Plecto Supercharges Sales by 600% at Danish IIoT Firm

Company Background

Founded in 2006, Secomea is a leading provider of cutting-edge remote maintenance Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions. Headquartered in Denmark with offices in the US, Japan, and China, Secomea caters to over 300,000 machines & PLCs and 8,000 customers worldwide through an international network of more than 70 distributors. As the first remote access solution to achieve end-to-end cybersecurity certification and become Industry 4.0 compliance certified in 2015, Secomea continues to exceed international industry standards amongst machine builders, integrators, and manufacturers worldwide.

Challenge

Secomea needed a way to track sales activity levels in real time so that this could be visualized and used to motivate the newly-established enterprise-focused SDR team.

Alexandra Francis, Global Director of Inside Sales at Secomea, was determined to use her extensive knowledge and experience in optimizing business performance to meet the growing demand for remote access for end users in North America and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa).

Solution: Why Plecto?

Alexandra knew that Plecto was the tool she needed to achieve this demand. Not only did she have experience with Plecto as an SDR tracking her targets at Famly, but she was also responsible for implementing Plecto within her Sales Development team at eloomi, and initiating the use of Plecto within Inside Sales at Planday, where the entire company used Plecto across all its locations.

“For inside sales, the more trust I can give my team and let them run their day, and the less I can be a micromanager, the better off they’re going to perform," Alexandra says. "But of course, they need to have goals and guidance. And Plecto dashboards are extremely nice for tracking that.”

Here’s how Plecto helped Secomea achieve the visualization of sales activities while motivating and developing the inside sales team from the group up:

Plecto real-time dashboards and contests

• “I use Plecto for real-time activities and more of a motivational encouragement tool. For example, I use it to encourage the sales reps to build their pipeline."
• “Our sales reps care most about if their deals are progressing and where they rank in terms of their targets, which they can easily see on the global Plecto dashboard."
• “Once a month, we’ll do call-to-opportunity canvas days so I make a dashboard for these competitions."
• Dashboards built: Activity dashboard, global view for all reps, Revenue Ops dashboard, inside sales metrics, and personal dashboards

Plecto instant notifications

• Alerts when SDRs create an opportunity–entire sales department is notified so achievements can be celebrated collectively
• A clapping sound plays on speakers while a notification pops up on a TV screen

Data-driven coaching

• “Each rep has a personal dashboard. This is how I coach in one-to-ones and where each employee can compare their performance to last week, for example, so it can be very motivating!”

Results

Improved performance through data-driven activity and revenue goals

Alexandra outlines how Plecto was paramount for Secomea in identifying and applying the sales activity necessary to achieve their strategic goals: “In line with our revenue model, we can work top-down or bottom-up. So we can see if revenue goals and ARR are this…what activities does it take to get there from the bottom? And how can we get to that revenue goal?

"And that’s what Plecto has been the most successful for: tracking really and truly the number of activities that my team has completed, conversion rates in real time, what we need to achieve, and how we’re performing. So we can see are we on par, are we overachieving in getting the numbers that we need to based on our revenue model.”

Positive motivation and competition

Knowing how much of a driver being able to see and compare your numbers to others as an SDR (sales development representative) is, Alexandra knew she would use Plecto as a great motivational tool for her young, fast-growing team.

“Plecto is super motivating. Any salesperson in general, but especially young inside sales professionals, are competitive with themselves and within the team. Being able to have and see that healthy competition, and run these sort of sprint contests that we do using Plecto creates a positive motivation for them.”

More personalized coaching through transparency

One-to-ones with Plecto dashboards have been excellent for Secomea in terms of personalization of performance. Whether it’s a weekly sit-down or a daily check-in, Alexandra’s personalized approach to coaching allows reps to easily see where they can improve and make a detailed manager/employee collaborative plan, or take accountability for corrective action.

Alexandra comments on the value of having visual performance data: “The transparency is the most important thing. We can improve based on activity level, because it is so transparent for the reps who are able to see their activity. When I showed the Plecto activity and one-to-one dashboards to the board, they thought it was the best thing ever.

"It’s also transparent in the sense that the revenue team is able to visually describe what our strategic goals are for the entirety of the company to see. This means that CSM, solutions design, and the whole company are interested and can see what we’re doing in inside sales, so it provides that transparency and alignment there."

Improved data accuracy

“Plecto inadvertently helps data accuracy,” Alexandra says. “Salespeople hate admin, that’s just how it is. You miss things in Salesforce. But in Plecto where it’s more clear and more visual, then they are able to realize the data they input in Salesforce might be wrong.”

Plecto at Famly and Planday

• Famly (Early childhood collaboration platform): “In my very first job within SaaS, I was an SDR at Famly. At that stage, I was the one using Plecto as a tool to track my targets. And it was very much a driver to be able to see your numbers and be competitive with your team. That was the most important thing for me."
• Planday (Hospitality and HR software)
  • “At Planday, the whole company was subscribed to Plecto–our support team used it, and all of our regional and global sales teams used it. That’s how we were able to track how Germany was doing, how the UK and the Nordics were doing. It was fantastic!”
  • “We would do some killer dashboards and contests. It would be which region books the most or who calls the most. And that was great in an SMB sales team.”
  • “The Plecto mobile app was something I used every day. When you have 30 reps, and I needed to switch between different regions, it was the daily go-to.”

Final thoughts

"Over the years the update on Plecto's UI has also been really cool to see. The UI is great!" Alexandra says.

"It's the little things that have made things so much easier. The time period options for filtering have been updated. When you launched the option to choose the fields to import from data sources, it was a game-changer! It's really cool that Plecto is constantly evolving."

For those thinking about adopting Plecto, Alexandra most certainly recommends Plecto to those who want a business performance tool, specifically one for boosting your sales team's performance.

Her final advice: "Whether you're a Head of Sales or a RevOps Manager, invest the time to make sure you know how to use the formulas, how to set up what you need to achieve your business or team goals–otherwise you're not going to use it!"

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*Disclaimer:
We are committed to data privacy. All dashboard images in this blog post have been provided by our customer, Secomea. Names and identification photos have been blurred out or altered for security. Plecto does not access customer dashboards without written consent.