Zuus was looking for someone that could help them ramp the effectiveness of their SDR team. Their SDRs were building their own cadences, doing their own research, and the results weren’t great.
As Michael said in our interview, “the results weren’t great, we were getting a really low engagement rate and a really low handoff rate.
Watch the whole video interview (14 minutes).
What does it take to become the fastest growing private software company in North America, as Deloitte named Acquia?
Well, it helps if you can create all the qualified leads you need, because with predictable, scalable lead generation, you can create predictable revenue & growth.
Acquia’s sales leaders decided that, to hit their very aggressive IPO-track / $100 million+ revenue growth goals, they couldn’t depend solely on inbound leads coming to them, or on partners.
Tim Bertrand, VP Worldwide Sales at Acquia, discovered the Predictable Revenue book, through David Skok’s Why Salespeople Shouldn’t Prospect article.
It outlined exactly how a dedicated outbound prospecting team can predictably generate new, quality sales leads month after month, giving a company a way to control and dial up new sales growth (as Salesforce.com did, when it was less than $100 million in revenue and 300 people.)
Tim read the book and immediately thought to himself “I wonder if the author Aaron Ross does private training sessions?”
Tim and the sales leadership team (including VP Inside Sales Mike Stankus and Director Jeff Smith) jumped right in, and in just 37 days, they had executive agreement on the outbound sales strategy, had hired the first three prospectors, and signed on Aaron Ross of Predictable Revenue for help in building & training the team.
$100 Million is “When”, Not “If”
After just a year in launching the prospecting team, and growing new business pipeline by 75%, it’s clear that Acquia ‘s outbound team will add significant incremental revenue in the coming years, while helping Acquia also break the $100 million in total revenue faster.
Acquia: Metrics After ~One Year:
- Created an extra $6 million in qualified sales pipeline / Sales Qualified Leads (SQL*) in the first year.
- Closed $3 million in revenue already from the first 18 months of pipeline generation (which will multiply fast now that the flywheel is rolling)
- Grew the prospecting team from an initial 3 people to 25 reps across the USA and UK (which required more management help, thus hiring Tom Murdock in the USA and Tom Cain in the UK)
- Are already creating an extra $2m in pipeline per ramped prospector, or about $12-$15 million in qualified sales pipeline per quarter right now, and still growing; (many prospectors are still ramping because the team is growing so fast)
- Prospecting went from generating nothing to creating 40% of the new business sales pipeline.
* A Sales Qualified Lead means a prospector passed a new lead to their salesperson/Account Executive, who qualified it through a demo or discovery call, and ‘accepted it into their pipeline.
What’s Expected Of A Prospector At Acquia
Acquia expects each prospector to do:
- 300-500 outbound emails a month
- 100 “quick conversations” / “call connects” a month with all kinds of people
- 20 longer Discovery Calls with influencers/decision-makers
- 15 Sales Qualified Leads passed to and accepted by salespeople *
And they expect that activity funnel to produce, in pipeline and revenue…
- Average outbound deal size of $50,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
- 15 SQLs / month = $750k pipeline generated per month (a lower goal than a common goal of 8-12 SQLs per month per prospector, because they’re specifically going after large accounts.)
- Expected $55k-65k Annual Recurring Revenue per month per prospector; = $720,000 in ARR per year per prospector.
Doing the math, with 20 prospectors after just a year, at $600k Annual Recurring Revenue per prospector… Acquia already expects to add an incremental $60 million in pipeline and $12-$15 million in Annual Recurring Revenue in 2014 at a minimum. Revenue they wouldn’t have had. At a 10x revenue valuation, that’s also an extra $120-$150 million in equity value to investors in just 2.5 years.
And they’re planning on roughly doubling the team again (to ~40 prospectors) over the next 18 months, which will help them add an extra $30 million per year in Annual Recurring Revenue.
6 Things That Made Acquia’s Outbound Program Take Off:
1. The top management team was on board, supporting it from the very top. If the CEO doesn’t buy into the idea of specializing sales roles into ‘prospectors that prospect’ and ‘closers that close,’ it’s not going to stick.
