Building sales success through storytelling.
Regular cadence of internal sales win stories generates incremental partner engagement in the field.
CHALLENGE
Engaging partnerships in the field.
HPE wanted to better activate sales with its core “Complete Partners” and their solutions by empowering its sales teams with deeper insights into the power of go-to-market relationships with HPE Complete Partners in the field. By showcasing how successful deals have been executed through partner engagement, HPE could realize stronger sales across its entire Complete Partner portfolio, specifically in support of the value of these solutions to further enabling sales of the HPE GreenLake open and secure edge-to-cloud platform.
SOLUTION
Shining a light on deal success.
HPE engaged Avista to build a regular cadence of internal “Will to Win” sales success stories designed to articulate the deal motion activities that displaced competition and set HPE and its Complete Partners – including Cohesity, Commvault, CTERA, iTernity, Scality, StorMagic, Qumulo, Veeam and WEKA – apart. The stories captured the value of partnership in the field and the distinct benefits of a “better together” message while exploring how each customer will be implementing the combined solution and how many became breakthrough wins. The Will to Win stories were written, approved and applied to the overall HPE customer reference database where they are shared directly with global sales reps and go-to-market teams. However, these Will to Wins couldn’t be shared with the partners. Avista created a program where the stories could be repurposed in “Anatomy of a Win” books, arranged by partner, to share with the partner sales teams as well for further sales engagement and field activation from partner sales reps as well.
RESULTS
Sales win storytelling drives deal success.
Within just a few quarters of the program, Avista had completed more than 60 Will to Win stories and arranged the stories into complete Anatomy of a Win books for 9 different HPE Complete Partners. As a result of the program, many of the partner go-to-market managers have reported much deeper sales engagement by both HPE reps and partner reps in the selling of combined solutions. The deal storytelling has resulted in greater deal success. Avista has also aligned with HPE’s primary Complete Partners directly to build a pipeline from these wins to achieve the development of co-branded external customer case studies, placing more than 50% of the win stories into an external customer case study pipeline.
