Sisense reduces deal cycles by weeks with Success Plans

Searching for efficiency

Sisense helps businesses build custom analytic experiences and embed them in their apps and workflows. By doing so, they empower their customers to embrace data-driven insights and take action to improve operational efficiencies.

It was no surprise then when Sisense Chief Financial Officer Adam Towns asked Sales Manager Jon Barrett to use Success Plans to help improve the efficiency of their own sales team.

With Outreach, every step of the deal cycle gets mapped out in Success Plans and shared with the customer. In addition to a clear guide for sales reps to follow, Success Plans also acts as a log of every interaction throughout the deal cycle, allowing managers to dive into the data and identify opportunities for improvement.

With Success Plans, the Sisense sales team was poised to streamline and perfect processes with every new data point they gathered.

Balance customization with consistency to drive success

Jon is in charge of the sales team at Sisenses New York City headquarters. Before using Success Plans, every member of his team had their own process for managing opportunities. With information scattered across disparate spreadsheets and systems, Jon found it challenging to serve as an effective guide for his team. It also siloed reps from each other, so if one experienced success, that process wasnt easily repeatable for another.

Jon appreciated that Success Plans allowed his reps to retain some freedom, while also helping them execute deals faster with consistent, repeatable Plans.

Instead, reps are now able to identify plans that have proved successful and put them into play with adjustments as needed for their prospective customers. Jon likens this part of Success Plans to grandmas recipe cards, noting that plans can be used like a template and modified as needed to address the needs of their prospects.

From there, since every step of the sales cycle is clearly documented, the team can look at the data to identify opportunities to iterate and weed out the things that didnt work.

This balance between customization and consistency has been a major win for the Sisense sales team, and a key contributor to their success. Its not the only win, though.

Saving weeks of time

Streamlining the steps of the sales process and documenting it all in one place has been an enormous time-saver for the Sisense team.

Success Plans created a central repository that everybody can refer back to when there are questions about a prospect or when actions need to be taken.

In that sense, Jon says it saves everyone hours of wrangling information each week. It also has the added benefit of saving Jons sanity when it comes time to report on the state of the business.

“Success Plans helps me answer questions quickly without having to make 37 phone calls to get things figured out."

Perhaps more importantly, the data Jon and his team get from the Outreach platform has allowed them to identify unnecessary steps in their sales process. In some cases, theyve been able to knock multiple weeks off their time to close. They use that time savings to get new opportunities in the pipeline.

Success Plans also helps Jon coach his team to identify risks, deal delays, and potential deal killers so they can disqualify opportunities more quickly. Jon says mapping out a plan helps him and his team assess the likelihood of success at every step of the way.

"If you cant outline what the steps should be to get to a goal, youre probably not going to get to that goal."

Closing the deal with trust and confidence

One of the most critical steps in any selling journey is when it comes time for a key decision maker, like a CFO on the prospective customer side, to sign a deal. With Success Plans, Sisenses prospective customers have complete visibility into every interaction that took place along the way. This has increased trust between Sisense and their customers making it easier for prospective customers to quickly and confidently approve deals.

Today, Jon and his team are a well-oiled machine thanks to Success Plans. He recently asked his reps how much they would hypothetically be willing to add to their quota to keep Success Plans. Their answers say it all:

“Everybody was willing to add something to their quota to use this feature...up to $50,000. That means they find it valuable.”