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How a Visionary Salesloft Champion Triggered a Global Transformation Inside HBX Group
Published:
Salesloft’s value realization plan gave an HBX Group innovator the opportunity to spark a global organizational transformation.
Story Snapshot
- HBX Group is on a journey to transform their business and the way they sell. Aggressive goals were set by their leadership from increased revenues to improved sales processes.
- Mark Antipof, Chief Growth Officer at HBX Group, emerged as the true transformation champion. With multiple products across hotels, technology, services, and much more – Mark knew sales had to move from selling individual products in a disconnected experience to selling a connected, end-to-end value proposition.
- Mark engaged Salesloft to perform an end-to-end business value assessment, which laid out defined, manageable steps needed to fulfill HBX Group’s ambitious revenue growth mission.
- HBX Group signed with Salesloft initially in Q3 with a pilot. During the pilot, Mark and Salesloft worked to bring other executive committee decision-makers into the discussions.
- Following the resounding, demonstrable success of the Salesloft pilot, HBX Group expanded their investment significantly in Q4 and deployed Salesloft across their entire revenue org, going from 20 licenses to 500 licenses. The power and efficiencies that Salesloft brings to the HBX Group sales process will help the company hit their goals and ambitions.
When it comes to changing the status quo in an organization’s sales tech stack, it’s more challenging than ever to be an innovator, even if everyone agrees that something new is needed. According to Gartner, the average B2B buyer journey today involves 11-20 stakeholders — a huge increase from the typical five people it took a decade ago.1 With so many competing ideas, opinions, and priorities, it can feel almost impossible for a single believer to persuade an unwieldy committee with many decision makers and drive massive organizational change — unless that champion has Salesloft on their side.
A Universal Challenge: Bigger B2B Buying Committees for Sales Tech Stacks
HBX Group (formerly Hotelbeds), a leading B2B Travel Tech company, was on a mission to significantly increase revenue by transforming their business from point solutions to a true platform.
Barry Porter, HBX Group Director of Business Development for APAC and NA, laid out the existing sales situation the company had. “Previously, our salespeople sold within their swim lane, which is perfectly right and reasonable,” he reveals. “But there's a challenge you have when you try to upsell and cross-sell. The idea was to get us, even internally, thinking about this huge capacity we have to impact a customer’s business.”
The question was, how would they get there? An executive committee knew that change was needed, but with diverse key priorities from five different parts of the organization — acquisitions, strategic and key account managers, sourcing, marketing, and sales leaders — finding a single solution that met everyone’s needs seemed impossible. Enter: Mark Antipof, Chief Growth Officer at HBX Group.
Because we have five different regions who all had their own setups, when I first came in and asked for a pipeline, I got different spreadsheets with different tables and different numbers from multiple people. There was no way I could have done anything with it.
That’s when Mark decided to step up to the plate to drive the transformation business-wide.
A Clear Plan for Sales and Revenue Success
The vision was clear: the HBX Group team urgently needed to increase their salespeople’s ability to both win new clients and grow existing ones. Mark engaged Salesloft’s Value Engineering team to understand how Salesloft could help. Together, they performed a full, end-to-end business value assessment and selected four areas of focus with three key goals that would empower Salesloft to have the greatest impact on HBX Group revenue.
From there, Salesloft outlined what challenges would need to be resolved for HBX Group to achieve their strategic aims of expanding, elevating, and scaling. Salesloft’s value engineering team carefully mapped these challenges to how each part of the Salesloft platform could help. Finally, the Salesloft team created a projected outlook for HBX Group’s future improved state and resulting benefits if the current challenges were resolved.
It didn’t stop there. Mark and the Salesloft team then developed a series of strategies that would be actionable with a Salesloft deployment, from persona-based sourcing, acquisition, and account management plays to sales play launches and what the ultimate maturity model should look like for HBX Group.
Specific Sales Tech Solutions
Salesloft’s solutions for HBX Group centered on three key areas:
- Pipeline creation and coverage: HBX Group wanted to move away from demand fulfillment to demand creation, escaping the common 10% YOY trap.
- Team collaboration and performance: HBX Group knew they needed to give their sellers the confidence to take the power of their whole portfolio to market, helping them leave their comfort zone when they were used to selling products piecemeal.
- Technology and workflow optimization: HBX Group knew that to sell their full suite, their revenue team needed to have a single view of their pipeline and standardized, consolidated reporting that allowed them to more effectively manage the business.
HBX Group chose to start with a small investment for Q3, using the two teams that the Salesloft internal champion at HBX Group oversaw. The bigger play, however, was when Mark engaged four members of the executive committee who led the remaining teams and ran workshops to bring them on board in the pilot as well. By doing this, the executive members could witness firsthand that Salesloft was able to drive momentum and deliver on promises. Seeing that the plays in the business value assessment were real and actionable gave the HBX Group executive committee the confidence needed to buy into the overall program on a much larger scale.
We basically used the three-month period to bring all the strategies from the business value assessment to life. It gave them (the HBX Group executive committee) enough confidence that they could make that change in their business – believing that they could take action and make it all real.
Real Revenue Results, Expanded Implementation
By earning the executive committee’s trust through proof of a successful pilot, Mark and team were quickly able to rally the organization to truly transform and scale Salesloft.
The very next quarter, the HBX Group executive committee increased their number of Salesloft licenses from 20 users to 500 users. The quick, decisive choice to scale was driven by the trust created in the way Salesloft was able to help HBX Group execute a specific plan cleanly and deliver significant results to the organization.
Andrew Boocock, HBX Group Head of Sales for APAC, is excited about the dramatic changes that Salesloft has helped bring about.
Prior to Salesloft, the ability to track more effectively how we're targeting new clients and the progress we're making, where the roadblocks are, who's talking to whom – these things were literally managed in an Excel file and it was just impossible keeping track of it. Now we have reporting, standardized processes across business-as-usual account management and acquisition, and management of not only front-line teams, but also of regions to get clear visibility of where we are today.
When it comes to driving successful selling change, all it takes is one believer — with Salesloft by their side. If you are a champion who wants to make a big impact, contact us today to learn how our team can help you drive global transformation and value at your organization.