This is the situation Montreal-based Chronogolf found itself in just one year ago.
The company – which markets a comprehensive SaaS management platform for golf courses – had been growing steadily, fueled by leads from marketing and in-person presentations and demos from their sales team at golf courses throughout Canada and the Northeast United States. Successful as those tactics were, Chronogolf wanted to expand – golf courses in havens such as California and Florida didn’t yet know who they were.
So, like many companies looking to increase their leads, opportunities and, of course, revenue, they read the book Predictable Revenue and realized the power of outbound sales. All they needed was some help putting all the pieces into place.
“The book was very interesting. It showed us ways we could accelerate our lead generation,” says Guillaume Jacquet, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Chronogolf.
“With the tips outlined in the book, we could get more qualified leads, support our inbound, and add more predictability to the amount of qualified leads that we can give to our sales team.”
Predictable Revenue’s Growth Assessment Service
It was at this point that Chronogolf reached out to Predictable Revenue and began using our whiteglove Growth Assessment service.
Led by Aaron and our consulting team, the Growth Assessment service consists of both high level philosophical outbound concepts and technical offerings such as detailed discovery sessions (so Chronogolf’s unique needs are fully understood), a deep dive into defining Chronogolf’s Ideal Customer Profile, regular calls with Aaron, and actionable outbound plans for Chronogolf to implement.
For example, Chronogolf had been having its sales reps juggle both prospecting and closing deals. With Predictable Revenue’s guidance, Chronogolf was able to establish a dedicated prospecting team and avoid the negative cycle of having reps bounce between the focusing on closing new clients and generating leads.
But that tailored process didn’t stop there: Predictable Revenue led Chronogolf through a “Kill a Word” workshop to hone their messaging, discussed the importance of precise list building, outlined processes to sharpen their sales coaching, and dove deep in their KPIs and metrics to shed light on what numbers to concentrate on.
This focused treatment resulted in Chronogolf quickly building an effective outbound machine, free of the missteps a company typically makes when they do it all on their own
“We knew the growth we wanted required us to reinvent the way we were generating leads and that meant doing outbound. We had read the book extensively, we had a certain level of knowledge, and we didn’t need to be convinced. We understood the key concepts, and were ready to leverage the execution points,” says Guillaume.
“But it comes back to our seasonality – no golf course is going to implement new technology during their high season. When we decided to put outbound in place it was March and we had 4 months to get ready to hit our seasonal target. So having Predictable Revenue allowed us to avoid the traditional mistakes of putting an outbound team in place all on our own.”
The Future: Predictable Growth
Not only did Chronogolf get a team in place to start booking meetings at the precise right time – remember knowing your market’s particular buying nuances is critical – they were able to begin generating leads immediately and quickly expand their outbound team.
Since beginning with Predictable Revenue, the Chrono golf sales team has grown from 2 to 6 people, with plans to hire 2 more prospectors immediately. That growth can be attributed to Chronogolf’s outbound success: outbound leads now account for more than 50% of the opportunities in the Chronogolf pipeline.
“We had almost zero leads from outbound at the beginning. It took 2 months to start having a constant flow of leads and opportunities. Now, we are seeing between 25 – 50 qualified opportunities coming from outbound per month,” adds Alexis.
“But don’t forget, one critical thing to remember for any company looking to explore outbound – get strong buy in from management. The belief that you will send a couple emails and people will come in through the door is a fantasy. So, you need to hire right, define your Ideal Customer Profile, and refine your messaging. It takes 3 – 4 months to really understand how this works if you do it right.”