400% ROI on Sales Training

A SaaS app sells a new category solution to marketing teams to help sales executives close more deals. This new offering was impressive and they had some amazing logos working with them. But they had a few problems.

Problems

  • Their CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) was $16,000 and is way too high.
  • Their average Transaction Value (ATV) was $42,000.
  • They were taking 6 – 9 months to close most deals.
  • They were closing less than 20% of their deal in the pipeline.

During the Sales training session, we reviewed their current sales funnel to learn what they were doing, how they were presenting their offering, and identifying learning opportunities to increase sales numbers. We have identified:

Opportunities for growth:

  • Not pitching their offer in a powerful way
  • Not qualifying opportunities well from a needs perspective
  • Not qualifying budget effectively
  • Presents the offer and sends over proposals too soon
  • Not powerful enough in negotiating or closing deals.

In reviewing the deal flow, we identified a timely opportunity for two salespeople to implement some of the new information and training they had attended on a live sales call during the last hour of the training session as that meeting could not be postponed.

The salespeople came back into the training session and said they finally got a verbal commitment from the customer of a forty thousand dollars ($40,000) sale producing a 400% ROI on the cost of the half-day onsite sales training.

In conclusion: 

  • A structured approach to sales is imperative to close more deals. These steps include;
    • Qualifying the clients’ business needs they are committed to addressing.
    • Understand their timelines and budget.
    • Collaborate with them and create a space for them to design the solution. This is one of the steps that gets the client. In this case, committing to working with my client as the salespeople finally listened to the prospects’ concerns of the roll-out and user adoption of their SaaS application. It will result in a larger sale.
  • The ATV went from $42,000 to $76,000 an 80% increase.
  • The sales cycle dropped from 60 Days to 120 days.
  • They are closing over 35% of deals that are qualified.