How Infosys Builds Deeper Customer Connections at Scale With Relationship Selling

Editor's Note: This interview originally appeared on Microsoft's Customer Stories microsite.

To help surface social and business connections across a global sales network, Infosys has brought together Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator—a solution that Microsoft calls Relationship Sales. We talked with two Infosys sales executives, Nitesh Aggarwal, Associate Vice President of Global Sales Effectiveness, and Ashutosh Goyal, Global Sales Effectiveness Senior Manager, about how Infosys sellers use the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution to build stronger networks, better understand customer needs, craft more relevant proposals, and leverage their entire careers.

With the Relationship Sales solution, our sellers can influence more leads and convert those leads into deals. —Ashutosh Goyal, Senior Manager: Global Sales Effectiveness, Infosys

Here is what Aggarwal and Goyal told Microsoft about how Infosys uses relationship selling to help sellers be more effective and meet their customers’ goals.

Please tell us a little about Infosys and how you got introduced to Relationship Sales.

Nitesh Aggarwal: Infosys is a $10 billion IT company that offers consulting, application, business-process, and digital products and services that help some of the world’s biggest brands maximize business performance. We used Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator together—now available as the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution—because we saw an opportunity to help our sellers use their social and business connections more effectively.

Why did Infosys want to connect Dynamics 365 with LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Aggarwal: We have more than 1,200 customers and a network of at least 24,000 contacts. With the sales organization managing ongoing opportunities, we wanted to link transactional data with shared social and business histories so sellers can identify and leverage the connections often hidden across that vast Infosys network. By combining Dynamics 365 and Sales Navigator, we can bring together comprehensive customer data and social insights into one sales tool.

How does the Relationship Sales solution help Infosys sellers be more effective?

Aggarwal: When sellers enter and retrieve sales-engagement data in Dynamics 365 for their contacts, they are seamlessly connecting that information to social insights in Sales Navigator, while the social insights for every lead are tracked and qualified through Dynamics 365. They get a single view of data and intelligence that helps them go into introductions already understanding a contact’s engagement history—and something about her background, connections, and priorities.

It’s not always easy to stay up-to-speed on 15 to 20 contacts at once. But now our sellers can establish connections, cultivate and maintain relationships, and build their own networks, without spending a lot of time at events. They’re more efficient at scale, and empowered to consistently provide better, more contextualized proposals for every customer and lead. They can apply best practices, ensure consistent follow-up, shorten sales cycles, and engage every customer on a personalized, consultative, one-to-one level. In less than two years, the sales team has built a sales-influenced pipeline worth about $2 billion, and used the enhanced seller output to close many of the deals.

How are Infosys sellers using this solution to reach further into new and existing accounts?

Ashutosh Goyal: When sellers work in Dynamics 365 and Sales Navigator together, they know all the opportunities, meetings, emails, deals, every sales engagement for a contact—and the past and present connections, shared career experiences, common colleagues, and the social-media activity that orbit around the customer relationship. Then they can combine the transactional and social histories to start conversations and make compelling proposals. Maybe something like, “We share a colleague who forwarded me a machine-learning blog you wrote. We’re excited about AI too—have you considered Infosys, Nia?”

Relationship Sales helps our sellers build a complete understanding of their customers and leads, their technology needs, business priorities, and company culture. They know where a contact fits in the customer life cycle, can build connections with other stakeholders in finance or procurement, identify technology and business opportunities, and make more focused, more contextualized proposals. With the Relationship Sales solution, our sellers can influence more leads and convert those leads into deals.

What is the most exciting thing for Infosys about Relationship Sales?

Goyal: We’re a big company with big customers, and we live by large deals that involve a lot of people, so we’ve put Relationship Sales at the core of our selling strategy. By using Dynamics 365 and Sales Navigator together, we can leverage the entire professional career of everybody on our sales team. All their work experience, all their history, all the connections they’ve made, can all be brought to bear with a mobile phone. That’s a lot of power, and we’re using it to make our sellers more productive, increase revenue momentum, and meet the needs and aspirations of our customers.

In less than two years, the sales team has built a sales-influenced pipeline worth about $2 billion, and used the enhanced seller output to close many of the deals. — Nitesh Aggarwal, Associate Vice President, Global Sales Effectiveness, Infosys

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