The Customer
Hexagon, Platform Solutions is focused on providing solutions for the application and embedding of Xalt for industrial enterprises. Xalt is a powerful framework for accelerating digital transformation and the ability to leverage IoT data. Today, Platform Solutions focuses on Xalt’s abilities as a mobile app platform provider that allows enterprise business leaders, IT professionals, and business analysts to improve their business processes, operations, and overall organizational efficiency. Hexagon, Platform Solutions was formed from the acquisition of Catavolt, inc. within Hexagon AB. Catavolt, Inc. was founded by enterprise software pioneers from IBM and Infor in 2008 and has been helping companies outmobilize their competition ever since.
“We asked ourselves,” says Kim Brown, Director of Sales Development & Operations at Hexagon, Platform Solutions, " ‘How do we want our sales team to spend the majority of their time?’ Entry level sales professionals who do cold calling and prospecting can easily spend 7 of their 8 hours a day punching numbers into a phone and not necessarily talking with anyone. We wanted a mindset shift.”
The Challenge
Even with tools and technology at their disposal, Hexagon, Platform Solutions faced a hurdle. The organization wanted to connect with its market faster and with more accuracy.
Hexagon, Platform Solutions was a longtime ConnectAndSell customer. Over the years they made continuous, concerted efforts to drive costs down and boost sales productivity levels. These goals prompted the shift to find a new sales engagement platform.
Kim Brown
Director of Sales Development & Operations at Hexagon, Platform Solutions
To Hexagon, Platform Solutions, the primary value of their salespeople had always been their ability to connect with others, and to convey the message of their product and what the company does through genuine conversations, as opposed to flat pitches. They sought to find a solution that could redirect the focus back to selling rather than manually feeding data into machines.
Solutions Used
Hexagon, Platform Solutions turned to Koncert (formerly, ConnectLeader) to solve this challenge. Koncert’s Advanced Dialer Stack (with Click Dialer, Flow Dialer, and Agent-Assisted Dialer) gave Hexagon, Platform Solutions’s sales team the ability to leverage click-to-dial, accelerated smart dialing, agent-assisted dialing, and advanced features (such as local callerID displays) to improve connect rates.
“We’ve got so many ways that we can call through our prospects and contacts now,” says Kim, “and each calling method has the speed and agility that other solutions don’t.”
Benefits
“Having tools that multiply the amount of quality connections and intro sales conversations by 3, 4, 5 times,” says Tim, “leads to more meetings set, more demos done, more opportunities created, and closed revenue.”
Tim Marinello
Vice President & GM of Sales at Hexagon, Platform Solutions
Hexagon, Platform Solutions’ team now knows how many conversations, on average, it takes to set a meeting, how many meetings it takes to get a qualified lead, and from there, opportunities. “When we can triple the amount of calling volume, then we know we’re tripling our ability to get qualified leads,” says Kim.
But it’s more than that, they admit. Koncert has given Hexagon, Platform Solutions’s team the tools and the insight to improve sales enablement, pipeline, reporting, and sales rep retention rates.
Sales Enablement
Hexagon, Platform Solutions was already taking an account-based approach when they began using Koncert, and Tim Marinello, Hexagon Platform Solutions’s Vice President & GM of Sales, found that the platform was “a necessary tool — for any account-based system. If you don’t have the ability to target the right folks and get to them efficiently, then an account-based approach is really not an option. And that’s what Koncert really provides. It’s allowed us to do it all in a more cost-effective manner, and it’s pushed us to be more agile with how much we spend for each connection.”
Multiple dialing methods allowed the organization to reach more prospects and enabled their team to place the majority of their focus on qualifying leads and following up with opportunities. Kim noticed a sizable improvement in their pipeline creation. “We increased the amount of dials and qualifying on the front end, so from leads that came from a cold call in Koncert, we were able to increase our pipeline generation (from qualified lead to pipeline) from 14 percent to 24 percent in nine months. It was fantastic for us.”
Koncert offers advanced recording features that give management the insight needed to properly train their cold calling professionals. “When everything is recorded and your reps are calling four times more often than the average rep at other businesses, you learn right away what the challenges are and what you need to do differently,” says Kim. The result is a highly trained workforce that has access to powerful sales enablement tools.
Sales Rep Retention and Growth
In sales, employee retention is a hot topic. On average, cold calling sales representatives stay at a company for 12 to 18 months. Hexagon Platform Solutions’s average is upwards of 18 to 24 months. Their management credits this to several factors, and Koncert has played a large role.
“Our reps get to ‘win’ more often, they get to make more money, and because we use Koncert, their whole day doesn’t have to be cold calling,” says Kim. “We can get the same production in three hours that would normally take someone eight hours.”
As a result, sales representatives have more time in their workday. “They get to run their own meetings, they get to strategize about how to best address their specific market, they get to do follow ups.
They basically get to be more of an actual sales rep than a cold calling rep. Our calls are accelerated. And yes, we could have eight hours of cold calling if we wanted to, but we’ve been able to have the freedom to set up a roadmap for these reps to become sales professionals in their career.”
Integration with Salesforce
“It’s one of my favorite features about Koncert, the way that they integrate with Salesforce,” says Kim. “It acts as a fully bolted-on component. That, for us, is huge because all of our reporting is embedded in the interface.” Because employees have the ability to both log into Koncert or work within Salesforce, it reduces the number of windows they have to juggle. “Our team has so many tools that all play a vital role, but it was exhausting that each one had to exist on its own somewhere, so it’s just seamless the way [Koncert] has done it. Everything I need in Koncert exists in Salesforce, everything I need to report on is inside Salesforce, and anything I need to admin or configure exists inside of Salesforce.”
ROI
Eighty percent of Hexagon, Platform Solutions’s new customer pipeline is sourced from their sales development team. The number of dials that would normally take them three days to make, they now make in one.
Tim notes that Koncert’s products have dramatically impacted his sales team’s success. Without agent-assisted dialing tools, sales representatives had around five conversations per day. “Having tools that multiply the number of quality connections and intro sales conversations by 3, 4, 5 times,” says Tim, “leads to more meetings set, more demos done, more opportunities created, and closed revenue.”
Hexagon, Platform Solutions has been able to arm its staff with a tool that helps its team win more efficiently. “We’re getting more production out of a six person team [using the agent-assisted dialer] than we did with 20 manually doing it. It pushes folks to get better and become better sales professionals in the process.”
About Koncert
Koncert provides sales enablement tools for the modern sales team. The sales engagement platform that has helped companies like Hexagon, Platform Solutions revolutionize their selling process includes customizable sales cadence software, sales dialers, and predictive intelligence. With Koncert, businesses are able to simplify their sales stack and save time and valuable resources.
Give your sales team what they need to consistently exceed their quota: an integrated, all-in-one suite of tools that puts you in front of your prospects. Learn more about Koncert today.