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INTERCOM ON SALES
What we’ve learned about sales on our
journey to scaling a billion dollar business.

Intercom builds a suite of messaging-first Executive Editor: Courtney Chuang

products that all modern internet businesses
can use to accelerate growth across the Copy Editor: Karen Ostergren
customer lifecycle, from acquisition to
engagement and support. Book Design: Allison Sherratt,
Jason Yim, Joshuah Miranda,
intercom.com Judson Collier, Lily Wang, Tim Gilligan

We also regularly share our thoughts on Special thanks to Evelyn Clinton,

product management, design, sales, marketing, Amanda Connolly, John Collins, Geoffrey
startups and the business of software. Keating, Fiona Lee, Davin O’Dwyer
intercom.com/blog and Seth Putnam.

© 2019 Intercom Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-7323863-1-0

We’ll spare you the legal mumbo jumbo. But please don’t share this book or rip off any

content or imagery in it without giving us appropriate credit and a link.

Got questions? Head over to intercom.com and get in touch through our Messenger

(or you can drop us a note at [email protected]).

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 CAST OF CHARACTERS

Karen Peacock
Chief Operating Officer

LB Harvey
Senior VP of Sales & Support

Stan Massueras
Director of EMEA Sales

Jeffrey Serlin
Senior Director of Sales & Support Operations

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FOREWORD
Jason Lemkin, CEO, SaaStr

The hardest part of sales is different at every stage of growth.

In the early days, the hardest part is how slow it can all seem. Back then, everything takes too
long – acquiring your first 10 customers, hiring the initial team, adding enough new revenue
to keep the lights on. The first part of your journey can feel like a long one.

When you do finally push past your initial traction and reach the next level of scale, take a
pause – even if it’s just for yourself – because what you just accomplished is no easy feat.
And now the truly tough part is scaling even faster. Growing just 20% faster involves so much
work. The pressure of “triple, triple, double, double, double” will likely make your head spin.

When people ask for advice on scaling their businesses, I advise that getting to the next
inflection point comes down to three things:

Hiring a growth oriented sales leader. A great VP of Sales is worth her weight in
gold. She is capable of taking the business from traction to scale – creating a real
machine to monetize your inbound leads, adding outbound and driving expansion
on top of all of that.

Being obsessed with your customers. Insanely happy customers will carry your
business really far. They will actively recommend you to their peers at other
companies, and they will buy more stuff from you too: more products, more seats,
more of everything.
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 Embracing, not just accepting, change. Just as the product will be disrupted, your
sales organization will need to evolve as well. Move upmarket, adopt new tools, find
better ways to connect with your prospects. The adage is true; only the agile survive.

While the journey to scale may be a hard one, it’s also one that many of us, myself included,
have been on before. That’s not to say there’s a magic formula for success. Growth will always
be tough work. But proven sales plays can help you get there faster.

That’s what Intercom is sharing in this book. From actionable advice on managing a world
class sales team to a new framework for selling in real time, they provide an inside look at
what it actually takes to scale a billion dollar business. It’s jam-packed with the kind of
practical wisdom that can only be learned on the front lines – the kind I like to read and I
hope you will, too.

So get out there, run as many plays as you can and enjoy the journey.

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PREFACE
LB Harvey, Senior VP of Sales & Support, Intercom

I came to Intercom a few months after we raised our Series C funding round. The company
had grown massively over the previous three years and was on track – and still is – to be one
of the fastest growing startups ever. Now they needed someone to help really scale sales.

I met Eoghan, our CEO and one of our co-founders, for the first time in the summer of 2016.
If I was cautiously optimistic at the beginning of our meeting, I was fired up by the time it
ended. I was inspired by his passion for the company and willingness to embrace the
unconventional path to growth. One thing in particular that he said has stayed with me:
“We don’t have ping pong tables.”

It might sound trite to some, but contained in this one sentence is a statement about our
principles. It says that Intercom is a place where people come to make an impact each and
every day. While I’m not opposed to fun, I want people to feel inspired to do great work, not
like they’re just killing time.

