OREANDA-NEWS. April 13, 2016. Recently, I hosted the first ever Connected Leaders webinar,Revamp Sales Operations with AppExchange Apps. The webinar featured customers using AppExchange apps by partners Conga and NewVoiceMedia and was full of incredible stories of businesses transformed through the use of apps. In the conversation with Vernon Keenan, CEO of Telnexus, and Chase Larson, Head of Sales Operations at Six Pack Shortcuts, we uncovered ways for you to revamp your own sales operations through the use of apps.

Below are tips to help you with that process, alongside some of the fascinating results from using Conga Composer and NewVoiceMedia ContactWorld.

1. Ensure you can track your most important KPIs

Understanding and acting on data is an integral part of sales operations, but effectively implementing the right tools to do so is a challenge. Six Pack Shortcuts makes thousands of sales calls each week, so for Larson, the visibility provided from NewVoiceMedia and Salesforce made all the difference.

“We needed to make a lot more calls,,“ Larson said. “The click-to-dial phone system from NewVoiceMedia was able to take our average of 80 phone calls a day with hand-dial calls, to 200-250 phone calls. NewVoiceMedia seamlessly integrates into Salesforce and enables a productivity level that’s unmatched.” Six Pack Shortcuts just hit 62,000 outbound phone calls, up from an average of 10,000-12,000 phone calls per month, as a result of implementing NewVoiceMedia ContactWorld.

2. Build a scalable solution to grow with your sales operations

It’s convenient to search for solutions that apply to an issue facing your business today, but if you must scale your sales team by 15% in the next year, it’s important to finda vendor that can meet today’s demand, and future needs..

WhenTelnexus implemented Conga Composer to help solve an invoicing challenge, it was an iterative, flexible process. “We’ve been able to use [Conga Composer] to leverage our entire business, so we’ve created all of our customer documents based on this technology,” Keenan said. “We’ve created a real-time information system...we’ve grown 100x in terms of productivity.” Keenan also described the agile approach taken to implementation, which allowed them to iterate over several versions of document templates over the course of a couple weeks.

3. Use apps to best utilize your employees’ time and skills

Technology can make our lives easier, both in and out of work. Keenan and Larson discussed how their employees were better trained and better utilized as a result of Conga and NewVoiceMedia.

“We essentially eliminated an entire job description with the productivity gains,” Keenan said. “Fortunately, we’re a growing company, so that person is moving into a business and software development role. We’re thinking about spinning out the software for use by other companies.”

For Larson, many of the gains resulted from a significant decrease in new employee onboarding. “We’re able to use ‘secret monitoring’ to listen to sales calls. With new salespeople, we’ll log our sales manager into a portal, and he’ll have a walkie-talkie headset (and a hoverboard to ride around) to listen to his team members as they’re on calls,” Larson said. “That process alone cut our training time down from 3-4 months to 3-4 weeks.”

Head over to the AppExchange to learn more about NewVoiceMedia ContactWorld and Conga Composer.

Be sure to register for our next Connected Leaders webinar on April 28 at 11am PT, titled “Using AppExchange Apps to Elevate Your Sales Team.”