Transforming Sales Strategies: Mursion Doubles Sales 3 Years in a Row via Enhanced Qualification and Value-Based Selling

Engagement Highlights

• Shifted team from selling a transformational product to qualifying buyers around critical training goals and mapping product to these critical goals
• Helped sales team surpass a budget goal of doubling sales revenue for FY 2019-2020 by sharpening sales messaging and qualification
• Increased the SDR team’s 1st meeting production by 25% in 90 days and 58% in 180 days.

Challenge

Mursion created the market for immersive virtual reality for soft skills training with a platform that blends artificial intelligence and live human interaction. By using trained professionals to orchestrate interactions between learners and avatar-based characters, Mursion simulations achieve the realism needed to deliver measurable, high-impact results for soft skills like leadership, diversity and inclusion, customer service and sales. The challenge for the growing sales team was that the uniqueness of the platform led many conversations to focus only on Mursion’s product and product capabilities without effectively qualifying each prospect around buying goals and readiness. Too many sales conversations went through multiple demos only to lose momentum.

Solution

Winalytics began its engagement with Mursion focusing on 1st call execution. In collaboration with the CEO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing and team of Business Development Directors (BDDs), the messaging framework for 1st calls was revised to focus on deeper buyer discovery. While continuing to start 1st sales calls around a demo to anchor Mursion’s unique capabilities, the BDD team was trained to follow the demo by immediately qualifying each buyer’s critical learning and development goals and gap to those goals that the Mursion platform could resolve. The critical goal and payoff to solving that goal was used to qualify forward to a stakeholder call and scope a proposal for a potential engagement.

The work with the BDD team was followed by work with a team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). A new prospecting approach emerged that started with a focus on inviting prospects into a value-added conversation around a critical goal and using an 8+ cadence of email, call, vmail, and social touches to get prospects to respond to that invitation. The focus on prospecting around critical goals not only helped secure more first meetings, but led these meetings to be of a higher quality with more prepared and qualified prospects.

Results

The performance impact of the engagement was strong on both 1st meeting setting and deal velocity from 1st meeting a closed won deal. The VP of Sales noted within weeks that the BDDs were having more intentional conversations focused on identifying a buyer’s critical goals. The team finished out the 2018-19 fiscal revenue in strong fashion, tripling sales revenue achievement, and in the following fiscal year 2019-2020 was on track to beat its budget goal of doubling sales revenue. The VP of Marketing similarly noticed that the SDR team quickly became more intentional in their prospecting outreach and committed to a disciplined touch cadence. The combined shifts in the prospecting approach helped the SDR team raise monthly 1st meetings set by 25% in 90 days and 58% within 180 days.