Search past winners/finalists


  • MESA logo

Ooyala: Bill Gibbs

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Ooyala
Company Description: Ooyala harnesses the power of big data to help broadcasters, operators and media companies build more engaged audiences and monetize video with personalized, interactive experiences for every screen. They go beyond traditional online video platforms, providing software and services combining best-of-breed technologies with industry-leading video analytics to help their customers optimize and automate video programming, video streaming and video syndication. Ooyala is an independent subsidiary of Telstra.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Operations Professional of the Year

Nomination Title: Ooyala: Bill Gibbs, Sales Operations Manager

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 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:

Driving revenue and profitability to a 30% YOY growth was a pretty clear mandate to Bill Gibbs, Manager, Sales Operations, at Ooyala. While this goal provided a clear roadmap for Bill, what was less clear was how Bill would overcome some key internal business challenges that stood in the way.

One of the challenges was to increase the number of large enterprise deals. In 2013 five very large deals accounted for 25% of Ooyala’s ACV bookings. In 2014, Ooyala’s Sales team was challenged with increasing ACV (Average Contract Value) by 30% YOY.

Two key problems kept the Sales organization from solving this business issue; length of sales cycle (12-18 months) and access to power (CXO). Ooyala needed a new methodology that would enable the sales reps to differentiate the company early in the sales cycle and move the sales cycle into a mutual plan and deployment

Although the sales organization believed it communicated a value message, they struggled to deliver an overall value proposition.

Added to this issue was a lack of a common sales structure, standardization or methodology across functional teams as well as a tendency to lead with products alone. These issues left Ooyala struggling to identify and connect with business level buyers. Additionally, their buyers were struggling because all vendors in this fast growing market sounded similar to one another.

To address these problems head on, Bill championed the adoption of the ValueSelling Framework by implementing a common language across the global sales organization and cross-functionally within the company as well as provides a scalable process to strengthen pipeline management and arm the field with a unified approach to selling.

This strategy was rolled out in three phases:

Phase One:

Trained Ooyala Customer Engagement teams including sales leadership, field sales, customer success, professional services and marketing on the ValueSelling Framework methodology. In total more than 200 Ooyala team members were trained.

Phase Two:

Deployment of ValueSelling tools (ValuePrompter, Mutual Plan Template and Opportunity Assessment forms) and the establishment of a weekly pipeline review process.
Phase Three:

Methodology integrated into the Business Process Automation solution (Salesforce, eValuePrompter), with Key Performance Indicators tracked on-demand (SFDC Dashboards) and forecast health check provided weekly to Sales Leadership (SFDC Forecast Module).

Throughout this transformation, the team learned how to uncover customers’ critical business issues and moved from selling products and feature sets to articulating the value of working with Ooyala.

Bill’s efforts to transform the sales environment at Ooyala have yielded significant results including:

-Increased YOY bookings
-Unable to share actual numbers at time of entry.
-Roughly 60% increase in average deal ACV ($75K to $120K average deal size new business opportunities.
-The organization has shifted from a transactional, product-centric model to a value based selling model.
-All new business deals compliant with ValueSelling.
-In Q3, three large deals netting an ACV of $2.1 M closed based on implementation of the ValueSelling Framework.
-The ValueSelling Framework is required as part of the lead engagement cycle, which is used to empower managers to coach more effectively from lead qualification to final decision.
-Significant improvement in trend spotting and forecast accuracy. ValueSelling Fundamentals incorporated into SFDC FRCT module and Sales/Sales Leadership Dashboards.
-Q4 Pipeline Health Assessment reporting is based on eValuePrompter data, last update, etc.
– driving inspection from overall pipeline to opportunity. All new Q4 business is pipeline compliant with the eValuePrompter, and weekly opportunity assessment.
-The new ValueSelling framework and language is fully incorporated into all sales activities within the Ooyala sales process.

 

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)