Vonage: Driving productivity and sales through digital transformation
About Vonage
Vonage (NYSE:VG) is redefining business communications. True to its roots as a technology disruptor, Vonage embraced technology to transform how companies communicate to create better business outcomes. The company's unique cloud communications platform brings together a robust unified communications solution with the agility of embedded contextual communications APIs. This powerful combination enables businesses to collaborate more productively and engage their customers more effectively across messaging, chat, social media, video, and voice.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Prodoscore and Salesforce
Google Cloud Partner Prodoscore provides powerful software to measure sales team productivity. It offers real-time productivity insights based on daily Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Vonage communications activity to help businesses drive adoption of cloud-based software tools and to continuously improve employee performance.
Salesforce is the world's leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and a Google Strategic Alliance partner.
By connecting Google Workspace with Salesforce, Prodoscore, and its own unified communications platform, Vonage has improved sales practices, productivity, and internal collaboration among employees, while enhancing engagement with customers for deeper relationships and optimized B2B sales.
Google Cloud Results
- Connects key business productivity tools in a unified solution to streamline everyday tasks
- Records activity directly into Salesforce, reducing administration and increasing the accuracy of sales forecasting
- Simplifies management visibility of sales activity to help ensure consistent software adoption and use
- Rapidly enables managers to address employees' level of engagement with cloud software applications
- Builds sales team confidence to focus on priority opportunities and to communicate consistent sales messages
- Improves work-life balance and supports flexible working arrangements
20% increase in productivity
A pioneer in the VoIP industry for consumers, Vonage was founded in 2001 and has remained true to its roots as a technology disruptor, continuing to evolve and develop a portfolio of emerging technologies that, today, transform how people and businesses communicate. Through a series of strategic acquisitions, as well as organic growth, Vonage has pivoted to the business space, providing more than 100,000 businesses with the tools they need to improve internal connections and collaboration among employees while enhancing engagement externally with customers. Vonage's unique offering and powerful combination of unified communications, programmable communications, and cloud contact center solutions help customers to create better business outcomes.
As it sought to build solutions for businesses, the company focused on creating a unified communications solution in the cloud that integrates seamlessly into a business' existing cloud productivity applications. The result is that companies can increase staff productivity and offer their customers better experiences while reducing operational and infrastructure costs.
This particular offer is built by unifying Google Workspace, Salesforce, Prodoscore, and Vonage's own communication platform, Vonage Business Connect (VBC). It also supports the flexibility to add other cloud solutions, and it is already winning Vonage new business clients. As Vonage brought the solution to market, the company also deployed the solution across its internal organization to enable its own digital transformation.
Reimagining processes with Google Workspace
Vonage made the decision to transition its legacy productivity and email platforms to Google Workspace as a pure cloud-based solution, following a deep evaluation into the company's business operations and processes. This was followed by a major investment in Salesforce, transitioning from siloed CRM solutions to a broader implementation across the organization.
"A group of sales managers at Vonage initially deployed Prodoscore across Google Workspace, Salesforce, and VBC as a pilot to visualize and analyze the data from all three cloud-based applications in a single dashboard. Team productivity jumped 20 percent because the sales team now had a clear view of the applications that drove productivity and where to focus their activity."
—Crisantos Hajibrahim, Chief Evangelist, ProdoscoreAside from the individual benefits of the two cloud products, one of the key reasons for choosing Google Workspace was the way it seamlessly integrates with Salesforce. This immediately offered additional productivity gains: Gmail messages could be connected directly to the Salesforce database, and customer records managed using Salesforce Inbox for Gmail. In addition, when meetings were arranged, there was no need to send separate invitations using Calendar — they can be sent directly from the Salesforce interface into Calendar. These straightforward changes quickly reduced everyday administration tasks, saving the sales team's time for more productive activities.
The benefits increased further with the onboarding of Nexmo, The Vonage API Platform following its acquisition in 2016, bringing together programmable communications across multiple channels. Voice, SMS, and messaging app communications could now be integrated with the core cloud apps, saving time while empowering more flexible, mobile workers.
The case for Prodoscore
As adoption of Google Workspace progressed, company executives wanted to help ensure employees were realizing the full value from the available cloud tools, including, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Meet, and Drive.
"We sensed that Google Workspace use could be accelerated but we needed to better visualize what tools teams were using to collaborate across the organization," explains Kevin Thomsen, National VP Strategic Partners at Vonage.
The underlying questions about software adoption were central to Vonage's decision to introduce Prodoscore – a powerful tool that helps businesses visualize and measure how teams are adopting cloud-based tools. Since Prodoscore is fully integrated with Google Workspace out of the box, managers can quickly gain visibility into employee activities such as how often they create and store documents in Drive, and how many emails they send through Gmail. Prodoscore enables businesses to set their own parameters for productivity and for measuring performance on a daily basis. The combination of Google Workspace, Salesforce, and VBC enabled Vonage to provide a unique cloud-based solution that integrates seamlessly with Prodoscore — all with very little deployment effort.
20 percent increase in productivity
Crisantos Hajibrahim, Chief Evangelist at Prodoscore, explained how Prodoscore became a core sales management tool at Vonage. "A group of sales managers at Vonage initially deployed Prodoscore across Google Workspace, Salesforce, and VBC as a pilot to visualize and analyze the data from all three cloud-based applications in a single dashboard," he explains. "This enabled them to establish a baseline of productivity. The managers then coached their sales reps on the value of Prodoscore and how it fostered engagement and productivity across the cloud applications. Team productivity jumped 20 percent because the sales team now had a clear view of the applications that drove productivity and where to focus their activity."
