Devoteam Streamlines Sales Cycle With Jive-Powered Deal Management

-- Unified Sales Flow Drives Significant Cost Savings and Increased Revenue

PALO ALTO, California, Aug. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Devoteam, a French IT consulting firm with 4,700 employees operating in 23 countries across EMEA, has transformed its sales organization using Jive Software (Nasdaq: JIVE), a leading social business platform. As a result, the company has slashed deal cycle times by a third, reduced its cost of sales by €1.5 million per year and helped it increase its revenue by €4-5 million.

(Logo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130819/SF65756LOGO)

Devoteam, which experienced rapid growth while evolving as a provider of large-scale, end-to-end technology solutions, wanted its sales organization to pursue much larger and more complex deals. This meant longer, more expensive sales cycles, and the involvement of various groups – engineering, consulting and legal – in the creation and approval of pitches. Devoteam immediately saw the need for a technology solution to transform its existing practices and inefficiencies, including the over-reliance on cross-functional email, phone calls and face-to-face meetings for collaboration.  RFP responses alone required hundreds of meetings per year.

"It was an unsustainable situation," said Nicolas Morliere, head of bid management at Devoteam. "Devoteam had to find a way to get more consistent, unified, agile, and better leverage our people."

Devoteam deployed a Jive-powered social intranet, which quickly became a hub of business-wide collaboration and communication. This solution replaced the company's old portal and improved employee productivity and company alignment, while reducing email exchange and travel. Within 12 months, Devoteam had successfully implemented a streamlined, standardized sales workflow in its Jive environment.

Today, more than 300 sales, sales support functions and engineering staff are using the system to manage several hundred deals per year, generating more than $500-million annual revenue. The Jive-based solution has cleared away the bottlenecks and functional silos that impeded Devoteam's sales process in the past, enabling diverse stakeholders to work together seamlessly across geographies and functions. As a result the company has accelerated every stage of the pipeline - from qualifying opportunities to creating proposals to negotiating contracts and closing deals. In addition, Devoteam has seen the following results upon implementing Jive:

• Sales support staff reduced for each deal from seven to five
• Meetings cut by 50 percent
• Sliced in half sales representative onboarding time, down from one month to two weeks
• Increased customer win rate by 33 percent

"It is not just the speed that has improved, but also the quality," said Antoine Colin de Verdiere, mobility offer director at Devoteam. "We're creating better proposals in a fraction of the time. With the improved information-sharing we get from Jive, we can better understand and respond to customer needs."

For more information, please visit www.jivesoftware.com or the Jive News Blog here.

About Jive Software
Jive Software (JIVE) one of the world's leading social business solutions. Our cloud-based collaboration platform connects employees, customers and partners together – helping a company increase productivity by as much as 15%* according to research performed by a top three global business consultancy firm.  By combining the power of cloud, mobile, big data and proprietary collaboration technologies, Jive is transforming the way work gets done and unleashing productivity, creativity and innovation for millions of people in the world's largest companies. For a free trial of Jive's next-generation social business platform, please visit Try Jive.

*Source: Top three global business consultancy research; November 2012