Innovative Go-to-market software company brings on seasoned executive to help lead them through growth phase

Complex sales, also known as enterprise sales is not something an individual should go at alone. From Business Development (BD) to your product team, professional sales organizations that communicate seamlessly achieve greater success. Here’s how to do it:

Latest software updates

We've been working hard since our launch to give you easier ways to qualify and close your best prospects. Here is a summary of the most recent changes:

Most good sales people have some form of functional Attention Deficit Disorder. Let’s call it SADD—sales attention deficit disorder. Don’t get us wrong, we love sales people. And SADD can truly be functional for sales people. Successful sales people will not perform administrative tasks, such as many of the mundane requirements of CRM if the activity doesn’t help them close business.
Sales acceleration software, which we call ZRM-Zebra Relationship Management, generates everything the salesperson needs, guiding the process from prospecting to final negotiations.  Further the software creates customer retention and existing customer growth through a comprehensive account management process. This software brings mobility to the sales process, enabling sales reps to access and update information from the field and integrates with Salesforce.com eliminating the need for sales executives to manually enter data in the CRM.

The ZRM sales enablement software is an end-to-end solution.  Sales executives are able to identify their perfect prospect (Zebra), research the Zebra to identify its critical business issues, generate value-based presentations and obtain executive-level buy-in early in the process all guided by ZRM. 
The powerful combination of sales enablement automation, expert sales process and Salesforce provide sales and management what they need to both close business and run the business.

The business problem we solve:

Selling to Zebras (STZ) creates sales acceleration software that bridges the gap between low, plateaued or slow sales growth and dramatic sales improvement. It’s sales enablement software works as an acceleration engine with Salesforce (and other sales apps). It provides a comprehensive system that increases sales, brings greater mobility to the sales process and emphasizes results over busy work.  Our sales software runs in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

STZ sales app:

• offers a software-driven sales improvement process
• delivers repeatable, metrics-based results
• drives new sales
• lowers customer churn increasing retention
• increases new customer revenue
• increases upsell and cross sell

A business case should fundamentally include:

• The business problem solved
• Quantifiable, net of all costs, risk adjusted value of solving the problem
• Customer proof of “for whom” value has been achieved
• Financial metrics to allow for a thorough evaluation of the project spend versus other uses of the available dollars (ROI, NPV, EVA, Payback Period and monthly cost of non-decision)

Executives are skeptical of value claims because of 78% past project failure rates. Annual survey results collected by InformationWeek which indicate that only 28% of technology projects achieve expected results.
The business problem solved, value claims for both direct (hard) and indirect (soft) benefits have to be verified by existing customers. A strong business case includes little or no “industry” claims but is the result of “proof” from existing customers. Executives tend to discount “industry claims” due to past projects missing expectations.

It should only take you 1 minute to score your prospect against the Zebra.  Apply a score of 0-4 for each question, where 0 is an extremely unfavorable response and 4 is extremely favorable.  A perfect score is 28 (7×4).

For most companies, a score of 23 indicates that the prospect will buy 90% of the time. Deals you have won should score at or near 23.  Lost deals, deals you don’t believe will ever close and stalled deals will always score 17-22. Most deals that you lose will score less than 17.

Now before spending time with a prospect (or an existing customer), assess whether they are worth your time using your scoring method:

·         A score of 0-16 says spending time with this customer is a waste of resource

·         A score of 17-22 says proceed with caution

·         A score of 23 or above says pursue this account with everything you have!

Ready? Build your Zebra 

Pipeline close rate is calculated as follows:

 Complex sales cycles have three major components:

1. Account targeting, qualification and lead generation
2. Business case and total cost of ownership based value proposition
3. Customer retention and upsell cross sell

1. Account targeting, prospect qualification and lead generation
Organization, operations, access to power, funding, ROI/TCO/Value, technology and service are the seven sales attributes that affect every sales opportunity. Building a profile which identifies your organizations fit with these seven attributes is the first step. Utilizing these seven attributes in qualification helps to ensure pursuit of the right prospects and the development of a challenger sale mentality. Measurement of each attribute creates consistency and repeatability. Lead generation starts with a measurement against these seven attributes.

