Case Studies

As Chief Operating Officer at Cost Certified, Lewis Cowie was used to wearing a lot of different hats. The company was rapidly outgrowing its early-stage marketing plan, and as their cost-per-demo climbed, they began looking at another way to scale.

After reading the Predictable Revenue book, Lewis began to look at building an outbound sales team. With limited time available, he turned to Predictable Revenue’s consulting services to help
establish a sales development team for Cost Certified.

“I didn’t want to recreate the wheel,” Lewis says. Instead, he reached out to Predictable Revenue to ensure he had a solid playbook and didn’t waste time making errors that could be avoided.

Before Predictable Revenue

Before working with Predictable Revenue, Cost Certified was struggling to increase growth predictably. Unfortunately, inbound marketing can lead to a plateau in lead generation. As a new company, they hadn’t had time to develop enough quality content yet and were mostly focused on pushing commercialization.

The Problem

The primary problem at Cost Certified was that sales had stagnated. They’d reached an expensive cost-per-demo, and without a new strategy, it was difficult to scale. Although Lewis saw the potential in building an outbound team, he didn’t have the time or expertise to build one himself. “Hiring 30 people in six months takes a lot of time.”

The company’s first attempt at improving its sales development strategy lacked focus. They tried testing with lists but didn’t have strong systems behind the process. Lewis knew it was time to invest in outside help.

Cost Certified had tried hiring an outbound service in the past, but the quality of leads was poor, and this time they needed consultants they could trust. After reading the book, Lewis knew Predictable Revenue had a solid system. He decided the most cost-efficient solution was to build an in-house team with help from our consultants.

Our Solution

Because Cost Certified’s goal was to get a team hired and trained as quickly as possible, Lewis chose our Outbound Success – Plus Consulting Services. We helped Cost Certified establish systems to build a solid, scalable foundation for sales development.

“It was generally a really good experience.”

Aside from laying those foundations, our coaching team provided feedback, tech stack recommendations, and helped set up outreach. We also provided additional support for troubleshooting and questions as they came up. “They definitely went above and beyond and helped us set systems up outside of the playbook.”

“The pace and meetings ended up working really well for where we were at…We got everything done in record time.”

The Result

Lewis decided to test their newly established system by having his AEs perform SDR work. With just an hour and a half of calling, most AEs were booking at least two or three meetings a day with a 3-4% conversion rate.

Lewis is confident they can train SDRs to have the same success and has already begun the hiring process. “My expectation is that eventually, they should be better than their AEs.”

Cost Certified’s “demos booked” have gone up by almost 10x, and they have cut their marketing budget by 70%.

“With inbound marketing alone, we were booking around 4-6 demo’s a day. We are now booking as many as 40 demos per day. In addition, we have had to promote 2 SDRs to AE’s within their first month because our current AE’s are completely overbooked.”

We also created a framework for multichannel sequences based on Cost Certified’s customer pain points, outcomes, and stories. Our team refined their existing sequence and created a new sequence to A/B test that resulted in a 70% open rate.

Conclusion

Lewis Cowie and the Cost Certified team understood the value of the Predictable Revenue model, but they were stuck on execution. With the help of our Outbound Success – Plus Consulting Services, the company was able to build its own outbound system and processes.

Working with our expert coaches, Cost Certified was able to drastically reduce their cost per demo. We refined their existing sequences and built new ones, along with an effective script to convert more cold calls into meetings.

Lewis was busy driving revenue and sales, and managing his direct reports. The last thing he had time for was to build an outbound sales team from scratch. With guidance from Predictable Revenue, he was able to get a team up and running, establish best practices, and lay the foundations of a successful and scalable outbound team.

10x

demos booked

promoted 2 SDRs to AE’s within their first month

70% open rate

in new sales sequence

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Magdalena, who was in a Sales Enablement Executive role (when the engagement started) and Georg Schildknecht, the VP Growth at Ryte, came to us to help them establish outbound sales within their organization.

Before Predictable Revenue

Ryte decided to work with Predictable Revenue as they had a “bit of knowledge missing” and they wanted to have a proper “kick off” to establish the outbound sales function. As a young sales team, they looked to Predictable Revenue to gain knowledge that comes from experience. Ryte needed a well-thought out strategy to ensure they were establishing the outbound sales functionality at their organization the right way, the first time. They thought about trying to build the outbound sales team first internally with research. They had bought some lead lists and were diving into understanding their target market personas but noticed that they were missing knowledge in how to do sales outreach, specifically messaging and sequencing.

