Enhancing Sales Productivity

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>> Gary: Hi, my name is Gary Hutchfonter assumed spelling and welcome to Sony Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Brad Rinklin, he's the Vice President of Marketing of Akamai. Welcome.

>> Brad: Thank you.

>> Gary: What is the elevator pitch for Akamai?

>> Brad: Well you know we have a number of different ways to describe the company. The most simplest way is that we're the FedEx of the internet. Simply put, you can use the public mail system to deliver your mail across from one point to another, or you can go and find a company that can guarantee quality service and the time that you want to deliver that content and go with FedEx, we're that same way for the internet. So we deliver content, applications, video streaming, software downloads across the internet for companies like Apple, MLB, Amazon, eBay.

>> Gary: How many sales people?

>> Brad: About a hundred and twenty worldwide.

>> Gary: And the company's public now and does about eight hundred million in sales?

>> Brad: That's about right.

>> Gary: What was your growth rate over the last five years?

>> Brad: So we've been in and around thirty to fifty percent year over year depending on the year.

>> Gary: What are some of the challenges with growing a sales force at that rapid rate?

>> Brad: I think one of the key elements that we focused on was at that growth rate a lot of the problems and issues are actually hidden. Obviously, with that kind of success everything else is kind of overlooked or not noticed. And so as we took a look at how we could continue that growth rate for our shareholders we took a look at how best to address productivity across our company.

>> Gary: What is a benchmark for productivity?

>> Brad: From a sales productivity standpoint, we'll look at it by number of units sold, monthly recurring revenue sold by a rep. So for a rep in our company we're looking for anywhere from twenty to twenty five thousand dollars a month sold per rep. And our unit count standpoint, you know around ten to twelve units across a year sold for our company.

>> Gary: So you have a fairly high cost per sales rep. So what have you decided to do to improve sales productivity?

>> Brad: You know we can do that a number of different ways. And you can take a look at if I need to grow my revenue by fifty percent year over year, I can go out and hire more sales reps or I can make the sales reps that we have currently on staff more productive. The latter is obviously much more cost effective and much better for EPS.

>> Gary: What's the ramp up time for a sales rep?

>> Brad: Around six to eight months for us for.

>> Gary: So you have a fairly high training cost as well?

>> Brad: Very much so, very much so.

>> Gary: So how can you make the sales rep more effective?

>> Brad: Well I mean it's a number of different things, but obviously making sure they have the right information at the right time is one of the key aspects.

>> Gary: How long does it take on the average to prepare for a sales call in your company before you came up with the sales enablement solution?

>> Brad: Well I think that, you know, what we saw for the most part was for every hour you were going to spend in front of a customer, you should be spending four to six hours preparing for that meeting.

>> Gary: Right.

>> Brad: Just understanding that customer, understanding the industry you're selling into, the business problem that we were going in to solve, you know, the political aspects of the organization that you're going to go talk to, understanding the pain chain that you're going to go sell against, putting together the proper solution to present in front of that team. And so you know, it's a long aspect of preparation that obviously gets paid off well in the end with a contract. But without that preparation, you didn't get the, you know, quite the close ratios we were looking for.

>> Gary: So what's the best preparation decelerator?

>> Brad: Well I'll tell you, I think that, you know, we have implemented a number of different solutions over the years and thought we had put together a pretty good homegrown solution for sales enablement with our internal website to allow for our reps to be able to just get up and grab content. And from a search ability standpoint, you know, it's fine. They can go up and they can search for content. But what we did is we actually went out and took a look at a number of different solutions that were outsource solutions and we found the company Savo assumed spelling who put together a fantastic solution software as a service on demand system that we plugged in and we went from solution that was good for search which Savo's fantastic in and of course took the place of what we had internally. But increased it into a collaboration machine that allowed us to really understand what sales tools were working in the right timeframe, making sure that the information was organized by industry, by solution for our sales reps, gave our subject matter experts an area for them to be able to live and post and interact with the sales folks and gave the sales folks a very good feedback loop within our system to be able to make sure that they could tell us what they need and what's working.

>> Gary: What was the net benefit?

>> Brad: Well, I mean net benefit is that we've been able to maintain the high growth rate even though our company's, you know, revenues are growing and growing. You know it's the law of small numbers but we, or large numbers, but we are maintaining that growth rate. And obviously for our shareholders and for our company that means a heck of a lot and what as we strive to be a billion dollar company, we're doing that still with really only growing overall sales rep numbers on very small percentages. You know, eight to ten percent growth year, every year on our numbers of sales reps. We're still maintaining that growth rate on a large number.

>> Gary: Well thank you Brad we're going to continue our conversation tomorrow where Brad will explain to us how he has used Savo to harness the collective intelligence of his sales organization.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====