Healthcare firm Alan sees up to 3x increase in seller productivity

“We wanted a precise understanding of our funnel to identify levers to increase productivity”

France-based healthcare firm Alan has a simple but powerful mission: to help people live healthier lives as a one-stop health partner for body and mind. This mission applies not just to the companies and independent contractors that Alan serves. Alan also helps its employees live healthier and purpose-driven lives, embracing a culture of shared ownership and flexibility.

The result is a unique, even disruptive approach to how Alan’s global sales organization creates and closes pipeline. Ghali Bennani Laafiret, Business Strategy and Operations contributor at Alan, explains, “Our philosophy is that everyone is the owner of what they do, and what they do is always part of something larger.”

Alan’s culture of sales autonomy has its pros and cons. While sellers report high levels of job satisfaction, it was on each rep to own their selling workflow. This meant reps relied on spreadsheets and CRM reporting when prospecting leads, and sellers would not necessarily use updated messaging or they would deprioritize useful communications because of a lack of time. Follow-up tasks often piled up and caused sellers to fall behind when managing their deals, ultimately stifling their productivity and win rates.

“Every challenge a seller faces is an occasion for sales operations to build an impactful process. We needed to eliminate friction for sellers, but we didn’t have the data to understand what our sellers needed to achieve high levels of performance. We wanted a precise understanding of our funnel to identify levers that would increase productivity.” Ghali says. This lack of visibility had big consequences, especially for planning teams who had to forecast and build plans for future growth.

With high hopes of increasing their reps’ productivity and gaining critical visibility into performance, leaders like Ghali began exploring new sales technologies. And in keeping with Alan’s unique culture of sales, they needed a technology that was as flexible and easy to use as it was powerful for driving results. To meet this need, Alan brought in the Outreach Sales Execution Platform.

Reliable pipeline creation thanks to increased seller productivity

Staying true to its culture of sales autonomy, Alan implemented Outreach but did not require all sellers to use the platform. But the Account Executives (AEs) who’ve opted to use Outreach quickly realized just how powerful the platform was for managing their pipeline. One year into their deployment — and with nearly all organic adoption — 130 of Alan’s sellers leverage Outreach because it makes them more efficient and productive.

These sellers now use Outreach to execute the right tasks each day with the right prospects. Because their follow-ups are automated, Alan sellers focus less on time-consuming, administrative tasks. Instead, they can focus their time and energy on high-value selling activities. And with customizable, brand-approved sales messaging, reps don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel and can instead focus on building relationships with their customers.

“We have collections of sequences and templates our reps use to break through the noise and book that initial meeting. Sellers don’t have to analyze what to say or when to say it because Outreach does that for them. Customers are actually receiving better content as a result,” Ghali says.

Outreach also gives sales leaders visibility into the actions that sellers are taking to convert meetings into opportunities. With these insights, Alan’s sales leaders can do deep, data-driven pipeline inspection in order to identify gaps, model assumptions, and scale strategies that increase conversion rates and seller productivity.

“With Outreach, we can learn from our successes and use them to drive optimization at a large scale,” Ghali says. “We’re now looking at optimizing every stage so our sellers are equipped to win more deals. If we’re finding any heterogeneity in our funnel, we investigate and see how we can improve.”

Outreach adoption becomes the key to accelerating deals and ruling the leaderboard

One year after first deploying Outreach, Ghali sees it as a critical component of Alan’s sales technology stack. On high-pace teams, top performers are tripling the level of activity when compared with lower performers — mainly thanks to Outreach. These sellers who use Outreach are not just communicating with more customers. They’re communicating with the right customers with content that’s proven to convert. As a result, Alan is seeing accelerated deal velocity and higher participation from its sales teams.

“The reps using Outreach the most are consistently the ones on top of our leaderboard,” Ghali says. “There’s a strong correlation between the number of activities done and progress in our sales cycle. Our reps who use Outreach tend to use it in a very intense way, and as a result, they’re seeing more meetings booked and their opportunities close faster.”

The more that reps adopt Outreach, the more visibility and confidence Alan’s sales leaders have in their pipeline coverage. And because Outreach is associated with success, that adoption is only increasing — all without a mandate to do so.

Outreach has become the seller’s de facto sales technology of choice, resulting in a more productive and effective salesforce. Ghali is confident that Alan will only realize more value as it grows its partnership, “By continuing to optimize every stage in our sales cycle, we know we will close more business. And that ultimately means helping our customers and Alaners live healthier, happier lives while continuing to grow as a company.”