Pipeline Development for Successful Business Exit
Company: ProfitLine
Overview
The board of investors wanted to build value in the pipeline to position the managed services company for an exit.
Challenges
- Lack of differentiation – The industry had become commoditized and the company’s brand and messaging no longer stood out.
- Growing number of decision makers – It was a complex IT sale with between 6 and 8 key decision makers.
- Small sales team – There were only two enterprise sales reps in place and no time to build out a large enterprise sales team.
- No demand generation – There was no pipeline of existing leads to work so the immediate need was to generate leads for the enterprise reps.
- Low win rate on RFPs – There were hundreds of RFP’s put out by buyers each year but the company had a low win rate.
Opportunities
- Social selling – LinkedIn was a new social platform and offered a way to identify buyers and “listen” to buzz on the street as well as identify and connect with targeted decision makers.
- Marketing automation – The company had an existing Eloqua marketing automation platform that could be leveraged for inbound lead generation.
- Outbound lead generation – build a new team to generate and qualify leads for handoff to “closers”.
- Sell differently – Use a differentiated consultative sales approach that stood out from the competitive feature sellers.
Solutions
Since we didn’t have time to build out a large enterprise team, we created an inhouse sales team, trained them in Common Sense Selling™, and combined inbound lead generation with outbound prospecting using targeted tools (RainKing) and Social Selling using LinkedIn.
- Rearchitected Demand Waterfall with Inbound and Outbound
- Customer research and analysis
- Marketing operations
- Buyer persona development
- Brand development
- Content marketing strategy
- Analyst Relations
- Social media strategy and activation
- Social selling program
- Inside Sales development
- Sales enablement
- Sales playbook development
- Sales training leveraging Common Sense Selling™
- Online strategy and digital campaign strategy
- Email marketing via Eloqua
- Customer User Group
Results
By closely aligning sales and marketing, the resulting inbound and outbound activities generated a 500 percent growth in pipeline value. Through improved stakeholder identification and qualification, we were also able to cut the sales cycle from an average of 18 months to less than 6. To further improve our sales results and win rates we hired a team of sales engineers who handled the technical demos as well as the RFPs. We built out an RFP content database and improved the quality of responses to improve win ratios dramatically, further increasing the number of sales wins.