Helping aNewSpring embrace signal-based selling to accelerate pipeline velocity

More than just your run-of-the-mill LMS

If you are a large-scale training provider or designing learning products, you need aNewSpring. This platform allows you to turn training into complete learning journeys. You can also effortlessly combine online and offline learning activities.

aNewSpring’s learning management system (LMS) quickly expands beyond the boundaries of a typical LMS. That’s why they call their software a 'learning journey platform' instead. Add to that the very active community of learning pioneers created by aNewSpring, and you have a golden formula for training your organization. 

But even with such a great value proposition, it’s not guaranteed that the marketing efforts will deliver the right results. 

In this case study, we’ll show you how we helped aNewSpring embrace signal-based selling. 

We’ll also explore how our IP Reveal, LinkedIn Ads DBA, Video Expertise Content and Fundamental Case Studies playbooks accelerated sales cycles and increased win rates. But first, some fundamental work had to be done.

The old lead gen and outbound combination was no longer sustainable

In the case of aNewSpring, it turned out that their intended growth was no longer compatible with their outdated marketing strategy, which was completely focused on lead generation. Simply collecting contact details and forwarding them to Sales, regardless of whether they fit the ICP, was not yielding high quality leads.

For the scale-up phase aNewSpring is in, the ambitions were much higher. That’s why their Founder reached out to Unmuted for support in the transition to a more modern B2B marketing strategy.

“I look at marketing, sales and doing business in general a little differently than most people. I have a different mindset, and I see that exact mindset at Unmuted.” – Martèn de Prez, CEO and Founder

Switching to demand gen and signal-based selling

To ensure that there was a solid, modern go-to-market (GTM) strategy in place and that sales and marketing were on the same page, we developed a strategic plan. The transition to demand generation and signal-based selling was central to this.

Unlike marketing strategies that rely solely on lead generation, taking a demand generation approach makes you consider: how much demand is there for my product in the current market? How do I best capture that demand? And how can I actively create more demand for my product?

And as for signal-based selling, it’s a sales strategy where you pre-determine a set of signals that indicate a high purchase intent. You then link these signals to specific actions by your sales department (more about that later).  

“We see that Unmuted is truly a pioneer and that they help us respond to major marketing trends.” — Famke Vromans, Campaign Marketer

Building a strong GTM team

aNewSpring also indicated that they wanted to bring their marketing and sales departments together to form a cross-functional GTM team. This team would be responsible for achieving pipeline metrics that directly contribute to revenue growth. That brought us to the next challenge.

Hubspot Data Standardization

In order to track the right metrics and ensure that Sales and Marketing could stay on the same page, aNewSpring’s Hubspot data needed to be standardized. This created a common understanding of how deals were created, how they moved through the pipeline, and how these deals were closed.

It was especially important to establish the correct names and definitions for deal lifecycle stages and thus create a single source of truth (SSOT). This is how the first step towards better alignment between Sales and Marketing was taken.

Pipeline Velocity Dashboard

We then used the new Hubspot setup to build a dashboard that gave us a better overview of our performance. Within this model, we identified 4 key metrics that contribute to revenue growth:

• Total number of deals
• Deal size
• Sales cycle length
• Win rate

Improvements to any of these metrics had a direct impact on revenue overall, which is why it was absolutely necessary to track them in our Pipeline Velocity Dashboard.

Explain ABM

To influence these metrics, you need to expose your target audience to relevant marketing touchpoints. But before you do that, you need to figure out which companies and individuals you actually want to reach. 

At Unmuted, we are strong believers of using ABM in your marketing strategy i.e. focusing your marketing efforts on a defined list of target accounts. 

For example, you can easily show LinkedIn ads to the right people within a company that is on your list of target accounts. This means you can put your brand name and proposition directly in front of your target group. 

Together with aNewSpring, we created a high-quality, targeted list of approximately 400 accounts to start with. 

Playbooks and best practices

Now that the foundation of our GTM machine was in place, it was time to deploy some of our proven playbooks. The goal of these playbooks is to create more touchpoints with the target accounts and monitor positive signals that the Sales team can act on.   

