A New Way to Sell: Thought Leadership from Salesloft

The digital revolution is no longer reserved for early adopters, small startups, and tech companies. 

Digital-first is now the standard for all revenue teams across industries, and teams are racing to close the great digital divide. 

Did I say ‘digital’ enough for you?

Today, there are more than 10,000 RevTech and MarTech solutions, and more are joining the fray every day. If you’re a buyer, how do you choose? If you’re a seller, how do you stand out?

Many revenue teams find themselves buried under multiple, disconnected tools. What started out as much-needed point solutions meant to address specific needs has multiplied into a much bigger problem: tech bloat and “frankenstack”:

• Tech stacks balloon and management costs rise.
• Revenue predictability suffers from disconnected platforms, channels, and data sets.
• Sales reps struggle to meet quotas and manage their time effectively. 
• Managers struggle to identify the critical coaching moments when they’re needed most.

It’s time to simplify and take a good hard look at the tools we bring into our tech stack and those we, as providers, bring to the market. 

Salesloft on navigating changes within tech 

As a vendor that contributes to this sometimes glorious yet often messy revenue tech stack, Salesloft has fully embraced this era of growth and change with a forward-looking product, customer, and marketing strategies. 

I'm here to briefly describe each of these strategies. None of these strategies are entirely new, but they are an evolutionary milestone to the way we serve our customers and speak to the marketplace.

The strategies I’ll outline below are as follows, including repositioned and streamlined: 

• Product: Modern Revenue Workspace™
• Customer journey: The LOFT journey
• Brand: The New Way to Sell

All of which was launched, with pride, in September 2021, to help current and future customers better understand what we can do for them as they evaluate their systems.

Product: Modern Revenue Workspace™

The Modern Revenue Workspace™ is a single system where sellers and revenue teams come together to collaborate, execute, and serve their customers. 

“Sellers and sales teams are moving from lots of tools they have to use to one workspace they love to use.”

Kyle Porter
Salesloft CEO

The Modern Revenue Workspace™ works in tandem with your CRM software by synchronizing your data and supporting sales intelligence and additional revenue workflows through an extensive partner ecosystem.

It provides four critical value points to its users:

1. Work from anywhere with the insights you need everywhere: The Modern Revenue Workspace gives sales teams everything they need all in one place. Best-practice workflows and all the communication channels sellers need are built right in. Data and AI inside the platform identify the most winnable deals while helping sellers know what to do next and get the coaching and insights they need to win.
2. Enterprise-ready conversations: Our enhanced transcription engine offers improved accuracy, searchability, and filtering to guide managers and sellers. This lets them easily identify buyer and market trends and coaching opportunities to set more meetings, build more pipeline, speed deal cycles, and improve the chances of winning more deals. 
3. Power a predictable revenue engine: You need 67% of your reps hitting quota, every quarter, for revenue to be predictable. Otherwise, you are likely relying on a handful of heavy hitters to get you to your quarterly goals and can be blindsided when it’s too late to course-correct.
   
   The Modern Revenue Workspace tracks and analyzes seller activity, opportunity engagement, prospect sentiment, and account data with AI models designed to identify trends and insights to help revenue teams achieve their goals and keep leaders informed, all the time, every time so you can pivot on a dime and proactively manage your pipeline.
4. This provides the foundation of success for revenue teams to efficiently manage their pipelines, generate demand, and win more deals. "At Salesloft, everything we do centers around helping sellers exceed their goals. We know how hard selling can be, and we know it can be easier. We know how complex sales processes can be, and we believe they can be simpler. We know how elusive accurate forecasting can be, and we know it can be better. " - Salesloft VP of Product Marketing, Chris Mills Introducing the Modern Revenue Workspace™ by Salesloft

Salesloft leverages the Modern Revenue Workspace™ across all our revenue teams including marketing, sales, and customer teams. 

Customer: LOFT Journey

Salesloft has always put great emphasis on the customer experience which we lovingly refer to as the LOFT Journey. It’s the model for the Salesloft customer experience end to end.  

“Helping sellers and sales teams is at the heart of everything we do. To reach their highest potential, sellers need a partner that cares about their aspirations and helps them achieve something greater. That is Salesloft.”

Sydney Sloan
    Salesloft CMO

LOFT is an acronym that stands for Learn, Operationalize, Fine-tune, and Transform. It was built to contextualize the stages our customers go through as they select, implement, and leverage the Modern Revenue Workspace™ and how we support them throughout their journey. 

The journey is cyclical and designed to ensure customers have the access and guidance needed at every stage to achieve their desired results, drive ongoing growth, and react to market changes in real time. 

Learn 

At the most basic level, when a prospect is working with our sales team they are in the Learn stage.  In this stage, we are committed to learning their business, challenges, and goals to provide a solution that meets their needs. We aren’t selling software; we are solving problems. 

Meanwhile, the buyer is learning about our product and service offerings and identifying the potential impact we could have on the business in comparison to other vendors. 

Operationalize 

Should the buyer choose to continue down their LOFT journey and purchase Salesloft, they transition to the Operationalize stage. Our implementation team works hand-in-hand with the customer to implement and execute on the agreed-upon solution. 

Fine-tune 

Once the technical implementation is complete, the customer moves to the Fine-tune stage. At this stage, the implementation team ensures the customer’s teams are educated on how to use the Salesloft platform, that reports are functioning, and workflows are optimized for efficiency.

This is also the stage where the customer is officially introduced to the customer success and support teams and provided access to all our customer resources. 

Transform

With implementation and onboarding complete, the customer graduates into the Transform stage. With users fully enabled and teams using the platform, our success and support teams keep customers up-to-date on product innovations and changes in best practices while providing strategic guidance based on customer adoption and goals. 

The most critical element of this strategy is that the LOFT Journey is focused on our customer’s experience. In truth, it is not our journey – it's theirs. It focuses on building a relationship between Salesloft and the customer, not as a vendor – as a partner.

We are proud of our technology and want to ensure our customers have everything they need to succeed. We regularly reach out to users for feedback on their experience, and we closely follow engagement on our G2 profile as one of the many indicators of customer satisfaction.

Marketing: a new brand for a new era of innovation

In addition to investments in product and customer experiences, Salesloft rolled out a new visual identity and brand messaging in September 2021. 

Our rebrand is more than a new look. We want it to tell the real story of sales – and the people who love it. So we asked what that story sounds like. What does it look like?

The moral of the story 

We live in a time of great change. As providers, we must rise to the challenge and give our customers the tools and support they need to not only survive but to thrive. 

Over the past year, Salesloft has worked diligently to take our offerings, both platform and services, to the next level and defined a new, fresh look to bring those offerings to the market. Through that process, we've learned a lot. 

Product. No more point solutions, integrated experiences are where it's at.

• Invest in solutions that offer robust technology partner ecosystems. 
• Ensure data can be easily shared and accessed in your preferred CRM.
• When you can’t build native, leverage APIs to get what you need.

Customer. Just being a vendor isn’t going to cut it. Be a partner.

• Map your customer journey and make it cyclical.
• Meet your customers where they are and consistently re-evaluate your offerings. Invest in your customer teams.

Marketing. Be bold and be earnest.

• Give meaning to changes to your brand with product and customer experience innovations.

Every audience is important. Make a big splash internally, in the market, and with customers. You have to bring everyone along with you on the change curve to achieve your lightning strike.