Leaning into sales execution intelligence helps Renaissance increase meeting-to-opportunity conversion rate by 93%

Edging out the competition starts with a complete picture of the sales cycle

How does an education technology company grow revenue in a competitive market? For Renaissance, the answer has always been to build strong, lasting relationships with the school districts that comprise its customer base. 

"Education is a finite market," says Salvatore Cirillo, Chief of Staff to the Chief Revenue Officer at Renaissance. "And so it becomes a question of relationships. We had to put ourselves in a position to start having the right conversations that met the customer where they were."

Salvatore continues, "Renaissance uses data to help our customers improve learning outcomes, so why aren't we taking that same data-driven approach as a sales organization?" So he partnered with sales leadership, from the Vice President of Sales Operations & Enablement to the Chief Revenue Officer, to evaluate whether their existing sales technology stack was helping sellers efficiently execute multi-channel workflows and drive teams toward attainment.

What Renaissance saw was sellers relying on inefficient processes to create, manage, and close opportunities in their pipeline. "A seller would hold a meeting, take notes, go back to their CRM to add those notes, then regurgitate those notes to their leader," Salvatore says. "This was not only an incredibly manual effort, but it also didn't generate insight into which sales activities were driving the most impact." 

"It's good to know what selling activities are taking place," Salvatore says. "It's better to know which activities are having the best impact. And once you have those insights, how do you apply them across the larger organization?"

For Renaissance, the answer was the Outreach Sales Execution Platform. According to Salvatore, "Outreach was the platform for us because we knew it would help us connect with customers more consistently, with a much more strategic approach, and at the scale we needed."

Seller adoption fuels the sales execution intelligence engine

Renaissances Account Executives (AEs) use Outreach to create and close pipeline more efficiently than ever before. Instead of spending their time manually tracking their opportunities, reps can focus on only what will help them win deals. 

"Seeing our sellers this excited, engaged, and talking about Outreach as their tool of choice is a great feeling," Salvatore says. "Anyone who's implemented a tool for their sellers knows that adoption can be a challenge. We set a goal of 80% adoption for the first few months and overachieved that, hitting a 87% adoption rate that is still trending upward."

Adoption is crucial to Renaissance because every new seller that uses Outreach brings in more buyer/seller interaction data. This helps Outreach's Sales Execution Intelligence deliver even more detailed insights and targeted guidance about their opportunities. Whether it's by surfacing deal health scores or recommending the best next steps for reps to keep deals on track, these insights and actions give reps and their leaders data-driven strategies to help them close more deals.

"With Outreach, we have insight into whats working and whats not working across multiple channels," Salvatore says. "We also have more insight into which deals we are most likely to win based on our activity data. This is ultimately going to drive better pipeline, which will drive the revenue generation were looking for."

With visibility into what's driving success, sellers are finding new ways to optimize their workflows. Whether it's testing email subject lines or sharing recordings from winning meetings, Renaissance is always finding an opportunity to leverage their data to drive revenue results.

"There will always be sellers who can, for example, present certain products better than others," Salvatore says. "With the ability to share recordings, our sellers can really go deep and audit how someone else presents."

After increasing productivity and pipeline conversion rates, Renaissance brings Outreach to even more reps

Renaissance sees the Outreach platform as essential for not only getting more at bats with their customers, but also for ensuring every action a seller takes is impacting revenue while nurturing strong customer relationships. One year into their Outreach partnership, AEs are seeing a sizable increase in their meeting conversion rate, a metric that Salvatore and sales leaders can easily access in their Sales Execution Report.

"Using the Team Performance metric, we saw that we had a 27% meeting conversion rate in the last three months compared to 14% in the previous three months," Salvatore says. "This is about a 93% increase - and essentially, one in four customers are being converted to a meeting. This is really exciting for us. And I know that we can get higher."

Notably, this impact isn't isolated to AEs. Renaissance piloted the Outreach platform with their Customer Success Group - a pilot that tripled reply rates. Seeing the value of the platform, Renaissance added all of their Customer Success Managers to the platform. "Something we're really excited about is our Customer Success Group using Success Plans to help transition customers through our sales-to-customer success handoff," Salvatore says.

Renaissance will also be transitioning its Sales Development Group to Outreach in order to continue the trend set by AEs for quality pipeline creation. "Our SDRs were actually using a competitor product. But we realized really quickly that it wasn't giving us the kind of insights or the scale that Outreach was giving to our AEs."

Salvatore is excited about the year ahead. "As more go-to-market teams adopt Outreach, we're certain it will result in increased productivity, better insights and ultimately, more people coming together to learn and figure out how we can move together to better serve our customers."