CLIENT:
$3M b2b Start-up within a larger consumer oriented business
DRIVER:
Mature market company – mostly consumer oriented – was asking for significant growth from this ‘side project’.
CHALLENGE:
How to transition a ‘feature-focused’ inside sales team selling year to year subscriptions in an environment where the competition was winning deals that we were not involved at all or that we were considered the less appropriate option.
SOLUTION:
We created and successfully sold to senior management a 3-phased plan to invest in the sales team and sales operations around it to a new Consultative Selling, field based model.
In the first phase, we opened 4 field positions and brought in experienced consultative sales reps who sold to benefits, not features, while transitioning the inside sales reps to a customer experience and field support for renewal role.
In the second phase, we provided the corporate infrastructure to support the growth –
1. sales enablement training and support;
2. marketing lead generation, product suite branding, and relationship management support,
3. sales operations with tool automation support (moved to salesforce.com, cleaned up the data, combined the data with industry relevant third-party data, implemented new business lead management and tracking as well as renewal management, improved contracting process and moved to 3-year subscription deal cycle, and created ROI calculator that focused on understanding the impact to the customer so they could build a business case for purchase).
4. Metrics identification and tracking to both territory management and executive review, including sales growth, average profit margin, average contract value, win-loss by sales stage, length of sale, weighted funnel pipeline management, prospect leveling, and individual rep metrics – leads to Op close, ave deal $ and # of products, total contracts by prospect level, etc.
Phase 3 included expanding out the sales department to 8 FTEs while advancing their sales skills (Miller-Heiman, LinkedIn Social Sales, etc.), integrating sales automation with marketing automation, and further refining the renewal process.
RESULT:
The product suite continues to grow at 25% year over year revenue clip with last year’s new cash sales growing 45%. In addition, the funnel size has tripled in the same amount of time. The sales reps are expert consultative sellers, with 87% exceeding their quota goals, and the overall North America department met 114% of quota in 2014 and 112% in 2015. The average contract dollar value increased from $10k a year to $28k while the net promoter scores went from 34 to 56. Renewal rates continue to be at 99.1% (customer calculation) and 102.3% (revenue calculation).