To take a sales organization from startup to scaled-up, you have to embrace the same
principle. Getting a company to its first $10, $25, $50 million in annual revenue is hard, de-
manding work. But scaling a billion dollar business? It’s even harder. There’s a reason com-
panies live by the mantra “Grow or die.”

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In many ways, scaling a sales organization is like solving a puzzle. You have a bunch of jigsaw
pieces – your team, your product and your buyers – that have to come together in just the right
way for you to hit your next inflection point. The catch, of course, is that there’s no box with a
pretty picture on the front to follow, just a lot of valuable lessons to be learned along the way.

This book is a collection of those lessons. It’s filled with the ideas and tactics that have
enabled us to build a business worth more than $1 billion. What follows is our take on the six
areas we believe are crucial to scaling sales: people, foundation, methodology, techniques,
collaboration and growth.

While our journey is still just getting started, I hope this book can serve as a helpful reference
to you on your own journey. I really hope you enjoy it, and good luck out there.

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INTRODUCTION
Karen Peacock, Chief Operating Officer, Intercom

I’ve led and advised many high-growth businesses.

There’s one misconception about sales I’ve come across
many times. It’s that the purpose of the sales organization
is to maximize today’s revenue. When positioned properly,
your sales team won’t just drive short-term wins. They
will also help you build lasting relationships with your
customers and build a big business.

At Intercom, the job of sales is three-fold: drive revenue

for the business, drive success for our customers, and be a
voice of the customer within the company. Only by doing all
three can Intercom be the kind of company we want it to be.
When our customers grow and succeed, we grow. When we
grow, we are able to invest in helping our customers grow.

Our sales leader LB Harvey and entire sales team care deeply
about our customers’ problems – the ones we can solve
now and the ones we could solve tomorrow. We think long
term. We don’t just think about today. This is one of the val-
ues that has guided us as we’ve scaled sales, from a handful
of people to a revenue engine that now fuels a business val-
ued at over $1 billion.

To our customers and friends, thank you for joining us on this

journey. We look forward to working for you and growing
with you for years to come. This book is dedicated to you.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

PEOPLE 10

FOUNDATION32

METHODOLOGY
56

TECHNIQUES79

COLLABORATION
102

GROWTH 118

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 Intercom on Sales

Foreword by LB Harvey, Senior VP of Sales & Support

As a sales leader joining a new company, you have so many priorities competing for your time
– learning the product, diving into the sales process, building executive relationships. If your
company’s growth is skyrocketing, you’ll quickly learn that time is not on your side.

You have to pick a few areas to focus on first. One of the areas I chose was investing in a team
that would help take us to the next level. The sales team who helped Intercom drive its first $50
million in annual recurring revenue cared deeply about the product and thrived in ambiguity.
Those were traits I knew would be valuable at any stage of growth and wanted to preserve in
the team.

In other ways, we needed to evolve the team. Every salesperson at that point in time had a
blended role, tasked with both bringing in new customers and growing existing ones. They
were trained to work with small accounts in a transactional manner. The model limited our
ability to pull in revenue as our organization grew more complex, from 40 people to over 130
now, and we moved upmarket.

To successfully scale the impact of our sales organization, we needed to advance the skills of
our existing team and hire on senior, commercially minded salespeople. We needed to become
an organization of specialists. So, we created a customer solutions team dedicated to setting
up new clients for long term success. We built a sales operations arm to help the team sell
more efficiently.

There’s a common misconception about hiring in sales, that once you’ve gotten folks on the
bus, all that’s left is to do is watch them crush it. But upleveling the salespeople you have is as
much a part of building a world class team as bringing in better talent. That means providing
ongoing training and creating a culture that rewards personal growth.

If you don’t invest in the right people, little else matters. At the heart of every important deal
is people buying from people.

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 Intercom on Sales

LESSON #1

HIRING FOR SALES IN A

HIGH-GROWTH ENVIRONMENT
Getting the team right is one of the hardest parts of scaling sales. When you’re growing quickly,
hiring can become a mad dash to get bodies on the floor – you needed them yesterday.

But the fact of the matter is, you cannot afford to hire without intention. For the thousands of
leads who visit your website every day, their first meaningful interaction with your business
will likely be a conversation with a salesperson. You have to think carefully about what you
want that experience to be.

