Segment increases qualified opportunities by 92% with Outreach
Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that helps you collect, clean, and control your customer data. It should come as no surprise, then, that their sales organization is also obsessed with data.
Getting consistent by harnessing data
When Segment’s sales team needed to improve the conversion rates of their prospects into customers, they turned to Outreach. With deeper insight into their sales activity and customer engagement, Segment is able to hone their messaging, streamline their sales cycle, and empower their reps to grow their careers.
How inconsistent messaging and hundreds of sequences put the pipeline at risk
Before using Outreach, Segment was suffering from a classic case of messaging inconsistency.
“One of the things that scared me the most about the current state of our sales organization when I joined was there was no consistency of message. How we were showing up to the market was all over the place,” said Lesley Young, VP of Global Sales at Segment.
Tackling this inconsistency was one of the first items of business for Lesley when she joined Segment. Why? Because you can’t measure the impact of your messaging, or identify what works and what doesn’t, without consistency. Beyond that, it created confusion for prospective buyers around what Segment had to offer them.
That wasn’t Lesley’s only challenge, though. She also found that while her sales team was incredible at capturing leads, they were less successful at converting them into customers. When she tried to dive into the data to diagnose the problem, she found yet another case of inconsistency.
“When I arrived at Segment, we had something like 700 different cadences and sequences. Every account executive and every SDR had a different set,” Lesley said.
The noise in Segment’s sales activity data made it impossible for Lesley — and the rest of her team — to interpret signals from their buyers. That meant they ran the risk of pipeline leakage and low conversion.
What Segment needed was a set of repeatable sequences with purposeful, intentional, and standardized messaging. Outreach would allow them to do just that.
Segment sees a 92% increase in qualified opportunities by developing data-driven messaging
With Outreach, Segment was able to start methodically testing messaging to see what resonated most with their buyers. From there, they could iterate over time and refine their messaging in order to increase conversion.
“I loved this concept of having a hypothesis because you have access to the information. For me, one of the most powerful things we can do is take the signals, as I call them, and incorporate them into the messaging that we might be using with Outreach...to increase our conversion rate...and that has absolutely happened with us.”
Before, Segment had a 2% conversion rate on their emails because, as Lesley puts it, they “didn’t have a point of view.” Today, Segment sales reps are able to put leads through a predetermined sequence that nurtures them with targeted messaging before they even get on a call. By the time they engage — over phone, video call, or in person — the customer already has a clear understanding of what Segment is, and what the company can do for them.
The benefit here is three-fold. Firstly, it increases the likelihood that a prospect will move forward in the sales cycle. Segment has seen a 92% increase in qualified opportunities since improving the consistency of their messaging.
“We have gotten very consistent about how we speak about what we do, and that I think, reduces all the confusion. It increases your knowledge in the marketplace...across the company the message is the same.”
Secondly, it’s an enormous efficiency gain for the Segment team. Reps now work from a set of three to four standardized sequences per buyer persona, each of which contain proven, on-brand snippets for email communication. And with less noise in the cycle, reps can now hear signals more clearly, allowing them to pinpoint exactly where to intervene with which customers. They no longer spend their time on leads that haven’t responded to messaging with the right signals.
Lastly, by tracking all of this sales activity within one platform in Outreach, the Segment team could continuously improve their messaging, using insights to determine what to lean into and what to move away from.
Transforming the roles of sales leader and seller
Lesley sees another major benefit of bringing data-driven technology into her sales organization: it’s transforming the role of the sales leader and empowering her reps to grow into new roles.
“Outreach has created a job as a sales leader that is: you lead with data, you coach with data, and you use data to get the leading indicators to understand the health of your business.”
As Segment prepares for their second year using Outreach, Lesley hopes to promote at least 30% of their sales reps. They’ll also keep a close eye on customer retention.
“At the end of the day, it’s about the customers and whether they get the value from what we’re doing. I mean, that’s why we get up in the morning. That’s why we go through these processes,” she said.
