An industry challenger in the AI customer service space.  The company’s platform is focused on delivering high-quality and human-like responses via automated chatbots as well as enhancing live chat conversations using generative AI.  Their USPs include an extremely strong language offering coupled with training models for the AI that work across all facets of the platform, thus leveraging several different knowledge sources.

Historical growth has been via ad-hoc acquisition of customers in a wide variety of sectors.  This scattered approach to the account base has also directed the nature of the platform’s development with advancements made in several areas that are not always well connected.  The founders wished to scale and push the business in the direction of a typical SaaS model, incorporating subscriptions and targeting specific verticals.

However, the sales team consisted of two account executives with little experience and a newly recruited Sales Development Representative (SDR) in their first role of this type.  With no senior sales leader within the business, they needed someone to guide and nurture the team responsible for delivering their new GTM strategy whilst also combating the long duration of a prospect through the lead and sales cycles, frequently in excess of 6-9 months.

Create a slick lead-generation engine

With little to no experience in the SDR team, the first thing to do was recruit additional team members.  The recruitment of two additional SDRs with experience meant that we could leverage their knowledge and skills to upskill the less experienced members of the team and deliver results quickly.

The ACV for the platform was circa. £10K per annum which meant that in order to achieve the revenue goals we had to target volume with the SDR team.  This led us to identify an ideal prospect base that had enough contacts within our sweet spot verticals that we could work for a significant amount of time.  The breadth of the contact list was a double-edged sword where we were potentially picking up leads that were not ‘ideal’ or completely aligned with the proposition.  This meant we had to be particularly stringent on qualification, leveraging several criteria in order to move them through to the Account Executive (AE) team.

To monitor success we used several success metrics or KPIs.  They are summarised as follows:

• 60 Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) per quarter per SDR – a sales-qualified lead is one that meets BANT criteria and attends a demo with the AE.
• 20 connected calls per day – a connected call is one where we reach our intended target prospect (typically C-suite/director).
• 15,000 emails per SDR per week – this is not the number of contacts messaged but rather a measure of the number of communications SDRs were sending.  These numbers are on the high side for an SDR team but without a marketing function present within the business at the time, these numbers were imperative for reaching the audience required to deliver against commercial targets.

Establishing a feedback loop – SDR and AE working in unison

With well-qualified leads flowing in we needed to expand the capabilities within the AE team.  New team members with relevant experience helped to fast-track our ability to have quality conversations with our prospects.  This was not purely from an AE team perspective but also that of the SDR team as well.  creating constant collaboration between the two meant that we could more rapidly share insight gained up and down the sales cycle.  For example, AEs identifying challenges to closing 2 months into the sales process could be fed back to the SDRs so that they could better qualify and explore these issues with new prospects, in essence, mitigating the risk of new deals in the pipeline.  Similarly, the SDRs were constantly discovering new market-level insight that was valuable for the AEs to implement within proposals or pitches.  To achieve this level of collaboration we utilised the following:

• Regular commercial team meetings that focused on our activities in that week and learning that we could take
• Leveraging our own software to build up a knowledge base of relevant information.  this chatbot was accessed via MS Teams where the teams spent a large amount of their time
• AE shadowing.  SDRs would be able to attend meetings with AEs on deals where they could continue to add value as long as it did not impact their KPIs
• AE assistance in outbound activity.  AEs would contribute to the discussion around our messaging and how we can make better connections with prospects
• Team ownership over process.  The whole team was accountable for building a fast-moving and efficient pipeline.  With our guidance, they started to look for opportunities to improve our reporting, tech stack, collateral, etc. knowing full well that these improvements were assisting them in reaching and surpassing targets.

Despite being two separate teams with very different goals it was imperative that all team members understood what we were working towards and how each member had a part to play in that success.

As the owners of the sales process from discovery to close, the AEs were instrumental in outlining requirements we needed to build out in order to sell more effectively.  This included but was not limited to revised pricing and packaging, sales collateral, pitch decks, proposal templates, etc.  Key to the success of this approach was each AE understanding that in a scaleup we were selling as a team and that acting in a silo would not yield the results they or the rest of the team needed.

For this approach to work we implemented a sound strategy, with robust processes, underpinned by a culture of collaboration and ambition.

These results were delivered within a 1 year period

3x the number of SQLs -300% Increase in SDR effectiveness

In two quarters we moved the needle from 20 SQLs per quarter per SDR to 60, inline with our target.  By the end of 12 months, all SDR team members were hitting or exceeding targets.

Time to qualify down from 4 weeks to 2 – 96% faster qualification

Poor qualification, slow response times, and inefficient contact methods all resulted in slow qualification times.  We halved this by placing an emphasis on proactive follow-up, harder qualification and assertive positioning of next steps.

2.5 months from lead to close – 62% reduction in deal length

Reducing the deal lengths was probably the most challenging area to improve.  With a recession and the war in Ukraine slowing business on a global scale we had to implement solutions that would counter-act the natural direction of travel within the marketplace.  The most common challenge was an increase in the number of stakeholders and/or red tape that needed to be covered during the sale.  Even with these challenges, we were able to move total deal time down from 6-9 months on average to roughly 3-4, with some of our fastest deals closing in just over 2 months.  For a purely outbound-driven pipeline, this represented significant success.