While scaling our sales team, we spent a lot of time thinking about our sales culture – that
intangible but powerful product of who you hire and what they value. Here’s how we went
about growing a sales team that is both world class and culture additive.

Start with your non-negotiables

Whether you’re bringing on your tenth or hundredth salesperson, a crucial discussion for
your leadership team to have is about your non-negotiables. This is a conversation about your
core values and ways of working.

Eoghan, our CEO, has been instrumental in helping define what absolutely must not change
about our company as we onboard more salespeople. These are values that have been core
to the company since its earliest days, and many of these are what drew our salespeople to
Intercom. It comes down to three things:

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 Intercom on Sales

We’re customer-first. We value a positive customer experience above all else. That
means we will never subject our customers to crappy features or half baked
processes just because we want to drive more revenue.

We’re personal. We are thoughtful, respectful and friendly in our communication

with prospects, a testament to our mission of making business personal. We strive
to make data informed decisions about who, when and where to talk to leads.

We value impact. We believe in a culture where people come to the office to focus and
make an impact and then go home at a reasonable hour. Yes, that means no ping pong
tables. All of this might sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice.

Be clear – but not rigid – with your hiring profile

Once you and your leadership team are on the same page in terms of values, you can work on
attracting the right talent. These are the people who embody the traits you believe are most
crucial to being successful at the company.

There’s no one-size-fits-all profile that works for every company or even every hire. At Intercom
we value having a diverse team, and we’re willing to take risks on candidates who show promise
but don’t check every box perfectly. That means our hiring profile can bend – but not break.

Here’s what we prioritize when looking for great salespeople:

They respect product. Salespeople don’t need technical backgrounds to sell

software, but they certainly need to be passionate about the product and its value
to your buyers. Our best candidates are innately curious about how the product
could evolve, and they care deeply about customer success.

They’re resilient. Salespeople will get rejected time and time again and fail to win
deals more often than not. You want people with a track record of resilience and
grit. They should be comfortable owning up to past failures and moving forward.

They care about more than just quota. Great salespeople care deeply about hitting
their own quotas, but they care deeply about the team and company too. How can
you tell? They raise up fellow salespeople along the way, and they’re fired up to
help the team create best practices and scalable processes.

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They don’t rely solely on past playbooks. The best sales hires are comfortable with
ambiguity and happy to help create the playbook. This is absolutely crucial, because
high growth companies have a lot of unknowns. On the flipside, they also have
opportunities for creative experimentation.

Takeaway: Your values determine your sales culture

Basecamp’s CEO, Jason Fried, once said, “You don’t create culture. Culture happens. It’s the
byproduct of consistent behavior.” You can’t force culture or, worse, retrofit it to an existing
team. In the end, it’s a tapestry of the non-negotiables you hold firm and the behaviors you
celebrate. These are the values that need to come first.

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LESSON #2

INTRODUCING THE PROFILE OF

THE MODERN SALESPERSON
Few business interactions are more cringeworthy than a salesperson hard-selling a prospect.
These moments are awkward and uncomfortable, and oftentimes, they’re bad for business.

Modern buyers enter the sales cycle full of knowledge and opinions about your product and
your company. They’ve likely explored your website, read customer reviews and even started
a free trial. Frankly, that’s how we approach buying new products for our own team.

That’s why, as a sales organization, we’ve adopted a strategy of consultative, real-time selling
– one that is transparent and informative and meets buyers where they are in the purchasing
process. Let’s explore what this approach means for the modern salesperson.

SDRs who can accelerate the deal

Historically, the role of the inbound SDR (sales development representative) has been to collect
qualification criteria. Their objective was simple: run through a predefined list of questions, and
if the prospect is promising enough, pass them to an account executive.

At Intercom, SDRs are doing much more than that. They’re accelerating the sale by providing
prospects with value early on. For website visitors who write in through live chat, our SDRs
are assessing their use case, sharing educational content and jumping on discovery calls.

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 Intercom on Sales

Thanks to chatbots, our sales team is automating away many of the tasks that used to be
manual and repetitive, such as lead qualification. Now when a sales rep connects with a
prospect, she’s having a strategic, meaningful conversation about what Intercom can do
for that potential customer.

