Improving Discovery Meetings with inga.one

HR Tech, 15 employees, 70+ customers, wanted to scale sales team from 2 to 10, bootstrapped

How we met:

When I met Daniel, they were already pretty good in business. And with him being a bright kid from a prestigious “known-for-founder-excellence” university in Germany he knew what he was doing.

But still, he and his team had problems with scaling their sales operations. 

He thought he had lead gen problems, which is the first reaction of founders when they don’t close enough clients. 

But taking a closer look he really didn’t.

The transformation:

So here’s the deal. Daniel initially wanted to scale with advertising and I told him, that this may be possible, but we have to take a closer look at your end-to-end funnel first and see if it is ready to scale.

Quote “First reaction if pipeline is not full: we need more leads.”

What we did was, we took a closer look, how they started conversations with clients, how they did the first call, sales meeting and up until the close and even onboarding meeting structure.

It took a few minutes and a few deep-dive questions from us to find the misconception: 

This conversation with Daniel and his team went like this:

“What are you doing in this call?”

And they said: “Well we qualify the customer.”

“But didn’t you say the customer - at this stage - opted-in for more information based on a whitepaper and in this situation, you call him without a meeting scheduled?”

“Yes!”

Turns out, their whole team went on using an unplanned call for discovery. 

This was a critical situation. Most of their calls didn’t have the right frame for a client to understand how inga. could help him with his problem. 

What we changed was that they use the opted-in call just as a call for a quick intro to build rapport and then ONLY ask for a meeting in the future. 

That way, all their opted-in customers had the chance to get a emotional connection first, AND they could be prepared for their discovery call. 

Conversion rates from opt-in- to discovery, and discovery to SQL instantly went up.

But also another benefit: Sales Reps were so thankful for that change, because they didn’t mix different call styles and too many talking points into one short call. 

It made the whole sales funnel clearer and more productive instantly.

What are they doing now:

Inga. from there went on to improve conversions along the whole sales cycle and are now ramping up new SDR hires with the onboarding automation template we cover in the accelerator.

Critical learning:

Sales funnels are much more complex than just using any script or a process which you copy from hubspot or any other best practice company. You need to know what the calls are for and how to interact with specific customer groups your product is targeted for.

Don’t just use any template. Know WHY you use it.