How we doubled revenue in just 9 months

This is a short post detailing how from a Sales perspective we managed to double our revenue from one of our Product categories in under 12 months. Now I am unable to share exact revenue numbers as I do not think our Senior Leadership Team or Board would appreciate the overshare, also I will change the names of the products I am referring to. You can find a guide below:

• Product Category X
• Product A
• Product B
• Product C

When looking to increase from there are two things to look at volume and conversion. In sales very seldom do you have control over the first variable so all you can focus on is conversion & pipeline velocity. So that is where we will start.

Plugging the leaky bucket

This is how my CCO would describe this, in essence, you go on a deep dive and map out your current process and conversions and identify areas for improvement.

Here we some of our observations

1. Everybody is busy
2. Lots of ad-hoc work that we need to do
3. Lots of time spent emailing
4. On balance, more reactive than proactive
5. The process is not always clearly defined, and when it is, is not consistently interpreted/executed

Our goals were as follows:

• Take control of day – shift the balance from more reactive to more proactive…
• Clearly defined processes create headspace to listen/focus on sales skills, rather than whom to contact / what to do next…
• Best practice / “what to do if” clearly defined – what are the common scenarios and how do we most effectively handle these…

For us there was a lot of low hanging fruit, for example, Product A and Product B in 90% of cases should be sold together – this is the rule, not the exception. However, what we found what the conversion rate for this was under 50%. The steps to address this were simple, it just required sales training. We aimed to better educate the sales team on not only why Product A and B complemented each other but why it was beneficial to our leads for them to opt for us.

The interesting learning here was that some of the sales reps easily onboarded and actioned this information and we saw a clear difference in performance between individual reps (this is important learning which I will share later). The action point from this was to get the reps who overperformed to lead on the wider training for other reps and slowly this Product A & B CVR rate. This allowed us to drive revenue.

The next thing to address was CVR, this was floating around 30-40% for Product Category A. We did this with training. There were a few components to this:

• Pipeline management
• Sales process

Sales process

We worked in fleshing out our process and identifying key components which you can h=find below

1. Define/map ideal customer flow
2. Contact strategy – drives quantity of interactions
3. Customer interactions/calls – drives the quality of interactions
4. Scenarios / objections
5. Day/week plan

We ended up mapping out the structure of a demo

• Questions
• SeedLegals Story
• Product A FAB
• Product B FAB
• Post demo questions

We went as far as to flesh out the appropriate questions and comments for all the above points. The next focus was the cadence which we agreed to be as follows:

• Day 0 – demo
• Day 3 – call
• Day 5 – call / email
• Day 7 – demo or call/email if no demo booked in

After all the work above we slowly saw our CVR rate creeping up and as a result, we saw revenue rise but also importantly we saw an increase in pipeline velocity

A learning we found early is that some reps were naturally better at selling Product Category A so we embarked on specialism where some reps would only sell one Product Category. In the case of Product Category A, we went from 4 reps selling this to 1 rep focussed on driving 75% of revenue as a test and the remaining reps handling 25% to make this 100% after a successful quarter.

This move itself allows CVR to increase to 46.49% at the end of Q3, compared to 31% just 1 quarter early and included this 46.7% increase in revenue across Product Category A – not quite 2x but a great leading indicator that we were on the correct path.

As alluded to earlier, we made 1 rep responsible for all the revenue from Product Category A (this 1 sales rep was me). We continued on the pathway to improving training, my two areas were improving up-selling opportunities and improving conversion.

I stumbled across a great book called The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin. It looks to the practising mind of a master, instead of pure prescription. It’s less directly tactical than Peak. One philosophy I picked up and applies was “Start with the End game’ Josh was taught the end game first, just a king and a pawn. He mastered the end game, worked backwards and learned the starting moves last. In the sales world, this is the close, so we focussed on ensuring that all sales demos ended with advancements, clear next steps explained and understood by the prospect and a unlock / secondary demo booked. This was important in helping us move leads along the pipeline at a quicker pace. We focused on reviewing demos weekly until we got to a gold standard end game – I saw my endgame as after I stop screen sharing. I then focussed on the start of the demo, the discovery phase to be exact. If you recall Product A and B should be sold together, so this discovery phase was educating the prospect on how they needed both and heat it could do for the organisation to use both.

We also leant into the why:

• why they book the demo
• where they were in the buying process
• are they speaking to competitors
• how they stumbled across our business
• why now, what made this important

In addition, I would lean into my expertise in the solution. From specialising and living this product day in you pick up a lot of subtly about the product and the buyers buying process as well as common objections. One of them was fear, fear as they believed this solution to be complex and time-consuming so I aimed to debunk this. I have sold complex SAAS solutions before so this is a prime example of where consultative selling is key, also I would say slowing it down. In hindsight to see better results, I would have told myself to slow it down around the discovery/intro section, I have had the pleasure of being sold to by some great salespeople (I love hopping on demos as a buyer) and the great salespeople slow down the call to ensure they clearly understand my motives and needs and wed their solution to my needs.

