Sectona secures sales process efficiency with Salesforce

According to the Allianz Risk Barometer, cyber security has increasingly become the biggest concern for companies globally, outweighing threats around supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, and even the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Data breaches, ransomware attacks, and IT outage worries have only risen as organisations rapidly transition to a cloud world. Having foreseen these challenges in 2017, Sectona developed a secure cloud-first privilege access management platform to solve modern password management problems.

With employees in five countries and 75+ partners across the globe who work with customers across 20 countries, Sectona helps companies of all sizes secure privileged accounts and manage dynamic remote workforce access.  

“In a large and competitive marketplace, differentiation comes from customer-centricity, not the product alone,” says Nitish Kumar, CEO, Sectona. “At Sectona, we bring a service-driven approach to all our products and aim to delight customers by offering an experience that enables faster and easier decision-making.”.

Here’s how Sectona put its problem-solving approach into action with Salesforce.

Evaluating solutions that drive faster and smarter sales

Sectona’s previous CRM allowed the team to manage sales opportunities; however, the rest of the sales processes were carried out manually. With limited visibility into customer accounts and subscriptions, the sales team sometimes missed renewal opportunities. The lack of a single view also meant that the company could not keep track of the number of leads generated.

“Also, our quotes were not centrally consolidated, so our sales team ended up working in silos, leading to several gaps in communication,” says Kumar. “Moreover, as we added new products and services to our line, it became increasingly difficult to train the sales team on quote generation processes without a centralised system in place.”

Sectona began evaluating multiple CRM solutions to streamline processes and ultimately chose Salesforce.

“Among the tools we evaluated, Salesforce stood out for its advanced forecasting and contact management features. From a cost perspective, we were confident this investment was going to drive value in the long run – and we were right,” exclaims Kumar.

Consolidating and streamlining processes to drive efficiency

Today, Sectona uses Salesforce to consolidate all its sales processes, from lead consolidation and management, to quote configuration and streamlining pricing, discounting, and approvals.

Leads from the company’s partners, website, and direct marketing efforts flow into Salesforce Sales Cloud, where they are automatically qualified. Over 5000+ customer accounts are now monitored on Salesforce, with over 10-15 contacts mapped against each account; all enabling a rich contact management ecosystem.

The company also uses Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price and Quote) to accurately configure quotes and to streamline approvals for faster conversions. 

Multiple quotes are generated for different partners against an opportunity. A unified view of all these quotes helps sales reps offer various options to customers via these partners, enhancing customers’ evaluation and purchase experience.

Quotes have also been standardised by pre-approving pricing to reduce errors, decrease turnaround times, and enable greater transparency between the company and its partners. This enables a small team of sales reps to quickly approve over 300+ quotes in a month.

“Before Salesforce, processing 300+ quotes would take three times the time we take today, and many additional resources. Now, we’ve already recorded a 50% increase in efficiency in our processes,” says Kumar.

Further, the slab-based discounting feature of CPQ has helped the company reduce SKUs by 80%. The team has now intelligently combined individual SKUs previously based on individual discounting into a single SKU based on simple user input, all towards offering the customer the best possible price.

Enhancing forecasting capabilities, scaling revenue opportunities

The new streamlined processes also help the team track subscriptions, forecast revenue, and drive renewals on time. “We no longer miss acting on renewal opportunities and have increased our efficiency on this 100%,” says Kumar.

The leadership team can even forecast next year’s revenue opportunities more accurately, increasing efficiency by 75% from quarter to quarter.

And they can monitor and optimise sales rep performance by easily tracking the number of quotes processed and seeing where any delays happen.

Upgrades scheduled for Sectona

Elaborating on the company’s future, Kumar says, “Now that we’ve laid the foundation for a scalable sales process, we want to grow our network of field sales representatives across Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia, and acquire a larger market share.”

Sectona wants to next bring its partners and resellers on the Salesforce platform to allow for even more collaborative working, and to drive further efficiencies.

“We have become active advocates of Salesforce after witnessing its benefits and want our peers to know that Salesforce can add a lot of value to them,” says Kumar.  

“Partnering with Salesforce has already given us an edge; we can access best practices and scale with ease. Also, most importantly, given that Salesforce is a trusted brand globally, our association with the brand makes our customers and partners trust us more”.

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