Revenue Optimization: Anchoring on Value Drives Velocity in Every Phase of the Buyer Journey for HMI

Engagement Highlights

• Full adoption of a value-based selling approach by highly tenured sales team that had each developed their own individual habits and practices
• Significant pipeline growth, roughly doubling from from $19 million to $31 million over the 12 months of the engagement. 
• Net Revenue Retention, meaning the combination of renewed and expanded account revenue, grew to 120% over 12 months.
• The acceleration of sales revenue contributed to a successful acquisition by 360Insights

Problem

HMI Performance Incentives, a privately funded company in the performance incentive market, had achieved sales success but faced challenges with a lack of a repeatable sales process. Despite individual successes, each team member operated independently, hindering the organizational efficiency and potential for sustained growth. Acquisition was the result of success but not an immediate goal.

HMI had begun a process of developing buyer-centric playbooks for their marketing and sales team.  However, the company recognized they needed external expertise to create a more comprehensive strategy.  The CEO and Director of Demand Generation were committed to shifting all sales and marketing interaction from a product-centric to a buyer-centric focus.  They wanted to elevate the performance of all current sales team members as well as streamlining onboarding for new sales hires.

Solution

HMI engaged Winalytics to assist them in developing this more comprehensive approach.   

The new initiative addressed the need to elevate the performance of sales team members. The CEO’s goal was to raise the performance of each team member “by one band.”

The work started with the identification of a core set of value propositions that could be used to personalize buyer value in HMI’s sales conversation.  

The core value propositions included:

• Pipeline expansion resulting in New customer acquisition
• Client Retention through increase of Wallet Share
• Improve organizational efficiency and increase profits
• Channel Optimization through consistent process

With this shared positioning framework in place, Winalytics and the HMI leadership built a skills development program for their sales team to run more value-based sales conversations. It included:

• Shared buyer personalization playbooks with cross-company alignment on ideal customer profiles (ICP) as well as ICP messaging on core value props, discovery frameworks to understand value and content strategy to communicate value
• Shared sales playbooks and process with a shared language and best practices for discovery, positioning, and qualification
• Demand generation focus and playbooks to build marketing to sales demand generation alignment and build a culture of every AE “owning the top of the funnel.”
• Customer story telling sessions to get more proficient to select the right stories in each sales conversation to value props and build social proof
• Targeted skills coaching tailored to individual strengths and growth opportunities to raise performance and create a more cohesive, professionalized sales team

Results

The work on building buyer-centric playbooks for their marketing and sales team shifted the company’s revenue trajectory and ultimately led to a successful acquisition by 360Insights.

HMI experienced a range of sales performance benefits.  One was significant pipeline growth, with sales pipeline surging from $19 million to $31 million over the 12 months of the engagement. This growth was a testament to the effectiveness of the buyer-centric playbooks and the commitment of the sales team to owning the top of the funnel.

The HMI sales team also significantly improved their cross-selling and upselling within accounts.  Net Revenue Retention, meaning the combination of renewed and expanded account revenue, grew to 120% over the course of the engagement.  

One of their most tenured reps said: “I have gotten much better at account prep and finding the right buyers. It helped me land an account that could grow into a $5M account per year.” Another team member who committed to owning the top of the funnel, became the top producer of the year in terms of securing net new logos. One of the lowest performing sales reps closed one of the biggest deals of the year at $1.2M. He says: “I am much better at what I do now.”