DAP for Hitachi Vantara with Jeff McKittrick
Jeff arrived on the scene at Hitachi Vantara as a tech sales operations veteran, and as a digitally-oriented enthusiast, from his twenty years of experience at Cisco. His job was to assess the sales systems and enhance the overall selling experience, and through his technological aptitude, he has catapulted Hitachi into the new league of digital adoption leaders.
This is the story of a partnership between Hitachi and WalkMe, spearheaded by Jeff McKittrick, the visionary VP of Sales Business Capabilities for Hitachi Vantara.
Different company, same problem
Despite his previous position in a very different company, Jeff identified that Hitachi was struggling with the same main challenge that Cisco had struggled with: getting salespeople to adopt technology.
“Our initial challenges with adoption stemmed from the increasing amount of asks around our CRM and CPQ systems,” Jeff explained, “In an effort to find value in an investment that we made in Salesforce, our PROS pricing guidance for CPQ and other Sales Enablement tools we were asking a lot from our sales team by migrating all activity to these platforms.”
Jeff knew that migrating so many people to multiple new platforms demanded a digital adoption strategy. He had seen the integration of WalkMe in his last company, and so he advocated for getting WalkMe for sales at Hitachi as well. This decision proved to be extremely effective and lucrative for Hitachi.
The strategy stakeholders
There were three major stakeholders that would be affected by implementing a digital adoption platform and their goals were the foundation for the overall strategy.
Sales Employees
1. The ability to learn in the flow of work and not need to exit an application in order to complete a task.
2. Reduce noise and streamline communication within the app as opposed to emailing and using other apps for both inter and outer office communication.
3. Increase data integrity within the applications – to ensure that employees are actually entering the correct data and not skipping it because it causes a disruption of workflow.
Executives
1. Easy access to monitoring the implementation of the processes developed.
2. See and analyze exactly which functions are being used and which aren’t.
3. Understand the engagement of sales reps with the platform itself throughout the sales process.
4. Derive data insights about software usage and ROI.
Builders
The builders would be responsible for creating the WalkMe content and Jeff wanted to build a governance model to make sure that the creation, maintenance, and deletion of material had a clear process. Having WalkMe features integrated into their sales apps would allow them to work on more strategic initiatives and less on administrative work.
To ensure that the creation of WalkMe content was strategic, Jeff created a solution-positive culture among the builders. He awarded those who innovated and utilized the digital adoption platform and the builders were able to create ways for their sales team to save money, time, and focus on selling as opposed to managing apps.
This element of the WalkMe process was very important, and Jeff was able to show Hitachi executives the incredible ROI on both the sales apps and on WalkMe itself.
A solution you can measure
“I’m really proud to say that Hitachi was the very first adopter of the DAP Center! We saw value from the content on Salesforce and CPQ and we knew that we wanted to branch into other applications, but we also needed that visibility piece to justify that investment to our executive stakeholders. WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Center is how we deliver on our promise to those stakeholders.”
Jeff explained “By enabling us to follow a user through multiple applications in the sales cycle we have an unprecedented level of visibility into our user behavior and how to best engage them. We can see in real-time what’s going on and how our employees are using the platform.”
We’re so proud to have Jeff and Hitachi Vantara as a part of the WalkMe family. Jeff’s initiative with WalkMe for critical apps like Pricing Guidance allowed their team to go from 40% to 70% adoption.
Jeff will be speaking at the first-ever digital adoption event, WalkMe Realize, this March in San Francisco. To see Jeff and other visionary leaders of digital adoption sharing their stories live, reserve your early bird tickets today.