"Helping Customers Thrive with Our Asia Pacific Inside Sales Teams at Autodesk"

Inside Sales at Autodesk is not for the faint-hearted. You need grit, hard work, and relevant expertise. If you are in Inside Sales and you sell to customers digitally or remotely, you need to know your stuff and be prepared to face rejection daily, be resilient and keep going until you get that win. A typical inside sales rep, whether you are a Sales Development Rep (SDR) or a Territory Sales Rep (TSR) would have dealt with customer lists being ‘thrown over the fence’ to make some kind of ‘magic’ happen. Surprisingly, as we all know, that a customer record on a list, is neither a sales lead, nor a qualified opportunity, by a long shot. 

Autodesk is changing the game for the better and have created a groundswell of activity, in aligning our sales, operations and marketing teams for greater customer relevance and an even better impact on overall sales productivity, with modernized systems and processes. “Customers don’t tolerate generic or scripted communications from Inside Sales Reps. Think of the emails and voicemails you personally received over the past week and the number of poorly trained reps causing you pain. Generally speaking, most vendors have reached a tipping point where most SDR and TSR outbound calls lack value or relevant impact for the buyer. The types of calls vary from informal approaches that lack professionalism to poorly trained reps, who are reading something they were handed, but without any depth to discuss it. Buyers can smell uninformed communication a mile away and have no patience for reps that lack depth. It’s a dead-end. A customer’s mind switches and focuses on one activity only; “What is the quickest way to flush this time waster?”  “Vince Koehler, SBI, Make Your Number.”

More sophisticated methods are now needed as our customers seek more value driven engagements to match their new and ever changing business requirements with an even greater emphasis on ROI. Inside Sales is not tele-marketing, nor is it a call centre, traditional customer service or administrative support to the field sales reps. It’s so much more than that. A study conducted by Reality Works Group, stated that 40% of the largest technology companies intended to increase their inside sales during the year 2016. The numbers have increased to 20% this year. As the future progresses, more emphasis is laid on working with innovative techniques to increase the influx of sales, moreover, to solve complex customer business challenges in a simplified way. These challenges we face at Autodesk, can be anything from helping customers in Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Manufacturing, move from 2D to 3D CAD platforms, or help customers in the Media and Entertainment Industry, who need fast creative tool-sets for 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering. Autodesk’s 3D Software Subscription Collections, give customers greater access to the most up to date innovation tools, more software for less cost, greater control and better management over their software assets. Additionally, there is a rising need for innovation and adoption to simply help companies in these same industries, compete against start-ups who typically rise very quickly as a result of the accessibility to innovation and technology.

Inside Sales can scale to many customers, efficiently and productively, leveraging digital, social communication platforms and sales tools to address the rapidly changing buying needs of customers. Companies like IBM trained its inside sales reps to get leverage in generating more sales through social channels. This gave a 55% increase in Twitter and Facebook followers for the company.

Nowadays, it’s the “in-thing” to use social networking platforms to reach new and different buyers. It’s where users and customers live.  

Source: highdatanet on Instagram

The usage of digital tools such as video conferencing, Skype for Business etc., provides the ability for further access to reach the customer conveniently and to secure that next customer appointment or provide them with a technical or sales demo, for example. Orchestrating all these activities usually requires collaboration with our Technical Sales Specialists, Reps in the field or indeed the marketing team as needed and where relevant.

The implementation of Inside Sales Hubs World-Wide is a deliberate Autodesk Sales Strategy to scale and “leave no customer behind”. Autodesk’s Talent Acquisition, HR, and the Inside Sales Team joined forces; recruited and hand-picked the best talent, to join our Inside Sales Team across the Asia Pacific Region. We have 3 main Inside Sales Hubs in Asia Pacific:  Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo, servicing customers across ANZ, Korea, Japan, China, ASEAN and India. We also have Hubs in Barcelona, servicing the EMEA Region and in Denver, servicing our NAMER Region, run by their respective leaders. 

