

Seeing Change from the Ground Level

Todd Albright, senior vice president of Americas sales for asset management, joined SunGard in late 2012 for two reasons: “There was a tremendous product suite that had yet to capture its full market share, and there was an abundant amount of executive sponsorship of the transformation, from the CEO on down,” he shares. Albright says the firm never could have captured its rightful market share without the sales transformation.

In fact, a major goal in the transformation was to establish a consistent set of procedures, metrics, and tools, as well as a cohesive training infrastructure that could be used throughout the sales organization. One of the most obvious resources to tap was SunGard’s CRM and sales-management tool, Salesforce, which was reconfigured to guide salespeople through all the necessary steps they need to take to more effectively close a sale. Accordingly, SunGard has made a number of resources easily available from within this system. For example, Launch International has built a set of assets, sales tools and a framework, to help guide SunGard sales associates to key content and sales tools (case studies, white papers, market data, etc.) to help them with situational selling challenges. To serve up this content in a seamless manner, SunGard partnered with SAVO to create a one-stop shop to access it all directly from inside Salesforce.

To keep the sales force informed about the latest market happenings, SunGard has built and integrated its market research and analyst-relations strategy into a sales enablement support infrastructure. This includes publishing an “insights vault,” where reps can search for facts, figures, and trends, and a schedule of quarterly briefings, so subject matter experts can inform the sales associates about noteworthy events taking place in the industry and emphasize how they relate to SunGard solutions.

Tackling Hiring and Onboarding Challenges

Partnering with such firms as data provider OneSource, for example, or global sales-training and performance-improvement firm Richardson has helped SunGard’s salespeople become savvier about customer buying habits, possible opportunities for sales, and the selling approaches that work best. Such improvements have made SunGard a more appealing stomping ground for new sales reps. With rep turnover peaking in 2012, SunGard has since shifted away from hiring based purely on industry experience and a well-stocked list of contacts. Instead, the company now uses a talent-assessment tool provided by Chally Group Worldwide to define ideal job profiles and evaluate the skills and performance patterns of existing and prospective salespeople. The Chally tool also gives managers insight into areas in which sales associates need the most guidance and is used to create individual development plans and a common set of role expectations.

SunGard holds a live kickoff sales meeting once a year and invests in enhancing first-year sales rep training so that new reps can bring value quicker. Salespeople are now onboarded through SunGard’s Sales Academy, a structured program that includes curriculum and related support materials in the areas of product knowledge, market understanding, and selling skills. A combination of informational videos, self-paced e-learning, and field-based activities ensures that the learning is relevant and real-world for each salesperson.

SunGard has also hired a small team of sales-development executives who are dedicated entirely to increasing first-year sales rep productivity. This team assists front-line sales managers by helping new reps navigate the company, complete product and sales training, use sales tools, and assemble business plans. These sales-development executives thus give front-line sales managers more time for opportunity development, supporting the sales process, and closing business. In order to ensure correct motivation, sales-development executives’ compensation is based in part on first-year reps’ sales results.

Realizing Productivity Gains

During the sales transformation, SunGard established a common method to measure sales associates’ productivity, including how often they won or lost business and individual sales forecasts. These metrics are visible to all relevant stakeholders throughout the company; this increases accountability and inspires a competitive spirit. By adopting Xactly as an automated tool to manage incentives and commissions (previously tracked manually), reps can quickly see what they have sold and how they will get paid. They can also run through what-if scenarios, determining potential earnings based on various sales situations.

To put this in perspective, consider that, in 2012, one-fourth of the sales force (about 120 associates) were first-year SunGard salespeople. About 90 of these new reps booked a sale in their first year, even though IT sales cycles can be lengthy. The average annual productivity of these individuals was nearly $400,000. By improved training and other changes, SunGard aims to double that first-year sales productivity to $800,000, which could add another $30–40 million to annual sales.

“We’re highly focused on making the onboarding and new-hire training experience a success,” Neve says. “This is all part of making SunGard a great place to sell.”

A Brighter Tomorrow

Thus far, SunGard is on target for significant growth on a billion-dollar sales plan. To Neve, the contents of the sales pipeline, combined with an attractive win rate, signal a favorable future. Many financial firms are exploring the possibility of outsourcing many back-office tasks. This is demonstrated through an increase in professional-service and managed-service opportunities in the pipeline. With an arsenal of assets, SunGard is well positioned to address this market demand. Some unprecedented and significant deals have already begun to close.

“There were tremendous assets locked up at SunGard,” Neve summarizes. “We put a road map in place to unlock those assets, translating them into new sales and revenue growth.”

If it were easy to substantially boost sales force effectiveness, everyone would have it figured out. The reality is that taking on a sales force transformation is not for the faint of heart, yet SunGard stands as a testament to what can be accomplished. Today, SunGard operates in a much more coordinated and collaborative manner. Its products and services are bundled, and its salespeople are well equipped to sell based on insight. Reps are partners with their customers, who face tough decisions about accelerating growth, streamlining operations, or ensuring regulatory compliance. It’s an approach that has put SunGard on the path to sustainable, organic growth for years to come. •

 

ZS Associates

ZS Associates is a global leader in sales and marketing consulting, technology, and outsourcing. ZS’s sales consulting services help companies around the world excel at critical sales activities, such as designing sales channels that leverage both direct and indirect paths to market; creating the best sales force structure, territory plan, size, allocation, and incentive approach; and integrating sales and marketing programs with extraordinary results and levels of efficiency.

ZS also helps companies define and execute their sales, marketing, and technology strategy by designing, building, and operating the information management, reporting, and analytic systems that are at the core of their sales and marketing operations. ZS has an outstanding track record of implementing technology solutions because its experts intimately understand how people in every aspect of sales and marketing work and think. In ZS’s role as a strategic partner, ZS teams often bridge the gap between clients’ sales and marketing organizations and their IT organizations.

