Finding the Edge

Having built and sold both an appointment setting company and then a software tool that supports sellers, SVP of Revenue Enablement Steve Richard has been around the block. 

He knows how hard it is to find a software product that actually moves the needle for revenue teams, rather than being a cool looking toy that collects dust on the shelf. 

That’s why when he stumbled across BirdDog, he saw the opportunity to leverage meaningful, real world data to enrich the entire sales process, and jumped on the chance to champion & implement it at Mediafly. 

“It’s very rare to see a sales team embrace a new technology and use it without constant reminders, but that’s what we got with BirdDog.” - Steve Richard, SVP

7 months after working hand in hand with the BirdDog team to identify and test the signals that actually lead to revenue, Steve & the team at Mediafly saw that deals with BirdDog signals have a 69% win rate, more than 2x the baseline. And, if that wasn’t enough, the ACV of the BirdDog accounts is 50% higher than average.

Now, the sellers don’t go a day without leveraging BirdDog data to book meetings, talk to prospects & clients at a strategic level, and to close deals. 

01 - Identifying the Ideal Customer Profile

Steve knows that some events and characteristics of prospects make them a better fit, but the data was scattered and hard to find. Maybe it was…

• A job change in a news release

• A conference attendance on a social post

• An executive quote from an earnings call

• A big investment in a 10K

• Hiring certain positions on a job board

After all, these are 5 and 6 figure deals, where you can’t afford to miss something critical.

So, the team was stuck doing the research ad hoc and manually. Since chatbots were error prone and impossible to scale across an account list, they weren’t much help.

When Mediafly started working with BirdDog, the BirdDog team helped Steve list out every data point that mattered and turned them into signals, yes or no questions about their target market. 

The questions can be as simple as “Does {account} have a new VP of Sales?” or as specific as “Did an executive at {account} discuss the importance of buyer experience?”

Together, these signals transformed Mediafly’s prospect list by pulling in all of the critical data and using it to stack rank the accounts so the best ones are at the top.

Within 10 days of implementation, BirdDog saved a team member 6 hours a week on research–that’s another 7 work weeks for selling a year.

The best part is, we didn’t just guess which signals would be important: BirdDog worked with Steve to validate which custom signals mattered most. It turns out, some signals were 3x as common among the closed won deals than all of the crm accounts. This shouldn’t be surprising, as BirdDog signals are built to predict what’s going on inside the business.

02 - The Sales Floor

Once the upfront research was done, though, things were really just getting started. 

Rather than just doing one static data pull that would quickly grow stale, BirdDog checks every night for updates to signals on the team’s new-new, in progress, closed-won, and closed-lost accounts. Anything important gets sent not only to the reps inbox, but also is shared in a team wide slack channel. 

There, leadership can enable sellers by leveraging their executive perspective on events & even calling out when they might have a connection at a trending account.

“Since we're the first to know whenever anything important happens at an account, the BirdDog slack channel makes it easy for our sellers to act as strategic partners to our prospects & clients. It also gives me & leadership a place to coach and enable the team on leveraging the insights as they come across to close more business.” - Tony Kavadas, Chief Sales Officer

The drip of information helps the team act more as consultants and less as salespeople on their deals. As an example, after catching a critical global expansion via BirdDog alerts, seller Andrea Powers was able to bring it up in a strategic discussion and add a 5 figure opportunity to an expansion conversation with a Fortune Global 500 client.

It’s no wonder, then, that all of the companies BirdDog sent signals on with net new or expansion opportunities had a 69% win rate and the won deals had 50% higher ACV than the opportunities with no signals. 

03 - Lists That Work

Mediafly has a vibrant & impressive Value Selling practice. While their best clients tend to be firms that have already dipped their toes into value selling methodologies, it is exceedingly difficult to find this out at scale. 

You’d have to crawl their website & job postings & marketing collateral to look for hints that they use this selling philosophy. This is hard enough to do for one company… Imagine doing it for thousands of companies! It wasn’t practical or possible, so the team had no choice but to reach out to just anyone in their ICP.

For BirdDog, that’s a few minutes of set up. 

After Steve worked with the team to come up with some clever signals to find the firms that do value selling, like ROI calculators on their website and open or expired job postings for value engineers, BirdDog was able to generate a list of over 300 accounts with the right employee count in the right sector… that actually had tried value selling. 

The data was so high fidelity that one part time full cycle AE generated 3 SQLs off of it in 1.5 months.

Continuation

BirdDog injected critical real world signals across Mediafly’s entire sales process and systems, changing the way the team does business. 

Incomplete, done “when we have time” research has been replaced with a dynamic, living and breathing intelligence layer that knows what data actually closes deals. 

That data gets updated and injected into the team’s systems at the perfect time, so they can turn signals into sales.

“BirdDog has helped us focus on the stuff that matters and leave behind the things that we thought may have mattered but didn’t.” - Steve Richard, SVP