Empowering Digital Sales Transformation
As the global leader in medical device manufacturing operating in 150 countries with thousands of sellers selling complex products into differentiated marketplaces, Medtronic needs to continually transform their selling strategy to keep pace with market demands. Learn how Medtronic led the market to digital selling over nine years ago and how guided selling principles empower their sellers to quote the right compatible product at the right time for the customer.
About the Speakers
Jon Moeller is a Global Strategic Consultant where he guides pricing and sales teams through critical digital transformation initiatives. He works with customers across the phases of discovery, identifying value drivers, aligning to PROS solutions, building the business case, mobilizing cross-functional teams, and preparing our team to deliver the 1-5% revenue uplift results of transformation. During his 11 years at PROS, he has architected and delivered our solutions in Professional Services, has experience across 9+ industry verticals and prior to PROS led a $1B Business Unit building pricing processes from the ground up while delivering on key margin growth initiatives.
Mino Serna is a Principal IT Business Systems Analyst at Medtronic. He is a leader and visionary, and always competing to finish first. Serna is driven by achievements and strives for personal growth. He gauges success not only by his personal achievements but by the achievements of his team. He doesn't believe in self-preservation, and his knowledge, skills, and experience are utilized best when he can help the people around him grow.
Full Transcript
Jon Moeller: Hi viewers! Jon Mueller from PROS here today, I've got Mino Serna from Medtronic. We're going to be talking about how he's successfully delivered the PROS CPQ solution in his business unit and gone through some of the pains and the challenges. So Mino, if you'd like to give a brief introduction on yourself as we get started here?...
Mino Serna: Yeah, so my name is Mino Serna Principal IT Business Systems Analyst with Medtronic. Been with Medtronic for nine years and the entire time I've been working with the PROS CPQ system, implementing it to our business.
Jon Moeller: Great, so as we get started. Talk to us about the state of affairs of sales before PROS. What did that look like?
Mino Serna: There was quite a bit to it. There was a lot of confusion going on with how we were preparing our quotes. We, our business unit, is highly configurable, so at times we're selling incompatible parts. There were it was slow to get to our customers. There's a manual process. A lot of it was with Excel or other homegrown tools. So there is definitely a need for reporting forecasting. A lot of that whole sales support side that we needed to address.
Jon Moeller: And so was it a leadership change? Was it what forced the changes that we've got to address this, we've got to digitally transform?
Mino Serna: Yeah, it's a multi-faceted. There was, you know, from our sales reps to our internal teams that were preparing quotes, leadership, wanting to have more visibility, more forecasting opportunity management. There was a lot there that needed to be taken care of so that we can keep moving forward.
Jon Moeller: And when you got to that stage to want to push forward, what were those guiding principles of how you wanted to transform, how you wanted to make things simple and easy? What what were those key couple of points?
Mino Serna: Number one was taking care of the frustration of our customers. You know, they're spending a lot of money on our products and to give them an incompatible part that they just can't use or have to go through a process of getting a return, you know, does not bode well with what we're trying to do, build that peace of mind, being able to get the right product to the right customer at the right time. So we really wanted to address that, get them moving forward and help our sales team alleviate that for themselves. You know, having to renegotiate with the customer trying to build that rapport back with because of a bad quote. You know, we wanted to alleviate that part, make it easier for them to do their job as well.
Jon Moeller: Great. So let's get into some of those details, right? So when you think about guided selling those complexities of your business. Talk to us about those key areas of how you thought about changing it and implementing it and getting in front of your sellers.
Mino Serna: Absolutely I think the biggest thing to really understand first is what we're really selling. The business unit that I'm supporting is our net surgical navigation team. So our systems are large capital pieces of equipment that are used in surgery, surgery centers in a surgery itself. They are guided in regards to navigation. We're doing robots that help support a surgical case. So each of those is highly configurable. So as we're moving through and building this quote out, you have to start with a system what it's capable of doing, the parts that are compatible with it. And those are the things that we wanted to address. Being able to repeat a quote very easily, being able to get it configured the right way, the right time, you know, the first time through.
Jon Moeller: Yeah so when you think about the compatibility of those different solutions. Talk to us about how you would propose and put that onto the document and how you want your internal Sellers to see things versus how the hospital system needs to see things and how you want to structure some of those things.
