Executive summary:

Viva’s many modules offer very different benefits to each department in your prospect. The success of your sales plan depends on how well you can tell a compelling story to each executive/department based on their unique strategic management requirements.

Need

We often ask our prospects “What is your core system solution for <fill in the blank department..(sales/operations/ finance)>?”

The most common answer we get when we ask the Executive Committee (EC) “What is the core system you use for managing the entire enterprise in your EC meetings?” is “Excel and PowerPoint”

How crazy is it that multi million/billion dollar corporation is run through Excel and PowerPoint?. The reason for this is that, until now, there has been no common system to enable the work of the Executive Committee – what we call “Modern Work”. Viva is first to market.

Just like CRM is for Sales, ERP for Operations, Viva is for the Leadership Team.

The ability to consolidate information from diverse systems is not an unusual need. Think of your cars dashboard… it presents to the driver important information from a diverse set of systems -  power (gas, battery power), speed, engine status, navigation, road conditions etc. These all have different source systems, units of measure, relationships to each other etc., yet we have designed fairly universal dashboards to make it easy for you to drive almost any car.

We are reminded of the parable of the eight blind people and the elephant - in this case the eight blind people are the department executives/stakeholders, and the elephant is the organization. Viva is the management system they used to coordinate each part of the elephant - kind of like the elephant's brain.

Idea

If you were selling cars, you would quickly learn that each member of the customer’s family is looking for something different from the same vehicle - maybe one person is concerned about the towing capacity, someone else luggage space, another person might be more worried about what the vehicle looks like or its’ sound system. To effectively sell that car you need to understand each person's needs and be able to restate your car’s functionality into each those contexts.

The following are common need-sets that we see during the Viva sales-cycle:

IT

·      The efficiency and effectiveness of IT’s development and support activities

·      The linkage between IT’s work and the strategic success of the organization

·      The value added from the IT function

·      IT value for money

HR

·      Delivering effective performance evaluations - accurately linking performance and recognition

·      Engaging a diverse work force in a Modern Work environment

·      Effectively attracting, on boarding, and retaining great talent

·      Advising the rest of the organization on effective management practices

Sales

·      Sales ability to execute strategic activities, such as entering new markets or launching new products, which do not generate revenue dollars for the business or commissions for the Sales Reps

·      Enabling the sales team to prioritize on monetary activities, such as attracting new customers or developing their Sales teams

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Operations

·      Strategic performance (cost, quality, and time)

·      New product introduction elapsed time, success

·      Consistency across locations, products, markets

Executive

·      Strategy execution

·      Overall performance, beyond quarterly objectives

·      Special Projects

·      ESG (Environmental, Society, and Governance)

·      Regulatory

All these needs are met by the various Viva modules - the trick is to restate their functionality into each of these contexts in a way that each of these stakeholders can understand.

An interesting thing that we have observed is that the same functionality can be seen completely differently in different departments. For example, the information that Insights delivers is used by HR to develop better process is, training recognition programs etc. Operations can look at the same information and use it for better scheduling, process design and succession planning.

So what?

The sales approach that we have found most successful is gathering a cross functional “Advisory Team” to support your sponsor, but more importantly bring their cross functional and unique needs to the table.

We present to this Advisory Team a case study from an industry that all participants can relate to, such as airline or hotel, and the story has a series of structured vignettes that cover a selection of customer service, product introduction, market segmentation etc. These vignettes tell the story of strategic success across all departments.

The benefits of this approach include:

·      The cross functional story makes sure that each department sees their unique needs being met, so at the end of the meeting they all vote in favor of proceeding with Viva, even though, like the eight blind people, they're each voting for something slightly different

·      Using a case study from outside their industry avoids you being perceived as preaching to them about how they should be running their business, or getting caught on industry-specific  technicalities for which they have much deeper understanding then your industry-specific demo represents

·      Their responses to each vignette provide you with an even deeper understanding of their unique needs

The win

Inevitably these Advisory Team sessions result in a “small close”, such as a pilot in one area or a request to advance the story to the Executive Committee. Since Viva is the quintessential “land and expand” offering, the pilots inevitably end in either seat-expansion in that one area or further pilots in other functions or with other Viva modules.

There are many tricks and techniques to make this work. Let's talk about your prospects and develop a program for them…

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