ValueCore is the right partner to support PeopleDoc (now part of UKG)’s growth ambitions
UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) is the future of PeopleDoc, which will become the HR Service Delivery arm of one of the largest cloud companies in the world. At UKG, Our Purpose Is People, and we believe that organizations succeed when they focus on putting people first. UKG’s HR Service Delivery platform includes case management, process automation, and employee file management and empowers HR, managers and their employees to boost productivity, increase employee engagement, manage global compliance and meet the challenges of tomorrow. With more than 12,000 employees around the world, UKG’s own workplace culture has been named a best place to work all over the world, including consecutive years on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list. To learn more, visit UKG.com.
Scaling-up with ValueCore
PeopleDoc (now part of UKG) firmly believes in the concept of value selling and have invested in staff for this area significantly over the last year. With a desire to establish value selling practices across the sales teams in Europe, PeopleDoc developed a traditional ROI calculator which was used within the sales cycle with the support of the value engineering team. Due to resource constraints, the value engineering team could only focus on strategic opportunities hence covering probably 20% of the prospect with support. “We saw that the request for value engineering was picking up,” said Michael Jetten, Director Value Engineering-International Sales, PeopleDoc. “Our sales team wanted to have these kinds of calculations and wanted to get the information from the value engineering team into all deals, not only the strategic ones. To meet the increased demand and our significant growth expectations, we had two options: We could hire new value engineers and continue the manual practice, or we could buy a solution to help us scale up with automation.” PeopleDoc determined that a software solution was its best course of action, especially since the company was looking to automate the more substantial parts of the straight-forward, input based value engineering work around ROI to support all deals and not only 20% of them.
Consequently, a vendor vetting process for a web-based, self-service tool that could “digitalize” the ROI calculator and offer a more interactive environment for customers and prospects compared to a static Excel sheet-based discussion was initiated. At the same time such a solution needed to be simple and intuitive enough to be used by the sales team autonomously and without resource support from value engineering. Over the course of several engagements with providers, the choice came to ValueCore who could meet the above-mentioned requirements.
Now, with ValueCore, PeopleDoc’s value engineering team doesn’t have to get involved with each and every deal in person. Instead, their experience, expertise, and knowledge content are now available within the ValueCore tool, enabling sales to use this information for all deals and only needing the value engineering team for larger deals in person. This results in moving to close to 100% deal reach with the value content versus the 20% only reachable with the old, manual approach.
In particular, small and medium-sized deal sales benefit from the solution, since they can benefit from the value engineering material via ValueCore now as well.
A better way to manage the entire sales cycle
Moreover, during the discussions with ValueCore, it was discovered that this tool could be used for more than a simple ROI calculation tool – one that could optimize the entire sales cycle.
With ValueCore integration with Salesforce, PeopleDoc has been able to create standard output templates for pricing proposals. “We can now send proposals based on templates we have created per region, including a customized ROI and business case calculation,” said Michael. “We can channel every single proposal we send with this tool, and our entire sales cycle is now managed through Salesforce and ValueCore.”
“ValueCore has allowed us to make a big step where we have more control over our sales cycle and can make sure that our sales teams actually have something they can use and follow-up with customers on directly. We have visibility into the sales cycle with Salesforce and ValueCore, and can improve the overall quality over time via self-service.”
Shifting the conversation to value
PeopleDoc sales teams can now combine pricing information with a customized ROI calculation based on a few variables only and without involving an expert team. This helps customers easily visualize the relationship between solution cost and benefits within the commercial proposal. “This helps put everything in context and lets our prospects focus on the bottom-line value, and not just the price tag,” said Michael. “ValueCore helps us demonstrate our extensive HR expertise and the compelling business case our solution offers at an early stage of the discussion. This allows us to change the conversation from one focused on features and functions to one based on value. This was a key achievement for us, and a key objective related to this project.”
PeopleDoc’s value engineering department is relatively new and had been looking for a way to educate prospects in a manner that didn’t feel like they were teaching them too much. The ValueCore application helps them easily show their expertise and build trust. The tool guides users through the process of asking the right questions, which in turn, helps the prospect see how PeopleDoc has built a unique approach based on the track record with 2,500 customers worldwide
Great adoption from the start
The PeopleDoc team has seen high use and very quick adoption since launching the ValueCore tool. The usage trend is upwards and after 4 months full usage from the sales team has been achieved (see figure 2 below). Every PeopleDoc salesperson has used the application already, and many are using it with prospects directly on a regular basis which is an outstanding result after a few months being live.
Figure 2: ValueCore Usage
“Before we used ValueCore, salespeople had to create ROI numbers manually, or go to the value engineering team in order to create their own proposal,” said Michael. “Now all of this has been automated in a way that they can really focus on those parameters that are necessary to win the deal. ValueCore has helped them do all this and more and has contributed to very positive sales results.”
