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Vodafone Germany is one of the largest and most modern telecommunications providers in Europe. It realizes turnover of more than EUR nine billion and has 13,000 employees. Based in Düsseldorf, Vodafone Germany is a one-stop, innovative and integrated technology and service provider with a portfolio that includes mobile communications, fixed network telephony, Internet, and broadband data services for business and private customers. Continuous development, customer centricity, numerous patents and investments in new products, services, and the modern network have made Vodafone an innovation leader in the German telecommunications market.
Sales support goes social at Vodafone's enterprise business unit
Vodafone Enterprise recently asked itself "How do we break out of our information silos and drive synergies across our talented teams?" Short answer: put Vodafone Enterprise on the web via the Jive Social Business platform to facilitate networking, transparency, and collaboration and, over the long run, help drive sales and revenues.
Business needs drive the platform decision
Sales teams require flexible, intuitive communication tools
An enterprise sale is much more complex than a consumer sale—and there's a lot more at stake. Successful enterprise sales are founded on best practices and bolstered by information sharing and collaboration. Vodafone Enterprise found that the company's strategic communication platforms did not meet its needs. After going through several iterations of templates developed by corporate IT specifically for their use, Vodafone Enterprise decided to make an independent exploration of other options.
- Existing systems did not provide integrated information and the solutions were not intuitive to use
- Existing systems couldn't help the sales force quickly find specialized expertise for specific competitive situations
- Learnings and best practices were not broadly available to sales teams facing similar situations
"Vodafone Enterprise is an innovation leader in the German telecommunications market giving our customers one-stop solutions. With Jive we have a flexible platform that facilitates collaboration on products and creates transparency supporting our enterprise sales force."
Katharina Meffert,
Marketing Manager Online, Vodafone
The Jive platform stands out
"Highly efficient tool for sales support"
Using Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace as a starting point, Vodafone performed extensive analyses of a number of Social Business vendors and their products. "The Jive platform stood out for its flexibility and ease of use," says Katharina Meffert, Marketing Manager Online, Vodafone Enterprise. "Jive has turned into a really efficient tool for sales support that helps our sales team go that extra mile. We see it as a competitive advantage."
Calling the platform "Eplace," Vodafone took advantage of the ease of branding Jive to give it the look and feel of other Vodafone platforms. Today, almost all of Vodafone Enterprise employees are registered users on Eplace: all of the 1,000+ members of the Vodafone Enterprise sales force and another 1,000+ employees who support them. And most are active users with 70-80% logging on regularly.
Jive at work as Eplace
Entire sales force uses the platform
On Eplace, users leverage the wealth of know-how embedded throughout their business unit to make everyone's job easier. With access to Jive, Vodafone Enterprise sales reps spend more time selling and less time searching for answers and expertise. Jive connects sales with knowledge workers across Vodafone Enterprise, capturing and centralizing the expertise, content, and information sales teams need to make sure that every deal is backed up by an army of experts and advice. Productivity improves across the board, and the ramp up time for new sales reps decreases.
Share documents
Sales teams share information, best practices, and other documents among themselves, and they share documents with other departments that are associated with specific processes, such as finance or IT. "Before Jive, finding the right document could take some time," says Katharina. "Now, with the intelligent search feature, a document is found in just seconds."
Find people
Eplace makes it easy to find people within the company with specialized expertise by encouraging users to attach their profiles to subjects, such as a specific product line or technology, "eliminating the need to ask 10 people if they know of someone who can help you with a prospect, opportunity, or customer support," says Katharina.
Broaden business discussions
Eplace exposes business discussions and projects to a wider range of topics and people, as exemplified by a group project list that is regularly updated to keep everyone in the loop.
Answer questions quickly
Eplace enables staff to expose the answers to specific questions instead of answering them over and over, as exemplified by a recent discussion of tariffs and pricing schedules for a new phone the company has launched.
"Eplace helps us to create a lean and non-hierarchical environment to leverage the knowhow of our employees," says John-Paul Pieper, Business Manager to Director, Enterprise Sales, Vodafone Enterprise. "People-driven business makes a real difference in competition."
Learn More About Jive
Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.
Download our Sales Enablement Toolkit and learn more about sales force collaboration and communication
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