Case study: Honeywell

SalesFunnel - Honeywell’s window on the world

“SalesFunnel has been one of our greatest IT successes. The quality of the design and implementation has enabled us to deliver a value added business solution.”—Mark Rand, IT Director EMEA

Background

With roots tracing back to 1885, Honeywell employs more than 100,000 people in 95 countries, and is one of the world’s foremost companies.

Wherever you are, whatever you do, Honeywell’s control technology solutions can be found all around you, its customers build homes, manage buildings, run industrial plants and navigate aircraft through the skies.

Managing a Global business presents many challenges, not least opportunity management which Rob Potts, Sales Director EMEA, Honeywell Building Solutions, says "Is critically important. With more than 300 sales people in EMEA alone, having visibility of the pipeline is vital to our success."

Understanding the need

Honeywell Building Solutions, with a paper based forecasting system and lots of spreadsheets, acknowledged there were few tools to support the growing European sales operation. It was then that Honeywell first identified the need and potential benefits of formalising its sales forecasting and reporting processes.

Honeywell made a strategic decision to not divert internal IT resources from its core business activities and therefore ruled out in-house development. The company also explored and discounted off the shelf packages which at the time had limited functionality and would not support their European sales infrastructure.

The preferred route was to engage with a software application and systems development company, the ensuing investigations led them to Anatec BI, a highly skilled and dedicated team of individuals that specialise in delivering custom software solutions.

Working in partnership with Anatec BI

The main reasons that Honeywell chose Anatec BI were their technical expertise and best practice approach to project development.

Right from the start, using a mix of formal and informal techniques, Anatec BI provided the framework for software development, defined deliverables and maintained effective project control; this was to prove critical to the overall success of the project.

Requirements overview

A comprehensive phase of requirements gathering, systems analysis and systems design was carried out by Anatec BI. Phase 1 of SalesFunnel was implemented as planned and within budget.

SalesFunnel phase one

The initial implementation of SalesFunnel would deliver a high performance, reliable and user friendly system that would enable:

Web based opportunity entry
Opportunity history
Reports including:
- Opportunity listing
- Top ten opportunities
- Pie and line graphical views
Secure permissions based access

For the first time sales people throughout Europe could enter sales opportunities via a standard web browser. This provided management with real-time visibility of the entire pipeline and the ability to accurately report and make better informed decisions to help achieve their overall business objectives.

Honeywell was delighted with the speed and quality of the initial implementation from Anatec BI, it brought large geographically disparate sales teams together with a single process, administration was low, it was secure, reliable and easy to use.

Honeywell moved quickly to the next phase.

Phase two

Additional functionality was added to enhance SalesFunnel’s deliverables. Multiple pie charts provided a fast and reliable view of the health of the pipeline in real-time. Whilst associated actions and risk analysis were added to help sales people manage their opportunities more effectively. Throughout, with a focus on quality and performance, Anatec BI demonstrated an outstanding level of commitment, expertise and effectiveness.

In a changing world

Businesses, like people, change all the time; it’s organisations like Honeywell that are prepared to embrace change that continue to succeed and grow.

Honeywell recognised that when sales people follow a good sales process their chances of winning and closing new business opportunities were greatly improved.

A formal sales process following the Holden Methodology™ was introduced to further support the sales organisation. Around the same time Mark Rand, IT Director EMEA, Honeywell Building Solutions got involved with the SalesFunnel project for the first time. His first priority was to ensure it continued to meet the business’s changing requirements, which included sitting within the framework of Holden’s Methodology™.

Phase three

SalesFunnel was enhanced to enable multi-currency support, this meant opportunities could now be entered and reported in any currency. Localised language help support was also added enabling each country to get even more benefit out of the system.

Reporting was further strengthened with the introduction of traffic lights, and league tables added to provide senior management with a user friendly interface, greater visibility on key metrics and fast access to the pipeline which could be sliced and diced to provide accurate high-value information.

Mark Rand focussed on a particular challenge identified by sales people as a demonstration of the commitment and value-add attitude offered by Anatec BI. This was the length of time it took to enter an opportunity. Sales people wanted this to take no longer than 30 seconds. Anatec BI redesigned the interface without compromising the output data or system performance. Mark commented, “As usual it was no big deal for Anatec BI who carried out the task efficiently and effectively.”

SalesFunnel goes global

Honeywell’s Building Solutions US sales operation adopted SalesFunnel having been impressed by its deliverables and how closely it matched their sales methodology.

Anatec BI had designed SalesFunnel in such a way that globalising the system was relatively easy, their testing process was rigorous and the actual global implementation turned out to be incident free.

Rollout commenced to an additional 300 US sales people, together with administrators, marketing personnel and senior management bringing the global user community to around 1200 people.

The benefits to the business were significant, with visibility across the entire global sales organisation, senior management and executives could now share information about global or multi-national opportunities, allocate the best resources at the right time and manage the global business opportunities more effectively.

Phase four - refresh

Honeywell took the opportunity to further enhance SalesFunnel to include:

Comprehensive search capabilities
New reports showing:
- Sales cycles
- Activity summaries
- Funnel flow
Ability to input and report on key competitor information

SalesFunnel today

The most recent development is the automatic generation of a service opportunity when an order is confirmed for a solution job, this further improves the accuracy of Honeywell’s pipeline.

SalesFunnel is a tried and tested global implementation that helps enable sales people to improve their performance by:

Encouraging the use of best sales practices
Providing benchmarks for sales performance
Monitoring investment in sales initiatives
Keeping a history of opportunities
Enabling the sharing of information and experiences helps to improve teamwork

Sales Managers have real-time access to accurate forecasting information which enables them to manage their overall pipeline more effectively. Individual and team activity can be measured enabling better coaching and mentoring to help ensure sales people are spending their time on the best opportunities.

Information is paramount in any high-value sales organisation; SalesFunnel gives Honeywell’s Senior Executives flexibility to view information in a user friendly environment providing real-time visibility of pipeline information across the entire global organisation. Business decisions can be made early and support and resource allocated at the right time.

Mark Rand commented, “SalesFunnel has been one of our greatest IT successes. The quality of the design and implementation has enabled us to deliver a value added business solution”

In closing

Robb Potts said, “I’ve worked with other sales forecasting systems but SalesFunnel is by far the most comprehensive, easy to use and reliable system I’ve come across. It’s critically important to have visibility of the sales pipeline, SalesFunnel really is our window on the world. Anatec BI expertise and commitment has been instrumental in the success of this project.”