The oil and gas industry has been through a decade of tectonic changes that forced Hexagon’s PPM division to re-evaluate its go-to-market strategy. The logical next move was to expand into new markets, but that wasn’t possible without a comprehensive rethink of its go-to-market strategy, processes and sales technology. To accomplish this, Hexagon PPM used People.ai data to gain a clear picture of its sales team’s activities. In addition, it performed a comprehensive assessment of deals and pipeline health, giving insights needed to improve the sales cycle, customer engagement, forecasting accuracy, manager training, productivity and win rates.
About Hexagon PPM:
Hexagon is a global leader in sensor, software and autonomous solutions. Hexagon’s PPM division empowers its clients to transform unstructured information into smart digital assets to visualize, build and manage all complexities’ structures and facilities. Hexagon PPM executed a comprehensive GTM plan, sales strategy and sales processes, empowering its sales team to expand into new markets with ease and automation using People.ai as the backbone of its GTM tech stack.
“When we reassign accounts into different coverage models, People.ai data gives incoming reps a tremendous amount of insight for a handoff. People.ai adds contact insights and a level of intelligence to accounts that we didn’t have in the past.”
-Eric Chapman, Vice President Sales Operations and Enablement at Hexagon’s PPM division
A Transformative Sales Plan
As Hexagon PPM focused on expanding into new markets, it became apparent to the team that this direction required a re-evaluation of its go-to-market strategy, process and sales technology. That, of course, could only be possible with visibility into how go-to-market teams had engaged with buyers in the past, who was involved in conversations and how much time was needed to foster that engagement into real opportunities. By leveraging data from People.ai, including 746,000 sales activities, Hexagon PPM was able to surface answers to these questions as well as fuel its UX/CRM solution called GoSell with these data points to help direct strategy.
Coaching Sales Teams with Engagement Data
Tracking sales activities with People.ai gave Hexagon PPM new insight into actual selling time, customer engagement levels and inbound vs. outbound activity. With this data, managers initiated vital coaching conversations about opportunity assessment and account plans, guiding reps to analyze a deal’s health, leverage additional tools and move deals toward closing. People.ai also revealed “weaknesses in frontline manager training,” recalls Eric Chapman, VP of Sales and Operations Enablement. Empowered with data, Chapman could more clearly define managers’ roles in coaching and hiring reps, rather than closing deals for them. Reps now see and are conscious of how much time they spend on internal activities not directly tied to an opportunity, and managers are more conscious of time spent on staff meetings or engaging directly in deals rather than coaching or improving processes.
Industry:
B2B Software, Oil and Gas
Use Cases:
Coach sales teams using leading indicator, Contact creation
Key Results:
- Greater Pipeline Predictability
- Built a new go-to-market strategy and sales processes fueled by People.ai data
- Transformed manager training and seller coaching with activity data
- 30% increase in meetings with existing customers
- 25% increase in net new business meetings
- Ingested 80,000 new contacts into CRM with accurate account role and affiliation
- Captured 746,000 sales activities including contact frequency and deal health insights
- Improved opportunity decision-making and forecasting accuracy
“With People.ai data, we’re discussing with our sales enablement training team and senior leadership to leverage the insights for better planning and execution. Now that we see what’s going on in the field, we know what we need to work on for sales coverage or finding the right people for these roles.”
Full Pipeline Health Assessment
People.ai enabled Hexagon PPM to measure every deal’s health and its entire pipeline, first by bringing visibility to unhealthy opportunities; some were years old or had logged hundreds of activity hours without progress toward closing. Chapman notes that People.ai is making it “easier and quicker for reps to keep deals moving forward or abandon unhealthy deals at stage 0-2 rather than later stages.”
To maintain that health visibility, People.ai has added over 80,000 contacts to Hexagon PPM’s CRM, improving the team’s CRM engagement rate and getting reps to actively seek and leverage their activity data to improve sales cycles. One particularly useful insight has been the contact’s role, which shows Chapman when the team needs to engage with higher levels at the customer’s account. Sellers also leverage many of the newly added contacts when they build and update account plans and their customer network maps.
Accelerating Sales Ramp
Chapman knows that sellers get frustrated having to dig through emails and voicemails for crucial customer information, which is why he prioritizes guiding them through the selling process with tools and capabilities that support them. Onboarding and training on how the People.ai dataset brings value to their role means that Hexagon PPM sellers get what the system will do for them if they leverage these capabilities. New reps at Hexagon PPM find the tools “amazing” and report that they’ve “never had a system that worked this much for me.”