ZS’s outsourcing offerings complete the picture of how the company improves its clients’ sales and marketing operations. ZS runs many companies’ sales-compensation programs, information-management and reporting systems, territory and account planning, and other operations. In return, ZS’s clients benefit from lower costs of operation, greatly reduced error rates, and the ability to shift their limited resources and energy to the critical parts of the business that they are best equipped to manage.

Richardson

Richardson is a global sales-training and performance-improvement company. The Richardson team boasts more than 30 years of experience creating customized solutions that build organizational ability and improve the individual skills necessary to grow profitable sales.

Richardson works with some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world to create solutions that fit your unique culture and situation, helping you execute strategy through your sales force.

Richardson has worked with leading global companies to help execute sales strategy and improve sales performance.  In 2012, the Richardson team trained more than 75,000 professionals, created more than 600 new customized programs, interviewed more than 1,000 senior executives, and surveyed more than 3,000 sales reps.

Richardson offers a fully integrated, level-by-level curriculum for all sales and sales-management ranks to help ensure development and ongoing reinforcement. Its proven curriculum of more than 250 modules covers the necessary tools, skills, dialogues, processes, and strategy needed for every phase of the selling cycle, from prospecting to Richardson’s core framework of consultative selling to ensure a consistency of learning that is supported throughout the company.

Richardson’s unique differentiator is the depth of its customization. Its solutions are fully customized to account for all of the strategic, competitive, and cultural nuances of your business, which ensures that the training is relevant, aligned to your business, and applicable, even to your most experienced sales professionals.

Richardson is flexible in meeting your sales-training delivery needs. Its solutions are expertly delivered and implemented through multiple delivery methods that can be blended, stand alone, or complement one another to provide a highly effective, seamless training solution that will drive quick wins and sustainable performance improvement.

Launch International

Hundreds of thousands of salespeople in more than 285 organizations, including 50 percent of technology companies in the Fortune 500, have used the work of Launch International in millions of customer conversations.

Founded in 1992 in suburban Philadelphia, Launch International is a strategy and services firm that helps companies build and execute high-performance, integrated marketing and sales-enablement programs.  Launch serves technology-driven clients across a wide spectrum of industries, including technology, financial services, and healthcare IT, and it serves corporate, alliance, channel, and vertical-marketing organizations, as well as distributors, independent software vendors, and resellers.

Launch helps clients rethink the way they approach interactions with buyers, making sure interactions are insight based, customer-centric, aligned to the audience and need, and synchronized across both marketing and sales activities. The result is a more predictable path to revenue.

Launch International’s approach to solving clients’ problems is based on dozens of years of experience building best practices in strategic marketing, thought leadership, channel enablement, and demand generation. Its methodology is grounded in strategy and focused on anticipated results within the context of buyer and seller behavior.

Its exclusive Thoughtful Selling™ program integrates a thought-leadership perspective into sales conversations to elevate interaction between buyers and sellers. Thoughtful Selling™ is an approach designed to address the challenges of today’s technology marketplace. It is based on best practices developed as a result of working with more than 100 technology companies over a span of 21 years. By working with Launch International, companies can drive more revenue with the same campaign and conversation investment.

Unlike agencies that leave their clients feeling “lost in translation,” Launch clients routinely describe its process and expertise as a welcome and refreshing change.

In fact, they often say they’ve never worked with a company like Launch International.

Xactly

With Xactly, companies unleash the motivational power of their incentive-compensation programs. Despite most leaders’ desire to pay for performance, their incentive-compensation plans have become inefficient, unpredictable, and disconnected from objectives. Xactly delivers accurate, rapid, and impactful solutions on a secure, completely cloud-based platform. By streamlining and automating the how, when, and why of what they pay, Xactly’s customers reduce costs, gain visibility, save time, and eliminate risk. Xactly helps customers take control of their incentive processes and inspire performance.

SunGard provides mission-critical software and IT services to institutions in the financial-services industry to automate the many detailed processes associated with trading, managing investment portfolios, and accounting for investment assets.  Since SunGard manages more than $90 million risk valuations per second, the importance of delivering results is understood. SunGard was suffering through the pains of building and managing inspirational incentive-compensation plans for its global sales force. Previously, SunGard’s process was manual, time-consuming, and unable to deliver time-critical performance reporting. Its incentive-compensation system had to integrate with Salesforce out of the box and drive CRM adoption. SunGard also wanted to be up and running quickly with a positive return on investment. Lastly, any solution had to work for its finance and sales teams, giving critical real-time performance visibility to the sales team and control of incentive-compensation back to the finance team.

Xactly Incent delivered for SunGard on the most critical requirements. Xactly deployed quickly, with easy integration into other business-critical applications. The single sign-on integration with Salesforce has reps accessing CRM data with incentive compensation performance information. The easy-to-use interface allows for quick adjustments to compensation plans, including using multiple currencies and creating SPIFs.  Management and sales-rep dashboards give real-time visibility to SunGard teams, inspiring synergy, focus, and motivation.

OneSource

OneSource is a global leader in business-information and sales-enablement solutions that deliver unparalleled company, executive, and industry intelligence to make business professionals more effective and productive.
Only the OneSource multichannel platform intercepts relevant business signals and alerts you to opportunities and threats in the ever-changing marketplace. OneSource automatically determines which companies are involved and delivers to your team the best business information profiles available, assembled through OneSource’s exclusive real-time fusion of data provided by more than 60 data partners. OneSource world-class solutions empower professionals to leverage actionable insights to drive company growth.