Case Study

Leading technology company enables global sales teams with WhiteboardSelling sales enablement technique to more effectively deliver the company’s core value proposition to prospects.

Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI) is the technology leader in Application Delivery Networking. Blue Coat offers an Application Delivery Network Infrastructure that provides the visibility, acceleration, and security required to optimize and secure the flow of information to any user, on any network, anywhere.  This application intelligence enables enterprises to tightly align network investments with business requirements, speed decision making, and secure business applications for long-term competitive advantage. Founded in 1996, Blue Coat provides ADN infrastructure products to more than 15,000 customers worldwide, including 81% of the Fortune^® Global 500. For additional information, please visit www.bluecoat.com.

Blue Coat Systems is approaching $500M in annual revenue with 1,500 employees and 2,800 partners. Their solutions help companies optimize and secure the flow of information to any user, on any network, anywhere in the world. Through organic growth and a series of acquisitions, Blue Coat had three solution areas – Application Performance Monitoring, WAN Optimization, and Secure Web Gateway, Acceleration, and Security. The company was committed to integrating the sales and marketing of all of its product lines under its unified Application Delivery Network (ADN) infrastructure offering, to deliver the most complete solutions to its global customers. As part of this wide-reaching corporate initiative, Blue Coat needed to train its worldwide sales force in the new company positioning, messaging, and value proposition, so they could more effectively sell solutions to global customers.

The question was which sales enablement training method would best help Blue Coat sales professionals learn how to communicate its forward-thinking value proposition with customers in an effective, engaging, and exciting way.   Traditional learning methods including PowerPoint slides were ruled out as too passive for Blue Coat’s high-energy audience. 

Blue Coat implemented WhiteboardSelling, an interactive sales enablement solution that gives salespeople the ability to convey their organization’s message and value proposition visually – on a whiteboard or any other writing surface – in a compelling, confident, and consistent fashion. Blue Coat worked hand in hand with the WhiteboardSelling team to create one interactive whiteboard conveying the company’s new “corporate story”, as well as a second whiteboard that dives more deeply into product positioning and the company’s new integrated value proposition. This process was supported by the WhiteboardSelling Workbench^® technology platform, which made possible the rich collaboration by multiple constituents and stakeholders to ensure that the whiteboard message was broadly accepted and consistent with the Blue Coat brand.

"Having the ability to use a web-based interface that facilitated the whiteboard development process was critical.  This is what made it possible to get sales involved from the very beginning of the process," said Kip Darcy, Director of Sales Enablement at Blue Coat. "If sales is not involved up front in the content development, field adoption will suffer.  Since sales people don't have time to sit in content meetings, having the ability to sign into a secure site and provide content updates in real-time was extremely valuable."

Blue Coat initiated the white board learning process in a two-day interactive and fun meeting for over 160 sales professionals in the Americas. The sales professionals were then able to take this strategic knowledge with them into the field to deliver exciting and compelling sales presentations, recreating everything they learned in meeting rooms around the world.  In the first month the Blue Coat ADN Whiteboard was delivered over 150 times to existing clients, prospects, and partners.

The training was so effective – sales people reported feeling excited, confident, and eager to take the whiteboarding sales communication technique out in the field – that Blue Coat then delivered the same training, in local languages, to over 300 sales professionals in Asia Pacific and Europe.  All new hires are taught to white board in new hire sales training.  The Blue Coat goal is to ensure all sales professionals have completed the WhiteboardSelling training program.

Blue Coat’s sales professionals were extremely satisfied with the WhiteboardSelling sales enablement program. Sales teams especially appreciated that the sessions were interactive, with sales reps able to ask questions, add things to the whiteboard, and share their opinions, and included hands-on training on how to deliver the messaging on a whiteboard or any other writing surface. In response to a post-training survey, Blue Coat sales reps reported:

• 98% felt the white board activity increased their comfort level in selling Blue Coat solutions and articulating the ADN message
• 81% have already used the whiteboard with a customer 1-3 times
• 83% would recommend the training program to others
• 80% felt the business content was beneficial

By using the WhiteboardSelling sales enablement training to unify its global sales team on a single message and to give them a technique for delivering it, Blue Coat has achieved impressive results in the field. In just a few months of using the WhiteboardSelling methodology, global sales representatives have reported more follow-up sales calls and more closed deals.

"The WhiteboardSelling sales training methodology enabled our sales teams to deeply connect with our new value proposition and messaging; they left these sessions knowing our core positioning cold,” said Steve Rowland, Vice President, North American Sales.

“More importantly, they learned how to use whiteboarding to confidently and effectively communicate this key positioning to prospects in the field – with nothing more required than a whiteboard or even a pad of paper. My teams can now walk into sales meetings and recreate the whiteboard in an interactive way that really engages prospects in open dialogue.  This enables our sales professionals to add differentiated value to our clients, prospects and partners."