"Cut your sales cycle by 30%, How Certificial was able to dominate and stay ahead of their market"

See how Certificial was able to identify hidden stakeholders and bring them into the buying committee 30 days earlier than normal.

Don’t want to read the whole shpiel? No problem, here’s the summary:

The Challenge:

Complex Deal Cycle Management:
Difficulty in tracking who was entering the deal cycle, leading to uncertainties in stakeholder engagement.
Inefficient Information Distribution:
Stakeholders lacked immediate access to essential materials and information, causing delays and confusion.
Lack of Early Stakeholder Identification:
Previously, stakeholders were often involved earlier than realized, causing missed opportunities for early engagement.
Champion Turnover Impact:
A change in key champions typically signaled trouble, potentially derailing large enterprise deals.
Seamless Transition between Teams:
Frustration in customer success processes, where customers had to repeat their priorities and information when handed off from sales to customer success management.
Unclear Buyer Journey:
Buyers often felt lost in the sales cycle, lacking clear visibility of the process and next steps.

The solution:

Aligned’s platform brought transformative changes for Certificial:

Enhanced Analytics for Stakeholder Identification:
Aligned’s analytics provided clarity on who was entering the deal cycle and their levels of engagement.
Immediate Access to Relevant Information:
Aligned ensured that all necessary materials and challenges were available to stakeholders from the first interaction.
Early Insight into Stakeholder Engagement:
Gained an understanding of stakeholder involvement well ahead of formal introductions, allowing for proactive engagement strategies.
Effective Management of Champion Turnover:
Enabled quick onboarding and catching up of new champions, maintaining momentum in ongoing deals.
Streamlined Transitions to Customer Success:
Aligned facilitated a smooth transition from sales to customer success, preserving the context and reducing customer frustration.
Clear Visibility and Planning for Buyers:
Provided buyers with a clear understanding of their position in the sales cycle and future steps, enhancing their engagement and satisfaction.
Reduced Sales Cycle Duration:
The average sales cycle was shortened significantly, leading to faster deal closures and improved efficiency.
Personalized Engagement with Customers:
Enabled sales reps to provide tailored, contextual interactions with customers, enhancing the overall buying experience.
Improved Collaboration in Sales Process:
Fostered a more collaborative and engaging sales experience for both sales reps and buyers, moving away from a transactional approach.

Who is Certifical?

Developer of insurance verification and monitoring platform designed to simplify the supplier management and certificate issuance processes. The company’s platform provides immediate information, as well as a record of the entire history of a business relationship, access to real-time information sharing, and compliance alerts, enabling companies to curtail the risk of fraud, misinformation, inadequate coverage, and lapses or reductions in coverage.

Who was singing our praises?

Austin Myers, Certificial’s VP of Revenue, shares his journey of enhancing sales effectiveness with Aligned’s tools since taking on his role.

Got some time and want to go in-depth? Glad all this work wasn’t for nothing. Read on!

Addressing Key Challenges with Aligned's Solutions

Identifying Deal Cycle Participants:
We’ve gained a deeper understanding of who is entering the deal cycle, thanks to the analytics provided by the rooms.
Immediate Availability of Essential Material:
We’ve ensured that all the necessary material and information about the challenges are readily available to stakeholders right from their first interaction.
Monitoring Stakeholder Site Engagement:
Knowing precisely when stakeholders are actually accessing the site has become clearer.

Post-implementation of Aligned, we often discovered that stakeholders were involved much sooner than previously understood – sometimes as much as a month ahead of when we were formally introduced to them. This insight gave us a valuable understanding of the amount of activity and context in advance.

This information is now being leveraged for our marketing campaigns, adding a new layer of strategy.

At its core, Aligned addressed a fundamental visibility issue in the sales cycle. It has also ensured that we avoid repetition of information throughout the process, streamlining communication and enhancing efficiency.

Certificial

Headquarters

Holly Springs, North Carolina

Founded

2019

Employees

30-50

Industry

Business/Productivity Software

At its core, it solved a visibility challenge in the sales cycle.

Champion Turnover: A Critical Junction in Enterprise Deals

Being an SMB, the velocity of deals is fast, so the seller needs to know how much time they’re investing in a client at any given moment. For Certificial, knowing how bought in the client is, very early on in the process helps them determine whether the client needs more or less time in a deal.

This served two important purposes:

Understanding the Most Impactful Problem:
We knew what issue was going to be most critical for our organization.
Picking Up Where We Left Off:
We also knew how to continue from the point the previous champion had left off.

