Background
CIVIX delivers software and services to transform the public sector -- including elections, ethics, business services, grants, disaster recovery, and more. With a team of nearly 400 staff across North America, CIVIX is regularly featured on the GovTech 100 list and has clients in 26 states.
Clients rely on CIVIX as a trusted partner to extend their teams’ limited resources; using innovation and expertise to free them up to focus on the big picture of serving their specific constituents.
Challenges
Prior to working with SEG, CIVIX only had two territory sales reps for State Government business unit and less than 1000 contacts in the CRM contact database. They needed help building out their sales enablement operation to create tighter alignment between Sales & Marketing, a sales process for email campaigns, and creating a more robust pipeline.
On top of this, the company was recently rebranded after 6-7 acquisitions with the new name: CIVIX. CIVIX is a 2 year old company that was challenged with new branding for the company. For the previous companies If you Googled the name, it was non-existent. The primary method to win new business at that time was through the competitive Request for Proposal (RFP) process, which relied on a standardized sales operations model.
First thing CIVIX wanted to tackle: Add 10,000 contacts into the contact database so their sales leaders could begin to establish strategic market relationships within the geographic territories of the company.
Second: Establish a sales process that included Business Development Representatives (BDRs) to help build the top of the funnel to create more “at bats” at the State and Local level.
Third: Hire Inside Sales Reps/Business Development Reps to generate new pipeline and realign into 3 Sales Territories including adding 2 new Territory Sales Executives.
Solutions
SEG Partner and Consultant, Jennifer Hogberg, was hired to create a sales enablement process. This included a sales playbook, competitor battle cards, and marketing campaigns with sales follow up and adherence to the right Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in which they could track and manage progress.
Next, CIVIX tasked SEG with the responsibility of recruiting 2 or 3 new BDRs. Here’s how President Mike Wons described the hiring process:
“It’s a fantastic process. SEG gets us and understands it. It was very helpful to be able to say here’s the type of profile of the individual we’re looking at and in the matter of a week to 10 days I had a series of resumes to review and look at. I had the chance to interview five highly qualified candidates very quickly. The SEG team did such a good time vetting, I had 5 candidates. I wanted all five. It was really well done.”
With the outsourced BDR team model, CIVIX also turned to SEG to provide training and ongoing management of the new BDRs.
“They [the BDRs] had email addresses for CIVIX, all the tools, operated as part of the team, participated in standup calls. There was no view that they were different or separate, it was complete integration. It was seamless in helping us get started.”
Outcomes
First things first, SEG populated the contact database. Loaded in thousands of the SLG decision makers. CIVIX hired two high quality candidates for SLG that were sourced from SEG. This process all-in-all took a matter of weeks.
SEG provided the training for the BDRs and had the new hires “making a difference from the day they came in.” With high energy and focus, the BDRs were helping out in the first 10 days.
“They had no fear to take tasks to help the sales executives,” Mike Wons said.
The BDRs aren’t a short-term solution either creating opportunities then ending their assignment. CIVIX is building the bench for their future sales closers and Account Managers.
“They’re the farm team,” Wons said. “That’s where we start and build the strength for the team moving forward.”
Some of the positive outcomes realized by working with SEG includes:
- Creating opportunities to get into the sales pipeline.
- Talking to more people today than ever before. Contact database went from 0 to more than 8,000.
- Direct influence on position wins in City of Minneapolis for Campaign Finance Reform and Miami Dade County for their Ethics platform.
- More than $10 million in opportunities as a result of our BDR efforts. Relatively short period of time.
These things all started with our SEG BDRs.
“I’ve always needed to have an ‘SEG’ in my career toolkit, but I was never able to find someone that I could actually trust. The SEG relationship was one that clicked, and it clicked because of the team engagement and the seamless execution, professionalism, and tools SEG brought forward. It has been a fantastic relationship.”