How this sales team conquered a merger, pilots, and (literal) fire alarms

Team work makes the dream work. We're hardly original in this idea, and that's why Outreach developed its Account Teams function, so users can win business as a team.

Sales reps, Account Executives, sales engineers, and customer success reps, collaborate on the same account with the same end goal in mind – to create and nurture relationships with your customers for success. But, this type of collaboration, across that many people, requires structure and the right visibility to ensure everyone involved can access the records they need. The Account Teams functionality in Salesforce delivers this structure and now you can easily import your Salesforce Account Team setup directly into Outreach and start executing on your team selling motions in-app!

Sr. Account Executive Marshall Perez, Lead Solutions Consultant Corey O'Brien, then SDR (now AE) Ben Michaelis, and then SC (now Partner Program Manager), illustrate their journey through a complex sales deal at Outreach, from initial contact with the CMO to overcoming challenges during the demo, dealing with company mergers and CRM issues, to reengagement and emphasis on successful pilot criteria and increased sales. The focus on BDR productivity, leading indicators, and influencing the client's thinking led to a reframed perspective on sales engagement -- and they did it all on the Outreach platform.

Kick it off to the man who started the deal over here.

Yeah. So in my first month at Outreach, just starting off as an SDR, I actually had received an MQL for the chief marketing officer. And my first call to her, she actually picked up and, you know, right away, she's like, oh, yeah. I know Outreach. And then from there, she pretty much, to be honest, sold me from the get go. Just knew it was gonna be a solid opportunity, and she actually later on looped in some other sales leaders as well, including the VP of BizDev.

Took a while to coordinate everybody, for the, for the first and really kind of, like, big show stopper demo, which Corey was SC on and, got brutally interrupted halfway through the halfway through the demo.

We did. Yeah. A, a truck decided to back up into the loading bay at the office and break a pipe. And so the fire alarm starts going off in the middle of the demo, and we we it takes so long to get this guy in the demo.

We're like, no. We're fine. We're fine. Fine. And there surely, you don't wanna die during this demo.

We can reschedule it.

You know, after, you know, several demos, had been done, the the deal kind of stalled for a little while because, as Ben was mentioning, there was a merger of companies, and that also meant a merger of Salesforce CRM. That took a few months for them to work through. And, once they came back around and we got them reengaged, is when we started having a lot more technical discussions about what the actual implementation will look like. Going into the pilot, you know, we've been talking to you, talking to Nick. There was a lot of really big emphasis on how are we going to validate this? What kind of strict criteria can we define to say this is a successful pilot to eventually move into a full rollout? Then they just added, well, let's we'd love to see a twenty five percent increase in sales.

Yeah. Just during three months. It's not a hard, fast requirement, but we'd like to see that. The what they decided mid pilot was, hey. We really wanna make sure that we're, like, seeing the data that supports that outreach is better than what we're doing now.

And we're like, well, what does that mean to you? Right? And they're like, well, we wanna see that our our our our BDRs are more productive. We wanna see they're doing more emails, more calls, more sales, just like more activity.

I coordinated a meeting with Mark and I and Angela Garinger. It finally came about where she was like, well, they're just focused on the lagging indicators, not the leading indicators. And that was like that that was it. That was the light bulb moment.

And then Mark and I, you know, we're we sat down and we just dissected their, you know, ten SDRs that they had in the pilot. Right? We found the two top producers, and we're like, what is making these two guys the top producers?

Yeah. It was awesome. We actually we actually looked at them. One of them was killing it on the telephone. The other was killing it on email. And so we were able to take our metrics, our numbers, the things we did and captured in the pilot and say, what if we combine these two top sellers?

What happens? And the light bulb you could see the light bulbs went off in their head, and they and I'm out of focus.

But they actually said The content's too hot.

They actually said, this. This is what we were talking about yesterday. This is what we need from a sales engagement tool.

We brought this to the table, and we just kinda totally reframed their their thinking. And then it was just at the end, we asked them, like, imagine if you had this level of visibility to a hundred and twenty of your SDRs, what you could do with that. And that's, in my opinion, what what won us the deal. Great job.

Great job to you guys. Good job, Mark.

Nice, Mark.

That's the story of the deal.