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Lauren Wilverding is the Chief Financial Officer and was previously Global Head of Revenue Operations at Macrobond who discussed the challenges Macrobond were initially facing.
Before working with Cosmic Growth, Lauren states, ‘’We had brought on a lot of people from the industry. A lot of people who had a lot of experience with our buyers and users of the product. But not a lot of them had prior sales experience, so they’d learned it over the course of working here with the influence of sales leadership. But there had never been a lot of formal training around sales process and objection handling, and how to position yourself as you prospect.’’
Going on Lauren says, ‘’At the same time, we were looking to onboard a significant part of the organization, almost probably a 50% increase in new hires. All coming in at one time.’’
‘’So we had the goal of both upskilling the sales experience level of our industry expert team, and bringing in a new team that didn’t necessarily have the same industry expertise.’’
Cosmic Growth began their work with Macrobond by both analysing all their existing sales documentation, and conducting a number of interviews with management, their sales reps, and other key stakeholders to understand the company’s existing processes, ideal customers, their pains, the broader industry, and more.
With this information – along with their internal processes and expertise – Cosmic Growth created a custom sales playbook, sales cadences, and a sales training program to help effectively position Macrobond to their ideal prospects, with the goal of training the two different levels of their teams to book more sales meetings, generate more pipeline and close more deals.
Lauren states, ‘’What we discovered is we needed two different paths. We wanted to have ongoing coaching for team members that have maybe been here but didn’t have some of those basic blocking and tackling experiences around sales prospecting.’’
‘’And then we worked together… and looked to build an offering for more of a bootcamp like environment. So a rapid onboarding program, building two one week courses. One for London and one for New York, which is where our new hires were located to bring them in and have them work as a group and do some deep dive training over that two week period.’’
The bootcamps were conducted in person with Lauren describing how ‘’Cosmic Growth worked alongside our product specialists to build out a range of different onboarding content,’’ with the bootcamps then involving ‘’a lot of role playing and other activities where people who had been here for a while were able to come in and support the new hires as well as having the specialists from Cosmic Growth lead.’’
She goes on to state how Macrobond are continuing to use the content and training structure Cosmic Growth put in place to this present day.
In terms of a specific impact, Lauren describes that ‘’prior to Cosmic Growth coming on, we noticed that there was about an 18 month ramp period assumed for our reps. And since then we’ve been able to reduce that down closer to half where the team is becoming productive faster. They are able to take calls and demos on their own faster at a higher efficiency play overall for sure across the board.’’
Talking about how Cosmic Growth built out the content, Lauren states that before, ‘’Our sales leadership had provided a bunch of content that was very similar to the kind of content that we had seen the team use in the past, which was incredibly technical to the user, less about how to work your way into the organization, how to expand within an organization, how to expand your influence as a seller. And so it was really useful to have Cosmic Growth come in with that outside perspective to partner with.’’
‘’We needed a new level up approach that sales management had to get comfortable with about how to talk at the value level throughout the whole organization as opposed to the individual user value.’’
The impact on the leadership team has also been notable. Lauren says, ‘’I think for us, Cosmic Growth has been the most helpful outside of helping build on that content, with shortening the process for figuring out who is going to be a great fit within the organisation and who might struggle.’’
‘’So by putting the team through a consistent and kind of deep dive approach and having a third party that doesn’t have the bias of the existing sales structure and the existing management structure was really helpful to get outside perspective.’’
‘’I think it accelerated it from an ROI perspective.’’
Speaking of how the SDR Team found the program, Mike states, ‘’We saw a quick bump in activity and a quick bump in morale boost. I think the first thing that the team really appreciated was actually getting this training, and having it from an external resource dedicated to them. It’s something that they’ve been asking for for a while whether it was internal or external.’’
‘’So we saw an initial bump in downloads and activities, and most importantly, before Cosmic Growth had come on board, we did very little cold calling, and so instantly, we saw a beginning of cold calling, and by the end of the process, that was just part of what we do.’’
‘’And this might not be particularly measurable, but over this period we’ve had our first SDR promoted in over 18 months into an AE role as well, which I think is it’s testament to the program.’’
In terms of numbers Mikes explains, ‘’Our SDR outbound demos have doubled, and that actually has resulted in a doubling of our pipeline that the SDR team are generating.’’
‘’We’ve also noticed a slight uptick in the average deal size. I’d say about a 10 to 15% increase in the average deal size.’’
Building on how Cosmic Growth supported Mike personally, he states, ‘’ I think where Cosmic Growth helped me massively is actually to understand and have a greater empathy for what our SDR team should be working on and the difficulties that they face.’’
‘’I’ve never personally worked as an SDR. So actually for me, getting involved in this training program, going through the group sessions has been massively impactful, because I’m able to actually see what what good looks like from from an SDR perspective.’’
To finish off, Mike points out to anyone thinking of working with Cosmic Growth that, ‘’Firstly they (Cosmic Growth) took the time to understand how our business worked. Of course, Cosmic Growth has its frameworks and models that work across multiple businesses, which is useful and you want those benchmarks and frameworks, but they adapt them to how you sell.’’
‘’That’s not common. A lot of training companies will still come in with their framework model that worked well in 1999.’’
‘’The other thing that’s particularly good about Cosmic Growth is that it’s not a one and done exercise. We’ve all gone through training sessions or gone to conferences where you have that amazing insight, that initial boost. This is amazing. We’re going to take over the world. And three weeks later you’re back to doing the same old things you always did.’’
‘’And so to have a program, to have a process, to have a mix of in-person, a mix of 1-to-1 training and group sessions, really helped to just embed what the lessons were about, so it was almost, teach and then do.’’
Macrobond is the go-to, all-in-one integrated research platform for global firms, transforming vast macroeconomic and financial data into quick, impactful, meaningful data.
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