2. Business case and total cost of ownership based value proposition
Executives want to understand the business problems solved by a solution and the quantifiable value created by solving them. Generally complex solutions require complex implementations with expensive internal and external resources. Additionally these solutions produce benefits that ramp-up and accrue over time. A business case and total cost of ownership need to adjust to accommodate ramp-up and accrued benefits as well as all product, services, implementation and configuration costs as well as change and partner management time and expense. Note:

Why Tech Projects Fail: 5 Unspoken Reasons

“1. Technology ROI numbers are mostly fiction. The most complex variable in the ROI equation -- one that's usually ignored -- is the cost of the business re-architecture required to consume a proposed technology. If you take away nothing else from this article, know that technology demands business transformation, and that's usually the largest hidden cost.” 

Additionally risk adjusted measurements such as net present value (NPV), which takes into account the time value of money and economic value add (EVA), which adjusts for the cost of capital should be part of the total cost of ownership evaluation.
Results should be predictive, verified, to the best of your ability, before implementation and proven during and after implementation. Value achieved should be a continuous measurement and not a one- time event calculated prior to project approval.
When your sales organization brings a unique and perspective for solving a business problem coupled with a prediction of value you’ll be in a position to being a challenger sale cycle.

3. Customer retention and upsell cross sell
The value of a business is greatly affected by customer retention and the organizational ability to upsell and cross sell existing customers. Customer retention has become a high priority issue particularly due to proliferation of software business subscription model known as Software as a Service (SaaS). The SaaS business model makes customer acquisition easier but customer retention harder.  Some of the business issues that lead to the retention problem include:

• no clear repeatable way of identifying the right customers to retain
• inability to identify how much resource and “when to apply”
• no way of quantifiably measuring value delivered to the customer and claiming success
• make the mistake that implementation completion is “the end” rather than ensuring “promised value achieved” and demonstrating continued value
• do not define “value creation” for clients as a continuous process
• lack tools for retention, upsell and cross sell and tend to force fit “new customer acquisition sales cycle methodologies” that don’t work for retention or upsell and cross sell
• rely on solely on CRM which fundamentally is not designed to continue after an opportunity is “closed won”
• have bought marketing automation software and not solved the upsell cross sell problem (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua)

A successful strategic account management (SAM) program assumes that sometimes the wrong customers have been sold creating a customer retention problem. Therefore the first step is to develop a repeatable way to identify the right customers to retain. Customer should be stratified into high, medium and low to help establish a fact and priority driven approach to retention.

• High – strong upsell cross sell opportunity, frequent reference site or strategic to the business
• Medium – limited upsell cross sell opportunity; retention is the goal
• Low – little interest in retention—let them go, or minimal additional resources deployed

Those categorized as High and Medium

• Research & Internal evaluation to measure and claim success
• Identification of Power (Often existing customer relationships are at lower levels and are not productive)
• Prepare post-sales Executive Brief & present to Power (Executive Brief of the value produced by past solution and the “best practice” value that could be achieved through slight enhancements (process or product upgrades)
• Gain Power’s sponsorship to verify value of present project
• Annual calendar of “tasks” based action plan and dates to nurture customers and help identify expansion opportunities

Selling to Zebras (STZ) software runs in the cloud as a SaaS subscription. All you really need is access to the internet using an up-to-date browser like Chrome, Firefox or Edge. STZ software runs on phones, tablets and laptops. In addition, we have many integrations to other applications like Salesforce, Microsoft Office, Google and more.

Salesforce Requirements> Enterprise Edition

OS Requirements

PC > Windows 10

iPad > All iPads are supported

Additional Requirements:> Microsoft Office 2010 (32-bit) or higher