Situation
Arjun was out walking his dog on a peaceful New Jersey evening. But as often would happen, he found his mind wandering back to work. He was part of a small, but scrappy Revenue Operations team at Veriff. He helped a team of 40 salespeople, a handful of managers, and one lone enablement leader to use technology in their efforts to sell Veriff’s identity verification platform. Leadership had decided to embark on a shift in methodology, and Arjun and team had the tall task of supporting it through changes and enhancements in technology that would reinforce the right efforts and give them a clear picture of progress.
Pain
The revenue managers Arjun worked with were stretched particularly thin. Each of them had 7-9 team members to coach and hold accountable. They were never going to be able to listen to calls and provide feedback, or understand where to focus support and training.
Their performance tracking was superficial, focused mainly on call volume and surface-level statistics. They could see how many calls a salesperson made, but not why some of those calls might have been ineffective. Insights into specific issues like not selling on impact, pricing problems, or other call-specific challenges were missing. They were falling short on a critical part of leadership: being able to coach the team and provide meaningful feedback and wisdom.
Part of the struggle to pin down performance was that Veriff’s existing sales methodology, MEDPICC, felt incomplete, only covering the superficial elements of the sales process. They lacked guidelines and skills for diagnosing and responding to the real reasons customers buy, and how to actually sell those reasons through champions to other decision makers. They needed to be better at linking their solutions to real customer impact and needs.
They knew they needed to invest in making the team better, but they also needed the tools to be able to understand how those investments were paying off. They needed a more systematic, data-driven approach to understanding and improving sales performance. So Arjun set out to architect the solution.
Impact
Veriff started on their methodology transformation, and Arjun jumped into action. He started by implementing solutions from Momentum (WbD Certified Partner), specifically their new Coaching AI Agent to set a crucial baseline measurement. This way they’d be able to clearly measure the impact of any adjustments and investments in the team.
As the enablement team worked with Winning by Design to implement the SPICED methodology, revamp GTM processes, and organize training for the team, Arjun and team prepared to capture call recording insights and measure the real world application of the concepts. Almost immediately after the initial training, they saw a surge in the use of call opening/hygiene skills, alongside a noticeable improvement in scores measuring discovery technique.
Arjun saw that helping the sales teams approach training and reinforcement like professional athletes was especially impactful. Data became accessible to everyone – like game stats – allowing managers to see individual and team performance across 16 different competencies. As he puts it,
“Without Momentum, we had no idea where our reps were failing at across our competencies. Using their product, we are able to see how reps are performing week over week and analyze the trends to better understand how we can effectively deliver enablement to upscale their core competencies focusing on SPICED methodology”
This enabled week-over-week, month-over-month, and quarter-over-quarter analysis – like monitoring trends over the trajectory of a sports season. They were able to uncover nuanced insights into performance variations, even personal factors affecting the outcome of calls so they could coach and engage the team with proper context.
A continuous feedback loop was implemented. Periodic refresher training on specific concepts was conducted, and the impact on performance was closely monitored. Consistent coaching led to observable performance trends, revealing that without regular reinforcement, performance dipped.
With advanced features in Momentum, like RetroPilot Agent, Arjun could analyze closed-lost opportunities in more detail and uncover the real reasons behind lost deals. He could see where critical events hadn’t been uncovered in previous calls, and where there might be potential to resurrect or create new opportunities.
Arjun is optimistic about the future, planning to focus on competencies across the entire sales funnel, develop a comprehensive understanding of upsell and cross-sell skills, continue enhancing performance and improvement metrics, and create a competency specifically around how well representatives sell Veriff’s products.
While it’s still early to quantify full results due to the length and complexity of their sales cycles, the transformation effort has already had a significant impact on Veriff’s approach to sales performance measurement. They’ve moved from reactive, volume-based metrics to a data-driven, competency-focused, and customer-centric model.
Momentum has 3 main pillars that they impact, one of which is as Arjun puts it, “Democratizing the Data” so he can have Momentum feed Salesforce or other data sources of truth with first party data that he can then visualize and manipulate as he needs. They also provide dashboards to make consumption of data easier for both frontline reps, managers, and C-suite revenue leaders. Arjun said,
“Momentum has allowed us to shift our enablement program from reactive to proactive by first measuring the baseline and the week over week trends of rep performance so that we can effectively plan and deliver our training. It has been invaluable in helping understand our reps core competencies baseline so that we can effectively design enablement programs that upscale our reps.”
