Customer profile

A founding shareholder shareholder of Siebel Systems, Microsoft had invested tremendous efforts and capital (more than $150m) in the implementation of Siebel for its sales force. Some of us may remember watching the famous video of Tom Siebel's attendance to Microsoft Global Summit.

However, the MS sales/marketing and IT senior managers discovered 18 months after the launch of the first release that the level of usage was exceptionally low and the resilience towards the tool quite significant.

Business context

Hired in a Business Support Desk to provide Change Management expertise, XCIT consultants started reviewing the procedures, training and other Siebel related documentations that had been released. The conclusion was that Siebel had been presented to the user community in terms of functionalities ("What can Siebel do?") rather than in terms of user benefits. Salespeople couldn't perceive its value because they had no idea of how to integrate it to their day-to-day work.

For them, Siebel just meant:

• Spend time keying instead of being on the field to sell
• Be under control their manager
• Having nothing in return

What we did

Following Explic-IT's recommendations, our team changed the perception of Siebel by working in 3 directions:

• Get users up-to-date regularly: with a telesales campaign, we got in touch with the most resilient users (identified with the last login and synchronisation date on the server), helping them get a new configuration and local database
• Communicate the too's business benefits in a practical way and how Siebel could help salespeople increase their pipeline and generate more business, and how it could be was "a tool for the people"
• Get closer to the user community instead of acting like any remote helpdesk department, doing "Siebel At Your Desk" operations or "Siebel Road Shows" in Western Europe and further EMEA region.

Outcome

In 6 months, the average usage increased by 300%. More importantly, the confidence of users towards the tool had been reinitiated, This action helped Microsoft to maintain its sales on the mature market of software development. The market data and pipeline analyses provided by the Siebel data contributed ton the company's decision to reposition on the SME market.