Ryte had seen historical success with inbound marketing and had a team of five Inbound SDRs handling those leads. They had also hired one SDR who would be handling outbound sales. When Ryte hired Predictable Revenue the outbound SDR “was only handling one market and was not entirely doing outbound.” Their reps were handling a mix of inbound and outbound sales, instead of focusing on one.

The Problem

Unfortunately, Ryte saw their inbound lead flow plateau with the onset of the COVID pandemic however they knew they were well-positioned to ramp up their growth in 2021.

The tipping point to hire Predictable Revenue was the company raised a fundraising round at the end of December 2020 and would need to show specific revenue results. This was the perfect time to get everything implemented and ramp up outbound sales. They wanted to strategically show where they would be heading in the next few years.

Ryte had bought some lead lists and were diving into understanding their target market personas but noticed that they were missing knowledge in how to do sales outreach, specifically messaging and sequencing.

Our Solution

The Predictable Revenue team decided to focus on three things:

  • Uncover Gaps in the Lead-to-Revenue Cycle
  • Rebalance SDR Staffing & Hiring Plan
  • Build the Outbound SDR Program

With a 100-day outbound team plan, Ryte was provided with a step-by-step process to shift staff internally into new roles, establish the metrics necessary to measure the success of the program from the start and move forward with nailing their niche, drafting sequences and finally beginning outbound outreach.

The Result

Ryte found they were provided with a lot of material to work with. With a breakdown of the project plan it was easy to know what they needed to work on in a consecutive order. They even found the decision-making process of purchasing new tools (including sales engagement & data enrichment) was made easier through the coaching engagement with Predictable Revenue.

After working with Predictable Revenue they now have 5 Outbound SDRs and 5 Inbound SDRs. They also were able to expand from 3 markets to 2 additional markets during the engagement with Predictable Revenue.

One of the goals set out for the engagement and for Ryte was to create 1/10 of target revenue coming from outbound sales. Looking at 2021 results, Ryte did not only hit but exceed their goal with outbound activities contributing 27% of all pipeline and 20% of new customers.

The average selling price (ASP) of these new customers has a 26% higher average selling price compared to other channels and contributed 23% growth in new business.

“From our side, the biggest success factors were splitting SDRs & BDRs into separate teams and building a program around LinkedIn pipeline generation.”

Conclusion

Magdalena Prantl and Georg Schildknecht were fans of the concepts found in the Predictable Revenue book. And while Ryte had a well established inbound marketing engine, they knew they wanted the help of our company as they established their outbound sales team. Without our team, they’d be stuck implementing it on their own and possibly not being able to avoid the pitfalls that come from establishing outbound for the first time at a company.

“Lessons learned are that it [Outbound] takes time and it is worth giving it time. As well, looking at the program and starting the program independently of already existing Marketing/ Inbound activities earlier would have helped speed up the process.” Magdalena Prantl

After partnering with Predictable Revenue and following a straightforward process with an easy-going and manageable project timeline, Ryte was able to hire 5 outbound SDRs to establish a team of 6 managing 27% of their overall revenue pipeline. Thanks to the Predictable Revenue coaching team, Ryte has been able to establish themselves in 2 new markets in the process.

Most importantly, the goal of establishing metrics in the lead to revenue cycle has allowed them to easily measure their 23% growth in 2021.

Outbound Sales created

20%

new customers

26%

higher average selling price

Expanded to

2 additional markets

23% Growth

in 2021 through the engagement

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Stephen Depaoli is the Senior Director of Sales Development at Neo4j, a San Mateo, California-based graph database platform company. Neo4j drives innovation and competitive advantage for more than 900 customers including Comcast, ICIJ, NASA, UBS, and Volvo Cars. .. The company turned to Predictable Revenue’s coaching team to help them get their outbound sales development team off the ground for the first time.