2. They ‘just did it’, avoiding analysis paralysis. It only took VP WW Sales Tim Bertrand 37 days from the time he read Why Salespeople Shouldn’t Prospect to having executive agreement on the strategy, job recs approved to hire the first prospectors and a signed consulting agreement with Predictable Revenue. They figured out all the other details along the way, such as messaging, CRM / sales tools, data and comp plans. The faster you get started, the faster you learn what it takes to get results.
3. The sales team and prospectors were hungry for new ideas, including this kind of approach, especially while moving to a territory-based model, where inbound lead distribution wasn’t going to be equal anymore and they felt the need for constant sources of pre-screened new leads.
4. Acquia initially hired three excellent specialized prospectors – two in the US, one in the UK – and their only job was to prospect. Not close deals. Not handle inbound leads. Not invite prospects to events for marketing. Just prospect into cold accounts with the techniques outlined in Predictable Revenue. And three great people made everything work much smoother & faster. (See more in the Predictable Revenue Hiring Guide.)
5. They brought in experts who’d done it before, rather than trying to recreate the wheel. They knew exactly what to do and when to do it, at every step, without wasting time or money.
6. Focused on bigger deals & opportunities: Acquia has a big average outbound deal size, and the way the math works out with prospectors, the bigger the deals you can find, the more total sales you’ll generate. As a rule of thumb, we at Predictable Revenue recommend companies average the top 10%-20% of your customer base or deal sizes to gauge the kind of deals and companies to go after with outbound prospecting.
The First 120 days
The first 30 days of the new prospectors were spent mostly getting organized:
- Learning the Acquia product & market, Studying Predictable Revenue’s online Cold Calling 2.0 materials, & Shadowing salespeople
- Email & other online/IT accounts setup, including learning Salesforce.com
- Completing initial Predictable Revenue milestones like getting their first 200 outbound emails out, a first 20 phone conversations completed, writing up an Ideal Outbound Customer Profile (which is different than a company’s general Ideal Customer Profile), and building initial list of prospects.
Over the first 120 days, even as new hires starting from scratch, the three prospectors created their first $1 million in new sales pipelines / Sales Qualified Leads.
Some Tools Used:
To support Predictable Revenue’s Cold Calling 2.0 templates & processes…
- Salesforce.com
- Yesware for email templates & tracking across the whole sales team – case study coming soon. (We also recommend a similar app, Tout as the best when you’re using Salesforce.com to mass email)
- CirrusInsight – if you use both Salesforce.com & Gmail then you need this awesome app
- LinkedIn + SalesLoft for finding prospects and building a clean list
- InsideView for general list-building data & phone numbers
Career Path
By creating a prospecting team, Acquia now has a better career path for its salespeople. They can bring in affordable talent, see how they perform, and then promote them as appropriate. This practically eliminates sales hire failures into the Account Executive role.
Are You Trying To Add $100 Million+?
While Predictable Revenue has helped many companies as small as a $1 million in revenue break out, our system’s uniquely able to help b2b companies speed up and sustain fast or IPO-track growth, such as with Salesforce.com, Acquia & Responsys (who used our systems to grow 10x from $20 million to $200 million in revenue, and who was just sold to Oracle for $1.5B).
SOME HIGHLIGHTS:
• Created an extra $6 million in qualified sales pipeline
• Closed $3 million in revenue
• Grew the prospecting team from an initial 3 people to 25 reps
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Kristian, CEO of LearnKit, was faced with a new (higher) annual sales goal to reach, and limited manpower to do it. He was a one man sales team and needed to sell more faster (about 50% more) to have any shot at hitting his target.
He hired a Sales Development Rep (SDR) to help, but she couldn’t start for 3 more months. And, she’d never created/run an outbound campaign before. He’d tried prospecting on his own, with mixed results, and felt frustrated about not knowing “what he still didn’t know” about prospecting to feel confident in hitting his goals on time. He still wasn’t sure about his messaging or his targeting. He admits to being human and letting his prospecting efforts take a back seat to everything else.
He felt the pressure from the rest of the team and wanted to make sure he had the right processes in place to succeed. His initial plan was to hire a team of 2-4 outbound SDRs plus a manager, but building a team that large from scratch could take 6-12 months before the new team members were paying for themselves.
Additionally, hiring a large team was a risky play for LearnKit, which had raised little outside capital, if outbound didn’t become a profitable sales channel the company would have to lay off 5 team members and would have wasted 6-12 months of time + salaries.
