What do you do when your company is growing and increasing revenue but it’s not scaling at the pace needed? In 2011, this was the exact circumstance Nuance Communications was facing. Known as the leader in speech, imaging, and customer interaction solutions, Nuance needed a new CRM solution for a quickly expanding global sales team. 

In 2011, Nuance was experiencing:

• Fast growth and acquisitions
• Lack of visibility into the health of the business 
• No accuracy into pipeline
• Labor intensive forecasting 
• Manual & disconnected approval process 

Through the Salesforce platform, Nuance set out to establish a unified, global sales process that would make employees more efficient and improve demand generation. This new CRM solution would allow the leadership team to make better business decisions, and most importantly, create a more seamless customer experience. Nuance had clear executive-driven vision, a tight deadline, and eager users to start using the new tool, Salesforce Sales Cloud™. 

With 900 users in more than 70 countries, Nuance was able to globally deploy Salesforce and gain full user adoption in record breaking time. Their 60 day comprehensive adoption, communication, and training strategy involved continuous communication with all users. This plan took into account how each user specifically would be affected and provided an multi-media approach to education through an array of training tactics and communication avenues. 

We asked Bill Nelson, WorldWide EVP of Sales at Nuance Communications about the project and major milestones that made the deployment such a success.

Bluewolf: What were the driving factors for this change?

BN: Multiple variables. The primary driver was that Nuance’s sales reps didn’t effectively use our old CRM appropriately, and they didn’t like it. Nuance has acquired a number of companies over time, and many reps had come from using Salesforce at previous companies. From a business perspective, we were most interested in how the tool would actually support and enhance our ability to manage the business and drive further growth. 

The biggest reason for the change was a strong desire by the sales reps to move to a different CRM tool. We had to better support the sales reps, to improve their productivity, and to be able to provide the timely information that we weren't getting from the current CRM. It was a user-driven decision and therefore we felt our change strategy should be user driven and focused on employee empowerment. 

Bluewolf: What was your adoption strategy?

BN: Once we had established a new business process flow and had migrated all data into Salesforce, it was time to introduce the new system. Instead of doing a phased roll-out, we decided to deploy across all sales channels, across all geographies, simultaneously. 

We worked to execute a comprehensive employee engagement program building up to our annual sales conference. We had the goal to get all global users educated on the tool before our annual meeting where the entire worldwide sales organization of 900 Salesforce users would be present. Then during the conference we held addition training and open Q&A workshop sessions. 

The Bluewolf team partnered with Nuance to create a communications plan, including; “sales champions,” executive coaching and mentoring, and eLearning modules. This diverse and multi-media approach to training and communicating the changes was key. This made the change fun, exciting and memorable. All users got involved in our global transformation. 

Bluewolf: What is the largest improvement thus far?

BN: We have seen massive improvement, a full business transformation. We are now a business that runs by metrics and math. We are in an “adoption evolution.” 

First thing addressed is having visibility into pipeline. We were no longer using our CRM tool as solely a forecasting tool. We were using Salesforce to be our pipeline tool, representative of the funnels that exist for sales individual in the company, and by sales unit, by regions, and each of different components of sales coverage model. With this increase in pipeline visibility, we are now able to do a far greater level of demand generation to improve pipeline. We’re able to focus on improving lead quality, lead conversion, sales cycles and win ratios just to name a few. 

Bluewolf: What’s Next for Nuance’s Implementation Roadmap?

BN: To get the most value from Salesforce, you must view Salesforce as a program not a project. Keep adding value and continue to iterate on the tool and you will see the results you want. 

We plan to continue to invest in our Salesforce instance. It is not a one-and-done project. In less than a year of being live in Salesforce, we have seen some pretty phenomenal results, including:

    •    Scalability and the flexibility to grow 

    •    Full global visibility into sales 

    •    95% forecast accuracy 

    •    30% growth in pipeline 

    •    5x faster deal approval

Listen to the webcast to hear how Nuance globally deployed Salesforce, a new sales process and gain user adoption.