Tech focus where the selling happens
Chicago-based SAVO Group's online tools are the salesman and saleswoman's best friend, helping them quickly get up to speed, speak their potential client's language, and then close the deal.
John Aiello, co-founder of SAVO, said, "We enable sellers to focus on where selling happens -- in face-to-face conversations. We help them harness the collective geniuses of their organizations to conduct those conversations at a very high level."
(John H. White/Sun-Times)
Sales staffers answer a few questions with SAVO's online Sales Asset Manager, and within minutes generate selling materials, including brochures, presentations, videos, e-mails, white papers and more; obtain competitive intelligence, coaching documents and scripts to prepare to speak to the client, and are pointed to staff subject-matter experts.
The sales management portfolio, and the technology that supports it, earned SAVO a 2007 Chicago Innovation Award.
Aiello said SAVO-generated information is a huge timesaver for sales people, who on average spend 40 percent of their time cobbling together such information, and then typically tap less than half of the materials available from their marketing departments.
Aiello said 55,000 sellers at 50 companies use SAVO tools. SAVO's clients include IBM, HUB International, Northern Trust, Galileo, CitiBank, Morgan Stanley, American Express, LaSalle Bank, Akamai Technologies, F5, SPSS and CareerBuilder.com.
Privately held SAVO, which charges subscription fees to its clients, has captured 40 percent to 50 percent of the emerging "sales enablement" market.
Aiello said he and Drew Larsen -- whom he met at the University of Illinois in 1986 and with whom he started a band -- had kicked around start-up ideas in the mid- to late-1990s.
Aiello was vice president of marketing and sales for Sundance Homes, and before that, a brand manager for Miller Brewing Co. Larsen directed development teams at tech consulting companies and multimedia firms, with such clients as Motorola, Lucent and Ameritech.
Larsen, SAVO's president, and Aiello, chief executive, launched SAVO in 1999 as a technology and strategy consulting firm focused on aligning marketing and sales.
Aiello said the company, which employs 70, changed its model in 2002 to offer services with on-demand software over the Web to use technology to create compelling inform-ation so salesmen need not sell alone.