Sales Development at Enfo

Enfo faced the challenge of growing their business and truly being able to connect marketing efforts with sales activities and deals. Enfo decided to invest in inbound marketing and HubSpot. However, they did not see the full value in terms of new business opportunities.
 

Like many other colleagues in the industry Enfo were used to measuring sales performance through a number of KPI’s, but they did not measure marketing performance nor the cooperation between sales and marketing. In order to maximize the business value Enfo saw a need for a competent partner who truly understood the connection between inbound marketing and actual sales. That is how Enfo’s and Structsales joint journey started in the spring of 2017.

Enfo had already chosen to invest in HubSpot as their marketing automation system, but they had not succeeded in capturing the full value of this powerful system. To implement inbound marketing in a large organization, such as Enfo, is a tough challenge. You need an effective strategy and a clear goal to why you are doing this. You also need a distinct organization, clear processes, and role descriptions to support the strategy. This became Structsales mission – to help Enfo towards a sales and marketing team that works with a Sales Enablement focus. A team that minimize friction and activates sales in every activity.

Structsales has been our partner all the way and helped us understand how sales and marketing should work as ONE team, with the common goal to create more business opportunities together. It’s amazing to be able to see and measure the results now!
- Louise Hardne, Nordic Sales Development Manager at Enfo

At Structsales we have been stressing the importance of a human and personal contact in our automated world for a long time. We call the role SDR, Sales Development Representative. This is the person who acts as a link between sales and marketing and helps the customer forward in their buying process. It became obvious early in the journey that we needed to implement this role at Enfo. This also pointed out the need for developing a process for Sales Development and leads management in order to get the SDR role going.

We understood that the marketing team would create amazing business opportunities with great Sales Enablement content, social media and HubSpot as tools. Structsales were already helping Enfo with inbound marketing, content creation, design, campaign execution and social media, but we recommended Enfo to create a new role as well – an SDR. This role would have the responsibility to qualify and manage business opportunities from marketing, giving Enfo’s Sales representatives the opportunity to focus more of their valuable time on great meetings instead.

This was a brand-new role, so Enfo did not have any job description, processes or guidelines in place. Structsales helped Enfo to build these processes from scratch. These processes united sales and marketing in an awesome way and also created opportunities for the entire Enfo brand to grow.

A key to success has been that the we involved the new SDR from the start and co-create processes and guidelines together. Structsales facilitated workshops where best practice was mixed with Enfos’ specific challenges and needs, giving Enfo a clear process for how leads should be managed in order to create an effective organization with Sales Enablement in focus. Structsales also provided their own SDR to work for Enfo during over a year, helping them with follow-up and lead management in a more structured way. Structsales SDR also helped Enfo to establishing a more data-driven approach to marketing activities by creating reports and dashboards together with the marketing team. This work led to Enfo being able to analyze the results of their marketing efforts in a more effective and structured way. The work has also created great dedication and a strong focus in lead generating marketing activities in the entire team. Thanks to a solid SDR function alongside a focused marketing team Enfo has today closed marketing driven business worth a total of 25,9 million SEK. This is a combination of both online and offline marketing activities and proves that cooperation, focus, and patience really pays off.

For me it was very important that Structsales were there to explain and support me all the way. Structsales has launched both our SDR-process and our Inbound marketing machine. They helped us succeed all the way through active coaching and by sharing their deep digital competence in both sales and marketing.
- Louise Hardne, Enfo

Sales and marketing need to speak the same language

The next challenge was the lack of definitions and guidelines for the cooperation between sales and marketing at Enfo. Nobody really knew what a lead or a Marketing Qualified Lead, MQL, was. Not many people entirely knew what Inbound Marketing was all about or how they could implement the model to grow their business better.

Structsales educated, acted as a thrusted advisor, and even helped Enfo with hands-on operational work such as developing definitions and guidelines and by hosting workshops together with sales, marketing, and the business units. The outcome was a list with clear definitions from a contact in HubSpot and all the way to a “goal identified” in Enfo’s joint sales process. Structsales also created qualification criteria’s and a Service Level Agreement, SLA, between sales and marketing which served to support the SDR- function in its leads management processes.
 

The key to success is to involve the entire organization from the start – to get everybody on board with the project and most of all let the SDR be part of developing the guidelines. After all, it’s the SDR that will be using these guidelines in the everyday work. Dedication, commitment, and participation are important success factors in the execution. 

