Innovation in Expand Selling

Overview: What You Did

Provide an overview of your innovative approach at a high level. Details* might include, among others:

• Business challenges that led to the innovation
• Changes to the customer engagement model
• Functional involvement and program ownership
• Before and after process flows
• Processes or tools to enable effective internal communication and knowledge sharing
• Processes or tools to enable effective communication with customers
• Soft skills or other training programs that staff were required to complete
• Incentives for employees across functions (e.g. Sales, Services, Customer Success, Marketing) to encourage and reward desired business behaviors
• The role of technology in the innovation
• Data analytics practices you used to improve program results
• Roadblocks or challenges faced, and how you overcame them
• Lessons learned. What would you do differently next time? What can others learn from your journey?

Business Impact: How This Innovation Has Helped Your Company

Describe how your innovation has impacted business outcomes for your company. Provide supporting metrics*, such as:

• Growing service/product revenues with existing customers
• Customer loyalty/satisfaction/retention rates
• Broad-based participation in the program
• Lead generation and upsell and cross-sell metrics
• Percentage of customers purchasing multiple product and service offerings
• Efficiencies in sales and marketing processes
• Sales and marketing cost savings
• Measures of employee performance (productivity, satisfaction, turnover, etc.)

Customer Impact: How This Innovation Has Helped Your Customers

Detail how your innovation has positively impacted outcomes for your customers. Provide supporting evidence*, such as:

• Impact on your customers’ desired business outcomes: 
  • Grow their revenues
  • Optimize their cost structures
  • Comply with industry regulatory requirements
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Metrics related to consumption of products/services
• Customer testimonials

Judging Criteria

Your application will be judged on the following criteria:

• The Pacesetter Factor of Your Application: Is your application based on a compelling “best practice” and/or is it truly “innovative” in today’s technology industry?
• Business Impact: How has this helped your company?
• Customer Impact: How has this helped your customers?
• The Cohesiveness of Your Application: Is there a single, end-to-end narrative that is easy to follow and supported by good examples and/or data? (i.e., business challenges, inception, creation, implementation, adoption, measurement, expansion, process, results, lessons learned, future projections)
• The Effectiveness of Your Metrics: Do the metrics that you included adequately support the story that you are telling and are they organized and presented well?