Strategic Prospecting: Torchlight Succeeds by Moving from “Spray and Pray” Emails to Prospecting as a Trusted Advisor

Engagement Highlights

• Moved team from “spray and pray” email blasts to disciplined prospecting with agile campaigns focusing on a single message, buyer role, segment
• Increased number of monthly 1st calls by 61% in 12 months
• Increased 1st call to demo progression by 20% through more consistent 1st call qualification around buyer goals and readiness to purchase.

Challenge

Torchlight offers an innovative corporate caregiver benefit that helps employees with caregiver responsibilities manage work responsibilities and maintain work-life balance.   The Torchlight platform is particularly valuable for the more than 50% of all employees in the “sandwich generation” who need to manage parent and child dependents at the same time. Prior to the work with Winalytics, Torchlight was getting a healthy number of 1^st meetings each month using high volume email blasts or “spray and pray” prospecting, but less than 25% of these 1^st meetings progressed to a second call let alone a closed won deal.   Many of those that came to a first meeting were not qualified buyers or were just “tire kickers” interested in a demo on an innovative new product.   Weak first meeting progression had for several years running hurt the ability of Torchlight’s CEO and board to work toward consistent sales revenue production or accurately forecast sales goal achievement. The large volume of email blasts also alienated potential buyers.

Solution

Winalytics began its engagement by reviewing Torchilight’s key outcomes and impacts for its current clients. The work helped crystallize the key buyer problems and challenges that Torchlight’s platform solved. These included attracting and retaining employee talent, increasing employee time on task and productivity, and supporting benefit costs savings.  For each outcome, Winalytics was able to identify specific, measurable impacts.  These included:  84% of Torchlight’s users feeling more positively about their employers; freeing up 115+ hours of work time per user per year; generating $2k-$3k in benefits cost offsets per user per year.

These buyer outcomes were then integrated into prospecting campaigns and 1st call frameworks to support the Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) team.   Coaching around the cadences was used to refocus prospecting efforts from “spray and pray” outreach to inviting benefits leaders into a value-added conversation around their goals for recruiting, retaining, and deepening engagement with “sandwich generation” employees. The engagement also focused on building a first meeting framework that shifted from leading with the product platform to a focus on qualifying buyers around goals for caregiver employees, gaps to achieving those goals and their willingness to take actions toward building organizational readiness to purchase.

Results

The engagement supported Torchlight in achieving its sales revenue plan in 2019 for the first time in several years. Particularly important was the uptick in the number of 1st meetings. Shifting from the “spray and pray” prospecting model to an intentional prospecting model increased 1st meeting counts by 61%. Not only did the number of 1st meetings increase, but the quality of those meetings also increased with 1st to 2nd meeting conversion increasing by nearly 20% in the fiscal year 2019. It was this combination of a higher number of 1st meetings and better deal qualification to improve velocity from a 1st meeting to a closed won deal that proved key to supporting 2019 sales achievement.