Greg Rose, CXO @ Intellum
Robyn Hazelton, VP of Growth @ Intellum
Intellum has 20 years of experience selling into large brands and fast-moving companies. But when sales growth leveled out, Intellum took a big risk: it shut down all sales and marketing activity and took time to reimagine what a "growth organization" should look like in today's SaaS world. Join CXO Greg Rose and VP of Growth Robyn Hazelton as they lay out how Intellum's new growth organization incorporates traditional sales, marketing, and education to reignite sales growth and drive 100% of the pipeline.
2. “Most companies are great at selling outcomes,
but not so great at teaching customers and
employees how to achieve those outcomes.”
— Greg Rose | CXO, Intellum
12. Oh $&%!
How Do We
Keep This Up?
● Stay Smart:
Money out doesn’t mean money in
● Quality Over Quantity:
There is no model
● Create Accountability:
Measure marketing on closed
revenue
● Education Works:
Double down on educating
prospects
12
We all inherently know that a successful customer journey hinges largely on effective product education. But very few of us work to make that a reality.
In 2019 (looking into 2020) we realized that sales growth was flatlining and projected to stay that way. Maybe it was just the natural evolution of a company at the end of the second decade, but NO “NEW REVENUE” GROWTH is not the story Robyn and I wanted to tell. :)
In 2019 the marketing goal was to create 50% of the NEW LOGO pipeline while sales hunted the other 50%. Revenue projections showed positive growth, but that was all revenue - and we all know that selling to existing customers is easier than acquiring new logos.
We were so focused on existing customers, we were not really digging in to sales process and results … and when we finally did, we realized new logo was not only flat, but projected to be flat for a long time.
The company historically gre primarily by word of mouth. One large client led to the next and for quite some time we had plenty of work to keep us busy. When I joined 8 years ago there was no sales team. No marking team.Facebook > Google > Amazon, etc.
But in 2018 we had decided to grow. We started investing in sales and marketing.
Yet, by 2019 we still had a comparatively small sales and marketing team - and we were doing A LOT with A LITTLE. Specifically, we were standing up a mature marketing effort from scratch in less than 12 months.
As 2020 progressed and we were still staring down the flatline and we we took a hard look at spend - especially the cost of ICP new logo acquisition.
As a privately held company (the founders own it still) send was (and still is) under the microscope and for us CAC MATTERS.
We looked at the combined sales salaries, all sales support employee salaries, all operational, product, engineering support TIME, and realized the cost was WAY out of line with the updated projections. And while this slide is scarring, we actually had a bigger problem: Robyn was yelling There’s no FUNNEL, MAN.” Growth was impossible.
November 2020 (no matter headcount growth and budget spend we had 20 years of brand debt to overcome and we were not going to grow new logo)
We did something I never thought I would actually see happen: we called for a Full Stop of all spend, all sales and marketing activity was placed on immediate hold. We intentionally ground the machine to a halt.
Full stop: Is the revenue goal attainable?
Full stop: Do we know who our buyers are?
Full stop: Do buyers know who we are?Full stop: Are the people in the pipeline actually in market?
Suddenly, everything was on the table:
Sales headcount
Marketing headcount
Marketing spend
5 year growth plan, too.
FIRST organizational evolution occurs:
parted ways with sales leadership
reduced number of sales people
Secured exceptional sales execs, verticalized, and each becomes CEO of their own vertical, reporting to CEO temporarily.
Our biggest challenge from a growth perspective was the fact that the company has not historically invested in marketing or brand development. We grew word of mouth from one big company to the next. We now realized we had to overcome 20 years of brand debt - and overcome it really quickly.
Outbound activities
Thought leadership
Content engine
Social engagement
At bats
Raving fans
Multiple Front Doors
By H2 of 2021 the pipeline was full
sales was having lots of intro convos
demos were racking up
100% activity was now driven by marketing (for the second year in a row)
Pause here: It looked like we had done the thing.
Sales was telling leadership that marketing was killing it
Sales activity was at an all time high
Results were imminent (because the marketing excuse was now eliminated)
Life should be good, right?
Wrong. Celebrations were premature.
By the end of Q3 MARKETING knew that we should still be panicking
Opportunity ages were exceeding 120+ days
The pipeline movement was minimal
The Impact on brand awareness had been massive, but the impact on revenue was minimal
SECOND organizational evolution occurs:
Based on the marketing success filling the pipeline and the lack of success closing business, Sales and Marketing officially merge into one team and report to Greg as “growth”
Now the question becomes, how do you turn brand awareness into revenue?
If there has beena theme for 2022 so far, it has been “marketing-led growth” - which includes sales as part of the same motion and team.
H1 2022 has been all about:
Capitalizing on and closing the 2021 pipeline
Focusing on ICP (talk less, close more)
Defining clear Verticals
Streamlining”enablement”
Focusing on product education (enable less, educate more)
Pulling Education into the funnel
Introducing more community based activities
Doubling Down on…
Thought leadership
Capturing the in-market buyers
Content engine
Creating raving fans
Multiple front doors
RESULT: We are currently on track to close XX% more than ever before. (400%? 4x?)
H2 2022 is already baked. The challenge now is, how do we keep this up while continuing to grow and scale?
Stay Smart: we can only do a few things at a time. Even trying to observe this we have learned that we spread ourselves too thin. Everyday we ask 1) is what we are doing going to lead to more closed business? And 2) is what we are doing actually tied to a company goal?
Quality over quantity: C-level people love to reverse engineer simple models. If we need $100 in revenue and we close 1 out of every 5 opportunities, then we need $500 in leads. SIMPLE! It never, ever works that way. Focus on getting your ICP opp creation right. The volume will follow.
Create accountability: measure marketing on closed revenue. PERIOD. Not JUST active pipeline It’s part of the story but not all of it.
Education works: You can CREATE your ICP funnel - educate your prospects and leverage that CONSUMPTION to filter top of funnel into ICP.