Verificient

Engagement Highlights

• Used agile prospecting campaigns to raise 1st meeting pace and sharpened 1st meeting qualification to focus on deals with highest dollar potential
• Increased the installed base of customers by 60% within 12 months
• Reduced by 30% sales and marketing investments while increasing the percentage of “enterprise”

Challenge

The market for online exam proctoring started to generate momentum in 2008 when ProctorU and others launched remote proctoring offerings staffed by live, human proctors. Verificient entered the proctoring market in 2014 with an automated, online proctoring solution a year after Examinity and Proctorio started the automated, proctoring category. Verificient initially had good success in signing up new customers with a largely CEO, relationship-driven form of selling. As market competition intensified this “evangelical” approach to selling stopped being effective. The company had two successive years in 2017 and 2018 of relative flat growth before entering into a difficult CEO transition. To rebuild its growth trajectory, the new Verficient CEO and leadership team recognized the need to create a repeatable approach to prospecting and selling.

Solution

Winalytics began its engagement with a review of all existing customer accounts to confirm status, document key buyer impacts, and understand what a high potential enterprise client looked like for Verificient. From there, Winalytics developed and executed a series of agile prospecting campaigns to test different higher education segments for 1st meeting potential. Segment tests focused on large public universities, private master’s universities, large online programs, community colleges as well as corporate certificate programs. Winalytics also developed a qualification formula for inbound leads and 1st calls to more quickly identify those with enterprise potential. Enterprise potential accounts were defined as those with an addressable online population of 1,000 students and a central decision-making group responsible for managing vendors and technologies to support online learning. The qualification strategy focused on identifying those enterprise potential clients with capabilities in their existing proctoring solution who were open to considering a pilot to experience Verificient’s capabilities.

Results

The performance impact of the engagement was significant around increasing 1st meeting pace and overall deal velocity. In the first six months of the engagement, Winalytics quickly established a cadence of 20+ 1st meetings a month while helping focus the marketing team’s lead development efforts by narrowing outreach from large scale email blasts to targeted agile campaigns. Six months into the engagement the 1st meeting pace was reduced by 60% while the number of large enterprise deals increased. Better 1st call qualification also reduced significantly the number of 1st calls that stalled without moving into a meaningful stakeholder conversation. The overall impact of building a more repeatable prospecting and sales strategy was to increase Verificient’s total customer base by more than by 60% in just 12 months.