Journey Personalization: Activator Shifts from Decline to Dominance through Value-Based Marketing, Sales, and Service

Engagement Highlights

• Developed a new positioning strategy to support an elevated product shift focused on customer data platforms and multi-channel marketing. 
• Developed sales, demand generation, and account management playbooks to help each revenue team put the new positioning strategy into practice
• Implemented a multifaceted skills development strategy, including team learning sessions, paired or small group skills coaching, and sales manager coaching
• Use the skills development strategy to upskill the existing sales team, onboard new sales team members, and upskill service team members.
• Average contract values on Activator’s most popular product rose by 24% in less than 12 months, and new sales revenue increased 75% over the same period.

Problem

Activator invented the product category for equity mining and marketing solutions for car dealers. This feature helps dealers increase their sales by identifying buyers with equity in their vehicle that could be used to support a trade-in or new car purchase.

After years of using their equity solutions to drive growth, Activator’s sales and revenue stalled and began declining due to increased market competition. The company realized that relying solely on standalone equity solutions was no longer sustainable. 

Company leadership decided to expand its offering, moving into the market for customer data platforms and customer journey marketing. This product innovation was driven by the growth in disparate marketing systems and datasets used by car dealerships. A solution that could integrate disconnected data to create a personalized and uniform experience for each buyer was needed.

The new product launch necessitated a quick adaptation and team retraining.  The existing sales team had to undergo significant reskilling to move from a transactional to a value-based selling approach.  The value proposition for the customer data platform and journey marketing also needed to be fluidly versioned for buyers in the unique automotive retail sales, service, and marketing departments.

Solution

Activator engaged Winalytics as its partner to build the new positioning strategy and team playbooks for sales, demand generation, and account management to bring the positioning into practice across the buyer journey.  

The work started with the identification of a core set of value propositions that could be used to personalize buyer value, including:

• Driving more sales revenue and sales transactions
• Increasing service revenue and service ticket value
• Optimize marketing spend and buyer experience 

With this shared positioning framework, Winalytics and Activator leadership built a skills development program across the Activator sales, demand generation, and services.

• • Shared buyer personalization playbooks with cross-company alignment on the new CDP positioning, complete with ideal customer profiles (ICP), value messaging, and discovery frameworks to understand value and communicate value
  • Collaboration with Revenue Enablement on team-level playbooks for the Prospecting, Sales, and Account Management team
  • Integrated essential playbook tools into HubSpot-based workflows, specifically utilizing buying roadmap emails (BREs) and Mutual Success Plans (MSPs) to embed key strategies in day-to-day operations.
  • Bi-weekly small group skills coaching was used to help team members implement the new playbooks with all-team training sessions on the off weeks to “share stories” from the field that help continually update playbooks with team best practices.
  • Bi-weekly sales and service manager coaching calls were used to help front-line leadership target their work with each team member on key strengths and areas of need. 

• New onboarding processes for sales hires introduced them to their new selling system, providing them with the necessary knowledge and skills to contribute quickly.

Results

This comprehensive approach allowed Activator to equip its sales, demand gen, and account management teams with the tools and skills to accelerate revenue significantly. Performance gains were demonstrated in a variety of ways, including:

• Average contract values on Activator’s most popular product rose by 24% in less than 12 months, from $2,649 to $3,272 in Monthly Recurring Revenue.
• New sales revenue increased 75%, from $1.31 million to $2.28 million within the first fiscal year of the strategic engagement.
• New hires significantly enhanced sales performance. Within 15 months of implementing the new strategy, newly hired team members held the top three spots on the quarterly sales leaderboard.