Hi Charlie, tell us about your role/team you handle at Nintex. What inspired you to join the company?

I’m the Vice President of Sales Operations at Nintex. My team is responsible for all global renewals, managing and reporting our sales data, forecasting, and more. I was inspired to join Nintex because I wanted to work for a company that was on the cutting edge of business process automation.

Operating as efficiently and quickly as possible is critical to success in Sales Ops – it can literally make the difference between closed and lost revenue. After working in Sales Operations for over 10 years, I’ve grown a passion for process automation technology and the impact it can have in my field and beyond. Most of all I wanted to work for an industry leader and to me, Nintex was and continues to be the leader in the space.

What is the most contemporary definition of Sales Operations?

To me, Sales Operations is all about serving as the central hub for Sales, Finance, and Marketing. Its function is to ensure that the company has the most effective selling motion possible and that all departments that interact with sales are aligned in process and execution.

B2B Sales transactions can be lengthy and complex, often hinging on manual documentation traded back and forth via email. How does Nintex address these challenges internally and for customers?

Friction, delays, and the unnecessary back-and-forth during the document generation, automation, and completion process can make B2B Sales transaction complex and drawn out. Nintex Drawloop DocGen® for Salesforce and Nintex Workflow Cloud help our team and our customers’ sales teams focus on what they do best – sell.

Features like form field recognition for e-signatures in Nintex Drawloop and Nintex Workflow Cloud help us and our customers accelerate Sales processes. And our solutions easily integrate with the popular tools that Sales teams already work with every day like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Steelbrick, or any other CRM or CPG systems.

Internally, we leverage our own technology to improve these processes for our team and customers. Over a year ago, we built a solution using Nintex Drawloop and Nintex Workflow Cloud to automate and streamline our renewals process end-to-end. The solution currently also leverages Salesforce and Apttus for a complete to automate our configure price, quote (CPQ) process, and Nintex Sign™ powered by Adobe Sign for e-signatures.

Tell us more about how Nintex’s global Sales team expanded? How did you scale the business to meet new demands?

Since the beginning, Nintex Partners have played a crucial role in the success of our customers and our business. This approach allows us to scale and focus on innovations to our business process management and workflow automation technology while our partners provide services to implement these solutions and ensure success.

We also work with global partners, like Adobe, Microsoft, and Salesforce, which provide additional flexibility and value to our customers. Integrating with these solutions helps our technology provide even more value to our customers.

As part of your workflow automation, which tools and vendors did you choose to work with?

Specific to the Sales Operations, we struggled to offer a complete end-to-end Sales Automation solution without relying on a patchwork of multiple disparate systems for automation.

Then in 2019, we partnered with Adobe to integrate Adobe Sign into Nintex Drawloop and Nintex Workflow Cloud. This partnership helped us drive more efficient, end-to-end digital workflows that live entirely within our or our customer’s environment. The integration with Adobe Sign also allowed them to work out of their preferred CRM solutions without having to leave that environment.

What capabilities did Adobe Sign provide that DocuSign previously did not meet?

We needed e-signature capabilities that were smarter, more versatile, and easier to use by a variety of our team members. This could be anyone from an entry-level Sales rep, needing to initiate a digital contract, to our customers’ developers, who assign work tickets and entire projects to their global teams.

We worked with Adobe to integrate their e-signature offering natively in Nintex as “Nintex Sign™ powered by Adobe Sign.” Nintex Sign offers a better UI in Nintex Drawloop and Nintex Workflow Cloud. The integration allows our customers to carry out most tasks without having to leave their preferred CRM solutions.

We also have greater control over functionality, such as blind carbon copy (Bcc:) and field tagging. And, Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s Machine Learning and AI technology, brings powerful form field recognition that makes the contract delivery, signing, and return process a breeze. The entire implementation of Adobe Sign only took three days to get up and running.

What have the results been for your Sales team with these new processes and partners?

With the easy-to-use and powerful capabilities of the Nintex Process Platform, we’ve been able to automate and streamline the most manual portions of our Sale processes which allows our sellers to spend more time focusing on customer success and sales, rather than manual data entry.

We’ve been able to take recurring Sales processes, which involve more than 8,000 public and private sector clients across 90 countries and automate them for our customer base. This means that our Sales team now has more time to work directly with customers on solving their digital transformation challenges, rather than spending too much time on manual, administrative work.

Additionally, our Sales team saved approximately 35,000 work hours in the calendar year 2019 by digitizing the document-centric process. Each renewal representative can now manage millions of dollars more in renewal volume, and we’ve seen a reduction in late contract renewals, saving the company several million dollars per year.

Tell us about your experience in working with AI, ML, and Big Data in automating your Sales functions. What kind of ROI have you gained from leveraging these technologies for your own Sales Ops?

AI and Machine Learning allow for the programmatic automation of data entry throughout the Sales cycle. When combined with workflow automation, this further increases the efficacy of automation by eliminating manual entry for the front-line seller. This provides sellers more time to focus on just value-added sales tasks.

COVID has slowed down sales. What challenges are you facing at Nintex and how do you interact with your customers to ensure Sales don’t dry up?

Customer success is our number one priority at Nintex. We’ve made valuable business continuity resources available including free downloadable process and workflow templates. We’re also providing training at no-cost on process mapping, workflow automation, digital forms, and more to our customers and partners through June 30. We’re committed to helping our global Nintex community navigate through these unprecedented times.

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I’d like to hear from Brian Selby, SVP of Sales Ops at Tableau.