Siemens achieved consistency and scalability in sales with Shark

About Siemens Digital Industries Software

Siemens Digital Industries Software help organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware, and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. The Siemens Xcelerator business platform and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimise their design, engineering, and manufacturing processes to turn today's ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries.

Before Shark / The Challenge

Before using Shark, Siemens DI would typically use Excel-based tools to create business cases that they would then try to modify and present to the customer in PowerPoint and Word documents. However, these outputs were not the same business cases that they create today; they would include qualitive benefits that were not measured with monetary values, as well as some customer references.  

These types of tools were generally used internally, so the team would have very little collaboration with the customer about the value they could achieve using Siemens products. There were occasions where the solutions that the team were selling required input from the customer, so they would need to try and walk the customer through complicated Excel documents.  

One of the key challenges that Siemens DI faced was that they did not have a structured value-based approach within the business. Every salesperson and consultant would have their own way of generating a business case which meant their approach was not consistent, scalable, or comparable. Following an internal recommendation from a Sales Director within Siemens, and a desire to move away from traditional technical led expertise to an enterprise level focus, the team decided to engage with Shark Finesse.

The Solution

In 2020, Siemens Digital Industries Software started their journey with Shark Finesse. Within 4 weeks, Siemens DI had a customised version of the Shark platform that included benefits that were aligned to their products, the industries they were selling to, as well as the conversations they were having with customers.  

Value-based selling was something that the team were aware of, and it was used here and there, however actively promoting it within their sales cycle to customers was a new concept, therefore they decided that training would be beneficial to them. This training consisted of one online session, as well as a full day on-site workshop. During this time the team were taken through the key features and benefits of the Shark platform, best practices, as well as value-based selling theory. The sessions were interactive which meant the team could ask questions and any potential reservations or nervousness could be addressed.

Today, the main users of the Shark platform are primarily sales and pre-sales teams. The presales consultants will usually customise the business case with customers and then the sales team will deliver the sales pitch and the value case to the customer. For future usage, Siemens DI are looking at how the Shark platform could also be utilised within the Customer Success team so they can evaluate how their products are performing after implementation.  

Shark enabled Siemens DI to have a standardised value selling process and it’s now an expectation that new products and services have business cases associated with them. It would previously take them weeks to create a business case where as now, with the correct methodology and tools they can deliver a value proposition to their customer within a day, sometimes even an hour!

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