Before Predictable Revenue

When Stephen Depaoli started in his role as the Senior Director of Sales Development at Neo4j, he quickly realized that the company couldn’t rely on inbound leads alone to hit company growth targets. His concern was based on the volume of inbound opportunities he was seeing and, after doing a little digging through the numbers, Stephen determined that, “the SDRs [were] not receiving enough to necessarily hit their goals, and that some outbound motion would be wise to supplement what they [were] already doing.” The sales development team needed to come up with a new strategy, and fast.

Stephen’s sales development team was geographically dispersed and growing fast. They had 25 people on the team across North America, Europe, and Asia and had some aggressive hiring plans. Stephen has his hands full covering the myriad responsibilities that come with being a global sales leader, and while building that outbound function was high on his priority list, he couldn’t fly the plane and build it at the same time.

In his search for outside help, he turned to his colleague, Lisa Hathaway, VP of Demand Generation at Neo4j who had worked with Predictable Revenue in a previous role. Stephen was also familiar with us, because a CEO at a prior company of his was a big fan of our book, Predictable Revenue.

We supported Stephen by collaborating on the strategy, working sessions with everyone involved on the project, and bringing in coaches to work one on one with the sales development team.

Our Solution

Predictable Revenue took a three-pronged approach to building the outbound function at Neo4j. We supported Stephen by collaborating on the strategy, working sessions with everyone involved on the project, and bringing in coaches to work one on one with the sales development team. “It’s a triple-track sort of process…and all of [it] is valuable.”

What we solved for Stephen at the end of the day was extending his bandwidth. With wall to wall meetings he needed a team that could, “spend the time every week with the outbound team, reviewing strategies and tactics”.

On top of the tactical team support, Stephen knew that making changes in an org of 25+ people wouldn’t be without its challenges. Having our coaching team involved in designing the strategy “solves a lot of problems before they even come out.” Change management can be hard and collaborating on the strategy gave Stephen and team back some spare cycles because we were able to steer them away from mistakes we’ve seen in the past.

As a veteran sales development leader, Stephen knew that building an outbound function from scratch would take time to get right. Some of his team expected us to, “know all the answers all the time to everything immediately!” Luckily, Stephen assuaged them: “no, they’re going to help us create good experiments to figure out what the answers are, that doesn’t mean [Predictable Revenue sales coaches] know all the answers for our company walking in the door.” We love working with experiment-driven leaders like Stephen.

“I certainly know about outbound sales development and I could coach people, but it’s never going to be as good as having all the resources that Predictable Revenue has, so, [we] very much appreciate that we had access to them.” –  Stephen Depaoli

Conclusion

Stephen Depaoli and Neo4j came to us to solve a simple problem: they had goals to reach and inbound wasn’t going to get them there. But for a team as large as Stephen’s, adding outbound would be no small feat. So, we minimized the risk of a big transition by offering expertise and support to the team. In addition, we’re helping the team experiment, iterate, and refine all the time so that the outbound function at Neo4j can scale quickly and effectively.

While Stephen wasn’t coming from a place of no experience when it comes to building and scaling outbound functions, like many sales development leaders today he’s got a lot going on. Having Predictable Revenue’s team come in to tackle some of the big stuff allows him to focus on the intricacies of Neo4j and focus on closing more opportunities. We’ll leave you with one last quote from Stephen: “I certainly know about outbound sales development and I could coach people, but it’s never going to be as good as having all the resources that Predictable Revenue has, so, [we] very much appreciate that we had access to them.”

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Jessica Arnold is the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Health Catalyst, a company offering a fully integrated suite of healthcare data warehousing and process improvement solutions based on their proprietary Adaptive Data Architecture. Jessica and Patrick Nelli, Health Catalyst’s President, came to us to help them diversify the products they were selling through outbound and establish more consistent revenue.

Before Predictable Revenue

“The catalyst for deciding [to work with Predictable Revenue],” Jessica explains, “was an increased investment in Health Catalyst’s go-to-market strategy and sales teams.” They needed a well thought-out strategy for taking 3 new categories of offerings to market, and wanted to focus on creating the “operational rigor” required to have consistent revenue in each of those 3 categories. And outbound was certainly a motion that had worked before. Health Catalyst had seen historical success in sourcing its $5-10 million enterprise deals through outbound sales, so it made sense to invest in building the outbound function in a more structured way.