The significance of these two aspects cannot be overstated. This was a powerful type of feedback loop, showing that we’re enabling the buyers to engage not just at the beginning but throughout the entire 7-8 month deal cycle. It allowed someone new to quickly get up to speed within a week, over several months of a deal cycle, and to carry it forward without losing any momentum.

We had a champion turnover, and that's usually the beginning of the end with large enterprise deals

Aligning Buyer Insights with Clarity and Direction

Aligned serves our buyers most effectively by offering two crucial insights:

Comprehensive Visibility:
Recognizing that buyers have myriad activities in their week, they often only have 1-3 minutes at a time to catch up. Aligned brings all the essential information back to the surface in a manner that’s quick and easy for them to digest. This ensures that key details are always accessible, helping buyers stay informed amidst their busy schedules.
Guidance in the Sales Cycle:
Buyers in the enterprise cycle frequently feel lost, wondering, “I have no idea where we’re at, it feels like we’re just in a long loop with no clear plan.” Aligned remedies this by providing clear visibility into the sales process, letting buyers know exactly where they stand and what’s ahead.
This not only ties everything together but also fosters a collaborative relationship, as opposed to a one-sided sales push.

Streamlining Transitions in Customer Success

One significant challenge that customer success teams, including ours, frequently encounter is managing long cycles with multiple stakeholders. This becomes particularly apparent when the deal transitions to a Customer Success Manager (CSM) for onboarding. Typically, the CSM’s first question is, “What are your main priorities?” This often leads to customer frustration, as they’ve already spent considerable time establishing these priorities with an Account Executive (AE) or possibly a sales engineer, only to find themselves repeating the same information to the CSM.

Aligned has effectively facilitated a seamless transition in this area, enabling a more contextual and coherent customer journey. Instead of segmenting the experience into separate ‘sales’, ‘CSM’, or ‘marketing’ journeys, Aligned integrates these aspects into a unified process. This approach ensures that the journey is consistently managed and understood from the customer’s perspective, greatly enhancing the overall experience.

Aligned has really enabled a seamless kind of transition and allowed them to execute a contextual customer journey

Accelerating the Sales Cycle with Aligned: A 30% Improvement

Before implementing Aligned, our typical enterprise sales cycle averaged around 10 months. However, post-implementation with Aligned, this duration has reduced to approximately 7 months. That’s a significant 30% uplift in efficiency. We attribute this remarkable improvement to two main factors:

Clear Plans with the Champion:
Establishing very clear and structured plans between us and the champion has been pivotal.
Engaging Relevant Personas Effectively:
Gaining an understanding of the personas entering the room and engaging them with the content that resonates most with them has been crucial.

These strategies have significantly driven our deal cycles to move faster. A 30% reduction in cycle time is substantial in the enterprise segment. It’s the difference between securing revenue within the same fiscal year and potentially delaying it to the next. This acceleration has been a game-changer for our sales efficiency and overall business growth.

30% is a big lift in the enterprise segment. It’s the difference between getting revenue in the same fiscal year or having that pushed off into a later year.

The Reps' Perspective:

Sales representatives at Certificial embraced Aligned for two primary reasons:

Contextual Customer Engagement:
Aligned allowed reps to offer tailored experiences to customers, elevating the personalization in their interactions.
Enhanced Buyer Experience:
The platform made the sales process more collaborative and enjoyable, fostering a stronger partnership between reps and buyers.

Facilitating Growth and Collaboration in Go-to-Market Strategies

In the go-to-market community, we often engage in discussions about tools that can help us grow together. Aligned stood out in this regard. One key aspect that made Aligned distinctive was its rich analytics and the flexibility it offered, aligning with the evolving trajectory of our platform. As buyers, it’s often challenging to feel confined to what is initially offered, especially when implementation and early usage can be difficult. Over time, as our needs evolve, we tend to outgrow certain functionalities, necessitating the search for new solutions.

However, with Aligned, we found a collaborative synergy. Our teams worked in tandem, not just alongside each other. This collaboration has been instrumental in integrating Aligned into our processes, creating a more dynamic and responsive relationship that adapts to our changing needs.

Facilitating Growth and Collaboration in Go-to-Market Strategies

Transformative Outcomes:

Improved Champion Turnover Management: Aligned enabled swift onboarding of new stakeholders, maintaining momentum in ongoing deals.
Streamlined Customer Success Transitions: Aligned’s platform facilitated seamless handovers between sales and customer success teams, preserving the context of each client’s needs and priorities.
Buyer Empowerment: Aligned provided buyers with clarity and visibility, helping them understand their position in the sales cycle and the future steps, fostering a collaborative environment.