We’ve never had a sales engine, specifically, we’ve never had a lead generation engine. My struggle was that we were very very referral based. We’d work with a client, do a good job and hope they’d know other companies we could help.”
The following is a transcription of a case-study call between Hassan (Xavor), Colleen (Xavor) and Collin (Predictable Revenue). It’s longer than our normal case studies because we felt this format helped the story shine through.
Collin – Thank you both for doing a case study with us, I’d like to start by talking about what you were doing before we started working together.
Hassan – We were waiting for Oracle to refer business to us and doing events with in different cities to drive traffic but we weren’t doing any sales development.
We are a consulting firm that’s been in business since 1995. Back then, our founders had gotten together and raised a little money to help people build websites. We built a lot of websites and eventually started helping clients integrate them into various business systems from Microsoft and Oracle.
We’ve never had a sales engine, specifically, we’ve never had a lead generation engine. My struggle was that we were very very referral based, we’d work with a client, do a good job and hope they’d know other companies we could help. A common source of new deals was employees of our customer moving to new companies and bringing us in.
I’ve been experimenting with various growth channels but I don’t have a background in sales or marketing – I’m an engineer by training – and experimented with a bunch of things. One channel that’s always worked was getting referrals from Microsoft and Oracle. We just had to sit and wait. I had very little confidence in our ability to generate business out of people that we don’t know. They call us parasite partners because we wait for them to sell something and then we’re the parasites who do the implementation.
Collin – Sounds like you had a good stable business, why bother doing more?
Hassan – A friend mentioned Predictable Revenue, Aaron’s book. I read it and then forced Colleen [one of Xavor’s Account Executives], to read it or listen to it. We wanted to use what we read to build our lead generation engine.
Initially, we were thinking of following the steps in the book and letting Colleen run with it. We had a few other AEs at the time and thought she could figure out the process and then hand it off to one of the other reps.
Then we found out about your Accelerate program and wanted to give it a try. We liked that we wouldn’t have to take one of our best people away from closing and could pay someone who has already figured it out to run it for us. It was that model backed by your own software and domain knowledge that we were interested in.
We thought that it would be great if Colleen didn’t have to worry about it. We wouldn’t have to stumble through the mistakes ourselves and worry about sending emails and then figuring out what to say and what not to say.
Collin – How has working with Predictable Revenue impacted your business?
Hassan – Very positively. Our relationship has given us the confidence that we can take a well defined market and a good product and work with you guys to get conversations with the right audience.
Some of the conversations you brought us didn’t have an Oracle product yet and we were able to bring those deals to them, that was huge and really elevated our position with them.
We’re a very engineering oriented company and, in the past, some of the products we built ended up with 0 customers. Working with you has really changed my perspective on how I look at the business and my confidence level in trying to go after newer areas. We recently built and launched a new product – xEngine – that I wouldn’t have previously invested in building because we wouldn’t have been able to find customers for it. Now, I’m confident that your team will be able to get us in front of customers for it.
The product is going to live on it’s own and hopefully be it’s own revenue stream, maybe even it’s own entity one day. Primarily this is because of our experience with your team.
All of you guys are amazing and it’s really changed our business.
Hassan – Colleen, how was it for you?
Colleen – For me, prospecting like this is something I didn’t have time for. You’ve provided us with the bandwidth to maintain a constant stream of new prospects. Whether the prospect responds now or your team works them 6 times over a number of months, having that has been huge for us. It’s been very successful for us and it’s been very enjoyable working with you.
Collin – What was your first impression when we got started?
Hassan – With you, it was great. I’ve worked with appointment setting companies, I’ve bought lists and contacts, and tried doing it myself. Everything was not that good as an experience. We had tried many things over the years from a demand gen perspective that brought us sub-par results.
We’re also a Microsoft partner and they had hired some companies to give us these types of appointments around a specific domain. Their primary means was phone and then a follow up via email. One company was even email only like you guys but it just didn’t work.
Most of these sales outsourcing companies have very old school boiler-room type salespeople and it’s a different experience to work with them. I’m sure there are better companies out there but we never found them. We had very sub-par results so I was pretty skeptical when we first got started with you.
Our first impression with your team was really good. They were very understanding and your approach was quite different. Our account strategist was great and instilled a lot of confidence in your team and process.
Collin – We actually took longer than we hoped to help you close your first deal, how was that experience?
Hassan – We started with you in April of 2015 so it was 12 months before we closed our first deal with you guys. You introduced us to the company in May of 2015 and closed in April of 2016.
The first deal we closed took a while but we were happy the whole time with the results.
We understand that it’s hard to generate these types of meetings and we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that we were getting so many. When we started seeing proposals and quotes, we knew that was a good sign. Our sales cycles are long so we knew we wouldn’t see deals close right away.
Your Account Executive did a good job of setting the expectation that it was going to take a few months to build towards getting our first qualified appointments. So we came in with this mindset and we actually started getting qualified handoffs sooner than we were expecting.
Colleen – I liked having your input throughout the campaign and always being on top of making sure we were improving our messaging. Your team was always asking how we could tweak it and coming up with ideas. I’ve been really happy with the experience we’ve had. Our strategist has been great to work with, very responsive, and responsible which adds to our satisfaction going forward with you. Nothing but good things.
I appreciate the initiation and how you’re always trying to improve the way you do things.
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