Imprivata, a developer of enterprise security solutions that help simplify password management and user access issues while enhancing IT security, wanted to take their sales organization to the next level. One option they were considering was building an inside sales organization that would focus on pipeline development. To determine the potential ROI of this concept, Imprivata brought in The Bridge Group to conduct their Inside Sales Validation Program.
Over the course of this 2-month engagement, The Bridge Group was able to ascertain that building an inside sales organization was not only a viable option, but also one that had the potential to add a significant amount of incremental revenue for Imprivata. Armed with The Bridge Group’s recommendation for structuring an inside sales team, Imprivata has already begun to move forward and has put into practice many of the processes, tools, and performance metrics that The Bridge Group developed during the validation exercise.
Here Molly Galetto, Marketing Director for Imprivata, discusses the engagement and how The Bridge Group helped her company determine the most strategic way to grow and expand their sales organization.
The Challenge: What’s The Next Strategic Step?
As a startup company, we successfully launched our first product in early 2004. Since then, we’ve been continually growing our sales team, to the point where we recognized the potential need for an inside sales organization. Before making that investment, we wanted to understand the potential return on investment (ROI) in terms of how it would impact our sales pipeline.
Around this time, our CEO, Omar Hussain, received a cold call from Trish Bertuzzi, the president of The Bridge Group. As a result of their discussions and because others on our management team had heard of her company’s work, we decided to have them come in to validate our assumption that building an inside sales organization was the best strategic direction for our company’s growth.
Testing the Market
We had a strong sense of what our issues were concerning taking our pipeline development efforts to the next level, but when The Bridge Group came in, they actually helped us gain a better understanding of our challenges and how they could be resolved. The Bridge Group’s Validation Program provided us with real world data in two specific areas that we were interested in. First, we wanted to test two new verticals to find out the extent of their potential. Secondly, we wanted to see what type of results we could realistically expect through targeted outbound cold calling in comparison to following up on incoming leads produced through our marketing campaigns.
As part of the validation engagement, The Bridge Group assessed our current situation and, based on our objectives, they developed a comprehensive inside sales process. Their recommendations for our lead generation and qualification processes included defining and developing ideal customer profiles, a calling methodology, a sales handbook for qualifying leads, baseline metrics, reporting templates, and everything in between.
The Bridge Group also provided us with a hands-on consultant who actually tested the processes through hundreds of hours of outbound calls. This consultant was able to demonstrate and verify, by calling on prospects in our marketplace, how inside sales would fit into our organization. Through her efforts, she was able to evaluate what type of calls were most effective, testing such things as cold calling as a standalone program or calling as a follow-up program to inquiries generated by marketing. She was also able to work within the various vertical markets where we’ve had success and gauge what the reactions of those prospects were to a particular message. Along the way, she continually made modifications, changing scripts, emails, and other tools based on the results she was garnering. The consultant was also able to provide us with insights into the quality of the lists that we rented and purchased.
The Right Answers, The Right Direction
The Bridge Group was able to not only validate the concept of an inside sales organization for us, but they also provided us with a strategy and an infrastructure for the group. The Bridge Group helped us recognize that because of our lengthy sales cycles and sales process (which is heavily channel based), an inside sales organization would be very effective in nurturing prospects until they were fully qualified and ready to be turned over to either the channel or the field sales reps.
Armed with the knowledge of what an inside sales group can do for us, we’re in the process of hiring reps for the group and we’re following the recommendations that The Bridge Group presented us. We’re going to use the processes and the tools that they developed and modify them as we grow and expand our product offerings.
Straightforward, Knowledgeable and Ready to Get the Job Done
The Bridge Group was very easy to work with and they got things done by pushing where they needed to. They did a very thorough job, providing us with weekly updates that kept us informed of the progress. When critical issues that needed addressing arose, we all would take a step back and say, “okay this is what we need to be doing going forward.” The Bridge Group was good at driving through these issues, but they were also flexible enough to make adjustments along the way.
One of the best aspects of working with The Bridge Group was that the consultants are smart, knowledgeable people – they got it quickly and didn’t take up much of my time on an ongoing basis. The other thing that impressed me was that they are straight at you – there was never any hidden agenda, they just want to get the job done and they want you to be happy. They weren’t trying to sell me more every day.
I would definitely recommend them to people who are trying to figure out whether an inside sales organization would work for them. There is no question in my mind that this has been a helpful program – and it is very clear that Imprivata will profit from The Bridge Group’s expertise.