Strategic content and workflow optimization helps GoTo increase pipeline coverage by 10x

Winning in an expanding market requires rethinking how sales reps operate

In recent years, business communications tools have become increasingly vital for business continuity. This opened the opportunity for GoTo to seize even more market share of both small and mid-size businesses. However, the path to profitable growth would require GoTo’s sales leadership to take the company’s sales execution to the next level.

To get to that next level, sales leaders began evaluating their systems for creating and closing pipeline. They needed their Account Executives (AEs) to take on more pipeline generation as part of their day-to-day activities. But the sales engagement technology they had in place relied on manual processes to generate pipeline. Updating their activities was cumbersome, and although GoTo had content for sellers to use, sellers weren’t always using the right content with the right personas. As a result, reps tended to over-communicate to duplicate leads using content that wasn’t vetted for success.

Because of these challenges, GoTo’s sellers ultimately didn’t fully embrace their previous sales engagement tool. The lack of adoption led to a lack of data, making it nearly impossible for sales managers to meaningfully evaluate their team’s progress toward quota attainment and have confidence in their pipeline coverage.

“Our previous system was a burden to maintain and really bogged down our sellers,” says Steph Drumright, Senior Manager of Program Management. “We wanted to remove the guesswork from their day-to-day and enable our sellers to be more productive.”

Automation and insights drive seller productivity

GoTo deployed the Outreach Sales Execution Platform as the foundation for increasing seller productivity. With Outreach, GoTo’s global team of AEs and Business Development Reps (BDRs) execute all of their selling activities from a single platform.

“All of our systems speak to each other, and because of that, our sellers are able to create more pipeline with the right people,” says Adam Tyson, GoTo’s Senior Manager for North America Sales Operations. “We use Outreach, ZoomInfo, and Salesforce side by side to create a universal task flow that keeps everything up-to-date.”

Outreach also automatically syncs every single email, phone call, and LinkedIn request back to Salesforce. As such, GoTo’s sellers no longer have to spend valuable time manually logging their activities, and with Outreach orchestrating their pipeline creation and management workflow, they’re set up to execute the right activities at the right time. This ultimately leads to higher win rates and stronger rep participation across the team.

Sales managers also use Outreach’s insights to make data-driven decisions and provide specific coaching to individual reps. Managers can see not only how many emails or phone calls a rep has made, but also what type of persona a rep is spending most of their time targeting. With this data, managers are coaching towards quality activity instead of telling sellers to just “do more.”

A Content Committee empowers sustainability and scale

GoTo also cites their partnership with Outreach as essential for setting up their business for long-term success. Outreach’s Professional Services team emphasizes the importance of scale and sustainability when deploying new technology, a sentiment that has been core to the success of GoTo’s sales execution programs.

“You can have a new system, but if your behaviors don’t change, you’re going to run into the same issues,” says Aniyah Pendleton, Systems Training Program Manager. “We wanted to ensure that the content going into the system would enable sellers to do their jobs.”

To that end, GoTo established a Content Committee for Outreach. With this committee, Sales and Marketing work together to create high-quality content for sales reps to use in their prospecting sequences. Perhaps most importantly, the Content Committee strategically updates messaging based on changes in the market, updates to their product, and feedback from the field. 

 With the Content Committee in place, Aniyah knows that sellers are using the best content in their outbound prospecting efforts. “The change in effectiveness among the sales teams was immediately apparent after we deployed the committee,” Aniyah says. “We noticed more meetings being booked with the right buyers right away.”

Adam agrees, “I’ve worked in small organizations and I’ve worked in organizations with a thousand users. This Content Committee approach is the most impactful way to manage sales content I’ve ever seen.”

Transforming how sellers build their pipeline

With Outreach, GoTo’s sellers are now executing tasks faster and with more precision. “Our sales reps say that using Outreach has made a huge difference in the amount of time it takes them to complete the same task compared to pre-Outreach,” Aniyah says.

They’re using that extra time to increase their pipeline coverage by 10x and focus more on optimizing every stage to closing deals — without increasing their workload. 

Outreach brings all the engagement activities into a single source of truth and provides sellers with insights that help them prioritize what types of engagements have the best chance of closing. Then they can put more effort and research into closing those deals. This allows them to better meet the wants and needs of their prospects.

“With Outreach, sales reps don’t have to think about what activities to do when,” Steph says. “They can think more about the strategy behind their customer engagement.” 

As a result of the success they’re seeing and thanks to Outreach’s user-friendliness, seller behaviors have transformed. “Our sellers want to use Outreach because they know it helps them be more productive, build their pipeline, have more constructive engagements, and close more deals,” Aniyah says.

Sales managers, meanwhile, have the confidence to make data-driven decisions and provide specific coaching to empower sellers to succeed at every stage in the deal cycle, leading to greater long-term success for sellers at GoTo.

“We want our customers to want to talk to us, and before, we didn’t have a great way of ensuring that was the case,” Steph says. “Now, we have the transparency and content to ensure quality customer engagement and that our sellers are productive and successful.”