The Challenge: Anthology had purchased 4 EdTech companies that all had different systems, standards and sales processes. Leadership had attempted to formalize account and opportunity plans but were utilizing Excel spreadsheets that required salespeople to retype a lot of information out of Salesforce which frustrated the team. Also, the documents did not allow for easy collaboration from technical, product and customer success teams. After 6 months the initiative was abandoned.

The Solution:    I approached leadership with a proposal to utilize Quip which made it possible to recreate these same plans within Salesforce. The major benefit is that the plans dynamically pulled in the required information from the CRM and populated fields with no redundant work by the salespeople. Since everyone in the company had access to Salesforce it allowed for a high level of collaboration and transparency while reinforcing the need to keep the data pristine. After the great success with these plans, we expanded it build and present Quarterly Business Reviews, Executive Briefings ahead of client visits, territory plans and go/no go RFP reviews. This tool saved countless hours across the organization and significantly elevated our go to market strategies.

My Contributions:   There was a cost to the tool so put together a formal proposal and ROI for leadership to gain their buy in. However, we lacked the resources to actually build out all of these plans so I took that on myself as it was mission critical to get these in place. I trained the entire organization of 200+ people globally and created a series of videos and training guides so the adoption was accelerated.