HomeAway
Company: HomeAway, Austin, TX
Company Description: HomeAway is the world’s leading online marketplace of vacation rentals, with sites representing more than 625,000 paid vacation rental home listings throughout more than 145 countries. HomeAway® offers an extensive selection of vacation homes that provide travelers with memorable experiences and benefits, especially more room to relax, for less than the cost of traditional hotel accommodations.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Operations Team of the Year
Nomination Title: HomeAway's Sales Operations Team
Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2011 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
In HomeAway’s eight-year history, the company acquired 18 businesses – each with unique sales processes. As the pace of acquisitions slowed in late 2011, HomeAway created a global sales operations organization to centralize and improve the performance and efficiency of the global sales teams. As a result, over the past year, HomeAway’s sales teams have transformed into a more streamlined, effective operation and are better equipped to meet the needs of the business and customers. The global sales operations team accomplished this by:
1. Establishing a global sales process
The sales ops team conducted a global effort to analyze and document all as-is sales processes and programs across eight countries in order to identify commonalities and differences. By doing so, they established standardized procedures that better meet the needs of HomeAway’s customers. The process provided the foundation for establishing global key performance measures by sales stage, proper training curriculum and the basis for testing and optimization activity.
2. Developing effective training, sales communication, and employee on-boarding
With a global sales process defined, the team designed and developed a global training curriculum that aligns with sales teams, tools, products and skills. To further aid and ensure rapid learning and retention globally, all materials were translated to the language of each regional HomeAway sales team and transitioned to an e-learning environment.
3. Deploying and standardizing tools and reports
A single customer relationship management (CRM) platform and a single telephony system were deployed to enable a common sales process with shared measurement and reporting ability. With that core technology platform in place, the team can deliver timely and accurate management-level reporting. In addition, a custom sales queue was built to drive greater standardization and efficiency.
4. Integrating sales & marketing
To increase adoption of new processes and tools, sales operations coordinated with sales and marketing to run an intense 12-week program designed to train and align sales with marketing activity. The program resulted in establishing a standard customer engagement process, generating additional sales opportunities and substantially increasing the conversion rate of orders per dial year-over-year.
5. Continuous testing and optimization
With common sales measures and technology established, sales operations now has a strong foundation to design and run continuous tests to further optimize the sales and marketing process and drive global best practices. The team has a better understanding of how new hires can be most effective and the value of each sales touch point across global teams, which enables management to make more timely and effective decisions.
The outcome
As a result, revenue from sales completed by agents grew year-over-year, therefore proving the effectiveness of the agents. Thanks to the changes implemented by management, HomeAway relies less on its online transactions and has grown revenue per sales agent.
Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:
Mike Ortegon joined HomeAway in March 2012 as Senior Manager of Global Sales Operations. In this role he is responsible for working with sales leaders across the globe to make strategic business decisions, run effective and efficient teams while executing the company’s corporate strategy. Previously, Mike worked for Harte-Hanks as Global Account Director, focusing on multichannel, data-driven solutions for Fortune 100 companies. Throughout his career, Mike has worked in management, operational, sales and marketing roles in North America, EMEA, Latin America and APAC.