Siili Solutions is a combination of a digital agency and technology powerhouse that specializes in digital strategies and creative technical solutions. Siili’s growth targets are high, and continuous sales development is important. Siili’s Chief Commercial Officer Pasi Ropponen spoke to us about how Dear Lucy has made it easier to track sales and communicate the key figures in a clear, visual way.
Update: Pasi Ropponen was named the interim CEO of Siili on August 23, 2021. Congratulations!
Siili Solutions Plc is a tech consultancy that combines a digital design agency with technological multi-expertise. In 2020, Siili’s revenue was 83.3 million euros and the increase in the previous year was 3.4 percent. Siili’s personnel include approximately 800 professionals in Finland, Germany, the US, and Poland. Siili is listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki Stock exchange.
Siili’s Core business focuses on the development of digital experience, from strategy to customized software development, intelligent data use, automation, and cloud services. We had a chance to speak with Siili’s Chief Commercial Officer Pasi Ropponen whose main responsibility is the Core business with large and medium-sized customers operating mainly in Finland.
“In Siili Core, our commercial operations have been divided into business units according to the customer segments. Each unit has a business director and a team of commercial-focused individuals. The organization also has service-specific substance experts,” Pasi describes.
Pasi Ropponen, Chief Commercial Officer, Siili
Predictability and Clearer View of the Bigger Picture to Support Sales
Siili’s sales and marketing funnel has been developed with an extensive toolkit. HubSpot has been the main sales tool for the last three years. Although the features of the sales and marketing tools are used well, there was a lack of visualized data that was easy to understand and communicate between different business units.
“We have brilliant financial reporting in place, but when it comes to sales, the lack of predictability has been a challenge. Accurate and detailed forecasts that support business management are made in Excel, while HubSpot represents our future potential. There were some bottlenecks between these two.”
“We wanted to be able to predict the future and communicate the current situation to people in a visual form”, Pasi describes the development needs of sales reporting.
A lot of time and effort was spent within the team to build HubSpot dashboards, but they were not perceived as a real management tool and were therefore hardly used in the teams.
“We missed the visual presentation that would make it easy to see the overall picture of our own unit. It was also important to see how one team compares to other teams – how our unit is doing and how others are doing. “
Pasi sums up the challenges of reporting sales in a growing company:
“As the size of the company grows, so does the number of metrics, charts, and figures which makes it difficult to separate the essential data from the irrelevant. We sought simplification and structure in order to improve communication.”
Dear Lucy Shows the Big Picture and Makes Processes Transparent
“Because we had already done a lot of work with HubSpot, we knew exactly what it could do and what we still needed. It was easy for us to identify Dear Lucy’s potential and the added value it brings”, Pasi says when we asked how Siili ended up using Dear Lucy as a solution.
Pasi continues:
“Transparency for sales teams and also for consultants was an important criterion for us when making our choice. We want key sales and marketing figures and social media posts visible on the office wall for the team (when we can get back to the office again, that is).”
“The ease of illustrating the overall picture is what we particularly liked about Dear Lucy. The interface is great as things are presented in a competent and credible way, and changes can be made if required.”
With the introduction of Dear Lucy, new metrics have also been added, such as the sales case velocity. According to Pasi, this has sparked important discussions on how it's important to deal with things quickly in sales, or it shows in the results.
Different teams and individuals benefit from Dear Lucy in different ways. Pasi himself says that he looks at trends and ratios a couple of times a week, such as offer base trends, funnel data, and lost and won sales cases. Additionally, he uses Dear Lucy to get the data and facts that support meetings.
“I get the answers I need directly from Dear Lucy. The business unit leaders use the reports to run their weekly meetings, and we have built a separate dashboard view for each unit. The historical trend lines and comparisons to other units and the whole company are easy to see from Dear Lucy. The marketing team is also one user group that creates data for Dear Lucy”, Pasi continues.
Better Prioritization with Visualized facts
According to Pasi, Siili is happy with the cooperation with Dear Lucy. The cooperation has been smooth, and Siili had a clear vision of what they needed to solve with Dear Lucy from the beginning.
“It really helped that on our end the people attending meetings with Dear Lucy's team were those who knew our needs the best and knew the shortcomings of our sales reporting”, Pasi praises his own team, too.
Who benefits from Dear Lucy? Pasi recommends the following:
“Dear Lucy works especially well for all growth companies that want to systematize their own commercial operations and provide transparency to the organization. Dear Lucy positively forces us to think things in a new way, especially when it comes to prioritization. If there is room for two things, you need to choose what they are.
“If the business has many units and there is a need to combine data from them and provide it to everyone easily, Dear Lucy is a great solution”, Pasi adds.
Summary - Case Siili
Learn more about Siili on https://www.siili.com/.
Interested?
If you are looking to create clarity into future sales or communicate key metrics across the organization, Dear Lucy can help. Visit our live demo for examples of popular sales and revenue KPIs or schedule a demo with our expert.