Configit’s New SDR Team Doubles Its Opportunities Quarter-by-Quarter with Growth Genie
Configit is a leading provider of configuration solutions for manufacturing companies, enabling producers of highly configurable products to reduce the time spent moving between product design, sales, and manufacturing by up to 92%. In large part, these performance gains can be attributed to the company’s proprietary Virtual Tabulation® technology and its unique approach.
As Anne Dorthe Gyldenkærne, Configit’s Chief Marketing Officer, explains, “At Configit, we help advanced manufacturers to transform their configuration process into a competitive advantage, utilizing the DNA in their products and the way they configure them to create a single source of truth.”
New SDRs deliver 2X more opportunities quarter-by-quarter
More leads qualified into opportunities than before
Salespeoples’ time freed up for higher priority tasks
Growing demand for the company’s services provides ample proof of the power of its process. In 2021 alone, Configit’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased by 42%, while the number of deals exceeding $1million that it was able to secure increased by 50%.
Yet this growth didn’t occur in a vacuum. In 2021, Gyldenkærne was tasked with expanding Configit’s lead generation machine, including developing a new inside sales unit and all of its processes and playbooks.
Early on in this process, Gyldenkærne recognized the value of bringing on a partner who could act as a second set of eyes while pushing the team to get clear on its messaging and validating its new approach to sales. As she was already connected with the team at Growth Genie, evaluating its offerings as a potential provider was a natural next step.
“For me, success is based on a process, because then you can evaluate what keeps the success going or what you need to amend to get a success going. Growth Genie is very process orientated. We can now monitor how many leads we’ve reached out to, how many have we mailed or phoned, or actually had positive conversations with, so that’s really great.”
Finding the Right Partner to Support Configit’s Sales Team Expansion
Initially, Configit’s leadership expressed concern over whether an external provider like Growth Genie would be able to understand and support the company’s complex enterprise sales processes. “There was a bit of uncertainty on whether Growth Genie understood this very complicated and very niche product we have to be able to actually frame it in the right way,” notes Gyldenkærne.
Further, she faced objections over whether the creation of a sales development rep (SDR) team was the right approach for Configit; however, Gyldenkærne was able to convince the company’s leadership of the importance of determining a prospect’s fit before investing heavily into sales.
“There’s a level before you deep-dive into the match between a company’s pains and the technical solution we’re providing,” she explains. “By getting leads in, we don’t necessarily get an opportunity unless we understand whether it’s a great fit or not a great fit. In our industry, even though we have a very clear profile on who is the best-fit customer, it’s still 3-5% right now that are mature enough to buy our solution.”
Through her efforts, Gyldenkærne was able to successfully shift her team’s perception. “They could see that, if we put the right processes and systems in place, then we can actually do more volume and more easily find the needles in the haystack,” she states.
Building and Launching Configit’s New Sales Development Rep Team
To better identify these needles—and to avoid wasting the time of more senior sales representatives—Configit moved forward with the creation of a new sales development rep team that could identify mature leads and nurture them into opportunities.
“The sales reps didn’t really have time to reach out to all the leads, because our sales process was quite cumbersome, being an enterprise sales process with 10-15 stakeholders involved,” Gyldenkærne says. “We needed to find a way to make sure sales got an idea of which leads were worth following up with and doing opportunities on and which ones weren’t.”
To support the expansion of Configit’s new SDR team, Growth Genie helped with the build-out of its processes, including developing its initial sales playbook and advising Gyldenkærne on the systems and software platforms the team needed to have in place.
Growth Genie provided support “both on the content side—developing the base content and the cadences that we needed—but also on the systems landscape,” according to Gyldenkærne. “Growth Genie helped us actually build up an IT infrastructure that supports the whole process”
Setting the Stage for Successful Long-Term Growth
Thanks to these efforts, Configit’s new SDRs are now doubling the opportunities they deliver on a quarterly basis.
“We really have quite a streamlined process now; we can see that we can scale what we’re doing,” Gyldenkærne explains. “Our sales development reps can reach out to a lot of leads at the same time, identify the most active ones, and then reach out to them before the more inactive ones. That way, we have many more leads qualified into opportunities than we had before, and we’ve been able to put more leads into the sales development rep nurturing flow than we had before.”
Configit has also invested in developing and launching a new sales nurture sequence. “We have a person reaching out on a continual basis to the ones that are not completely mature, to ensure they mature over time,” Gyldenkærne describes. As a result, she continues, “It’s not just marketing trying to nurture these leads, but an individual that’s reaching out and who has actually researched what their current issues and pains are.”
“For me, success is based on a process, because then you can evaluate what keeps the success going or what you need to amend to get a success going,” she explains. “Growth Genie is very process orientated. We can now monitor how many leads we’ve reached out to, how many have we mailed or phoned, or actually had positive conversations with, so that’s really great.”
Going forward, the systems and processes developed by Growth Genie will enable Configit to scale its new sales processes across different regions, adapting them as needed to varying cultural requirements. “The teamwork was really good,” Gyldenkærne concludes. “It’s really created a good foundation for us to continuously develop the way we’re approaching the SDR field.”
About Configit
Configit is a leading provider of configuration solutions for manufacturing companies, helping advanced manufacturers to transform their configuration process into a competitive advantage by utilizing the DNA in their products to create a single source of truth.
About Growth Genie
Growth Genie is a B2B sales training consultancy that enables companies to increase the number of outbound sales meetings they book through custom sales playbooks, sales cadence development, and sales coaching.