1. How has the sales process changed in a time of remote B2B selling?
Enterprise sales cycles used to span 6-18+ months. With COVID-19 imposed travel restrictions, the situation is much worse.
For Crayon, we’ve noticed the 3 key changes in the remote B2B selling era.
- Our buyer’s priorities have changed. They are solving a different set of problems. We have thus changed how we articulate our product’s value proposition to convey how maya.ai helps solve this different set of problems.
- Their budgets have reduced. The same problems remain (if not, worsened) but the budgets have shrunk. In the pre-COVID world, we pushed for paid pilots and proof-of-concepts. In the new remote selling era, we’ve noticed that they are now more open to pilots that can deliver results.
- Our prospects are doing more self-discovery and research before getting in touch with our salesperson. To this end, we have been working on digitizing most of our sales and marketing assets to facilitate self-discovery for our prospects.
2. What is the biggest change that your sales enablement team (GTM: demand generation, marketing and sales engineering) has undergone in the last 6 months?
Our sales enablement function has evolved across 3 dimension to include more research, collaboration and digitization of materials.
As I had mentioned earlier, prospects are now into self-discovery. So we have been doing more research on these prospects to tailor our content to suit their needs. Our research efforts have been in 4 areas:
- the markets that we operate in: macroeconomic indicators, financial access metrics, mobile banking usage, level of spends, etc.
- the impact of COVID-19 on consumer preferences across categories in these markets,
- the relevance of digital assets of the banks in these markets,
- the objectives and pain points of prospects from publicly available information
We have also been improving on how we collaborate to build on each other’s strengths. In the past, both marketing and demand generation would both create content and share them on different platforms. We have now streamlined efforts that plays to the strengths of each sub team, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Sales Engineering provides content. Marketing creates assets, and demand generation shares it with the right audiences to create engagement with this content.
Lastly, we have also changed how we distribute the assets that we create. Primarily, we worked on a couple of digitization initiatives. We created an online seller portal that houses all the templates and research. This was targeted at an internal audience – our own salespeople. For external audiences, we created customer portals that showcased our product capabilities and case studies. A huge benefit of such portals is the analytics, which enables us to understand how prospects are engaging with our content.
3. In your opinion, what makes a Crayon, a Crayon?
The culture at Crayon is vibrant like the colors in the Crayon box. Each employee brings with him/her different skills. When these skills are combined in different proportions across initiatives, unique pieces of art come to life, just like our products.
Across teams, people get things done fast – one MVP at a time. This has allowed us to ship3 new products in the last 6 months. The pace of progress is infectious.
Thanks to an open culture, which enables a healthy sharing of ideas and believes in constructive candor, the number of iterations required are far lesser for a product, to go from MVP1 to Release.
Employees seamlessly take on different roles, based on the need of the hour so that the mission can takes precedence over hierarchy.
When you start working with a team of talented, smart, dynamic, passionate, energetic, driven individuals, your learning increases exponentially.
Along with other Crayons in the box, you get to paint your own vibrant canvas. To me, living by Crayon’s values, especially ‘The Mission is the boss’, makes a Crayon.
