Background: Global Systems Integrator Challenged by Sales Ops Inefficiencies
Neudesic, an IBM company with over 2500 employees globally in the US and India, is an award-winning, global systems integrator with an exclusive focus on Microsoft technologies, the 2023 recipient of the Microsoft Al Partner of the Year in the US, and the 2023 finalist for the Global Microsoft Al Partner of the Year.
As a global systems integrator, Neudesic generates revenue by placing the right consultant into the right role, ensuring the consultant has the proper skillset to deliver the solution on time, on budget and as scoped to the client.
Mike Scariano is the Chief Revenue Officer of Neudesic and has been with the company for over 16 years, including prior to its acquisition by IBM in 2022. Mike is responsible for the 100+ professionals in the company's sales org as well as for all of Neudesic's marketing alliances. Mike's colleague, Rikki Kopack, has been the VP of Strategic Initiatives at Neudesic for a decade and previously led the company's IT and operations teams.
Mike identified some critical inefficiencies surrounding the creation of documents necessary to win new business. Whether an RFP, pitch, or proposal to win to a net new client, or providing new talent to a current partner, clients and prospects often want to review the consultants' resumes to understand the consultant's fit, previous project experience, and certifications.
Before ikaun, the Neudesic team was managing this part of the sales process with Word documents.
Rikki comments, "There are several reasons why this surfaced as a critical business process. For one, the ability to export resumes for RFP or pitch and proposal documents quickly and efficiently was critical in terms of giving us every opportunity at winning business, but also from a workforce management standpoint.
Our staffing team would look at an open role on a client initiative, and we were reliant on our staffing team's "mental rolodex" of someone's skills and it often took many cycles of conversation to understand a consultant's project experience, followed by rounds of updating stored document files.
Challenges:
Solutions powered by ikaun:
Word versions of CVs and resumes were not being regularly updated across the organization and there was no efficient process to ensure the most recent version of any particular CV was used. Also, even when provided templates, it was all too common to lose branding or consistent formatting during an updating process, triggering significant cleanup post-document assembly and causing a large amount of last-minute scrambling.
ikaun was identified as a key sales enablement tool for Neudesic's business center of excellence. ikaun's ai-powered, expertise management software includes powerful features that automate updating resumes, RFPs, pitches and proposals across a vast array of templated formats by centralizing experience, human resources, finance, and time and billing data—making customized and perfectly branded documents available in minutes.
Rikki adds: "Properly presenting the Neudesic brand fundamentally means presenting our consultants in a manner that is professional, buttoned up and consistent and then ensuring this process is easy and quick for our sales team is priority number one."
Rikki led the initial process and collaboration between Neudesic and ikaun, defining all Neudesic's requirements by surveying stakeholders across the company's business units and communicating those requirements with the ikaun team to drive the configuration of the system. Once clarified, ikaun initiated integration with Neudesic's key systems enabling the ikaun data engine to centralize and automate consultants' key data, project work and experience, availability and more.
Lastly, a quarterly cadence was defined for consultants to add the final, nuanced touches to the ikaun data engine such as: What were their specific contributions to project XYZ? What technologies did you interact with? Once the quarterly cadence was defined, ikaun was set to automate reminders to consultants to provide their updates—and reminders would be set to continue until those updates were provided.
Finally with the requirements and integrations verified, Neudesic led a pilot group to a group of fifteen consultants from different regions within the organization; from here, this data was used for user acceptance testing.
Once the process and integrations were complete, ikaun was launched across the organization. Rikki adds: "We were ready to accelerate our sales process and put an end to last minute scrambling."
Results and Next Steps: Global, Multi-Language Roll Out
Today, ikaun has eliminated significate operational and cost inefficiencies for the sales operation teams. ikaun accurately centralizes Neudesic's key experience data into an easy-to-use data engine for sales and delivering business value as both a sales enablement tool but also increasing the satisfaction of Neudesic's consultants.
Neudesic's satisfaction with ikaun means the team will be rolling ikaun out globally to its India consultants next, "And this is where Neudesic will see the biggest bang for the buck," adds Mike. "With over 2000 consultants in India with over twenty different languages, ikaun will help with multi-language conversions of documents to exponentially reduce inefficiencies for the India team and rapidly accelerate our sales team's ability to place these talented individuals on the right projects at the right clients — and that's what it's all about."
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Neudesic, an IBM company and award-winning global systems integrator, specializes in delivering tailored Microsoft technology solutions. With over 2,500 employees across the US and India, their business model relies heavily on quickly matching the exact right consultants—based on skills, experience, and certifications—with the right client projects.
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