IP Reveal

First, it’s important to know which companies are already checking out the aNewSpring website and what they do there. By installing the IP reveal tool Leadinfo, we could provide the Sales team with the intent data they need to prioritize their outreach.

Outreach to a company that is already familiar with aNewSpring helps to reduce the sales cycle length and increase win rate metrics. In addition, aNewSpring can also see directly whether their ABM campaigns are paying off, because they can see target accounts among their website visitors. 

LinkedIn Ads DBA

We used the LinkedIn Ads DBA (Demand - Brand - Acquisition) playbook to tell the story of aNewSpring directly to their potential customers. We did this by providing the target account list with a high volume of relevant ads.

Think of a mix of ads that play on the pain points and challenges of the target group, highlight commercial opportunities, share the vision of aNewSpring and share social proof. In addition, we added ads that make it clear how easy it is to book a demo.

Video Expertise Content

In addition to the paid LinkedIn ads, we also wanted to create organic marketing touchpoints. We recorded a series of videos with internal aNewSpring experts that were shared organically from each expert’s own LinkedIn profile. These posts then become potential Thought Leader Ads to add to our LinkedIn ad campaigns.

By empowering aNewSpring employees to share high-quality video posts, showing SDRs how to connect with the right decision makers, and sharing internal instructions on how to respond and comment on each other's posts, the entire aNewSpring team created more organic touchpoints with the right people.  

Fundamental Case Studies

Every serious marketing machine is fueled by high-quality, targeted content. For aNewSpring, we started interviewing satisfied customers such as the Academy for Legislation to create valuable customer stories, both in Dutch and English. 

Customer stories are an important form of social proof that can be used by Sales in their outreach, and also by other teams. These case studies can also be re-purposed to create persuasive LinkedIn ads and other content.

“No vague language, no focus on empty, short-term metrics. Really wanting to understand and help your target group, and to market that with an honest, clear message. That is where we and Unmuted find each other.” – Martèn de Prez, CEO and Founder

Communicating the right signals to sales

With a solid marketing foundation and a healthy volume of touchpoints with decision makers at target accounts, we were almost there. Now we just had to make sure the right signals reached sales.   

Defining signals and actions 

We defined a number of valuable signals and gave Sales a number of corresponding actions, so that SDRs could start selling in a targeted manner, i.e. signal-based selling. This strategy ensures that the outreach of SDRs is always relevant. In addition, we built the marketing infrastructure that is needed to capture these signals.

Processes to synchronize CRM data with engagement data

This infrastructure looks like this: with Leadinfo we map companies that make relevant visits to the website. Think of long website sessions in which, for example, the pricing page is also visited. 

This information is then forwarded to Hubspot and a notification is sent to a Slack channel for aNewSpring SDRs, so they know exactly which companies are reading customer cases or visiting the pricing page.

In addition, we also monitor engagement data in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. When there are companies that show an above-average amount of engagement with aNewSpring ads, Sales is notified.

What’s next?

Signal-based selling is now fully embraced within aNewSpring. And although everything has been running smoothly so far, there’s always room for improvement. For example, we want to automate even more. 

We also plan to deploy our Pipeline Acceleration playbook, which will expose ads to even more people within the organization of an active deal, helping to further reduce sales cycle length. 

And we want to go upmarket to make sure that the average deal size goes up as well. All of this can of course be tracked in aNewSpring’s Pipeline Velocity Dashboard. 

This dashboard already shows that since our collaboration started, there has been a strong upward trend in deal size and a strong downward trend in sales cycle length.

Over three quarters, the average deal size of qualified deals grew by more than 26%, while the number of SQLs also rose by 22%. At the same time, the sales cycle became nearly three weeks shorter, dropping from 124 days to 104 days on average.

To calculate these numbers, we looked at the LTM (last twelve months) data in the first and last measured quarters to rule out seasonal variation.

Plus, win rates also went up a bit, by about 4%. A huge success in our opinion!