Automating sales documentation repositories using AMPLIFY Integration Builder

ow do you manage your sales documentation? A customer relationship management tool (CRM)? An intranet site? Excel sheets?

Since I am responsible for the sales engineering organization at Axway, my team generates a number of artifacts that can be stored and shared, including:

• Write ups of discovery workshops
• ROI business case analysis
• Solution Demonstration presentations
• Proof of Concept scoping plans and results
• Technical and Financial Solution proposals
• Statements of Work for professional services
• Legal documents such as Product Order forms
• … The list goes on…

Axway uses an intranet platform from Jive Software for collaboration on projects. It includes a social aspect as well as housing project related documents. Jive is helpful but when not used in a consistent way, we get into trouble because documents end up stored all over the place. We also use Salesforce to manage our opportunity pipeline, and Salesforce has its own ability to store documents.

The net result was that we never had a consistent view where anyone from Axway could see all the artifacts related to a sales opportunity for a client. Furthermore, we had other contributors in professional services creating valuable artifacts and that was organized differently.

The solution?

In partnership with my other team managers, we went to Jive to organize the assets. Jive allowed the concept of creating a single landing page that represents the client. You can have sub-pages (projects) that represent the different sales engagements and professional services engagements. We then had a one stop view of all artifacts for the customer. Right?

Still not happy…

The concept was awesome but in practice, it meant a manual process to create the landing pages in Jive every time there was a new sales opportunity. The team members would not create the landing pages in a consistent way, and it meant a lot of my time being spent being a steward and validating that the teams were following best practices.

The Holy Grail… Automating sales documentation

With the Axway AMPLIFY Platform, we created an approach to automate the process of creating Jive repositories. Integration Builder makes it easy to detect when an opportunity in Salesforce gets to a certain stage in the sales process. AMPLIFY’s Integration Builder monitors events and then takes action to automate the process of creating the project in Jive.

Now I have an automated and consistent approach to creating the documentation repositories in Jive and much less risk of human error. Even better – I did not have to write a line of code to get there.  We simply took advantage of our connectors for Sales Force and for Jive and used AMPLIFY’s orchestration engine to automate the creation of a project.

There is more. In my leadership role I am trying to enforce best practices to ensure the team is creating professional artifacts during each stage of the opportunity.  It’s a constant challenge for me to manually check how the opportunities are progressing and that we are creating the artifacts along the journey.

AMPLIFY Integration Builder

Axway’s Integration Builder opens up all sorts of opportunity to get proactive notification of the sales process and adherence to it. For example:

• If a sales opportunity progresses from discovery process to say education then the Jive repository should have all the discovery notes. Axway’s Integration Builder automatically detects when the opportunity changes to a new stage and it can also look to see if the Jive repository is empty. That can give me the trigger to investigate why we did not capture the discovery during the earlier stage.
• If the opportunity did not turn out to be a successful outcome in the early stage and there are no artifacts in the Jive project then using Axway’s Integration builder, I can clean up the repository in an automated fashion.
• Essentially, whenever there is a change in Sales Force, I can detect it now automatically and that helps me have much better governance on sales process adherence.