"It was impressive just how quickly the team became productive with CRUSH. Within days, our sales team identified millions of dollars in new opportunities within their strategic accounts."RapidRatingsJamil Dewji, Director of Sales Operations
When Sefton Cohen recently joined RapidRatings as its new chief revenue officer, he saw an enormous, untapped stream of incremental revenue opportunities from the company’s biggest customers. But for the company to realize this revenue, Sefton knew it would mean a significant upgrade of the company’s approach to sales strategy, particularly around account planning.
As one of the fastest-growing FinTech companies in its sector, RapidRatings provides the most sophisticated analysis on financial health in the world. Its software predicts financial outcomes for suppliers and other third parties, transforming the way category leading companies manage enterprise risk.
“When I came on board at RapidRatings it was evident the company had many excellent relationships with individuals at its key customers, but a lot of these relationships were siloed within discrete departments or divisions,” says Sefton. “Many areas within these large and geographically dispersed enterprises were unaware that our solutions and services could address their pain points. We needed to find ways to leverage existing relationships, gather the necessary intel, and develop the sales approach that would proactively get our solutions and services in front of decision makers in other areas of the business, and do so in a value-driven way.”
Sefton quickly set about implementing an extensive transformation of his sales team, moving from what had been a feature/function sales approach into one that is much more focused on solution-selling. Concurrently, he needed to put in place an array of new internal processes that could support this new direction. Sefton turned to Jamil Dewji, RapidRating’s director of sales operations, to implement the necessary tools to operationalize this strategy.
“High on our list of priorities was to identify a robust key account management solution that’s native to Salesforce,” says Jamil. “It was critical that we transform our existing account-planning processes from a range of spreadsheets and PowerPoints into a centralized framework that would work seamlessly within our Salesforce environment and its data—the place where our sales team works every day. We needed to be able to map out in a clear, consistent way the lines of business where we aren’t engaging, the influencers and decision makers we should be targeting, the challenges that different departments are facing, and other sales-critical information.”
While the sales team was being retrained in the company’s new sales methodology, the team was simultaneously upskilled in adopting account-based selling as a discipline with consistent methods and best practices for developing actionable account plans.
“After an evaluation of various tools, the clear choice for us was Prolifiq’s CRUSH key account management solution,” says Jamil. “In addition to having the account-planning features we needed, CRUSH won the day because it operates 100% natively in Salesforce. It’s a huge benefit for us to have a solution that speaks the same language as Salesforce and that provides similar views and reports.”
During the evaluation of CRUSH and its subsequent purchase and implementation, the RapidRatings team worked closely with Prolifiq’s account team.
“We worked with Prolifiq to build out what a good account plan should look like,” says Jamil. “Together, we determined how our account plans should be configured and established the most important metrics. Quickly after we trained the team, hundreds of account plans had been created by sales reps for their top strategic accounts.”
“We were impressed that Prolifiq took a consultative, hands-on approach during the entire evaluation and implementation process,” says Sefton. “They weren’t there just to sell us a solution and send us on our way; the Prolifiq team provided invaluable input during many of the discussions our sales leadership had as we retooled our entire sales approach. They got us thinking in creative ways how our new objectives could be accelerated by the capabilities that a robust, native-Salesforce key account management solution like CRUSH could provide.”
The RapidRatings sales team was especially impressed with the powerful Prolifiq dashboards that are included in CRUSH, which helps each sales rep manage their entire portfolio of accounts from a single view. Reps can instantly know where they can most productively spend their time each day.
“Within the CRUSH dashboards we can see the growth of whitespace, new opportunities that have been created, key stakeholders that have been added, new people to target, and more,” says Jamil. “On top of this, our sales executives use these dashboards to quickly see foreach sales rep where they can assist reps in closing deals more quickly by providing coaching, resources and feedback. This gives our reps a whole new level of executive support.”
“We’ve undergone a paradigm shift in our sales methodology, and the Prolifiq team along with its CRUSH solution has been instrumental in helping us operationalize many of our critical sales processes,” concludes Sefton. “This trusted partnership has been instrumental in helping us make significant progress toward accomplishing our new sales objectives.”
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