The effect of this is that SDR teams are shifting from repetitively posing questions to being
seen as strategic assets. In the years to come, we’re betting that chatbots will make sales reps
even more valuable, not less.

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 Intercom on Sales

Account executives who can sell in real time

You want to engage buyers when they’re most interested in talking to you – when they’re on your
website and investigating your offering, not 30 minutes later or after they’ve filled out a form.

That’s why we created an entire team dedicated to selling in real time. Their mission is to
convert our SMB leads into customers, by first getting them to start a trial while they’re on
our website and then, once the trial is complete, converting them to a paid plan.

Our real-time account executives have a hybrid role that mixes the traditional responsibilities
of an SDR and an AE. That’s because they’re managing the full sales cycle, from qualification
to close, over live chat. Like an SDR, they need to be skilled at:

Initiating outreach

Establishing use case

Doing light discovery

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Because this is also a closing role, our real-time AEs need experience in:

Pitching solutions

Managing trials

Driving the purchase

Real-time sales enables prospects to move through the funnel as fast as they’re ready to go.
And what we’ve seen is that compared to those who go through the self-service funnel, these
smaller accounts not only pay us 20% more, on average, but are also less likely to churn.

Takeaway: Aim for value and the money will follow

If you perpetuate a culture of customer-centric sales, you’ll cultivate trust and build stronger
relationships with your prospects and in turn, you’ll capture more revenue. The key is to
continually deliver value at every touchpoint, from the first chat with an SDR to the moment
the deal is signed.

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LESSON #3

EVOLVE THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR SALES

ORGANIZATION TO FUEL CONTINUOUS GROWTH
As your revenue grows, your sales organization will need to evolve. Your buyers will become
more numerous, spread across different segments and personas. Your sales process will naturally
become more complex. Your headcount will increase to match the rising deal volume.

To effectively scale up, you will have to alter the structure of your sales team and if you are
successful, more than once. The sales organization that thrives during the scrappy startup
phase is very different from the one that propels your business to its next inflection point.

At Intercom, the history of our sales team can be divided into three acts, from an early
volume play to a sophisticated revenue machine. Here’s how these changes accelerated the
growth of our business at each stage of its lifecycle.

Act I: The initial sales team

When we created our first sales function in early 2014, we only had two sales roles: SDRs and
AEs. Our SDRs were responsible for managing the front lines – chatting to inbound leads,
qualifying them and then handing off promising opportunities to our AEs.

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 Intercom on Sales

We had a high volume of inbound leads, and the mission of our sales team was to convert as many
prospects as possible. We didn’t distinguish between new and existing customers, between small
and medium-size businesses (SMBs) and mid-market and enterprise companies (MMEs). If
you wanted to use Intercom, our sales team was here to help.

This initial team drove our first several million in sales-assisted-revenue. They were a layer on
top of our self-service business that nearly tripled our average revenue per account (ARPA).
It was early proof that having a sales function could accelerate our growth as a company.

But like many sales teams at young startups, ours still had fundamental questions to answer.
What is the line between sales and self-service? How do we talk to leads? Is it over phone, email or
live chat? Do we have light or in-depth discovery calls? Why do we win over our competitors?

Act II: More deals, bigger deals

As we answered those fundamental questions, we began to evolve our organizational structure. We
focused on bringing efficiency to a new area: our lower volume, larger accounts. We brought
on our first sales engineer to drive the technical side of the purchase and the first members of
our sales operations team to train our reps and standardize our sales process.

We also began to experiment with outbound sales to prospect into higher value accounts, and
we hired our first outbound SDRs. We planted the seeds for an organizational structure that
would enable us to gradually move upmarket.

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 Intercom on Sales

The result was higher ARPA and double the amount of revenue closed compared with the
previous period, despite a decrease in the total number of deals. We had evolved the structure of
our team to support a more complex sale and, as a result, had increased our overall productivity.

Yet, we still had plenty of opportunity ahead of us – to better serve our prospects and existing
customers, to optimize our workstreams and to forge a path to sustainable growth.

Act III: Specialists, segments and sales operations

Our next objective was to invest in a team structure that would be sustainable for the long term
and could scale with our customers, our revenue and our company. Intercom had transformed
from a startup into a high-growth business, and our sales organization needed to do the same.