The Problem

In the past, the only deals Health Catalyst had sourced through outbound were “large, wall-to-wall, and highly customizable.” These enterprise deals are high value, but difficult to source consistently. The team wanted a way to diversify the stream of deals by combining more “out-of-the-box and application-specific solutions that could be easy to implement and more lightweight.” These smaller deals would represent an opportunity to “seed and grow,” or, as other companies refer to the strategy, to land and expand. Additionally, the smaller, higher velocity deals would act as a safety net in case any of the “lumpy, large enterprise deals” fell through.

Jessica knew that outbound would be the best way to get more of these deals in the pipeline, but the team didn’t necessarily have a great deal of experience with a strong sales development system. As a result, the team struggled to come up with concise and focused messaging and didn’t have a good way to gauge how well outbound (or inbound, for that matter) was working.

Our Solution

With 15 years of sales development experience, Jessica was no stranger to outbound before taking on her role at Health Catalyst in March of 2021. She had also read the Predictable Revenue book when she worked at Salesforce from 2011-2015, so she was very familiar with our methodology as well. It was always Patrick’s goal to have the team operate within the Predictable Revenue framework, so the two of them joining forces with us to make that happen made perfect sense.

Jessica met with our team on a continuous basis as they implemented our framework at Health Catalyst. Her team was, at the beginning of the engagement, “not in a mature place. They were not in the framework. They were focusing on different things than what Predictable Revenue would have them focus on.” We helped Jessica prioritize what the team was focused on, decide what should be done first, and organize all that needed to be done into a manageable roadmap.
“Starting to see customers respond in a positive way and knowing these campaigns are working, or this campaign isn’t working, and being able to constantly evaluate that feedback” is a vital piece of the puzzle that Predictable Revenue helped Health Catalyst find.

The Result

The most impactful result of working with Predictable Revenue, for Jessica, was establishing an outbound sales development framework. After they finished working through the final steps of putting the framework in motion, it will be “what is described in Predictable Revenue. That’s what [they’re] continuing to work on. That’s what [they] consider world class.” 

Jessica breaks the results of implementing the framework into 3 categories. First, there’s the education and participation of Health Catalyst’s internal teams. Through the engagement we “educated them on what that sales development function does, the value of it, and the rigor that is important to sustain it and watch it grow.” Next comes the impact on Health Catalyst’s prospecting. The team now understands the formula and activities necessary to generate opportunities. The final impact is on their customers. “Starting to see customers respond in a positive way and knowing these campaigns are working, or this campaign isn’t working, and being able to constantly evaluate that feedback” is a vital piece of the puzzle that Predictable Revenue helped Jessica find. In teaching her team the framework, we were able to “affirm a lot of the things Jessica knew to be true.”

Most importantly, the goal of diversifying the products they were selling through outbound was also met. Health Catalyst is “starting to see a constant stream of different product sales, which is a positive directional movement”.

Their growth from Q2 to Q3 2021 are:

  • 20 created opportunities (+53%*)
  • 10 stage 2s (+150%)
  • $12.1M in created pipeline (+40%)
  • $9M strategy stage 2 pipeline (+36%)

*percentages are growth from Q2 to Q3 results

Conclusion

Jessica Arnold, Senior Vice President of Business Development, and Patrick Nelli, President were always firm believers in the Predictable Revenue methodology. While Health Catalyst had a great track record with outbound, it lacked some of the organization and structure that a tried and true outbound methodology like ours could bring. Without it, their team was stuck relying on the same type of deals they always had through outbound, weren’t clear on exactly what they should be doing, and didn’t know how they should be measuring success.

Consequently, “It was [also] really nice to have that alliance – somebody to bounce ideas off of, who’s done it multiple times and could provide a different idea or a different perspective while building out the team.” Thanks to the Predictable Revenue coaches, Health Catalyst saw a better understanding of sales development on their team, improved prospecting tactics, and received better responses from customers.

Jessica, Patrick, and the Health Catalyst team now know how to measure success and have a plan for how to continue optimizing and iterating. They saw an immediate diversification of the types of deals they were sourcing through outbound, and, most tangibly, a 40% growth in their pipeline within one quarter.