Situation
Eftsure excelled in the mid-market sector, achieving impressive sales in the SME and SMB segments. However, they struggled to penetrate larger enterprises and institutional organizations with the same vigor, leaving significant opportunities untapped and challenging their ability to protect average selling prices.
Pain
Despite their strengths, Eftsure’s sales approach was not as effective for larger businesses. Challenges included navigating unexpected stakeholders and decision-makers and identifying timing and legal issues toward the end of the deal, which created deal closure uncertainty and ultimately impacted revenue forecasting.
Impact
The results were transformative: following the last round of training in Q3, Eftsure experienced an outstanding Q4 with significant wins in the enterprise sector, reflecting an increased ability to accurately predict deal closures and overall improvements in customer management capabilities.
Situation
The team at EHS Insight was seeing strong revenue growth, but at the same time experiencing a lot of lost deals. They knew that they could be capturing more of this demand. They needed to solve for this in order to meet aggressive future revenue targets.
Pain
Win rates were at an all time low, and it was difficult to figure out patterns behind why reps were losing deals. To address the drop in win rates, their VP of Sales rolled out a few key initiatives with Winning by Design:
1) training for the sales team, focusing on core skills including customer-centric discovery and closing
2) clearly defining the go to market motion to align with their customer journey using playbooks with turn-by-turn directions
3) defined personas, conversation cards and case study stories to give clear guidance on the effective discovery questions reps should ask their prospects, and the impactful customer stories that they could tell in order to prove the impact that they could deliver to their customers
Impact
Within one quarter, the key leading indicators (such as sales activities) were already trending up, and within two quarters, all of their core KPIs significantly improved.
The resources such as playbooks and conversation cards gave the team much higher confidence on customer calls, more effectively selling their platform.
This confidence, defined process and higher morale across the team translated into strong improvements in all of the following metrics:
- 65% increase in sales meetings
- 9% increase in average deal size
- Faster time to book demos
- 5% increase in win rate
- 126% increase in connected calls with prospects
- 123% increase in sales activities completed (emails, calls, notes, tasks, supporting each other in demos)
- Met aggressive revenue targets for H1
- Closed the largest deal in the company history
Situation
Mirion, a provider of nuclear measurement and detection systems, launched a new product into the market called AccuRad. This product is a personal radiation detector designed to protect the public from dangers of radiation. Due to changes in the market, Mirion’s direct total addressable market (TAM) shrank and AccuRad underperformed.
Pain
In an effort to drive more pipeline and free up the AEs’ time to close deals, VP of Marketing Matt Maddox set up a new inside sales/BDR function. However, there was little process or messaging in place to target accounts in a programmatic way. Matt brought in Winning by Design to identify opportunities to achieve and exceed revenue goals and identify a new Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Impact
Through Winning by Design’s GTM Diagnostic, Matt and his leadership team discovered that the traditional GTM motion, split between direct sales and selling through distributors, was no longer effective. Across the key metrics of ACV, Velocity, and CAC, Mirion’s direct sales were not nearly as profitable as their partner sales/distributor channel. With that knowledge, Matt and his team were able to switch focus and double down on their distributor motion to increase revenue from the AccuRad product.
To support this focus, the Mirion reps used Discovery QCards for guidance on how to have even more productive discovery calls with their target distributors. Matt and his leadership team collaborated with WbD Revenue Architects to create a Sales Playbook that gave the team common turn-by-turn directions and metrics to follow. The team also created a new Account Based Strategy to identify key buyers, an updated target audience, and clarify the true impact of AccuRad.
Going through this exercise helped their team realize they should shift their focus to the higher education market to improve sales performance. After implementing this shift in strategy, Matt was later promoted to CRO to continue the strategic expansion of the product and its success.
Situation
TakeBlip was on the cusp of transformation. They were at a critical point in the organization’s life where they needed to shift gears from an amateur sales team to a professional one.
Pain
Take Blip’s small team meant there was very little formal structure and coworkers were often stretched thin. This left the team less effective than they could be. When Take Blip started growing their team, they began investing more in sales, which highlighted the lack of structure in the organization and further exacerbated their existing pain points. They knew they needed training to fill in the gaps and a methodology that would help provide the professional process and structure that they were seeking.
Impact
Winning by Design’s Bowtie Data Model became a cornerstone for Take Blip. They used this to standardize their internal language for the organization across every department, including Sales, Marketing, Partnerships, Product Development, and Customer Success. By using the Bowtie, every department was now measuring the same metrics against the same model, where they could truly measure their efforts over time, track improvements, and identify areas that still needed more resources.