Our recently recruited Inside Sales Representatives come with varying degrees of experience and expertise. We hired a number of millennials, whilst some folk have up to 20 years’ of customer sales and channel experience. You might ask the question, “Why would someone with 20 years of experience want to be an Inside Sales Rep? Good question… It’s these folk that can see the value in being more productive and in some cases (depending on how savvy the rep is), make more money over the phone and feeling that buzz celebrating smaller but daily wins, compared to spending months on large deals for example, which is ultimately rewarding, however, when the deal finally closes, feeling exhausted after a long sales process (in some cases 2 years), as a result of spending hours travelling, long drawn out tough and very complex negotiations, coupled with riding the highs and the lows of “what happens to my earnings, if the deal does not come in?” For these experienced folk joining Inside Sales, it’s a personal choice, either driven by a relocation, career or lifestyle change. The advantage of finding experienced talent, coupled with millennials drives a great coaching, mentoring and knowledge transfer culture.

As part of the interview process, most of our candidates interviewed, had to prepare for and go through a value-selling sales pitch screening process, alongside being qualified for the attitudes and behaviours to align to the specific values of Autodesk. Cultural diversity and language was such a major component, given the diverse customers that we serve across all of Asia Pacific. 

Autodesk’s Inside Sales Team consists of a fun and passionate bunch of people. Our primary aim is to delight and help our customers win. We also strive to amplify business growth within our APAC field territories, managed by our Territory Sales Executives. The Inside Sales Team is a group of hungry, innovative individuals with versatile skills who want to work hard, and make a difference. Their main objective is to figure out what customers really want, more like a discovery. They deal with important customer and lead qualification, are on the front-line and they create possibilities for opportunities to grow and ultimately close the business, working with channel partners, for a customer win-win.

Our sales representatives see great value in helping to move customers to Autodesk’s subscription-based models and continue to help educate our customers about our Cloud-based solutions. Customers love hearing from Autodesk and they are always on the look-out for how they can get the best of breed in technology and have access to more of our cool stuff. Equally customers are always inquisitive and want information about how they can create new revenue streams and get an edge on their own competition, whether they are early adopters or laggards.

Delivering value, combined with the task of ‘high touch’ in a given day is a tough gig for Inside Sales Reps and both these things are fundamental skills an inside sales rep must have, which has been proven to be extremely rewarding, when the rep manages their time, energy and development needs effectively. Many companies are shifting their resources to scale to more customers through an optimized Inside Sales function.  An Inside Sales Strategy, in most cases, is more cost effective. According to a recent report, outside sales calls, costs more than six times, compared to an inside sales call.

Many companies are making Inside Sales Teams a priority. They view it as "the future of making things work". They are working towards making this sector more advanced by using different analytical methods and optimized training, resources and tools to improve the productivity overall. Furthermore, managers can easily save time, give more support on the ground, trigger a rep buddy system and get more direct and quick feedback about how the sales performance is trending and check-in on the team’s development and coaching needs.

Our Inside Sales Team Culture

At Autodesk, the need to build a vibrant, happy, positive and high performance culture in Inside Sales is very important. Our purposeful Teamwork is a focal part of delivering results, embracing and respecting diversity and inclusion and as a result, people thrive. We strive to ‘make the whole greater than the sum of the parts’. Sometimes, this job can be very daunting for reps, which in some cases can demotivate folk very quickly due to sales pressure around ‘the numbers’. A well forged team culture, underpinned by a surrounding healthy corporate company environment can raise feelings of positivity in mindset and behaviours for people to thrive through positive actions and deliver on good sales practices. We want to make the employee feel more like they’re ‘at home’ to have fun, raise the bar to world-class and make a real difference. Our Senior Vice President, for Asia Pacific #Patrick Williams not only cares for the business but leads the way in caring for our people, validated by results in Autodesk's Employee Engagement Survey. When Senior Executives lead by example, they benefit by people following.

Here is a glimpse of our teams across APAC, in the first phase of our 7 weeks of intensive on-boarding where we partnered up with Readiness and Enablement in our PGlobal Sales and Operations Team to deliver a comprehensive training program:

In our Singapore Hub, we service customers in ANZ, Korea, ASEAN and India

As customer’s change and technology advances, sales reps will need to get more and more savvy and versatile on their approach of figuring out how they can add more value to customers, compared to what customers can already find through online search. We need to partner more than ever with marketing to leverage digital SEO strategies, to firstly better anticipate and then solve customer problems. We also need to continue to invest in deep learning to grow and stay current on new skills needed. 

 Howard Brown, founder and CEO of RingDNA quoted:

“The shift to inside sales has been transformational, enabling managers to provide reps with better data track their performance in real time and help them be more successful."