This phase involved three important developments:

1. Specialization
Until this point, our sales reps had largely been of jack-of-all-trades. They could prospect into
an account, close it and upsell it. While this model served us well early on, to mature our sales
team we needed to bring on sales reps who could own one part of the sales cycle and nail it.

Today our SDRs and AEs are dedicated solely to winning new business. To provide white
glove onboarding, we’ve hired customer success managers, and to expand our accounts over
time, we’ve hired a team of relationship managers. We’ve also continued to invest in sales
engineers who handle the technical side of the deal, both pre and post sale.

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2. Segmentation
Our buyers now come from companies of all sizes, from small businesses to businesses with
thousands of employees. To effectively sell to our diverse customer base, we’ve segmented our
core sales organization into sales reps who work with SMBs and sales reps who work with MMEs.

We’ve also created an emerging small business (ESB) segment that focuses on our smallest sales
owned accounts. On our new business side, we have ESB account executives who primarily use
live chat to engage and convert prospects. On our existing business side, we have relationship
managers who provide scaled account management.

3. Sales operations
Finally, for a sales organization to run efficiently at scale, you need to invest in sales operations.
That’s because sales ops is the collision point for so many crucial sales initiatives, from strategy
and enablement to analytics and systems. They are responsible for the foundation that enables
your sales reps to sell better and faster, your sales leaders to capitalize on opportunities for growth
and your entire organization to function smoothly.

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As a result of evolving the structure of our sales organization, we’ve seen higher conversion
rates throughout our pipeline, higher overall win rates and higher ARPA. Sales continues to be
an increasingly important driver of new and expansion revenue. Best of all, we now have a sales
team that’s designed to keep scaling alongside our revenue and our customers.

Takeaway: Structure your sales organization to maximize revenue

Your sales organization will look different at each stage of your company’s lifecycle. The only
common thread will be the premium placed on rapid growth. Done well, each iteration of
your team structure will enable you to do one thing: maximize future sales.

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LESSON #4

WHY YOU SHOULD INVEST IN A

WINNING LOCKER ROOM
Defining your quota philosophy is a careful balancing act. Set quotas too high, and you’ll end up
watching your sales reps flounder from quarter to quarter. Set quotas too low, and you’ll have a
tough time achieving the level of productivity you need to run your organization at scale.

An effective sales quota philosophy straddles the line between being ambitious and being
achievable. When executed properly, it sets a clear and useful bar for individual performance,
while maximizing your company’s overall growth potential.

We’ve adopted a “winning locker room” strategy whereby the majority but not all of our team
is expected to hit quota. While simple in concept, it’s been a powerful organizational lever.

The advantages of a winning locker room

You cannot have a world class sales team without a transparent, realistic and growth-oriented
approach to setting quotas. And that is what our winning locker room strategy is grounded in.

1. Transparent
Transparent might seem like an odd choice of words to describe our quota strategy, but the
point should be clear in a minute.

First, imagine this situation: you’ve just ended the half, and only 20% of your team has hit
quota. Now imagine the converse: you’ve just ended the half and 100% has hit quota. Either
you’re left with a dejected team that feels they can’t get there and some of whom you have to
manage out, or you have to accept that everyone’s a winner with no room for improvement.

A winning locker room solves both situations. By having 60% to 75% of your team hit quota,
you have a majority of sales reps who are winning and at the same time, the skills that

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distinguish your top performers from the rest are transparent. Now you have the opportunity
to coach underperformers, promote from within or bring in new talent, and drive the entire
organization to better outcomes.

2. Realistic
Sales is a high risk, high reward profession. While failure shouldn’t be the norm, even the
best sales reps and leaders will not win 100% of the time. As much as you might want to
guarantee your team’s success, you should not eliminate the potential for failure. The reality
is there are no trophies for participation in sales, and if you want to build a sustainable business,
not everyone can be a winner all the time.

At least 25% of Intercom’s sales reps will not hit quota in a given quarter. But the way we see
it, these moments are learning opportunities. Only when you miss the mark can you develop
the resilience to succeed in sales for the long term.