That’s when he reached out to Predictable Revenue to find out what we could provide to help him increase revenue. He evaluated a number of options ranging from direct competitors, list providers, and even doing it themselves with a resource overseas. At the end of the day, he liked the experience our team brought and the fact that we had already dealt with most of the roadblocks he was facing. As an added bonus, we were able to help them have a lot more conversations really quickly.
He began our Accelerator Service, and the first thing we did was our Nail a Niche workshop to fine-tune his targeting and create a go-to-market strategy for each of his niches. Within the first 3 weeks our Accelerate team was already generating meetings for him. By month 3 we were delivering 10 meetings per month.
Before hiring Predictable Revenue, LearnKit was only generating 2-3 appointments every month because all of their initial sales came from word of mouth and referrals from their networks. The steady stream of new meetings helped Kristian accelerate their sales growth and get on track to crush targets.
3
New Meetings Each Week
7
6-Figure Opportunities Generated
1
Deal Closed By End of Month 6
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Clio’s a fast-growing SaaS company in Vancouver, whose CEO is Jack Newton (now that’s a cool action hero name). Clio sells practice management software that helps lawyers better run firms. Clio hit some sales team growth problems in 2012, after growing from three to 18 “generalized reps” in less than two years. Those “generalized” reps did it all – prospecting, following up on inbound leads, closing new deals, & managing those customers. Transforming this team of 18 generalized reps into three specialized teams of six reps each, restarted Clio’s sales growth.
The original 3 reps had it easy – “the world was their oyster”: they had a lot of inbound interest, they didn’t need structure, they could cherry pick leads and deals to close a lot of business. They didn’t need territories. By the time Clio had 10 salespeople they’d started feeling growing pains. * The team was frequently stepping on each others’ toes, such as inadvertently starting to work the same deals. * There was a lot of unhealthy competition on the team, and they wouldn’t help each other. * Each rep’s success depended wholly on themselves to sink or swim, as there was no sales ‘system’ or support.
Clio went with three, not four, key sales roles
Clio’s executive team felt the sales team could do much much better if they got out of each others’ way and worked together to systematically break down & tackle the market. By the time the sales team grew to 18 generalized salespeople in mid-2012, Jack read the Why Salespeople Shouldn’t Prospect article, and knew they had to finally specialize the team. Jack saw it reducing sales team conflict, improving how they handle small deals, and enabling more outbound prospecting – especially with larger law firms.
Clio took Predictable Revenue’s specialization ideas and customized it to their unique situation, creating three new roles:
a) Six Prospectors: tasked with getting into larger law firms.
b) Six Closers (Account Executives) tasked with closing larger law firms.
c) An “Engagement Team” of six reps mixing both inbound lead response and closing of small law firms/deals (firms of less than $100 in monthly revenue).
To make this transition, Clio had to rework a lot of important sales systems: designing new roles, new quotas, new comp plans, creating a territory system (which they’d never had), figuring out which rep should go into which team, changing salesforce.com, and a lot more. So they dived in with both feet.
Be generous, not stingy, with comp through a transition makes it easier for everyone to keep working as a team.
Lessons Learned
#1) Simplify Comp: Past comp plans had a ton of rules and regulations around the kinds of deals that would be eligible for quota. Clio was trying to drive the right behaviors with those rules, but they created too much confusion and obstacles. For example: Clio used to have a lot of rules and conditions with channel partner deals, and often salespeople didn’t benefit at all if a partner closed a deal. Now, $1 of revenue is $1 of revenue wherever it comes from. By removing confusing comp conditions, salespeople and partners collaborate and close much more because everyone’s interests are aligned.
#2) Overpay Salespeople During The Transition: During the restructuring, Clio paid the team a flat fee / fixed bonus for three months while gathering data and figuring out new quotas & goals. Clio wanted the team to feel comfortable helping switch to the new model, without distracting them.
#3) Create A Collaborative, Not Competitive, Sales Environment: Fun or friendly competition is helpful & energizing. Hurtful or ‘real’ competition kills your team. By shifting to territories + specialization, the sales team didn’t feel anymore that it was a zero sum game. Jack says they now have an “unbelievably collaborative sales team” that helps each other close deals, roots each other on, trades tips and best practices & sale techniques. Beforehand, this never happened.
For more, click here to download the full eBook.
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.”