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.

Situation

OwnBackup was going through extreme transformation across the organization. They had a rapidly growing sales team – from 125 to 200 by EOY – and a new CRO. The org was in the process of shifting from a single product-focused sales motion to a more strategic platform sale. They were also experiencing rapid revenue growth, with strong tailwinds from the growth of their Salesforce ecosystem and recent transition to the cloud and remote work.

 

Pain

While such growth was positive, it also caused lots of pain. They realized that their current infrastructure would not properly equip the team to meet their aggressive growth goals and scale. On the Sales side, they were converting opportunities at a high rate, but their infrastructure was not built to sustain this at higher growth rates. Processes suited to fit a smaller company, inadequate data to aid decisions, and growing complexity were preventing them from being able to scale properly. In addition, a lack of bandwidth to implement prevented them from using a consistent methodology, deploying modern training, or implementing the proper workflows into their tech stack across all Revenue teams.

 

Impact

OwnBackup exceeded their 2021 revenue goal as a company by August 2021 and the majority of their reps hit their numbers in July and August. OwnBackup also raised an additional $450M in funding, saw their average sales cycle lengths decrease, average revenue per deal increase, and overall company churn reduce.

They did this through uncovering issues via a GTM Diagnostic performed by WbD. Shortly after, OwnBackup began the process of co-creating content for their team with WbD. They created SDR and CS playbooks, sales-ready messaging, and personas to enable the entire Revenue team. They also implemented the customer-centric SPICED operating model so that their customers would have a consistent experience throughout their entire customer journey. This operating model unified the organization with a consistent process and language, and equipped each of the teams with tools to assist customers along their buying journeys. 

The leadership at OwnBackup then fortified their investment by empowering their front line managers to learn how to become coaches for their teams, and by implementing the SPICED methodology in core systems. The SPICED framework has become so popular with the team that it became a crucial part of OwnBackup’s culture. 

Situation

MURAL had a rapidly growing sales team, with one large Fortune 500 customer, and was looking for ways to predictably grow into additional enterprise accounts from historically product-led growth. Then COVID hit; with so many companies now working remotely, they suddenly couldn’t fill orders fast enough.

Pain

The Revenue team had no consistent sales process, difficulty getting their programs to be adopted by enterprise sales team, and lacked a cohesive operating model to serve the enterprise.

Impact

After implementing new processes and training, MURAL was able to achieve a shorter sales cycle, increase their enterprise penetration, and increase their close rates.

The program included defining and implementing a clear sales process, enablement to increase adoption, skills training, cue cards with strong messaging for each persona, and a Salesforce implementation to ensure consistent process adherence across all GTM functions.