What was the opportunity?

Based on in-depth customer research and interviews, I spotted a trend between some recent deals we closed at Pickle:

• B2B software sales leaders with unseasoned AE’s selling into low-tech verticals (they sold software to plumbers, HVAC, construction, dealerships, etc. who sold to consumers). I called them B2B2B2C buyers (3B2C for short).
  
  

• Who ran high-velocity sales cycles (1-2 meetings) & on-the-spot discovery/demo/close in 1 meeting that typically ends in ‘no decision’. Meaning they didn’t pick them or a competitor. Strike zone personas just picked nothing & moved on.
  
  

• Sales leaders have to know why they frequently lose good-fit opportunities to no-decision outcomes & fix it with training/onboarding for a better meeting experience.
  
  

• 3B2C prospects tended to be laggards in buying software. They’ve typically not even heard of our competitors & had recently started exploring the value of Pickle’s meeting capture software. And even if they had bought a competitor, a few of these deals ended up rip & replacing them to go with us instead.

These sales teams were running around 1,000 demos/month. So converting just 1-5% more demos from no-decision to closed won a month would make a massive impact on revenue.

Pickle could help them get that additional 5% at least & justify the cost of the solution.

Who were we talking to?

• Decision makers: SMB and mid-market B2B SaaS revenue leaders who were responsible for huge pipelines & desperately looking for any small increase in conversion rates within low-tech verticals.
  
  

• Champions: Sales managers needed to hire, train, motivate, & hold accountable 50+ inexperienced sales reps that typically turned over every 3-6 months on average.
  
  

• End users: Brand new sales reps who call on low-tech buyers who demand demos on the spot & 1 opportunity to close them.

What was the mission?

Gain a larger foothold in the 3B2C market, establish a repeatable full funnel process & position ourselves as the Spot Demo Intelligence solution.

How was success measured?

Close 5 new deals a week & reach $10k MRR attributed to 3B2C persona strike zone within 8 weeks.

Tracking & attribution were done through Google Analytics, SalesLoft, Salesforce, and AirTable. Used Zapier to connect them all.

How were we different?

• Our native integration with Zoom was built for capturing on-the-spot demos (unscheduled). Competitors missed these crucial meetings because of their Calendar bot integration.
  
  

• With the spot demo model, traditional deal forecasting is useless since new deals are marked won/lost within a day. They needed training to perfect closing a deal in one meeting (before, during, after).
  
  

• Need team collaboration, training collections, & powerful CRM object push. The one-off meeting note-takers from our single-user competitors weren’t going to cut it.
  
  

• 3B2C buyers don’t want to pay enterprise price to use 50% of our larger competitors. Instead, they prefer an SMB price to use 100% of Pickle.
  
  

• The turnover is frequent with large teams of entry-level AE’s & CS reps. This leads 3B2C buyers to need historic meeting data desperately but not want to invest in an expensive seat with a rep who will leave in 3 months.
  
  

• We created a special pricing package for 3B2C personas. Enabling them to act much faster than they typically do when evaluating software. Here’s the pricing package collateral I put together:

  
  

  

What was the distribution plan?

I always plan from the bottom of the funnel & work up:

Customer Activation

Personalized kickoff/onboarding meetings: set each user up for immediate “aha” moments & create stickiness faster.

Email & in-app chat automation: featuring customer highlights, product how-to’s, referral program opportunities, etc.

Built a community: Ongoing training, events, giveaways, content collabs, and much more.

Bottom Funnel

Deal mini sites: (through Loxo & Pageport) created for each demo stage opportunity. Contained a fake 1-year partnership celebration press release outlining what will be accomplished with us, “Why Pickle?” containing the boxes we checked for them, snippets of direct quotes from each conversation, similar buyer use cases, pricing terms, and onboarding/integrations next steps.

Pain & solution-focused landing pages: based on topics like Spot Demo Training Software, Spot Close Training Software. Competitor comparison pages outlining all the points from above. All were linked within follow-up messages to know who was landing on them.

Mid Funnel

Outbound campaigns: built around peer prospecting (AE to AE) & pre-recorded Loom demos that are specific pain points for the 3B2C buyer. These were sent after a hand-raise engagement from the top funnel to ensure higher quality.

Solution-related Templates: meeting scorecards, 1 on 1 sales training, low-tech buyer meeting battlecards, etc. that are tied back into the Pickle product features 3B2C personas care most about.

Sales Meeting Analyzer: Anyone could upload a call recording, get it analyzed, and scored instantly. Meant as a teaser to want to analyze more of their recordings.

Top Funnel

Un-gated content all about Spot demos (before, during, and after your meetings): How to prep/train, open, fast disco/qualification, demo, objections (no decisions), negotiate, close, follow up, handoff to CS, SDR/AE relationship, scorecards, entry-level rep motivation/competitions, handling spot close no-decisions. Helps them tackle the topics they care most about while we plug Pickle screenshots along the way positioning as the solution.

Social selling on LinkedIn: Utilizing the content we’ve created to build trust with personal brands. Reactions/comments to posts would move into the mid-funnel for more targeted engagement.

What was the outcome?

With only one marketer (me) and one sales rep running the entire campaign, the goal was a bit loftier than expected. Averaged 3 new deals a week & closed over $5k MRR attributed to the campaign; about 50% to goal.

However, the growth rate proved our 3B2C persona theory correct to the point where it became a staple of our GTM strategy.