How Minoa helped Europe’s Leading HR Software Company Scale its Value Selling Motion

Summary

Personio's goal is to help companies unlock the power of their people. They do this by empowering organizations of many sizes and complexities with an all in one HR solution to meet all your people process needs. With its headquarters in Munich and a recent valuation of $8.5bn, it is one of the most valuable HR-tech companies in the world and helps more than 10,000 businesses automate their HR functions. 

Challenge

Personio's product provides value to companies of all sizes. As such, they needed a scalable and efficient solution to deliver business value assessments to many interested prospects. Personio knew their existing spreadsheet-based solution would not support the velocity of their deals and the needs of their customers.

Solution

Personio adopted Minoa and integrated its own value framework into the platform, including all value drivers, ROI calculations, and use cases. Minoa’s features enabled consistent, personalized business cases, streamlined data collection, seamless Salesforce integration, and AI-generated summaries.

Outcome

Personio transitioned from spreadsheets to a scalable, self-service solution, enabling SEs and AEs to create impactful value narratives effortlessly. This unified approach empowered the organization, ensuring consistent value messaging and central ownership by key teams like value engineering. Furthermore, it provided Personio’s customers with an interactive, elegant, and objective way to understand the value and ROI of Personio's products in relation to their strategic objectives.

“Our goal at Personio is to inspire customers and help them unlock the power of their people. Using Minoa, we can easily and seamlessly illustrate the value of our products to customers and help them make informed decisions through an executive level output that demonstrates the benefits and potential returns when Personio is deployed” - Gerard Smith (Head of Value, Pricing and Solution Engineering)

Challenge

Personio's value delivery strategy needs to be flexible and tailored since it targets customers of all sizes and complexities.

The company has a dedicated value engineering leader, as well as a comprehensive framework that includes over 50 unique value drivers (and growing!) that the sales team could leverage. This sophisticated system was key to Personio’s initial sales success in a price-sensitive market. However, it wasn’t easily scalable as they relied almost entirely on classical solutions such as spreadsheets and PowerPoint. 

Existing spreadsheets were complicated, hard to use and even harder to maintain. This meant that when benefit calculations and value narratives changed, it was nearly impossible to implement across all users and drive self-service and scale. Different people were using different sheets, and this lack of consistency created a risk to consistent messaging. 

Furthermore, collecting and inputting the information for the business cases was time-consuming. To save time, Solutions Engineers (SEs) and Account Executives (AEs) often dialled back on personalization, leading to a potential for business cases not to maximise their impact. 

Finally, the spreadsheet infrastructure wasn’t integrated with Persononio’s wider infrastructure, including Salesforce and advantageous technologies (such as AI). Not only did this lead to more manual work, but it also meant that Personio was unable to track, analyze and optimize their value selling efforts. 

Without building a large and expensive value selling team, it seemed as though Personio wouldn’t be able to scale its value selling motions. 

Solution 

Personio needed to move away from spreadsheets and implement a scalable, self-service solution that would empower SEs and AEs to inspire customers and create impactful value narratives easily and effectively. Furthermore, this would need to be unified across the organization, while ensuring consistency of the value message and central ownership to key value-delivery teams, such as the value engineering function.

“Minoa is unlike any other value engineering tool I see in the market. It focuses on blending your customer’s experience with a comprehensive but inspiring value realisation process” - Gerard Smith (Head of Value, Pricing and Solution Engineering)

Consistency 

Using Minoa’s self-service capabilities, Personio integrated over 50 of its value drivers, ROI calculations, and use cases into Minoa. Being a single, unified platform, Personio’s value leader was able to instantly deploy these to all AEs and SEs, as well as subsequently edit them, bringing both scalability and uniformity—without investing in a massive value team. 

Collaboration

Personio leveraged Minoa’s collaboration capabilities to build business cases with their deal champions rapidly. Not only did this streamline the data collection process and save time, but it also meant that each business case was more relevant and personalized – especially when it came to selecting use cases. 

In addition, Personio used Minoa’s export features to automatically generate important sales assets, such as champion decks, ROI calculations, and graphs. Since Personio operates internationally, they made use of Minoa’s multi-language support features to create geographically relevant material. 

Integration and Artificial Intelligence 

Like many GTM teams, efficiency was key to Personio, so any solution would need to integrate with their wider sales tech infrastructure. To this effect, Personio made use of Minoa’s Salesforce integration to track and assess their value selling efforts in real time. 

To further save time and scale their value selling efforts, Personio also used Minoa’s AI functions to create business cases, executive summaries and value narratives automatically. 

Outcome 

“With Minoa, our teams can quickly capture customer pain points and impacts, and translate the potential business benefit of Personio through a simple and elegant process” - Gerard Smith (Head of Value, Pricing and Solution Engineering)

By working with Minoa, Personio was no longer hamstrung by a lack of scalability that had previously stalled their upmarket value selling motions.

Personio could now access its entire value framework and use case library within a single platform. Moreover, it could edit these and share updated versions with its entire GTM team in only a few clicks, meaning a lack of consistency was no longer a problem.

Solutions Engineers no longer had to choose between highly personalized business cases or saving time. With Minoa, they could do both and reduced the average time it took to build and export a business case by hours.

Lastly, Personio seamlessly integrated its go-to-market stack with tools like Salesforce while leveraging new AI advancements to drive efficiencies in the sales motion, so it keeps inspiring customers and helps them unlock the power of their people.