Mino Serna: Absolutely so with our quotes comes back to what we're selling, you know, always keeping that in mind. We are working with hospitals and surgical centers and these are large quotes, so they may be buying one system, maybe buying multiple systems, maybe building out a brand new hospital that they have to structure everything. So we are selling from anywhere from half a million to multimillion dollar quotes at any given time. So we have could have different product mixes of how many systems we're doing, what they can do. So from our internal team that's preparing these quotes, we want to make sure that they have the ability to select what they want. Starting with the base system of what they are trying to get to the customer and then building it out from there, asking questions as to what they want to do, what kind of surgeries they're going to be performing, what kind of software they want in there, and the supporting parts that help drive that the use of these tools. So really, being able to walk them through one time and doing it smoothly, there's a logical order in regards to how we're presenting it. We're able to offer layer in different marketing programs, promotions in there without our sales reps having to refer back to any type of notes or things. It's all within the system to guide them through it. They can select that. I want to do a promotion, I want to do a marketing piece. It'll change out the products for them. It'll change the pricing according to what we have set, and it'll be able to make that preparation much easier for them. From that point, we're able to start moving it in to the pricing negotiation, with our customers being able to give them a pricing offer for the products that they want and be able to give them our users multiple ways of getting to that proper price point. So it's, you know, it's a fine mix of where we're going, our sales cycles are anywhere up to 15 months. You know these, are customers need to allocate capital funds to be able to purchase our products. So it's a long sales cycle. They are trying to get the best product mix for the money that they're going to be spending within the amount of allocated funds that they have to spend on these products. So they want to make sure they get the right piece. So we could touch a quote multiple times throughout that 15 months, you know, it's not unheard of looking at it 10, 15 times as we're going through and being able to follow that quoting lifecycle. So from the first quote up to every possible version that they've done of it and at any given time, the customer will find out. OK, let's go back to the third quote that we did because I like the way that mix works and making it very simple for our team. They can easily just click back on the quote that they generated that met the customer's need. Make that active. Our opportunities get updated. Our forecasts get updated based on what those selections are and our customer gets what they really wanted, very simply.
Jon Moeller: That's great. It also changes how the internal teams get to view this with that opportunity and from inside the revenue insights, having everything in one single place, full visibility across all your Sellers, across all the products, profitability metrics, this visibility has probably been able to really change the way that you think about the business and forecast the business. Any key things that have come out from having that data and changing the way that you're training your Sellers and winning more deals?
Mino Serna: I would say that it's really about the customer comes back to that customer of what they are going to get and how they structure that deal. Being that these are large capital pieces. It's not just a sales process, these are a purchasing contract agreement. So there's a lot that goes into it. It's not just selecting the products, you know, that's the basis of it, but it's also providing them with terms and conditions for their contracts, being able to negotiate what works for them. We have government accounts and large buying networks that we're working with. So that each have their own entity of how they need to have a deal structured or their contract structured. So we give that flexibility to our sales team to be able to prepare these quotes for them. Being able to change how their terms and conditions are presented in there, give them ability to customize their proposals that go to the customer. It's there's a lot that goes into making sure that they get the right proposal the whole time without having to edit it offline, giving them a tool that can do it for them. Simply, that's what it's been making a successful internal team.
Jon Moeller: How about the service contracts in the subscription based approach of some of that and the recurring side?
Mino Serna: Absolutely Thanks. So, yeah, the subscription based service and support agreements, all these large capital pieces of equipment need to be serviced. We need to maintain our product to make sure that our customers and our patients are getting a good system, the one that's going to be supporting them. These are life saving pieces of equipment. These are things that are going to make them enjoy their life better, be able to live a better life. So we need to make sure that we're providing a product to them. So we have these extended service programs or different offerings that we have available to our customers to be able to get in and maintain those systems. So we've been able to leverage the tool to restructure our service contracts. Being able to if they have multiple systems out there, make them coterminous for either their new system that come in on or bundle those with the ones that they already have in place. Prorating service contracts easily be able to structure these, as well as one of the unique pieces that we've been able to address is being able to provide a customer with one quote that has multiple options to it. We can structure that quote out for him. We can provide them with the options all on one sheet, and they can now select the best option for themselves. The other part that is, again, these are service agreements. These are contracts that we're doing. So leveraging the tool to be able to dynamically build this contract based on products that we've selected. We're able to now put in the right terms and conditions, the right verbiage to support that product or that service offering. And again, without our internal team that's preparing this, having to modify a quote offline or make other adjustments, it's all within the tool.
Jon Moeller: Extremely powerful. So when you think about your user, right, you're selling team, the sales reps. How did you think about training them and how did they get onboarded? And how are self-service really? Are they today?
Mino Serna: When we first started, it was they were coming from a very antiquated system. Homegrown tools Excel based selling. There was a lot to it. They liked it because it's very simple, but there was no oversight. There was no way to get metrics on it. There was no way for our leadership to really understand what our pipelines and our forecasts were because there wasn't much reporting on it. So as we started building out adjusting our needs, we didn't just look at our needs from our leadership perspective, the things that they wanted to accomplish. But we looked at the needs of what's going to help our sales reps be successful. And we brought them into the process, making it a tool for the sales reps by the sales reps let them make decisions. What bring in those people in during the design sessions? What makes it easier for you? Does this look good as a replacement of these pieces look good. The tool is very customizable. There wasn't a solution I couldn't solve with the tool. So allowing those sales reps to help guide the tool that they're going to be using was an absolute must to get them to adopt. They now had a stake in the game. They knew what they were going to get themselves into ahead of time. It wasn't just a surprise they were there, so they were also able to organically spread the information about this tool that's coming like, this is great. We are now going to be able to be more successful. We're going to be able to do things quicker and we have the information we need at our fingertips as long as along with our management teams.
