Vena Solutions, a finance process management software provider, struggled to prioritize prospecting efforts across a wide customer base. Since adding Salesloft to its sophisticated sales and marketing technology stack, Vena’s inbound reps convert up to 90 percent of qualified leads to sales opportunities in certain channels. Those reps are directly responsible for more than 30 percent of the company’s ARR growth YTD.
Who Is Vena Solutions?
Vena Solutions has quickly become the leader in cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software. As the market leader in growth, product usability, and customer satisfaction, Vena helps hundreds of companies make more-informed business decisions by making it easier for them to surface financial insights they can trust.
Challenge: Prioritize the Right Leads in a Broad Customer Base
Vena’s sales team is responsible for reaching a wide variety of prospects. Like any revenue organization talking to a broad range of potential customers, Vena’s biggest challenge was prioritizing prospecting efforts across organizations with a diverse range of financial management needs.
Sales reps need to evaluate and rank prospecting efforts on the fly. Their approach and pitch must be personalized for each prospect, based on the size of the organization or its unique business challenges.
In the past, the team built its strategy around volume. The belief was that as long as reps achieved a certain number of touches, they would be successful. Reps would simply receive a list and start calling. The effort was haphazard and lacked standardization. Sales leaders realized early on that this was not the most productive path.
Vena also knew that too many leads weren’t being followed up on for days, weeks, or even months. Aidas Dirse, who leads the sales and marketing operations team, aimed to shorten the time it took for his inbound team to follow-up on leads. When further analysis revealed that the best opportunities historically originated from inbound leads, the sense of urgency to reduce response time escalated.
Earlier in its history, the company relied primarily on Salesforce to organize prospecting efforts. However, managing the team while ensuring individual reps achieved the desired level of touches and conducted follow-up activity proved difficult. Sales leaders knew their team could work smarter and faster. They decided to explore sales engagement platforms as a complementary solution.
Solution: Cadences Focus Reps and Maximize Prospect Engagement
As part of an increasingly sophisticated sales and marketing technology stack including Salesforce.com, Marketo, Uberflip, and other solutions, Salesloft immediately helped Vena create more consistent workflows. Cadences based on prospect types enable the team to maximize engagement.
Using these cadences, the sales team can better manage the number of touches with each prospect, qualifying buyers through a combination of progressive profiling and lead nurture campaigns. The following average touches per prospect have increased from 2-3 before implementing Salesloft to now as many as 12-14 touches.
Leaders encourage sales reps to use a core set of cadences, templates, and snippets, but also empower them to be creative in personalizing their communications and creating their own cadences.
Aidas relies on Salesloft Analytics to help him monitor and evaluate performance and identify areas for improvement. His team tests different versions of cadences and messages to find the best-performing combinations.
For example, the team has a cadence that begins with multiple calls and emails early in the cadence. Emails are sent throughout the cadence, with efforts intensifying again towards the end. This particular approach has helped the team dramatically increase its closed-won rate for inbound leads.
One of the most impressive things about Salesloft is how frequently the product team rolls out new features. We’ve been satisfied with Salesloft since day one, but with every new release, we continue to see more and more value in our investment. Frequent releases motivate us to continually refine and improve our efforts and never get too comfortable. – Aidas Dirse, Sales and Marketing Operations Specialist at Vena Solutions
Results: Accelerated Lead Follow-Up and Doubled Conversion Rates
Using Salesloft’s automation capabilities in tandem with a marketing automation solution, Vena is now efficiently evaluating, scoring, assigning, and mapping inbound leads to specific cadences.
The team responds to inbound leads within an hour; in some instances, responses are sent in less than 30 minutes. Operating efficiently, the team has achieved better results with fewer resources.
Vena Solutions has seen the strongest results in managing its inbound opportunities. As a result, the sales team is now achieving 80-100 percent of their targets and is still improving weekly.
The results of automating our inbound lead follow-up have been incredible. Salesloft and our marketing automation solution have helped us put a system in place that guarantees our leads are followed up with as fast as possible. As a result, we’ve seen a 50% improvement in inbound conversion rates from qualified lead to a sales opportunity, in some channels converting at a rate as high as 90%.” – Aidas Dirse, Sales and Marketing Operations Specialist
Aidas personally attributes as much as one-third of ARR growth in the year to the Salesloft platform. He believes this contribution has room to increase because of ongoing efficiency improvements he sees across the sales team.
“Salesloft delivers one of the highest ROIs among our sales and marketing operations investments,” Aidas said. “From a sales standpoint, it’s the single biggest factor we can attribute to our trend of increasing conversion and close ratios across the team. There is no question that we’ll continue to dial in our use of Salesloft to help us grow our pipeline and ARR to new heights at Vena.”
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