In the Flow 

Kelly McCabe is a Senior Client Executive at EY. 

She’s an experienced sales professional, having sold for the prior ten years at IBM but relatively new to the firm. Kelly is aligned to the mid-Atlantic region and focused on the Life Sciences industry.  She currently has a dozen accounts assigned to her.  

The first moment that matters for Kelly on any given day is where to spend her valuable time. 

Picking the right spots to focus is often a challenge for a salesperson, especially when they’re learning a new territory. The good news is Kelly doesn’t have to guess which accounts are the ripest for development. 

She has an AI-powered sales sidekick called ella in the palm of her hand. 

ella is Kelly’s eyes and ears to the market. She helps Kelly keep a pulse on her accounts, see around corners and anticipate clients’ needs. 

ella has already prioritized Kelly’s accounts using a powerful buyer-propensity algorithm. Kelly easily views her account list in the “targets” tab of her digital briefcase (or dBrief).

While Kelly was juggling family responsibilities over the weekend, ella was busy analyzing hundreds of data points from dozens of sources both publicly available and across the EY ecosystem. 

She is always looking for signals that a company is changing its business. Being the first responder to these changes gives Kelly an advantage over her competition.  

This Monday morning, Kelly received an alert from ella suggesting she reach out to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). 

After noticing six new job postings for data scientists on CareerBuilder, ella deduced that BMS is investing in its clinical operations at their Lawrenceville, NJ campus.  ella also understood that EY has been ramping up its data analytics practice.  

She was immediately reminded of a ‘win’ story a colleague posted on the ella feed a couple of days earlier. Kelly connected the dots and got excited about the potential of this opportunity. 

ella presented Kelly with insights and recommended she reach out to Rupert Vessey, Executive Vice President and President, Research and Early Development at BMS. Rupert’s email, phone number and LinkedIn bio were added to the “Contacts” tab of Kelly’s dBrief.

ella began analyzing Rupert’s social media posts on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. She was able to uncover the issues that seemed important to him as well as make some assumptions about his social style. 

According to ella, Rupert appears to be an Analytic. ella made some notes for Kelly on the best ways to engage with Rupert.

She also discovered that Rupert went to Oxford, was a former Rugby player and was a huge fan of Tottenham Hotspur, a premier league football club in London. ella added talking points to the “Customer” tab of Kelly’s dBrief.  

To make it easy for Kelly, ella drafted an introductory email for her to send to Rupert with the Tottenham chant as the subject line: Oh When the Spurs Go Marching in. Kelly was inspired to reach out. However, before sending the email, Kelly ran the sales play by Ed Smires. 

Ed is EY’s current GCSP at BMS. This is a critical year for the BMS account as the revenue has been running off. Ed has been trying to gain access to new buying centers at BMS for several months but has so far been unsuccessful. 

Ed immediately replied to Kelly, informing her that he supported the approach. Ed thanked Kelly for bringing the idea forward and for being proactive. 

A few days later, Kelly received a reply from Rupert. He was open to having an introductory call. 

Ed was thrilled that Kelly secured the meeting. In preparation for the discussion, ella created a contact plan that includes key questions to ask Rupert and a rough sketch of talking points she could share.

ella discovered that EY’s largest competitor, Accenture, had recently won a deal in clinical operations. 

ella gleaned some valuable insights from the press release about the regulatory and cost savings challenges facing BMS. She added the information to the “insights” tab of Kelly’s dBrief.

After scanning through her dBrief, Kelly was feeling good about the opportunity. Ed even suggested that Kelly lead the discussion with Rupert. 

Meanwhile, ella uploaded all of the notes into EY’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Kelly’s behalf, saving her from having to futz around with the system. 

Kelly’s manager, Rick Shue, was immediately notified that a new opportunity was added to his pipeline. 

A few weeks later, Kelly and Ed met with Rupert. Kelly was a little nervous the day before the meeting.

She was not an expert on clinical operations or data analytics. She didn’t want to look foolish in front of Ed, an influential managing director at the firm. 

Kelly asked ella to schedule a 30-minute session with Cyndi Baumgartner, the sales coach assigned to her from esellas. 

Cyndi and Kelly talked through the objectives for the meeting, and they worked through some potential issues that might arise in the discussion. Kelly was feeling much calmer after the session with Cyndi.  

Kelly found confidence in knowing that she was very well prepared. She also knew she could reach out to ella for any last-minute advice by email, text or her concierge feature in the ella app.  

The next day while Kelly and Ed were waiting in the lobby to meet with Rupert, Kelly received a text message from ella to tell her that BMS was just awarded stage three approval for an emerging cancer treatment drug. 