Enfo saw the potential in the SDR-function quickly and took full advantage of it, that’s why we succeeded. If the function does not get a clear mandate straight away it can easily become an ungrateful role which basically is used for cold calling and acting as a sales assistant. But by involving the SDR early in the process the function earns credibility and authority with both sales and marketing. This way the function can focus on creating real business value for the organization and its clients, and that’s what the role is supposed to do.
- Louise Hardne, Enfo

Sales Enablement has become a large part of Enfo’s organization and the SDR- function is a very important parameter to successfully connect marketing efforts to actual deals. The partnership between Structsales and Enfo have resulted in a SDR-function which not only contributes to the cooperation between marketing and sales, but also to the company’s business development. The SDR- function nurtures the customer relationship and strengthens the brand, while it contributing to developing the business offerings as well.

Structsales has played a key role by acting as a committed partner all the way and taken responsibility for Enfo’s business. Structsales has taken the time to truly understand the challenges Enfo had and by doing so Structsales could contribute with relevant best practise scenarios as well as tailored solutions for Enfo. The assignment has covered everything from digital strategy and processes to actually renting an SDR to Enfo during a longer period of time. The SDR has helped optimizing marketing campaigns, converted leads in an effective way, helped Enfo with dashboards and reporting, and also helped book 99 meetings in total with potential customers since the inbound marketing-project started at Enfo.

It has been a huge help for us that Structsales truly has acted as a partner to us and supported us on all levels, from strategy and processes to hands-on operational work. They are always available, competent, and solves our problems in real time. It has been incredibly valuable to us.

- Jens Yhrefors, Head of Marketing at Enfo

Having deep knowledge and experience regarding both marketing and sales is a must to succeed to create more and better business opportunities for an organization as large as Enfo. An organizational change of this magnitude takes time and it is important that both the customer and the partner truly understands how the change will affect the organization. It will be a bumpy ride and you will need to re-start at some time – that is how change management works in a large organization. Here Structsales has benefitted from our way of not isolating marketing and sales – instead we often say that marketing IS sales.

We want our customers to do more with less. Therefore, we look beyond conversion rates and specific activities. We aim to maximize the potential for increased sales and that means that we have to take responsibility for the customers business as if it was our own – that is how a value adding partnership works to us.
- Niloo Lopez, Partner and Head of Marketing at Structsales, also Account Manager for Enfo

1. Be clear from the start. The role of the SDR has to be clear to everybody involved from the start. It can otherwise easily turn into an administrative role that spends much time on cold calling and acting as a sales assistant. That is a waste! An SDR should get authority and earn respect in your organization and this starts with a clear job description and responsibility alongside a supporting mandate for the function.
   
   
2. Measure the right things, not a lot of things! A clear job description makes it easier to connect the right KPI’s to an SDR-function. This is very important. Make sure you measure the right things, not a lot of things.
   
   
3. Processes, processes and processes! To grow your business, you will need scalability and that only comes through processes. Make sure that you involve your SDR from the beginning so that you can get a clear ownership and a sign-off on processes for lead management, hand-over to sales, nurturing, and so on.
   
   
4. Act as ONE team every single day! Great guidelines and processes are the foundation to a value adding cooperation, but at the end of the day it’s all about finding a common goal to strive towards and this goal should engage sales, marketing, and the business units. An awesome SDR could prove to be a very cost-efficient way of growing your business, but it is also important that you manage to build a strong sales and marketing team parallel to the SDR function. It’s all about the team effort.
   
   
5. Dare to use the phone! Put your money on a person who is courageous, curious and comfortable with cold calling. Hot leads will not surface from day one – that is a myth! In reality it’s a combination of inbound and outbound efforts that creates opportunities and maximizes your business value.
   
   
6. Analyze – optimize and repeat! An SDR spends half the time on outreach and the other half on optimizing campaigns together with the marketing team. At least that is how we think it should work. So, look for an analytical person who understands how the different parts of your offering is connected and how you can grow your business via cross-selling for example. A person who likes technology and is able to use it to help your customers forward in their buying process.
   
   
7. Don’t pitch! The customer is not interested in your pitch as soon as they have downloaded a guide or read your blog, so stop pitching. The customer wants you to understand their reality and help them with their actual challenges. An SDR have to be able to understand business challenges in a complex environment and therefore this is a more senior role than most people think. It’s a person who both have the courage to pick up the phone, and at the same time the ability to nurture a customer relationship all the way to a decision.

About Enfo

Enfo is a Nordic IT service company enabling its customers’ data-driven business transformation. With their niched expertise in managing hybrid platforms, business applications and new digital services, Enfo brings together relevant data for more intelligent operations. Enfo both build and run digital solutions – supporting their customers in mastering the complexity. Enfo has over 900 niched experts working for a more intelligent world, with technology empowering people, businesses and societies.