3. Growth-oriented
We hire ambitious people who constantly want to achieve more. And it’s in our best interest to
create an environment where our sales reps are surrounded by peers who challenge them and
whom they can learn from. Having a room full of failures or winners accomplishes neither.

A winning locker room sustains your team’s momentum by creating room for growth without
sacrificing morale to unattainable goals. It creates an energy on the sales floor that is so
important in today’s fast paced selling environment.

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Don’t be afraid to raise the bar

The outcome of having a winning locker room is that you will routinely need to raise the bar.
That’s because you will have built and trained a world class team capable of smashing their quotas.

So, as a sales organization, how do we get better each and every quarter? There are two main
ways we adjust for overperformance:

Raise the team’s quota.

Institute accelerators.

The first makes sense when you have a pattern of overperformance. Say that for two quarters
in a row, 80% of your SDR team exceed quota and by 25%, on average. That indicates you’ve
successfully upleveled your reps, and it’s time to re-evaluate your quota strategy.

The second is valuable when you want to reward individual overperformers. We believe that if
someone is bringing in disproportionately more revenue than we’ve set the bar for, they should
reap the rewards just as they carry the risk. Accelerating their commission rates incentivizes sales
reps who have already done their job to do everything they can to pull in another few deals.

Takeaway: Strike the right balance between growth and failure

A winning locker room leans into the upsides for growth. Without shying away from failure,
it creates an environment where at every level – from the individual sales rep to top leadership –
you have a fair shake at achieving success.

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LESSON #5

USE DATA TO BE A MORE EFFECTIVE SALES COACH

Sales has an unavoidable reality: there will be months, and sometimes quarters, when your
team doesn’t hit their number. Even with our winning locker room strategy, at any time 25% to
40% of our sales reps will fall short.

The question for every sales manager is, what are you doing to help your team get up and over
the line? At Intercom we believe every manager should be a sales coach – committed to driving
their reps, their team and, ultimately, our company to greater productivity.

But doing the job of a coach isn’t as simple as offering a few words of solid advice or doing the
occasional whiteboarding session. It requires a methodical, data-driven approach.

Drill into team performance

For your coaching to be meaningful, you need to set benchmarks for performance based on
trends across your team. You cannot simply decide one day that your sales reps are capable of
bringing in 100 deals each when your top rep can only manage 60 in her best month.

Let’s use our emerging small business (ESB) account executives to illustrate how this works.
These AEs sell to our smallest sales owned accounts primarily through live chat and are responsible
for the full sales funnel from initial conversations to trial setup through to purchase.

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Looking at the example charts above, we can immediately spot a number of areas where the
team can improve. Here are just two of them:

Increase speed to lead: Last month Zachary chatted with the fewest number of
website visitors but created the most leads. Annie, on the other hand, chatted with
the most website visitors yet landed in the middle of the pack for leads. What is
Zachary nailing in his conversations that enables him to convert more website
visitors into leads? And how can we share that with the rest of the team?

Optimize deal management: While Raymond didn’t have the most conversations
or generate the most leads, more of his opportunities converted to customers than
anyone else’s and at a higher rate. Could he be investing more time in establishing a
compelling business case? Is he more effective in creating urgency? This one
requires more digging, but directionally, we know where to look.

Simply being on a high performing team doesn’t guarantee that our sales reps are equipped
with the skills they need. Learning doesn’t happen by osmosis. Analyzing team performance
enables us to identify where each of our reps excels and then skill up the rest of the team.

Diagnose gaps in individual performance

Now that you have a bird’s-eye view on your team, you can translate the areas for improvement
into a coaching plan for individual reps.

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Let’s revisit Annie’s numbers and deepen our view of the data in a section of the funnel where
she’s underperforming – the conversion of opportunities to customers.

From the chart above, we can see that while Annie is successfully getting leads who create an
account to actively trial the product, she’s having a hard time persuading them to complete the
purchase. Now we can isolate where Annie needs coaching on a granular level. We’d want to
look at her approach to key steps in the process, particularly:

Ensuring the trial is set up for success: Is she checking that the Intercom Messenger is
properly installed? Is she actively guiding prospects toward their first “aha” moment?