40% growth

$12.1 Million

in their pipeline within one quarter

150% growth

10 stage 2s

53%

20 created opportunities

36% growth

$9 Million

strategy stage 2 pipeline

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Timea Szabo, Head of Demand Generation at Blink, is in charge of generating qualified opportunities for the sales team, working closely with their Head of Sales, Peter Durkin. Timea looks after the performance marketing department and the sales development reps from a processes and systems perspective while Peter looks after the team from a management perspective. Blink came to Predictable Revenue for an Outbound Consultation designed to answer key questions, solve key issues, and help them achieve their goals around the outbound sales development function.

Before Predictable Revenue

The number one priority for Blink in 2021 was “to enter the US market and really make a splash there.” To do so, the Blink team needed to know if the outbound function would work as their go-to-market mechanism. They had recently hired four SDRs in the UK, one in Australia, and were looking to hire more in the US. As they continued to scale the organization and bring it into the US, they wanted to ensure that “the processes and the successes that [they] put in place didn’t break.” Timea and Peter also wanted to learn how to appropriately adapt and optimize their past strategies, understand “the type of personas and the type of copy and messaging that [they] should be using to enter that market,” Additionally they also wanted to get “more clarity on how to make sure inbound SDRs are hitting their targets and following best practices too.”

Timea and Peter wanted to understand “the type of personas and the type of copy and messaging that [they] should be using to enter that market,” and get “more clarity on how to make sure inbound SDRs are hitting their targets and following best practices too.”

Goals

To ensure the engagement was as efficient as possible, we asked them to come up with 3 clear questions they wanted answered by the Predictable Revenue team.

Blink’s questions were as follows:

  1. How do we make outbound work as a GTM mechanism in the US?
  2. What is an inbound SDR role at Blink?
  3. How do we get clarity around our funnel and metrics?

 

We also asked Blink to come up with 3 goals that they were aiming to achieve in 3, 6, and 9 months respectively. Those goals were:

 

  1. 3 months: Hire outbound SDRs that live in the US
  2. 6 months: Optimize inbound and have clearer metrics and reporting
  3. 9 months: Achieve predictable revenue

“We have now hired and onboarded 2 USA SDRs and our first US-only campaign was a huge success with 88% response rate.”

The Result

Looking back at the first question for the engagement, how do we make outbound work as a GTM mechanism in the US? Timea says Blink can check that one off the list. “We have now hired and onboarded 2 USA SDRs and our first US-only campaign was a huge success with 88% response rate, 3 closed won customers and an estimated $134,600.00 qualified sales pipeline from one campaign alone. We’re successfully cornered our “niche” in a sector, thanks to Predictable Revenue, and looking to expand from there.”

The second question, what is an inbound SDR at Blink? is answered and on its way to being implemented. Blink now has a clear idea of what targets a rep should have, and reps are on track to hit those targets for the second quarter in a row. Timea shared that Blink has clarity on this and that activity from inbound has just brought in one of the largest deals Blink has ever signed. “Our inbound SDR is focused not only on getting in touch with prospects who have dropped off before booking a demo, but also building out accounts from business intent data and prospecting them similar to an outbound outreach.”

As for the last question, how do we get clarity around our funnel and metrics? Predictable Revenue “has steered [Blink] in a direction where [they] now have better clarity on the important KPIs [they] should be tracking. We are using funnel metrics from activity metrics and tracking how they translate from calls/emails to meaningful conversations, disco/demos booked, and sales qualified opportunities. We are also tracking how each deal is pacing towards getting qualified by the AEs and understand where the bottlenecks are in the qualification process.”

3 months after the initial engagement, Blink’s 3-month goal of having outbound SDRs live in the US has already been met. Their 6-month goal of having inbound optimized and having clearer metrics and reporting is right on track and with the implementation of the expert advice received during the Outbound Consultation, achieving the 9-month goal of having Predictable Revenue is within reach.

Conclusion

Blink had a lofty goal for 2021: to expand into the US market and do it well.

Timea and Peter knew that they had many of the pieces in place to achieve this goal, but they needed some help to make sure that when they scaled their go-to-market organization, they could continue on a successful path. This involved figuring out how to increase headcount effectively (they are still hiring for AE roles and SDRs roles!), understanding their funnel and which metrics they should be tracking, and how the inbound function would dovetail with the outbound one.

After the outbound consultation with Predictable Revenue, Blink is confident that all their questions are answered and that their goals are well on their way to being achieved. The 4 deals that have closed as a result of implementing our advice certainly back up that claim.

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