Without a system of execution for its sales activities, Kallidus was missing the opportunity to constantly iterate, refine, and optimise its sales process. With its business development reps struggling to meet KPIs and connect with prospects, the team’s manager believed that Salesloft could help. Since implementing the platform, the inbound and outbound sales team has doubled its productivity, is reaching more buyers effectively, and is finding 32% more opportunities each month.
Who Is Kallidus?
UK-based Kallidus is a leading provider of integrated learning and talent solutions, with 15 years’ experience in delivering bespoke e-learning, talent management, and consultancy services to over 500+ clients.
Its award-winning, cost-effective SaaS solutions support people development within organisations of all sizes, in all sectors. Kallidus serves leading brands throughout the UK and worldwide, including McDonalds, O2, AstraZeneca, Transport for London, and Eurostar. Dedicated to customer excellence, Kallidus helps companies achieve business transformation and drive long-term performance success.
Challenge: Unify Sales Reps Around an Effective Prospecting Process
Chris Scotney, Head of Business Development, heads up the inbound and outbound sales efforts at Kallidus. Both groups seek to qualify opportunities for the company’s direct sales reps. The inbound team works with marketing leads across a number of channels, whereas the outbound side sources its own leads and opportunities.
Prior to seeking a Sales Engagement solution, business development reps (BDRs) at Kallidus lacked a unified approach to prospecting. With a number of add-ons, they were running the sales process in Salesforce and the approach was sporadic and manual. For Chris, it was hard to define what was working well and there was no way to report on activities. There was also no way to determine or classify hot leads.
We couldn’t say that this email is working or this cadence is working or this piece of content is working. We had no way to really report against our approach and use data to refine our process. — Chris Scotney, Business Development Team Manager at Kallidus
Without a defined cadence strategy, BDRs would create prospecting communication on a case-by-case basis, which meant there was no consistency. Reps also struggled to meet call KPIs. Each BDR had a goal of 30 to 40 calls a day; realistically, they were only hitting between 20 and 30 calls daily.
Without a system of execution in place, Kallidus was missing the opportunity to iterate, refine, and optimise its sales process.
Solution: A/B Testing Helps Reps Perfect Communication
Kallidus needed a way to save reps more time and help them increase daily call and email volume. Chris was confident that Salesloft would provide it. “As soon as I saw the system, I thought, ‘we need to get something like this in place,'” he said.
When looking into other Sales Engagement platforms, what stood out most about Salesloft were the people and the experience. His Salesloft rep provided quick follow up, frequent check ins, remained closely aligned with the Kallidus team and their goals throughout the process, and offered value-added guidance along the way. Kallidus did not find this experience with other platform providers.
Chris and the team also felt that Salesloft’s UI/UX was cleaner than most and easy to navigate. And by choosing Salesloft, Kallidus would save cost by consolidating three platforms into one.
The Salesloft onboarding process took about a week. Within three or four months, the BDR team was up and running with a defined cadence strategy and was leveraging A/B testing for optimal performance.
As a result of this experimentation, Chris and his team built up a bank of templates that he would review each month, and the sales director would review on a quarterly basis. Chris expected the BDR team to review these templates weekly.
Using a tip he gleaned from a Salesloft webinar, Chris pulled the best-performing templates to use as the team’s A template, while giving reps the opportunity to outperform it with their own B template. The team found that this approach increased average reply rates.
With the Salesloft implementation, Kallidus also perfected an account-based tiering strategy for reaching out to prospects. Tier one contacts went into an outbound cadence that involved heavy, manual personal touches through a combination of social media, email, and calls. Tier two contacts were put into an automated cadence. This enabled BDRs to effectively reach more prospects.
Results: Reps 2x Productivity, Boost Calls and Email Reply Rates, and Increased Monthly Opportunities Found
Since implementing Salesloft, the BDR team has grown from five to 15 members as new business has increased. Reps have more than doubled their email productivity, going from sending 1,400 emails per month to 4,000 emails per month. Thanks to A/B testing and personalisation, reply rates that were previously in the 2 to 5% range are now at 10% (exceeding their industry standard for cold email reply rates by 5%).
With cadences to streamline their process, BDRs have also nearly doubled the amount of calls they can make each day. “Beforehand, you’d have to do maybe four, five, or six separate clicks to get on to the next call,” Chris said. “It sounds so subtle but it’s those little changes—removing those six clicks between each call—that make a difference. If you multiply that over a year times 15 people, you’re going to save a massive amount of time.”
Prior to the Salesloft implementation, the average amount of opportunity each BDR found per month was £113,000. Now, BDRs are each finding £151,000 each month, a 32% increase.
Chris has also received a promotion since implementing Salesloft. “I think it’s unfair to say that it was all me,” he said. “I think the majority of it was Salesloft and its ability to streamline and automate the whole outbound process.”
Initially, Kallidus purchased Salesloft for its BDR team. But given the company’s early success with the platform, Kallidus extended Salesloft licenses to its entire new business team — direct sales reps, account executives, and new business managers. Those groups are now in the process of defining cadence strategies for each of the company’s sales cycles. Kallidus is planning to extend Salesloft licenses to its customer success team, too.
Of all the platforms his team uses, Chris believes that Salesloft provides the best support. He appreciates the training offered by Salesloft University and the regular webinars that discuss key topics and questions that the Salesloft support team fields each week. Chris has adopted that practice for Kallidus, too.
I think the support is one of the best parts about your service. You guys have clearly nailed it from a customer success perspective. —Chris Scotney, Head of Business Development
Want to learn about more Sales Engagement software? Check out our eBook, The Sales Tech Stack: Your Guide to Sales Engagement.