Sales Personalization: CeriFi Sales Team’s Commits to Next Level Positioning and Continuous Learning

Engagement Highlights

• Successful integration of 40 sales team members from 5 diverse sales teams around a common positioning framework and shared sales strategy and process
• Regular one-on-one meetings and a skills coaching program empowered team members to enhance their individual performance
• Created manager-led culture of continuous improvement around skills coaching, performance management and peer-to-peer learning
• Secured 10% year-over-year revenue growth from a base of over $100M and helped the sales team beat plan despite the disruption of needing to integrate 5 diverse teams

Problem

CeriFi has long been an industry leader in professional certification training and test prep for the financial services including the Series 6, Series 7, and Certified Financial Planner (CFP) licensures.  With the acquisition of Checkpoint Learning (CPL) and West Legal Ed Center (WLEC) from Thomson Reuters, the company extended its professional certificate training offerings to the Legal and Tax & Accounting fields.

The CPL and WLEC acquisitions brought over many new customers and new products, but also created a gap in sales and go-to-market strategy. Neither sales team had a shared positioning strategy and language nor a shared sales process.

Following the acquisition, CeriFi needed to develop and implement a unified sales strategy and process. This approach had to encompass both the CPL and WLEC sales teams, as well as integrate these new teams with the existing teams focused on the financial services market, in order to meet its sales objectives for the past year.

Solution

Winalytics partnered with the Chief Sales Officer and Sales leadership across 5 sales teams to build a plan for integration into one shared selling system that could scale across all teams.  

The work started with the identification of a core set of value propositions that could be used to personalize buyer value in sales conversations for each type of professional certification from financial services to legal and tax and accounting.  

The core value propositions included:

• De-risking achievement of professional certification 
• Reducing professional development costs 
• Creating learner-centered training delivery
• Simplified administration and reporting around certification
• Superior customer service and response

With this shared positioning framework in place, Winalytics and the CeriFi sales leadership built a skills development program for 40 individual producers.

The program was designed to improve the team’s ability to run value-based sales conversations. It included:

• Shared sales playbooks and process with best practices for discovery, positioning, and qualification
• Customer storytelling around ideal buyer personas to validate value props and build social proof
• Training of front-line sales leadership and teams in shared positioning, playbooks, and new sales process
• Developing a manager coaching framework with front-line leaders to boost team performance through targeted skills coaching for each individual team member

Results

The CeriFi team beat their plan in the year of the training and successfully integrated all of its sales teams to set up on-going success in years to come. Specific results included:

• 10% Growth YOY to beat plan: The sales team experienced a 10% year-over-year growth from a ~100M revenue base, successfully beating their annual sales plan.
• 5 Sales Teams Integrated: Winalytics helped CeriFi successfully integrate three acquired and two existing sales teams, aligning them under a common framework.
• 40 Team Members & Leaders Trained: The entire Sales and Customer Success field team, including leaders, underwent comprehensive training, ensuring everyone was equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge.

Karen Hundley, Vice President, Legal at CeriFi, provided insights into the ongoing impact of the training and integration efforts. She emphasized the importance of regular one-on-one meetings: “Employees who have regular one-on-one meetings with their managers are three times more likely to be engaged at work.”

She further explained the virtues of the structured weekly team meetings, detailing how they contribute to the team’s success. Karen highlighted the significance of discussing both wins and losses, stating, “It’s really important to look back at where you went wrong and what you could have done better.” The emphasis on learning from failures and sharing insights contributes to a culture of continuous improvement.

The monthly Playbook and Action Workshops, where team members actively contribute and share valuable insights, have been extremely successful. To quote one of her team members: “Together, we’re a better team.”

Karen says, “If others set up their follow-up training the same way, I guarantee that their reps would get something out of it … You’re giving them the opportunity on a regular basis to practice and share and be vulnerable with each other and not be afraid to listen, learn, and contribute.”