The Prime 8 Model for Increasing Closed-Won Deals
Growth-oriented companies rely on sales data as a valuable feedback mechanism to refine and improve sales processes. This data is crucial to identifying trends and insights that affect sales.
Critical data isn’t just in win/loss ratios and pipeline metrics, but also found in the less tangible data — patterns and practices that influence wins and losses. Discovering, documenting and sharing repeatable best practices is highly valuable to stakeholders across this cloud services giant who must innovate to stay ahead, but best practices often find themselves on a perpetual backburner.
One well known global cloud service provider does prioritize best practices, and collects this data in an internal document called a WinWire. WinWires are published and shared throughout the company’s intranet. A great idea in theory, but in practice creating a WinWire was a time-intensive, collaborative effort that stretched across different roles involved in the sales process.
Due to inefficient processes and competing business priorities, one business unit was able to collect just 8 WinWires in the first three quarters of the year - a number that was far, far lower than won deals.
This WinWire drought hampered improvements and innovations that reached across the organization: from impacting how the company collaborated with its ecosystem of partners to close a sale, to limiting the effectiveness of the organization’s go-to-market abilities. Prime 8 was brought in to create a better mechanism for creating and managing WinWires, ultimately boosting the company’s market visibility.
Prime 8 Optimizes Best Practices Data
To increase the collection of sales practices in WinWires, the technology company hired Prime 8 to create the capture process and manage the collection of WinWire data. The project's overall aim was to make the cloud provider's solution the number one customer choice.
Prime 8’s Strategy: WinWire Content Faster
Prime 8 Consulting was hired by the tech company to manage the collection and documentation and distribution of WinWire best practices. The project aimed to increase the volume of WinWires internally, creating visibility for successful sales practices, ultimately improving the effectiveness of internal collaboration across roles involved in customer sales, and innovating new ways to include partners in sales processes.
Prime 8’s primary responsibility was to increase the number of WinWires completed by engaging those involved in sales across all time zones to collect the details needed to create a WinWire and collect helpful resources for successful selling into specific business segments such as healthcare, finance, and telecommunications.
To maximize operational efficiency, Prime 8 created, implemented and documented a repeatable process for capturing the necessary Winwire details, collecting sales information and capturing relevant reference resources.
Building a more efficient WinWire creation pipeline meant it was quicker to identify and share ‘wins’ internally and with selling partners, enabling improvements to sales processes to be made in real-time.
The Result: WinWires Increase Dramatically
Outsourcing WinWires to Prime 8 Consulting allowed the client to benefit from increased operational efficiency, freeing up internal stakeholders to focus on tasks more directly related to their primary responsibilities while Prime 8 implemented an efficient, repeatable process that creates consistent results, even after the end of the project.
With an efficient and productive WinWire pipeline, some dramatic changes occurred:
3x increase in just one quarter in the library of WinWire best practices documented, published and circulated to sales roles.
Creation of a new library of industry specific resources for sales roles to leverage during the selling journey.
Greater visibility for senior leadership as a result of improved reporting.
The increase in WinWire documentation substantially amplified the client’s sales effectiveness and ability to reach customers in meaningful ways, resulting in greater market visibility and profitability.
Based on the results of the project, Prime 8 Consulting worked with leadership in other departments at the tech giant to share results and encourage adoption across multiple teams and products.
Project Snapshot
Industry: Technology (cloud computing)
Location: Washington, US
Company Size: 150,000+
Critical Business Issues: Low sale data collection rate affected adoption efficiency
Solution: Standardized collection process with detailed templates
The Method: Creating a repeatable collection process and templates to record wins and losses and publish and distribute quickly
The Outcome: WinWire publish rates tripled