Since Take Blip’s first training engagement with Winning by Design, Take Blip’s opportunities have spiked 247%, their wins have shot up 298%, and their bookings have increased 300%.
Situation
Citadel is a messaging app for CAC 40 companies (the 40 largest equities listed on the Euronext Paris). It is a startup company of ~100 employees within the larger Thales Group.
Pain
The company was going through an intense period of planning and restructuring of their GTM engine.
Laurent Duquesne, Citadel CEO, knew that they needed a scientific sales process to accelerate their growth.
Impact
By undergoing a GTM Diagnostic, Laurent was able to identify the key growth levers that would help them to be successful. From there, they created a custom Sales Playbook to establish and clarify the roles, process and account-based cadences for efficient outreach to target accounts. Training & High Impact Coaching helped cement SPICED as the consistent methodology across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success.
Situation
Cuebiq was in hyper-growth mode, with lots of opportunity in front of them. They were in the process of moving from a SaaS model to a PaaS (platform-as-a-service) model, and knew that they needed to make several big changes in order to make this transition a successful one.
Pain
A Diagnostic revealed several areas that needed to be addressed for the successful transition to a PaaS model: their pricing model needed to be adjusted to align with the new level of value they were providing, their sales team needed to be trained on enterprise-level skills, and their marketing efforts needed to be adjusted, as their inbound marketing machine would not sustain their future growth goals.
Impact
The first step was to roll out the foundational SPICED framework across the team; after implementing this directly in their Salesforce instance, they were able to ensure that they entire team was following the customer-centric process. Next, the Cuebiq sales team was trained on enterprise-level skills, which equipped them to sign enterprise-level deals on their new pricing model. They also were able to make the successful transition from an inbound marketing model, to marketing efforts focused entirely on targeted account-based marketing. All of these efforts led to the successful transition to selling PaaS, along with shortening their sales cycle from 6+ months down to 3 months even while switching to a more complex sale.
Situation
RingCentral, a global distributor of cloud-unified communications and collaboration solutions, offers its users with technology services. Chris Waldo, VP of Field and Account Based Marketing, was looking to drive more pipeline and more highly qualified leads into their pipeline.
Pain
A Diagnostic revealed a few key gaps: BDRs were not receiving any training focused specifically on prospecting, they did not have a clear process to follow, and they were focused only on volume metrics, leading to low quality leads that were being passed to and ultimately rejected by the AEs.
Impact
After defining new processes and addressing skill gaps with training and coaching, Chris was able to identify a lift of 33% in pipeline across the team of 50 BDRs.
The BDRs were certified on both inbound and outbound prospecting skills, and they now had a process and custom playbooks to follow with turn-by-turn directions. All of this was integrated into their enablement platforms to maximize adoption and make it part of their daily workflow.
Situation
While preparing for IPO, the Revenue team at Asana was seeing exciting growth in their revenue.
Pain
Leadership knew that they needed to prepare for the next phase of growth. Their CRO, Oliver Jay, recognized that their siloed structure, lack of a consistent sales methodology, and gaps in foundational skills needed to be solved in order to set up for future success.
Impact
By putting in place foundational skills and methodologies via a Training Academy, sales reps now had a clear sales process to follow, learned how to structure their limited time for efficiency, and learned new skills to fill their knowledge gaps.
Sales managers learned how to create a coaching environment across the sales floor, where peers could hold themselves accountable to the process. These foundations set up the Revenue team to use a consistent language and process, and were well prepared for meeting future growth expectations as a public company.
Situation
Logi had a hungry sales team with many reps who were early in their careers. Leading up to the release of the new version of their product, they wanted to optimize the field and get ready for a big growth push, while also focusing on expansion within their existing customer base.
Pain
A GTM Diagnostic uncovered some process gaps and skill deficiencies with the team. They began to redesign their sales process and launch the concept of ‘growth pods’ focused on expansion revenue. New process playbooks were designed to give turn-by-turn directions to all of their customer-facing roles (MDR, SDR, ADR, AE, SAM, and CSM).
Impact
With a newly defined sales process and growth pods in place to focus on existing accounts, the sales and CS teams were now able to all work according to the same operating system and language. Training and High Impact Coaching armed the team with clear guidance and elevated skills and techniques to be well positioned for their new product release.
Logi Analytics was ultimately acquired after more than doubling their close rate from 11% to 25% in 4 quarters.