OVERVIEW
Media and Publishing
5,600 Employees
Commercial Transformation
Salesforce rollout driving a shift from regional selling to global accounts
“Sellers got the exact steps for working a global account the moment a deal crossed their old regional boundary in Salesforce, while the task was in front of them. Adoption ran inside the tool itself, not as a push we mounted twice a year.That's what finally stuck."
VP of Sales Operations
The Challenge
The company was moving from 27 market-led sales teams to global account teams selling across three revenue lines: advertising, partnerships, and subscriptions. The plan depended on one shared Salesforce instance and a new deal process.
Earlier rollouts in some markets had stalled: sellers kept private spreadsheets, forecasts stayed unreliable, and managers coached from gut feel. Markets saw the new model as a headquarters project. Sellers worried about lost accounts and commission rules they didn't yet understand. The sales operations team had 4 people, 11 languages to cover, and one fiscal year to hit the target.
The Approach
Mapping the new deal process to five seller roles and eight key deal stages, from first meeting to renewal.
Delivering in-the-workflow guidance at each pipeline stage, in the seller's language.
Coaching sales managers first, with weekly pipeline-review guides tied to the new model.
Recruiting 60 market champions, each running peer demos and sharing wins in their region.
Tracking adoption by market, role, and deal stage, then linking it to pipeline quality and win rates.
Results & Impact
Within 90 days, 86% of sellers logged pipeline activity weekly, up from 29%. Lead-to-proposal time fell 22%. Cross-market deals rose 17% in two quarters, the first sign the global account model was working.
Sellers gave back about 6 hours a month by retiring side spreadsheets. Forecast accuracy improved enough for finance to drop a separate manual roll-up.
"I could see which markets had adopted the new model and which reps were still selling the old way, so I could replace the global memos nobody read with targeted coaching. It's game-changing visibility."
Head of Global Accounts
Looking Ahead
The company is expanding the model to partner sellers and customer success, plus AI-assisted account planning inside Salesforce. Next steps include adoption scorecards in every quarterly business review, a playbook library that updates as offers change, and a market-by-market plan for the 5 lowest-adopting territories.