While Prodoscore measures productivity, Google Workspace provides the cloud foundation to kick start an organization's digital transformation. Beyond the initial surge in productivity, the Vonage team soon identified areas of opportunity to further drive team productivity. Prodoscore provided managers, for the first time ever, with insight that some team members were not taking full advantage of the cloud-based applications provided by the company.
"Using Cloud Natural Language, we can understand what sales reps are saying, doing, and promoting much faster and more clearly than before. We see it as supporting our coaching efforts focused on helping people and teams perform better."
—Reggie Scales, SVP Mid Market and Enterprise Sales, Vonage"When we talked to them, we found out why," Kevin explains. "Managers quickly discovered that some employee devices had software configuration issues. In other cases, the employees were not aware of the application features, simply because they had just missed it during the software training."
Both issues were easily resolved and meant that, instead of having to retrain the entire team, managers could focus on those who had low adoption scores. Subsequent productivity scores demonstrated improvement and provided the additional benefit of cleaner and more accurate data in the CRM. This enhanced forecasting and management decision making.
Driving behavior change
With Prodoscore deployed, Vonage gained a management productivity tool to encourage behavior change across its employees. For example, Vonage configured the solution so that employee activity in Salesforce received a higher productivity weighting than other less productive tasks. As adoption of Salesforce activities and related email prospecting increased, the employee productivity score moved higher.
"Setting the Salesforce weightings higher was deliberate," says Crisantos. "Prior to Prodoscore, some sales reps recorded their opportunities in Salesforce once or twice a week. Sales managers want to use Salesforce as a real-time forecasting tool and, therefore, ad hoc input of activities resulted in inaccurate real-time sales data. With the stronger weighting on Salesforce, sales reps regularly and more consistently use Salesforce as part of their daily routine, thus providing cleaner and more real-time forecasting data for management to rely on."
After implementation of Prodoscore, the data indicates a nearly 200 percent increase in Salesforce updates by Vonage sales reps.
The Vonage team also looked to increase document collaboration across the sales team and considered Docs sharing and Google Meet as key indicators of collaboration. The sales managers leveraged Prodoscore activity weighting to encourage app adoption. The initial trial group of 15 veteran sales reps demonstrated an increase in activity post deployment of Prodoscore*.
VBC activity also increased across the team as engagement increased with Salesforce and Google Workspace. With the Mobile App, all calls made and received by field sales reps are automatically logged into Salesforce. Sales reps no longer have to manually log each call in Salesforce, since all the work is automatically done for them.
"This is a huge time saver for sales reps," says Reggie Scales, SVP of Mid Market and Enterprise Sales for Vonage. "In fact, Vonage has calculated that by integrating Salesforce with the VBC Mobile App and Google Workspace, sales reps free up significant time in their day. Less time is spent on data entry and more time is spent on more skilled sales prospecting activities."
As the use of Google Workspace and productivity visualization with Prodoscore has become more actively used, there's been a boost to employee job satisfaction and work-life balance. "We now have more people working remotely, who are able to be productive whether at home, remote, or in the office, through Cloud APIs," says Reggie.
"We're going to market and selling exactly what we're doing here at Vonage: a digital transformation toolkit, supported by VBC, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Prodoscore"
—Reggie Scales, SVP Mid Market and Enterprise Sales, VonageLearning from the best
As use of the fully integrated solution increases, Vonage has identified more opportunities to improve processes and productivity, particularly for its sales team. The company now aggregates all text from emails, Calendar, Google Chat, Docs, and Salesforce activity, and then Prodoscore uses Cloud Natural Language processing to analyze it.
"Each week, we task the sales reps with focusing on different products or parts of the offer. We now have visibility to see whether they are following the marketing messaging," adds Reggie. "While the first step is compliance, from there, the team can analyze the interaction data further. We can pinpoint the most successful reps, both in terms of their targets and their productivity score, and examine what they do differently. We can then use that to improve coaching and training."
The value of the solution is not just in the quality of the data but also the speed at which it is generated.
"Using Cloud Natural Language, we can understand what sales reps are saying, doing, and promoting much faster and more clearly than before," adds Reggie. "We see it as supporting our coaching efforts focused on helping people and teams perform better."
Selling an integrated solution
With Vonage reaping the rewards of the integrated solution, the next step was logical – offer it to customers.
"We're going to market and selling exactly what we're doing here at Vonage: a digital transformation toolkit, supported by VBC, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Prodoscore," says Reggie.
Already, that message is proving compelling – though Vonage has an advantage: "It's a lot easier to train salespeople to sell to customers if they're selling the things they use daily," says Crisantos. "VBC, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Prodoscore are tools they use everyday; they know the value proposition and can explain it. With that, we're reducing training costs and closing deals sooner."
*This information was based on a Vonage study with a cohort of 15 veteran Vonage Business sales representatives in the Chicago, IL office over a 7 to 10-month period. Productivity was measured based upon the time sales managers observed the sales reps focusing on activities that were productive to the organization (e.g. using software to search for leads; or working towards closing deals). Productivity does not contemplate lead generation and/or overall market conditions. Actual results may vary.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Vonage
Vonage (NYSE:VG) is redefining business communications. True to its roots as a technology disruptor, Vonage embraced technology to transform how companies communicate to create better business outcomes. The company's unique cloud communications platform brings together a robust unified communications solution with the agility of embedded contextual communications APIs. This powerful combination enables businesses to collaborate more productively and engage their customers more effectively across messaging, chat, social media, video, and voice.
About Prodoscore and Salesforce
Google Cloud Partner Prodoscore provides powerful software to measure sales team productivity. It offers real-time productivity insights based on daily Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Vonage communications activity to help businesses drive adoption of cloud-based software tools and to continuously improve employee performance.
Salesforce is the world's leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and a Google Strategic Alliance partner.