Increasing growth by opening new channels
This company's new business came to it, through inbound interest and events, and that had carried it a long way. To grow faster, the team needed to go and find accounts and agree one way to run a sales call. We rebuilt discovery and the presentation with the reps, moved forecasting into the CRM and set up outbound around their marketing. From June to September, demos booked a month rose 85% and new bookings rose 42%.
B2B software company // Client story
+85%
demos booked a month
25 a month from June to September, up from 13.5 a month in the six months before we started.
+42%
new bookings a month
New customers and new locations at existing ones, June to September, against the six months before.
+27%
pipeline added in three weeks
Deal value the first outbound campaigns opened, against the average open pipeline in the six months before.
Where the work started.
The company grew on good reps and a product buyers liked as soon as they saw it. Each rep ran calls their own way, and the forecast lived in a spreadsheet outside the CRM. The product was live in about 1 in 9 of its existing customers' locations, so much of the next growth was inside accounts they'd already won.
//discovery_and_presentation
One way to run a sales call
The goal was for every call to cover what a deal needs to move forward, without taking away each rep's style. We reviewed the team's recorded calls, sat down with every rep and set the questions each call has to answer and the points the presentation has to make. Reps cover the same points in the same order, and the words in between stay their own. In the quarter they started running calls this way, the team matched the previous quarter's results with one fewer rep.
//crm_and_forecasting
A forecast that comes from the CRM
The team wanted a forecast it could trust, pulled from the CRM. Until then the forecast lived in spreadsheets, because the CRM held years of old deals and close dates were only filled in once a deal had closed. We simplified the pipeline to five stages with clear rules for moving between them, cleaned out the stale deals, and set up automations that update close dates as a deal moves and flag any deal that goes quiet. We also built live dashboards for every stage of the funnel in 24 hours. Filling in missing deal values alone showed 37% more pipeline than the dashboard had reported.
//call_scoring_and_coaching
Coaching from game tape
The aim was weekly coaching for every rep, using their own calls. We moved the team onto one call recorder and scored every call against the same ten marks from the call guide. The score grades what the rep did, so a question still counts when the buyer dodges it, and nobody is ranked on it. The weekly meeting now runs on game tape: the team reviews a strong call and a weak one and picks one thing to work on. The scores showed reps reliably set a next step but often left budget and authority unclear, and those became the focus of coaching.
//outbound_and_expansion
Outbound built around their marketing
Most new business came in through inbound and events, so the team set out to find accounts itself. We wrote down what their best customers had in common and set up outbound around the team's own marketing, so every webinar and event gives reps a reason to reach out. We also built a land-and-expand process for locations existing customers hadn't rolled out yet. In the first two weeks, 15% of the accounts we emailed wrote back. In its first week, a new ICP segment booked 30% as many demos as the whole team used to book in a month. One segment replied at over three times the rate of another, so effort moved there.
//contact_research
No invented contacts
Outbound to hundreds of locations meant finding the right person at each one, at a high degree of accuracy while minimizing cost. We built a custom Claude plugin that ran a combined prospecting and enrichment waterfall-loop sequence leveraging their existing subscriptions. This increased the accuracy while decreasing the cost per location, and avoided adding any new subscriptions. It ran a cycle of checks and revisions on it's own, highlight confidence intervals, and linking every source for human verification. The plugin has since researched and been used by their team to reach out to more than 1,000 locations.
What the team was left with.
The team has a call guide it helped write, a score on every recorded call and a weekly meeting where it reviews its own game tape. The forecast comes from the CRM, and outbound and expansion each have a written process. A new intern used the outbound process to launch a campaign alone in their first week. From June to September the team won 50% more deals a month than in the six months before.