How Siemens Digital Industries Software Exceeded Annual Growth Targets by +100%

Siemens Digital Industry Software is the leading industrial software company and part of Siemens Digital Industries, one of the 3 operating companies that make up Siemens AG. With annual revenue for the software business exceeding $5 billion in annual revenue, Siemens is focused on growing and supporting partners, and is offering resources that facilitate the development of key global initiatives. Siemens currently supports partners that resell Siemens software, service partners that service the software, and developers who create apps and services built on Siemens technology. After transitioning to Highspot, Siemens deepened its focus on providing information to users that help them evolve their partner sales model.

A Lack of Insight into Resources Leads to Frustration

As Siemens transitions its business from perpetual software licenses to a Software as a Service model (SaaS), Siemens Digital Industries Software needed to ensure close alignment with its partner ecosystem to successfully navigate the change. However, its existing HTML-based partner portal was hard to use and not intuitive, with a poor user experience and no user interface. 

For example, it was difficult for partners to locate content, forcing them to sift through irrelevant information and modules before finding the right resource. It was also challenging to know how to deliver partners, internal sales reps, and other external stakeholders resources built for their needs. To make things even more difficult, the lack of analytics on the existing partner portal meant that the Siemens team had no idea how content was performing, providing an additional challenge in areas ranging from onboarding to ongoing enablement. 

With these limitations, notifying partners of new or updated resources required extra manual work from the Siemens team. “A lot of what we were posting on the HTML site was reinforced by direct communications,” explained Bradley Stern, global partner development at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “The easiest way to disseminate a message was to take a link and send it out in a communication or email.” However, this process was time-consuming and made it hard for partners to be self-sufficient. 

Customized Partner Experiences Enhanced Productivity

In hopes of encouraging greater employee self-sufficiency, improving onboarding and sales enablement, and creating more alignment between Siemens and its partners, the team decided to replace its previous platform with Highspot for both their direct and partner selling teams. This was essential to ensure a better experience for direct sellers and partners. Ultimately, this helped create greater clarity and made it easier for partners to find the right resources faster. 

Highspot also enabled the Siemens team to customize enablement journeys for different cultures, regions, and audience types. For example, the Siemens sales enablement team used SmartPages to build Spot overview pages to upskill partners in a program called the Expert Partner Program. This is a program designed to help expert partners leverage enablement content and to help future experts better understand how they too could achieve such remarkable results. “It could be perceived as a complicated process,” said Stern. But it’s “less complicated and more digestible using SmartPage functionality,” helping partners save time and be more self-sufficient. 

This combination of message and resource consistency alongside customized journeys help employees and partners alike have confidence in the materials provided within Highspot. “Features like bookmarking allow us to have the confidence that we don’t need to ask somebody to update an asset. It’s going to get updated automatically so that everybody is always up to date,” shared Stern. These improvements in confidence and consistency have helped increase partner productivity by 35%.

The impact of this improvement on the user experience for partners is clear. In fact, 72% of the top revenue-producing reps at Siemens have completed the intermediate sales training certification programs built in Highspot. This has enabled Siemens partners to seamlessly transition their business to support revenue growth in alignment with the new Siemens service model. 

Improved Partner Productivity Leads to Consistent Revenue Growth

Every team at Siemens strives to create a strong ecosystem where employees and partners can thrive – and since implementing Highspot, Siemens Digital Industry Software has been able to achieve just that.

Ultimately, Highspot has been central in accelerating the transition between perpetual license software and SaaS, a key goal that Siemens is still actively pursuing. “Using Highspot to house and promote all of the content and enablement has allowed us to increase the adoption rate of this program and allowed the message to disseminate quicker,” detailed Stern. 

This has contributed to over a 100% improvement in annual growth targets and ongoing momentum in long-term revenue development, due in large part to the increased partner productivity made possible through Highspot. “We’re really figuring out how to become more of a one-stop shop,” noted Gray. “We’re staying on top of the resources and the means necessary for our partners to succeed.”