The challenge
The company's revenue growth had stalled as it moved toward enterprise sales. Premium support was not consistently sold as a paid service: it was either left out of the deal or included for free. The customer support team, run as a cost center, was under pressure to cut costs.
The approach
As part of a larger transformation of the company's products, packaging and pricing, Verity focused on raising the share of product deals that included paid premium support.
- Agreed how to count paid support sales. Support was not always on the same order form as the product, and discounts landed on different line items from one deal to the next. Verity aligned the key stakeholders on a common definition: only paid premium support counted, and it matched a product sale when sold the same day or up to 31 days later.
- Built reporting around the agreed rules. In Nockpoint, Verity joined Salesforce, the product database and the product definition tables, applied the matching rules, and built the data transformations behind the analysis.
- Gave each team a consistent view. Dashboards for executives, go-to-market and sales operations, all on the same measure and updated daily.
- Updated sales training and materials. Verity revised the sales training materials and the resources in the sales support portal.
- Used deal reviews to refine the approach. Reviews of deals with and without support shaped further changes to the sales materials and the reporting.
The results
- New business: won deals with paid premium support rose from 18% in Q1 to a peak of 92% in Q3, and stood at 79% in Q4 to date.
- Upgrades: won upgrade deals with paid support doubled, from 21% in Q1 to 42% in Q4 to date.
- Consistent measurement: executives, go-to-market and sales operations used one agreed measure of paid support sales.