Jon Moeller: That's great. Now this is over eight years of continuous innovation, and no company stands still, especially today. So you've been launching new products, delivering more into the marketplace. How is that process worked as you've brought new products in trained sellers and put the products out into the marketplace?
Mino Serna: It's a fast paced world, sales does not slow down. They can't wait for an IT project to take place, you know, they can't look at it. I need this development, but we've got to wait six months or eight months. They have to be reactive to the market, and Medtronic is always first to market. So we have to be ready to go. The system has allowed us flexibility to move, be agile with the needs of our sales team. So being able to just get in the tool, configure it to their needs and build from there. We have new products that are hitting the market all the time. We are trying again. We're first to market on these pieces, so we have to get our tool up and ready to go. Being able to support whatever need it is and leverage what we've already done. So making it scalable and easy to bring on a new process. Leverage what's already there and just keep building from where we're at. Our sales team is considered the sales center of excellence within Medtronic for a large capital pieces of equipment. So we've had other operating units reach out to us because they hadn't sold large capital pieces of equipment or they just have a they're still on manual processes. So being able to fold their operating units into ours and leveraging the ideas that we already have, the methodologies that we already have and help them grow their business as well.
Jon Moeller: Well, great. Let's talk about some of those results. If you think about how the CPQ solutions enabled selling across the business unit that you're in Medtronic, what are some of those results?
Mino Serna: One that makes it much easier for our sales reps. So these long cycle deals, they're able to make multiple versions of them and revisions and get all these to the customer quickly. So again, these million dollar deals are able to now give them different options. How does it look if I have one product mix compared to another product mix, where are my benefits within these service contracts? If I do a one year, two year, three year, five year contract? So where do my benefits come from? So the customer really likes what the results they get, the speed of being able to evaluate where they're at with these deals internally from our sales teams, they're able to really structure these deals and get them turned around very quickly. So it's, you know, that side of it just makes it so much, so much easier. And you know, wants our sales team to really enjoy what they're doing. They now are not hesitant when it all comes in. They're not going to be sitting there and saying, we've got to restructure another deal for the 15th time. How am I going to track what I do? The tools allowed us to track that progression and just keep building on it and revert back at any time. We have that ability to just not lose the work that's been done, but just build on the quotes that have already been created.
Jon Moeller: Great and I mean, how many quotes is that a year for you guys? I mean, this is a lot.
Mino Serna: Yes, initially, you know, that's again back to where we first started. We didn't have those numbers to really go off of. We had ideas where these customers were at. We had certain metrics that are in there. At this point in the last year, our last fiscal year, we put out over 30,000 quotes just between and our internal sales team. Revenue that we captured for that was over $350 million in revenue. These are not small deals. We're not dealing with just small customers. We are, you know, this is a big financial gain for our team and being able to track it, report on it, forecast on these results has been just amazing for our team.
Jon Moeller: Oh, great. So what's the PROS partnership been like for you over these eight years?
Mino Serna: It's been an amazing ride, starting in as brand new implementation, you know, eight years ago, just diving in, not knowing what we didn't know, but having the guidance from the PROS team. They were on site with us being able to help us identify what our needs were explaining, what the capabilities of the tool were, being able to help get us where we want it to go, and giving us those options just like we gave it to our customers, our front end users of what do you need? We had that same type of support from the PROS team, and that was just to get us started. As we've been building out, as we've been growing, the PROS team has been right with us all the way. You know, as I mentioned earlier, there hasn't been a solution I haven't been able to come up with, you know, I didn't have it. The PROS team was right there to be able to go, unlike some of the other companies that we've interviewed, talked to, evaluated. The PROS team is intimately involved with us. So if the tool just isn't quite there, we actually can talk and work with product development. You know, you don't get that from some of the big companies, you know, PROS is there's been awesome. They've been right here evaluating what our needs are. If it doesn't get their finding a solution that will work and then ultimately, if they can get it into the product development lifecycle to help spread that functionality over to additional customers,
Jon Moeller: Well, Mino I appreciate everything here today. Our viewers have definitely appreciated it. Lot of great nuggets here, as our viewers are thinking about how to do this in their world, in their business, to drive value. So again, appreciate all your time or appreciate your partnership and looking forward to much, much further growth as we tackle different business units, as we work through each individual business unit’s requirements and work to drive success.