SELL MORE - Success Case: Automatic Data Processing

Advantage Success Case: ADP

What You Need: Sell the value customers demand.

The good old days are gone: today’s customers require much more. We help sales professionals develop the skills that matter – like knowing your customers, communicating your value, managing accounts better, and creating business impact.

Issues You’re Facing

  • Sales people need to sell higher and wider
  • Sales people lack the skills to have higher-level conversations
  • Limited financial or business acumen
  • Inability to understand or sell your company’s value
  • Customers demand more linkage to their business drivers

How We Can Help

  • Improve sales performance
  • Move from product to solution selling
  • Accelerate the successful launch of new products
  • Sell to higher levels
  • Manage selling to committees
  • Create sales coaching that focuses on adding customer value
  • Gain understanding of how customers buy

Success Story: Automated Data Processing
blue bulletADVANTAGE SOLUTIONS: The Advantage WaySM, Mind of the Customer custom simulation, SalesTEAMTraditional solution-based selling is really about moving you through a selling process. Now we’re thinking differently about that. Our partnership with Annika and Advantage Performance Group is what allowed us to come up with the right thing.

Transforming the Sales Organization

Thinking from the C-Level buyer’s perspective delivers powerful product
launch sales results for ADP.

Challenge

Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) is one of the world’s largest providers of business outsourcing solutions. In 2009, the company launched Workforce Now HR Services. An exciting “all in one” product for business owners, it represented a different, higher-level value from ADP.

The company knew that sales performance success would happen at the C-Level. “With this new product, we were moving from the solution portfolio of just providing technology-based services to offering a fully-outsourced suite,” says the VP of Sales Leadership and Performance. “That dialog is very different from a buyer’s perspective.”
ADP needed to help the sales organization sell to a different contact, at a higher level. Now the sales team would also need to understand the customer’s entire company — not just the HR function.

Success Solution

Advantage President and CEO Annika McCrea worked with ADP leaders to create an initiative that would help sales people understand the new product, develop C-Level relationships, coach more effectively, and think more consultatively.

The sales training initiative incorporated The Advantage WaySM process, particularly Impact Maps that created a “line of sight” from learning to business results. A business acumen sales simulation, fully customized to the ADP product launch, formed the core of the learning experience. The SalesTeam program further helped salespeople understand their customers’ buying cycles.

An Advantage Way Success Case evaluated how learners were making business impact 6 months after training. The study showed that staff at 3 levels had already produced significant sales, and that other behavior changes were improving sales performance in several areas. Results included multi-year sales contracts, expanded business with current customers, and more qualified prospects in the sales funnel. The bottom line: even in a turbulent economy, the ADP sales team was hitting launch sales goals.

The VP of Sales Leadership says, “The examples cited in the Success Case alone prove that the investment paid for itself, and that’s just scratching the surface. I’m confident that we covered our investment from an ROI standpoint. And from a sales standpoint, I expect that we will make a much larger impact over time.

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