When Rupert entered the lobby, Kelly congratulated him on his recent accomplishment. Rupert was impressed since the announcement had hit the wires less than 5 minutes ago. It was a great way to start the meeting. 

The meeting was a success.

Rupert was impressed with Kelly’s understanding of BMS clinical operations even though EY has no business with BMS in this area.

The hypothesis she put on the table was spot on. Rupert admitted that while things seemed good on the surface of his organization, he was worried about his team's ability to keep up with demand. Rupert agreed with Kelly that they should do a diagnostic on the maturity of his operation. He asked Kelly to send him a proposal the following day. 

It was an excellent day for Kelly, and the preparation paid off.  Ed was really pleased and very impressed. Kelly was feeling pretty awesome.

With ella at her side, Kelly is not only more effective, but she’s much more efficient than she’s ever been. ella saved her 30 hours over the past month. ella helped her stay in the flow, which enabled Kelly to stay focused on the highest value activities like building more pipeline. 

Most importantly, Kelly got that feeling back that she lost while at IBM. The feeling that she was doing something good, and she was good at it. It reminded her why she loved sales - solving problems, providing solutions and serving clients in their moments of need.

On Friday, Kelly sat with a group of former colleagues at Parc Restaurant on Walnut Street.  Her friends were griping, one after the other, about how difficult it is to sell at IBM. Kelly sat quietly until a friend asked her how she was doing at EY.  Kelly could not help smiling from ear to ear.  She grabbed her glass and said 

“Ladies, it’s a great time to be in sales and to sell at EY.” 

Cheers to Kelly and ella, a winning combination.  

Bringing the Joy back to Selling 

Although this is an imaginative tale of an EY Client Executive, it illustrates esellas’ vision and many of the capabilities of its flagship platform, ella, the 1st AI-assisted sales sidekick.  

Every salesperson remembers that feeling they had when they made a difference for a client and their company. 

The time they opened a new door, reached a flashpoint in a meeting, hit a key milestone, solved a problem or signed that big deal on the dotted line.  That feeling is the fuel that makes us believe we can move mountains. 

We call it sales-joy. Joy is the x-factor in sales.  While methods, tools, tech and processes are helpful, the joy propels us forward despite the headwinds salespeople face every day. 

At esellas, we unlock the power of a company's sales organization by harnessing its human potential.  

Our mission is to help salespeople find joy in sales and the confidence to win. We do this by enabling great selling experiences that create meaningful moments that matter. We know when a salesperson has a great selling experience, they sell more—as much as 115% more (in our controlled experiments).

They’re also much happier, and sales joy is a contagious, virtuous cycle. 

Better Selling 

ella is the steward of the selling experience at esellas. She gives salespeople superpowers while removing the friction and points of failure that cause salespeople frustration and rob them of sales joy. ella makes selling more effortless, more exciting and wildly more efficient.

Within the ella selling experience, reps: 

• are guided on where to spend their time

• have easy access to reliable data 

• get on-demand support and expert coaching 

• are relieved administratively (future release)

• feel part of a tribe 

Power users of ella are getting great results. 

They are more proactive and are building a more substantial pipeline.  Within the controlled group that is using ella, we’re seeing the following outcomes: 

• Selling more volume  - pipelines up 115% ACV

• Do more significant deals - 37% larger ACV 

• Ramp up faster - 2X faster than non-ella users 

• More productive = 30 hours/month more selling time

Our Vision is that its EY Client Executives experience the moments that matter daily - the ones that make a difference and fuel us to get up early, move with purpose and fight with a passion for winning. 

We see a firm where Client Executives are in high demand. They’re irresistible to clients and their EY colleagues because they are trusted problem solvers and proven business developers.  

We would love to put Ella to the test for a select group of EY client executives over the next 90 days.  

An engagement with Esellas starts with a 4-6 week blueprinting exercise where we gain a deeper understanding of your go-to-market strategy, the current selling ecosystem and selling experience. This exercise produces a series of on-ramps to the ella platform so that Client Executives can get immediate value from ella.  

• The cost of Blueprinting is $50,000, and the pilot price is $1000/month per Client Executive. 

• We recommend at least 20 CEs for a pilot. 

Our experience has shown that sales professionals engage ella differently based on their current deal flow and where the most significant gaps are in their pipeline. 

We hope this inspires you to imagine an exciting future of sales at EY and a great selling experience, and more sales joy for everyone.

About esellas.

esellas, the revenue performance company, is on a mission to help salespeople find the joy in sales and the confidence to win.

We’re a seasoned team of sales leaders, operators, techies and creatives who’ve helped many of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the world grow. We unlock the power of a company's sales organization by harnessing its human potential.  

“Our clients turn to us for our experience, and they stay with us because of their rep’s experience.” - Rob Chapple, Co-founder.