Another upside of the discovery phase if not only can you plant the seeds to allow the lead to see that Product A and B were a couple but also you could scope out of there was a need for Product C. Product C is at the same price point as Product B, however many saw Product C as a substitute or replacement for Product A (C was cheaper), again the goal was to properly educate and carve out the upsell opportunity.

This was a lot of information to share with a lead so we put together sales collateral that outlined the following:

• Our social proof and experience
• FAB’s of our solutions

Why was this deck important? Often you find yourself not speaking to all of the design makers and at times I believed I lost deals due to my inability o articulate the solution to one decision-maker who struggled to clearly outline it to another. So sales collateral would be great to fill the gaps but also we would aim to understand either at discovery or end game who else was involved. Interestingly enough, over time you could see some positive correlation between how much time was spent viewing the deck and how quickly they would move along the sales process.

So how did we end this quarter (month 6) with just myself and my team selling the solution? Our CVR shot up to 50%, however, we did experience a decrease in total quarterly revenue. A few factors contributed to this, I took 2 weeks off at the end of the quarter and our new team member has found an opportunity that was great for them so they had resigned. As you can imagine, I was pretty pissed so I knew we had to do it big…

The next month was a continuation of the work we had begun, the only additional levers we pulled were aiming to generate our SQL and trying to extend the LTV of our clients. We also hired a new sales rep who had sold a solution somewhat similar which proved to be invaluable – a learning from here is hiring people who have sold a product similar when you are looking to sell and have the process mapped out and best practice defined. Another suggestion is to hire from a company where stronger more senior salespeople have come from, in our case our CCO has fleshed out the sales strategy at one of his former companies so we knew the type of individual who performed well at this company based upon the solution similarities and sales cycle and went about outreaching to talent from that company. Often to win these candidates away you need to sell them on remuneration or career acceleration, we leaned into the latter.

If we focus on the levers: SQL. At times we saw fluctuations in top-funnel volume so we aimed to be proactive and address this. We were fortunate to have rich data from our customers and understood how Product Category A fit into their businesses and what data points would lead us to believe there needed / at least would be interested in this. We drafted copy and agreed upon a cadence for our outreach as we soon saw more steady volume. The only issue was at time quality was these SQL’s was questionable at best, so now the question was how we do qualify? We did not find an answer to this sadly, the solution was to qualify aggressively and quickly when we spoke to the lead and once disqualified to respectfully cut the calls short.

The relentless focus on training (up until it became insufferable) led us to reach an ATH CR rate of 67.92% and a 111% increase in monthly revenue compared to where we were 9 months ago. This was great for my team, we knew we could do it when all things aligned and went well so the next challenge was keeping it at this level consistently and then scaling.

Again, nothing new was done. We aimed to increase pipeline velocity and focused on a systemic approach to nurturing our lost deals. What we realised was losing a deal did not mean the deal was lost – if you recall I referred to many prospects not pulling the trigger on Product Category A as it was perceived to be complex. This nurturing process allowed us to win deals from the graveyard, at times deals that were lost several months ago. There were easier wins as it was about engaging, going over our value proposition and the leads often would process rather quickly.

So to set the scene this is how new our funnel looked:

• SQL
• Closed lost nurture
• MQL
• Internal SQL (from other sales functions)

So we have doubled the width of our funnel, with some sources having a better likelihood to convert than others – MQL’s tend to convert at a higher percentage than other sources bar internal SQL’s.

Now the focus was improving our pipeline management and lead scoring. With 4 sources of leads in the funnel, we found our sales pipeline increased in size which is great in theory but only great when you are converting a majority of them. To ensure this we:

• Drafted best practice post demo email
• Drafted best practice follow up day 3, day 5, day 7 (the cadence I mentioned earlier)
• Monitored tasks on the CRM

In regards to best practice communications, I worked on this and simply aimed to trim the fat, if you are fortunate to have a copywriter in the team review and edit this then I would suggest this. Same sentiment for the cadence. You could even A/B TEST copy, subject line, CTA to see which results in the better meeting booking rate or whatever your ended action point is.

To the lead scoring, it is simply determining which criteria or data points indicate a sales qualified lead and then assigning point values to each of those criteria, ultimately leaving you with a final score for each lead. The goal here is to allow reps to spend time on leads that have the best chance of converting and back to the above, ensuring we have a cadence in place and nurture process for those that do not convert at the same speed as others.

So now we are at month 10 end, we have now doubled revenue (111% increase) for Product Category A and just 2 months later we improved on the month 10 success with a 15% increase. Above you can find some ideas on how we were able to increase monthly revenue for one of our Product Categories by 142.8% in under 12 months.