Case Study

Global Software Provider Trains Global Sales Team to Better Engage Prospects and Close More Deals using Unique WhiteboardSelling Methodology.

Software AG is the world’s largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. The company’s 4,000 global enterprise customers achieve business results faster by modernizing, integrating, and automating their IT systems and processes. Software AG’s leading product portfolio includes solutions for high performance data management, developing and modernizing applications, enabling service-oriented architecture, and improving business processes. Software AG has almost 40 years of global IT experience and over 3,600 employees serving customers in 70 countries.

Software AG has a global sales force of over 400 people, selling a diverse range of business infrastructure software and services. Software AG wanted to ensure the sales team was presenting prospects with an interactive solution-focused message: a commitment to helping customers leverage and modernize existing applications and infrastructure for maximum business results. To bring the sales team up to speed on this interactive solution led approach, Software AG wanted to launch a training program for its sales professionals that truly engaged them in an interactive dialogue and inspired confidence in their selling skills, so they could more effectively engage with prospects during in-person sales meetings.

Software AG highly values its global sales teams, and management did not want to require busy sales professionals to sit through a series of boring PowerPoint slides. They knew a classic sales training meeting of this nature would not get people excited about the company’s product and service offerings, and innovative sales techniques. What’s more, Software AG wanted to provide a totally new sales methodology to their sales team, so they could move away from traditional slide presentations in the field and instead use interactive whiteboarding to communicate their solutions knowledge in a confident way.

Software AG turned to WhiteboardSelling to launch an innovative training program to help sales teams more effectively communicate with high-level buyers. The WhiteboardSelling sales enablement solution allowed Software AG to develop a “visual story” about its products and services – helping companies achieve business results faster – and to share critical new information on product lines and services with its sales teams. WhiteboardSelling helped Software AG with initial whiteboard message development services, trained and certified hundreds of salespeople, and provided online tools to measure the effectiveness of the WhiteboardSelling sales process over time.

Initially, Software AG worked hand in hand with WhiteboardSelling to create a series of four separate interactive whiteboards, each conveying a different solution message or selling approach. The interactive presentations, delivered by sales managers during small group meetings at sites around the globe, engaged sales people in an open dialogue about how to better convey the company’s core messages and communicate the value proposition of its leading products and services. Salespeople then took what they learned in the training sessions with them into the field, visually recreating the messaging and methodology they learned in the seminars onto whiteboards and other writing surfaces during meetings with high-level prospects.

WhiteboardSelling gave Software AG’s salespeople the ability to convey their company’s message and value proposition visually – on a whiteboard or any other writing surface – in a compelling, confident and consistent fashion. Instead of subjecting sales prospects to "death by PowerPoint™", Software AG salespeople are now fully trained in the effective, interactive, whiteboard-based selling techniques created by WhiteboardSelling. Whether teams wrote their sales pitches on a whiteboard, a flipchart, the back of an envelope, or a tablet PC via webinar, they were able to integrate the WhiteboardSelling communication model into their existing sales methodologies and apply the approach as a powerful differentiator in competitive and complex selling environments. 

Already, Software AG has trained over 340 salespeople using the WhiteboardSelling methodology, and the results have been impressive. Sales teams report feeling more confident, excited, and well-prepared for meetings with prospects. Software AG management believes that the WhiteboardSelling solution has enabled the company to differentiate itself against core competitors that are still relying on traditional slide presentations – and expects the WhiteboardSelling methodology will result in more meetings, more demos delivered, more customer value, and, ultimately, more revenue.

“WhiteboardSelling really opened up a dialogue among our sales teams about exactly what messages and value propositions are more critical to convey in order to close deals," said Joe Gentry, Senior Vice President at Software AG.

“Instead of forcing our sales teams to sit through a boring presentation, we used interactive whiteboards from WhiteboardSelling to convey those key messages in a dynamic, engaging, and passionate way. The result is that our sales people are more confident in their ability to convey our company’s key messages, and they have the tools and skills necessary to present those ideas visually to prospects on whiteboards in meeting rooms around the world.”