Amplience, a digital experience platform, was seeking greater visibility into its global partner-fueled sales funnel. But that wasn’t the only roadblock: The company also needed better insights into the performance of their inbound and outbound funnels.
The Challenge:
Since most of the SaaS-based software firm’s deals are executed in collaboration with a partner, its extensive partner network is integral to building the business. However, each partner has a different approach to data collection, integrity and normalization.
The company was struggling to easily roll up account data from disjointed metrics on several global clients and prospects. In addition, it needed a way to measure the effectiveness of all the different go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Most of the process relied on ad-hoc conversations around the status of individual accounts, which hampered the ability to build a cohesive strategy.
Amplience was also seeking to improve the productivity of its sales and business development teams. Unfortunately, its Salesforce platform didn’t have a good mechanism for capturing pre-qualification interactions, so the dialogue and activity were sometimes lost. This was an important barrier to overcome, as a lack of visibility into pre-qualification interactions made it challenging to move the opportunity along the funnel.
The company also needed more metrics on demand generation campaign performance, as it currently wasn’t generating insights into the efforts that were yielding results.
The Solution:
David Rich, Amplience’s Chief Marketing Officer, was determined to address these issues when he joined the company in early 2022. As a result, Amplience partnered with B2B Fusion, a sales and marketing execution firm, to implement systems and strategies to improve its business development efforts.
“I knew coming in that account-based experiences (ABX) were going to be an important channel for us, but we had no formal process and no appropriate technology,” said Rich. “We needed some formal help building out an ABX program and structure and then, related to that, the data that underpins it all. And we just didn’t have the ability to pull all that together into a unified funnel, where we’d have great visibility and transparency as sales and marketing are all looking off the same dashboards and the same set of data.”
Through B2B Fusion’s guidance, the company came up with a plan of attack: Establish a foundation of knowledge, implement a new tech platform and create a set of aligned processes and motions between sales and marketing and the associated metrics for ABX.
Rich noted that while the company had many discrete reports within Salesforce, it didn’t have a unified view of the funnel.
“We were looking for one set of metrics and one view into the data, not only for better visibility but for better account accountability and efficiency,” he explained. “We needed to see where things were going well and where things weren’t going well to drill into that as a collective team.”
According to Sharon Ward, Amplience’s Sales and Marketing Operations Manager, all of those changes involved a radical shift in how the company handled business. She explained that the company’s previous demand gen focus was just capturing names and emails, which resulted in leads that very rarely — if ever — converted. The company knew it needed to change its demand generation approach to focus on building awareness, so the company purchased revenue AI platform 6sense on the advice of B2B Fusion.
“We can see within 6sense when somebody’s searching for specific solutions, whether it’s for our solution or our competitor’s,” Ward explained. “That gives us much more insight into their intent, and we generate more qualified leads. We can also build landing pages for specific companies now, and we target them through LinkedIn. So, we’re getting to a broader audience instead of having just one person that’s visited our website, filled in a form and may not actually be involved in the purchase process.”
Additionally, Global Manager of Account Development Bobby Kutowaroo explained the company also implemented sales engagement platform SalesLoft to establish more automated and visible follow-up processes.
“SalesLoft helps us establish a cadence of how often we’re following up with people rather than just someone maintaining a spreadsheet saying, ‘Oh, you know, I called Joe last Tuesday,’” he noted.
The Results
The primary result for Amplience was the increased visibility and simplified processes for its account development representatives (ADRs), explained Kutowaroo. He noted that flowing the information into an opportunity — whether it’s updating a contact or lead — is now simplified and straightforward. Specifically, the company:
- Achieved a 6.5X higher conversion rate from activity to first meeting on a 6sense qualified accounts versus traditional cold outbound, with 83% of opportunities coming from accounts in the decision and purchase stage versus 55% in the first month of 6sense;
- Realized a 36% increase in the average first year annual contract value for deals entering the pipeline, which “can be attributed back to 6sense’s segments that form the basis for our top-of-funnel activity and helped focus all our channels back to the type of accounts that align to overall sales/marketing priorities,” noted Rich;
- Increased pre-booked meetings at events by 50%; and
- Elevated pipeline/opportunity value post-event by 250%.
Kutowaroo added that the systems and processes have helped him focus on team development, because it’s helped him go beyond just understanding his team’s strengths and weaknesses; he can now put those insights into reports and share them with his ADRs.
According to Rich, “we’ll continue to optimize, modernize and level-up the technology stack and processes to help our ABM and ADR teams be much more efficient and effective at doing their jobs instead of doing a lot of manual work.”
