Buyers First: Mainstay’s Shift from Product Pitching to Selling into Buyer Value Leads to a Tripling of Sales Revenue

Engagement Highlights

• Developed a value driven messaging and a buyer qualification framework focused on the critical goals that support deal closes
• Improved 1st call to closed won conversion from 10% to 18.7% through more disciplined call management, messaging and prospect qualification
• Supported a shift in sales trajectory toward tripling FY 2017 to FY 2018 sales bookings

Challenge

Mainstay is the only full student lifecycle conversational messaging platform enhanced by AI for higher education. Text messaging has become the best way for colleges and universities to engage both prospective and current students, but there are many different approaches to texting.  Drawing on behavioral science, Mainstay has developed an approach that moves beyond one-way texts or one-time nudges to build a continuous conversation and guide each student to the right next step and right resources to support their enrollment success. This powerful technology had helped the company get to their first ten customers, but an evangelical selling model with the two co-founders and one dedicated seller each using different messaging and qualification strategies was not proving predictable enough to meet ambitious growth goals.

Solution

Mainstay’s CEO engaged Winalytics to build a shared sales playbook across the team and then to coach each seller around deepening their skills to consistently execute the Playbook.   The team fell into a cadence of a weekly meeting to build and optimize the Playbook by reviewing call videos in FilmClub and then coaching calls in between focused on sharpening skills, building and running data-driven pipeline and deal tests, and developing strategies to move individual deals forward.   About six months into the engagement, Winalytics help develop a recruiting and on-boarding strategy to support on-boarding a new senior seller and a business development representative.  

Results

The engagement started in June of 2017 and after six months of work together Mainstay turned in its strongest sales performance to date in Q1 2018. Winalytics work with the team also had a particularly strong impact on 1st call progression, nearly doubling the 1st call to closed won conversion rate from 10% in the first half of 2017 to 18.7% in the 2nd half of 2017. The team was then on-track to triple its 2017 to 2018 sales booking achievement.  The other output of the engagement has been to support a repeatable recruiting and on-boarding strategy to make sure the new senior sellers and BDR achieve their full selling potential in the fastest time possible.