A joint study by DiscoverOrg and Smart Selling Tools of 200 sales and marketing organizations found that high growth companies with at least 40% growth over the past three years are 2.5 times more likely to have adopted an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. Furthermore high growth companies are twice as likely to have successful cold calling programs and are more likely to have a dedicated outbound prospecting team. High growth firms are also more likely to hire sales reps based upon their “tech-savvy” than experience and have adopted twice as many sales technologies than their slower growth brethren. With respect to MarTech, high-growth companies have adopted 24% more marketing solutions.
The study also found that fast growth companies provide at least three hours of coaching or training per week to their sales teams. At slower growth companies, training appeared to have less of an effect. According to the report, “While an increase in training hours correlated with a rise in growth rates for the high growth group, it did not with low growth companies. This suggests that training may not in of itself cause growth, but it is critical in sustaining it. Fast growing organizations need to train constantly to maintain momentum and enable teams to perform at a high level. Companies that err on the side of less training and coaching do not appear to set their teams up for the same level of success.”
“The findings clearly demonstrate that achieving fast growth is not as simple as having a great product and hiring experienced sales reps. Sales and marketing teams that are true revenue-generating engines take risks and do the hard things – like cold calling, focusing on data quality, and heavily aligning sales and marketing teams across account-based strategies.”
– DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck
“Technology proliferation in the sales and marketing industry is both a challenge and an opportunity,” added Nancy Nardin, CEO of Smart Selling Tools. “The fastest growing companies are investing in technologies that make their sales and marketing teams more productive and more insightful, while recognizing it is equally as important to have highly trained team members who know how to leverage that technology to its fullest power.”
The primary inhibitor of even faster growth at high growth companies was data quality issues concerning accounts and contacts.
The top technology available to sales reps were CRM (52%) and LinkedIn (free LinkedIn was deployed at 45% , premium LinkedIn at 33%, and Sales Navigator at 27% of sales teams). Pipeline and Opportunity Management software was third at 42%. Rounding out the top five were compensation/commission software and sales intelligence, both with a 38% deployment rate. Surprisingly, 37% of sales teams still employ account and contact data providers / list providers. As sales intelligence vendors support list building along with sales intelligence (and some also data hygiene), there are likely ongoing opportunities to move sales teams up the value chain from list purchases.
Predictive analytics / predictive intelligence placed 36th out of 37 technologies with only a 5% deployment rate. As Gartner estimated the total global market for predictive analytics technology to be between $100 and $150 million, this low penetration rate should not be overly surprising.
The study, conducted in November, used 40% growth between 2013 and 2016 (estimated) as the high growth cutoff as it is represents the recent growth floor for Inc. 5000 membership. Of the 200 firms studied, 17% fell into the high-growth category, 69% fell into the low-growth category (1-39%), 13% had flat revenue, and 1% had declining revenues. The survey was over weighted to technology companies with software, IT Services and Telco as the top three industries surveyed. 82% of the firms were B2B and 85% were headquartered in the US.