Success Story

How Nutanix Maximizes Sales Team Performance with Opportunity Insights and Coaching

Nutanix, a global leader in enterprise cloud solutions, partnered with Atrium to improve the efficiency of its global sales operations. Amid rapid growth, they needed help streamlining sales processes for faster decision-making and better pipeline visibility.

The Nutanix sales team had been expanding significantly, particularly with the addition of new sales reps in its commercial segment. They initially struggled to get the level of performance they were looking for from that team.

Dana Clark, Director of Worldwide Sales Operations at Nutanix, led the charge in addressing these issues to improve sales productivity across the board. In a conversation with Atrium CEO Chris Heineken for the Insight Track podcast, Dana talked about those early challenges.

“As we started to open up new segments, we noticed the productivity numbers from a commercial rep were vastly different from what we get from an enterprise rep,” he said. With hundreds of accounts to manage, commercial reps faced a different cadence of work than enterprise reps who typically handled a smaller set of high-value accounts.

Replicating the success of high-performers

To address these disparities, Nutanix partnered with Atrium to bring relevant insights right where the reps needed them, within the flow of work in Salesforce. The Atrium team developed a Customer Stories Dashboard with CRM Analytics to help reps quickly access and analyze their opportunity data. The dashboard pulls in key information from opportunity line items, accounts, products, and more. Multiple dashboard views were also enabled with advanced search options that allow reps to filter opportunities by dozens of criteria, presenting results in a summary table for export.

By embedding the dashboard directly into Salesforce, the team now has quick access to fresh, relevant data. The ease of accessing these insights also helped with user adoption by the team right out of the gate.

Dana emphasized that using data to improve sales productivity is an ongoing priority. “We want to figure out why some reps are generally more productive — whether it’s their accounts, who they are, or how they operate. We’re capturing a ton of data every day, and the key is using that data to drive productivity improvements.”

As Nutanix continues to gain deeper insights into the patterns of top-performing sales reps, leaders are better able to coach their team members to improve performance. As Dana explained, “What we want to do is ultimately arm the sales manager with data points for meaningful coaching conversations. For example, we can say, ‘Hey, I noticed you’re not engaging enough new accounts,’ and then work on improving those areas.”

The project was completed ahead of schedule and under budget, showcasing the focused effort and collaboration between Nutanix and Atrium. “I get a lot out of conversations with Atrium, just as much as they do from us. It’s that exchange of perspectives that helps us improve,” Dana added.

Looking ahead, Nutanix aims to continue refining its use of analytics and AI. “We’re starting to build profiles of what a productive sales rep looks like, and we want to coach lower-productivity reps to adopt similar cadences,” Dana shared. “The ultimate goal is to provide feedback that helps all reps optimize their time and focus on the most impactful deals.”

Through the development of the Customer Stories Dashboard, Nutanix not only improved visibility within Salesforce but also took a significant step toward data-driven sales excellence, empowering its sales teams with the insights needed to succeed in a competitive marketplace.

Nutanix is a cloud computing software company that sells what it calls hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances, a complete, 100% software-defined stack that integrates compute, virtualization, storage, networking, and security to power any application, at any scale. They focus on unifying private, public, and distributed clouds under one common software umbrella.

The Technology

CRM Analytics
Salesforce Sales Cloud

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