Introducing RevvedUp.ai

You’d have to be living under a rock to not be aware of how tough it is in revenue teams right now - particularly if you’re working at a venture backed startup (or selling to one).

But just in case you need a sobering reminder, here are a few stats that highlight the state of play right now.

Pipeline is harder to build

• SDRs now drive just 18% of pipeline down from 40% in 2022 - Insight Partners
• 73% of SDRs missed quota in '22 - Benchmark Research Partners
• Pipeline values are down 50-100% YoY - Ebsta
• The conversion rate from MQL to SQL is just 13% - Klipfolio

Deals are harder to close

• Win rates have decreased to 17-20% - Winning by Design
• Startups have seen a 24% increase in sales cycle, with the biggest increases in enterprise deals, which are 36% longer - Tomas Tunguz
• Average deal value reduced -32% YoY and sales cycles lengthened (+32% YoY) - Ebsta

Sales attainment is plummeting

• 42% of companies saw a decrease in quota attainment in 2022 - Everstage & RevOps Co-op
• Average quota attainment is just 40% - RepVue
• 23% of reps are responsible for contributing more than 83% of revenue - Ebsta

As a coach, consultant and fractional executive I’ve worked hard to help dozens of startups buck these trends…but I wanted to go further and support hundreds (and then thousands) of commercial teams to re-engage buyers and get back to winning ways!

Solutions

Before committing to throwing all of our time and energy into building a software business to help solve these challenges, we spent months speaking to hundreds of operators in GTM teams; even more time reflecting on my own success and lessons learned in running revenue teams; and looking at best practices amongst today’s standout winners.

Overall, we distilled the best approaches to four areas of excellence, and then looked at the blockers that most company’s face when trying to operationalise any of them.

Account Based Marketing

One common thread we found is that to really engage the highest value prospects, you need to approach them holistically, appealing to multiple stakeholders across multiple touch points and channels.

This means deeply personalising outreach across all touch points, from landing pages to emails, LinkedIn voice notes to video prospecting.

So whilst it’s highly effective, it’s expensive and hard to scale. Which puts the brakes on the approach in most organisations, and restricts it only to the absolutely highest value accounts.

Balancing Consistency with Buyer-Centricity

Next, we believe that strong brands win over time, helping to cut through the noise and establish trust and credibility that increases conversion and win rates.

Not only that, but for teams looking for repeatable scalability, they emphasise the importance of consistency in their sales approach, applying clear qualification frameworks and best-practices in templating follow-ups and prospect interactions.

However, it’s never been more important to be buyer-centric, tailoring your messaging and positioning to their needs; adjusting language to marry up to their communication style; and proving you’ve done the research to earn their attention.

The very best sales and marketing teams are able to subtly balance these two competing demands. But very few are able to manage it - and certainly not without investing tremendous time and effort into it.

Sales & marketing alignment

This is a perennial headache for most GTM teams, but those who get it right just execute so much better and faster.

Running shared campaigns, aligning to the same metrics, making it easy for sales to utilise marketing’s work, and for marketing to quickly get market feedback from sales…these are some of the simple - yet surprisingly difficult to achieve - ways to get teams rowing in the same direction.

However siloed tooling is a major blocker in supporting this kind of collaboration.

Support and enablement for reps

There is also a distinct advantage seen in those scaleups that genuinely invest in support and enabling their reps.

Consistently providing coaching, training and feedback. Offering tools to remove manual work that pulls them away from core selling activities. Educating them on the market and how to add value to each buyer interaction.

Unfortunately the commitment to doing this all the time, across every rep, is resource intensive and too easy to deprioritise, leaving most reps to 'figure it out as they go', once their initial onboarding is complete.

Existing tooling

As we looked across the market, we could see an explosion of new tools and the identity crisis of many incumbents trying to encroach on one another’s territory…but we couldn’t find any that seemed to actually offer a technical solution to the winning approaches outlined above.

Most existing tools in the sales and marketing stack were built in the ‘growth at all costs’ times, and so the focus on efficient growth in 2024 requires fresh thinking.

There are three main distinctions between the plethora of other tools and how RevvedUp is aiming to solve these root cause problems.

They are:

Quantity over Quality

In short, most tools looking to help build more pipeline remain fundamentally rooted in the belief that ‘more is more’ and focus on how they can enable even more mass-outreach, more efficiently.

We believe that this just continues to burn buyer-relationships. Instead, the emphasis has to be on quality - creativity, strong brand, deep personalisation, super relevant positioning and messaging - in order to win the attention of prospects.

Sales v Marketing Silos

Pretty much every tool can be cleaved into two camps - sales tech and martech - which means different teams and budgets operate them; you have to shift prospects from one tooling to the next; insights and data sets are siloed (or require complex integrations and reporting to marry them up).

This just exacerbates the challenges of aligning these teams. Instead you need a platform that thinks about a unified buyer experience, alongside the different executional needs - but shared objectives - of sales and marketing teams.

Pre and Post AI launches

Every wave of major market disruption tends to up-end existing incumbents. They always try to retrofit their existing tooling with the latest thing (websites, mobile apps, cloud access etc.), but fundamentally their core use cases, infrastructure, UX and business models make it hard for them to be as good in a new era, as those new entrants who are native in the new technology.

In this case, AI is making those waves, and we believe that tools build with AI at their core will be in a better position to leverage the power of this technology than those trying to squeeze it into their existing product suite.

RevvedUp

This is why RevvedUp was born.

Our mission is to support sales and marketing teams in achieving sustainable success through engaging buyers with more valuable experiences.

To achieve this, we’ve built an AI-powered Account Based Marketing solution for creating personalised prospecting interactions at scale, which can be used by both sales and marketing to engage buyers at every stage of the buying journey.

We believe we’re uniquely positioned to offer:

• Beautiful, creative, deeply personalised and perfectly positioned ABM campaigns at scale
• The right balance of applied consistency in sales approach, brand integrity and messaging…whilst offering genuinely tailored experiences for buyers
• An integrated tool that spans the buyer journey…uniting sales and marketing
• AI-powered prospect research & insights, always on coaching, and automations that empower and support reps to enhance their productivity and confidence at the same time

If that sounds like the kind of solution you’d like to have in your organisation as you strive for repeatable, predictable and scalable efficient growth…we’d love to demonstrate how we can help.