Unprecedented Sales Quarters: NovoEd Achieves Its Top Two Quarters with Enterprise Marketing to Sales Alignment

Engagement Highlights

• Supported best two sales quarters in company history within six months of engagement
• Bridged Sales and Marketing to establish an enterprise positioning playbook across four different business use cases (leadership, onboarding, upskilling, and DEI)
• Supported move from initiative-based selling to enterprise selling by deepening sales team skills to discover and pursue multiple use cases with prospects
• Leveraged 3rd party expertise and a proven revenue acceleration methodology to accelerate strategy and process changes across the extended go-to-market team

Problem

NovoEd offers a collaborative learning platform that helps organizations design and deliver experiential learning at scale. The company had grown rapidly and was approaching $20M in revenue, but its continued growth trajectory was hampered by the lack of a repeatable sales process that reliably led to new and expansion sales in a consistent, predictable manner.

Net new enterprise account acquisition had decreased from 2020 to 2021. Sales results were highly uneven across the team and unpredictable across time. The team’s tenure varied widely, with no generally agreed upon approach to consultative selling or set of best practices. 

“We were in a time of transition, and had achieved a certain level of success, but we needed to scale that success across our sales team. We couldn’t just rely on stars who intuitively came upon the right approach. That was the main challenge we were facing when I came into this role,” explains NovoEd’s VP of Sales Charlie Chung. 

The company’s leadership recognized the need to develop a scalable selling approach, replicating the success of their top-performing salesperson. They sought to refine their competitive positioning strategy to build an enterprise value proposition around key use cases, such as leadership, onboarding, upskilling, and DEI.

Solution

NovoEd partnered with Winalytics to help them launch the “Building Enterprise Sales Team (BEST) Capabilities” initiative. The focus was on developing deeper, more specific enterprise positioning and enhancing the sales team’s skills to run fluid and consultative sales processes. There were three main elements of the partnership.

1. Deepening Enterprise Positioning.Charlie says: “Our challenges were not squarely in sales or marketing; it was in how marketing positioning could be sharpened and adapted for conversations when we were sitting in front of real people with real problems. Marketing-driven messaging would have been vague and theoretical, while Sales-driven messaging would have been limiting and undifferentiated. We needed to combine both in a way that was disciplined, consistent, and pragmatic. That’s where Winalytics expertise really stood out, their equal facility with both marketing and sales allowed them to traverse both worlds and help drive practical solutions.”

   Winalytics worked with both teams to connect high-level marketing positioning to sales positioning for buyer conversations to content for key use cases. The key work here was in establishing specific positioning for each use case while identifying the key elements across them that led to a higher-level enterprise positioning. This allowed for serving specific initiatives within a prospect, but not getting pigeon-holed, so that there is a path for future enterprise expansion.

2. Deepening Enterprise Selling Skills.NovoEd had a team of experienced senior sellers, but there was a need to shift approaches from an initiative-based sale to a targeted enterprise-wide sale. “The team needed to be able to engage buyers and conduct discovery across individual use cases and also have the situational fluency to prioritize the right use for each buyer conversation,” is how Charlie describes the needed evolution in the team’s skill set.

   Winalytics helped develop new sharper positioning and sales-focused messaging. Then, in a combination of group and paired sessions over three months, Winalytics facilitated practice and peer sharing sessions that helped to drive the new positioning and messaging and allowed the sales team to practice their skills in executing on them.  

    

3.  Trusted with 3rd Party Framework.

Throughout the engagement Winalytics provided targeted content and tools, which were practical and helped solidify net new selling and account-based expansion. In general, Winalytics acting as a trusted third party, and by bringing to the table objectivity and proven approaches, this helped to facilitate internal collaboration across sales and marketing, a key factor to enable acceleration and success. 

 “The collaboration with Winalytics brought valuable external perspectives and expertise in B2B SaaS sales. They provided a principle-based approach and helped NovoEd adapt their strategies to fit ourtheir unique marketplace,” according to Charlie.

Results

Six months after the engagement, NovoEd experienced its two best net new sales quarters in the company’s history in Q3 and Q4 of 2022. This growth came despite broad external economic challenges in the latter half of that year. 

Annual sales revenue increased by 35% from 2021 to 2022, reflecting the success of the initiative. The company’s commitment to building broad team strength paid off, with two-thirds of the sales team exceeding their quotas. 

“The initiative with Winayltics really demonstrated investment, intention, and focus from the company. It brought energy to the team, with supportive and practical group and small group coaching sessions, which all delivered a meta message: that we understand the challenges of this market, and we are providing tools and resources to help make us all successful. It helped build our confidence and increased our agility,” Charlie says.

NovoEd is well-positioned for continued expansion over the next several years. The company’s investment in building scalable sales capabilities empowered the team to not only achieve its short-term goals, but to have the organizational capability in place to  embark upon its next stage of growth.