Solving ICP and offer structure
This company had built data most of its market couldn't produce, and it sold that data as fixed-fee pilots to large organizations that took a long time to decide. In our first two months we changed the buyer, the pricing and how the team tracked deals. The new buyers were less price sensitive since the data was more valuable to them and they signed annual contracts. Pipeline grew about fivefold in seven months.
B2B analytics company // Client story
5x
pipeline in seven months
Open pipeline when we stepped back from the hands-on work, against where it stood when we started.
+30%
new ARR in one quarter
Annual contracts signed in a single quarter, after pricing moved from one-off pilots to yearly terms.
15
old stages to one pipeline
About 15 stages across two pipelines became one simplified pipeline, with entry and exit rules per stage.
Where the work started.
The product was strong, and the team could explain every part of it. Their first buyers liked it but had no urgency to buy it, and each sale was a one-off pilot with its own price. The CRM had about 15 deal stages across two pipelines, and half the deals had no value entered. Nobody could say what the pipeline was worth.
//buyer_and_pricing
From pilots to annual contracts
The goal was a buyer who would decide quickly and commit to more than a pilot. Their first buyers valued the data but had no deadline to buy it. Financial industry buyers had a reason to move fast, because when you're pricing a deal, better data changes what you'll pay. We aimed the sales work at them, then at the most active of them, and the pitch now opens with the deal in front of the buyer. We also dropped fixed-fee pilots and priced on annual contracts. Buyers took to it, and new ARR rose 30% in one quarter.
//pipeline_review
Flagging the guesses in the forecast
Half the deals in the CRM had no value entered, so the pipeline total was partly a guess. The team needed a number it could plan on. We gave each of those deals a default value and a checkbox that says so, merged about 15 stages into one pipeline, and narrowed the weekly review to deals with no next step or two quiet weeks. The total became usable, everyone could see which numbers were guesses, and the review became short and spent on the deals that needed help.
//sales_training
Twenty calls before changing the script
They wanted a cold-call script that books short first meetings with the buyers they now targeted, and a fair test of it. Two bad calls usually make a team drop a new script, so we agreed to run it on twenty real calls before judging it. First, the team rehearsed against two researched buyer personas, with a different mood each round, so a gruff answer on a real call wasn't a surprise. Meetings booked from calling rose right away.
What the team was left with.
The company sells annual contracts to financial industry buyers who use its data in a higher value way and its pipeline is about five times what it was. The team works from one pipeline with stages everyone uses, a forecast that marks which numbers are guesses, and call guides short enough to read before a call.