Politico is a leading political journalism organization. Baker Communications partnered with Politico's revenue team on a 12-week Coaching in the Cloud engagement focused on Salesforce adoption and pipeline-building.
The Challenge
"I made a decision that the current CRM system wasn't achieving the results that we needed," said Roy Schwartz, Chief Revenue Officer at Politico. "I implemented Salesforce—now probably two or three years ago—and so by implementing Salesforce we can track calls and meetings and opportunities and really start to get to an understanding of close ratio."
"Pipeline measurement is everything," said Megan Dorward, Account Executive at Politico. "We know that we close 70 to 75% of all the meetings that we go on, so getting more meetings is everything to us in our business. It's very difficult to ask sales people to change—it's still a challenge, it's something that we deal with every day."
The Approach
"What I liked about the Baker solution was that it was over a prolonged period of time—over 12 weeks—that it was consistent, that we'd be doing weekly calls, that the time commitment was fairly minimal, and that ultimately would change people's habits, using their actual pipeline," Schwartz explained. "At the beginning of every week we got a handful of new accounts with leads and contact information associated with each account, and then the hope was to set up an in-person meeting with those accounts."
"Coaching in the Cloud allows us, at a lower cost, to help train the sales team and help them understand how Salesforce can be better utilized to make them more money—whether that's to do with Salesforce or whether that's just sales basics," Dorward added. "Being able to use real prospects, real pipeline, and doing the training and the coaching on the same call, I think has been very effective. The coach was very encouraging—we could get feedback from our peers and colleagues as to what they would do in a similar situation. We would talk about the successes we've had for the week and also talk about places where we were stuck."
The Results
"Coming out of the coaching play that we did, we have been able to reach out to a thousand different organizations. We had 300 calls that were actual, two-way communication between new prospect and our sellers, and that resulted in 45 meetings with new accounts, and that has resulted in 30 opportunities that we've identified."