How Xerox Gives Salespeople the Information to Start Conversations

In complex selling environments, one of marketing’s primary roles is to provide salespeople with the information they need to have conversations around clients’ issues before they discuss any products or services. This is especially important for new hires in sales, who need to build trusted relationships with customers they haven’t met before.

One of the biggest benefits of sales enablement tools is in closing this learning gap between new and experienced salespeople. Xerox has created a tool called XGS Tour that has done just that.

Since it was developed in 2007, some of XGS Tour’s biggest backers are salespeople new to Xerox. “This is a new population of salespeople who have not all sold complex services before, and they are really excited about this tool. They have an opportunity to be real change leaders in the organization and be successful at selling services. So they realized the value of this tool and wanted to jump right in,” says Julie Meyers, Xerox Global Services (XGS) vice president of marketing and strategy for North America.

A Rising Tide …

But new salespeople aren’t the only ones who benefit from the tool. By guiding salespeople through the selling process, Xerox’s XGS Tour lifts the productivity and effectiveness of the sales organization as a whole. For example, those salespeople using the Tour have seen a 59% decrease in time to contract signings. The tool helps top salespeople close business faster while giving less experienced salespeople the foundation they need to raise their game to the same level as these top performers. “We wanted to create a tool that didn’t necessarily tailor to the least common denominator. We wanted to take that less experienced salesperson and give her the capabilities of the tenured and successful salesperson,” says Jeannine Rossignol, XGS vice president of marketing programs for North America.

Marketing benefits from “guided selling,” too, because these tools help maintain a more consistent marketing message and brand image in the marketplace. The tool controls access to selling tools and acts as a repository for all marketing and sales content. Additionally, through the ability to track sales’ activities and usage, marketing can more effectively invest in the right activities that add value to sales and the business as a whole.

Research Is Critical

One of the most important tasks in the development of the Tour was also the most difficult: determining the clients’ key challenges. To do this, Xerox needed to collect and analyze all the pain points associated with every industry, geography, and offering. This analysis took several months.

But the team quickly realized that it would need to parse the messages it developed from the research. Different challenges would be relevant to different departments inside client organizations. Additionally, each department might see these challenges differently. Therefore, Xerox decided to focus on six key departments—HR, Finance and Administration, R&D, IT, Sales and Marketing, and Legal—and map the relevant challenges to each department.

After an initial examination, the team ended up with a long list of client challenges, which was untenable. The team’s initial goal was to get a list of one or two challenges per key department—about 6–12 challenges in total per vertical. They wanted to stay focused. To narrow the list, the team created a weighted voting system. They evaluated each challenge on three principles:

• Importance of the challenge to clients
• Xerox’s ability to address the challenge with its offerings
• Resources available to support the offerings associated with the challenge

Through this system, the team came up with the final list of challenges—10 in total. The core team then mapped these final 10 challenges to Xerox’s 12 offerings and, of course, the six key departments.

The Biggest Challenge: Changing Behavior

Despite all its efforts to make the transition as simple and easy as possible, many salespeople within Xerox—especially those not comfortable with technology in general or those too comfortable with PowerPoint—at first resisted using the tool.

Some complained that any presentation tool got in the way of having a true dialogue with the client. “When we hear this excuse, it’s a perfect opportunity to say, ‘Don’t use the Tour as a presentation tool, use it as a means to back up your claim and facilitate dialogue with client examples, detailed processes, or any other content that is in there,’” says Meyers.

Adoption is an ongoing challenge. To keep the process moving forward, the marketing team continues to add value to the Tour by making changes based on the field’s feedback and expanding it to cover its entire targeted audience. Additionally, marketing regularly shares metrics showing that the tool has helped decrease sales cycle time while increasing productivity and revenue. Marketing also shares best practices and success stories with the field.

By Rossignol constantly promoting the Tour’s benefits and providing the resources needed to use it, adoption continues to increase. According to Xerox, it is important never to stop doing this promotion. “When you are changing behavior, it is critical to keep visibility on the value, best practices, and results of the tool,” concludes Rossignol.

To see the rest of the steps necessary for developing a successful sales-enablement tool, ITSMA clients can read the full Xerox case study here.

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ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. We work with the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA annual program clients include business leaders such as AT&T, Cisco, Deloitte, EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others. Our comprehensive research, consulting, and training on topics including ITSMA Account-Based Marketing℠, Brand Positioning, and Solutions Development provide the insight and experience companies need to improve business results. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.