Increasing in-product activation: How is she ensuring that the right features are
being used? Could she be sending more targeted messages to drive product adoption?

Confirming the purchase: Has she actively communicated the trial end date? Are
there unresolved objections that she needs to address?

Successful sales coaching requires narrowing our sales reps’ worldview. Our goal is to identify
a specific set of skills or behaviors that will meaningfully impact our sales reps’ ability to hit
quota and then hold them accountable for closing the gap.

Takeaway: You need to peel back the onion on performance

At the end of the day, sales coaching is like peeling an onion. You start at the first layer with
data about your team, then drill down into individual performance and, finally, at the core are
the skills that individual sales reps need to focus on in order to improve. Only by working your
way down can you build up a sales organization that continuously pushes itself to achieve
better results.

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Foreword by Jeffrey Serlin, Senior Director of Sales & Support Operations, Intercom

I’ve been in sales operations for almost two decades, and I can tell you that the mission of
every sales operations team is the same: enable the sales organization to run better and faster.
What changes is your focus as the business grows – moving from repeatability to scalability.

LB, our Senior VP of Sales & Support, often uses an analogy to describe the role that our team
plays. It goes like this: if our sales reps are race car drivers, then our sales operations team is the
pit crew. We’re the ones ensuring our frontline sales team gets deals to the finish line with
precision and consistency. Just as in auto racing, you can’t have one team without the other.

My first priority when I joined Intercom was shoring up our foundations. That’s things like our
sales process, systems, enablement and analytics. There were plenty of opportunities to reduce
waste by automating low-value tasks, enhancing our onboarding and planning, and improving
our visibility into team performance. Beyond that, our job was to keep the trains running.

As we’ve scaled up, my priority has shifted to building on our foundation, so we’re able to
capitalize on new revenue opportunities. More of our job is now dedicated to being a strategic
partner to sales leadership and all of our go-to-market teams. We have created playbooks to
transform our sales organization into a well oiled machine and to meet our targets. That in
turn has freed up our sales ops team to focus on two high-value areas: identifying levers for
growth and executing on them globally and efficiently.

Sales operations is a job that’s never finished. We can always adopt better tools, increase the
rigor of our execution and experiment with different tactics. The key is to secure the capacity
to lean into growth wherever it takes us.

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LESSON #1

NAIL YOUR FORECASTING TO CREATE

PREDICTABLE REVENUE GROWTH
For the first years of Intercom’s life, we had a largely self-service, transactional business. In
that world, you don’t need rigorous sales forecasting. It’s a volume and conversion play –
customers grow, contract and churn without any input from sales. You’re looking at high
level trends and conversion rates and extrapolating that forward.

Rollup and deal-level forecasting becomes more crucial as you move upmarket and your sales
organization grows. You have a direct sales team that’s running larger deals, working one-on-
one with prospects and closing annual contracts. At this point, all sales organizations need to
institute sales forecasting, but not everyone knows how to do it well.

A rigorous forecasting process requires a clear line of sight into your sales pipeline. That kind
of visibility allows you to get ahead of at-risk deals and spot new opportunities for growth.
The outcomes are powerful: confident forecasting that is the backbone of predictable revenue
growth and accountability, from the individual sales rep all the way to the very top.

Why pipeline management is crucial to forecasting

To get deeper insight into our sales owned pipeline as we scaled, we had to implement proper
pipeline hygiene by defining our deal stages, the criteria for each stage and the data points that
reps had to input.

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The strategic outcomes of this work were threefold:

Standardization across the organization: We have every salesperson working deals in

the same way. This makes it possible for us to compare apples to apples when looking
at deals and performance by region, segment and individual sales reps.

Visibility into historical trends: We can confidently say how long it takes to close a
deal, and we can break it down by the average number of days in each stage or by
source – lead form, live chat, trial, outbound, etc. We’re able to identify the early
indicators that a deal is moving forward or at risk of not closing.

Ability to generate scorecards: We can easily see how our pipeline is flowing, from
new leads being created to existing opportunities that are being won or lost. For
sales managers, this means being able to proactively work with their reps on spe-
cific deals, and for sales reps, it means being able to course correct before a deal is
too far off track.

Building the forecast: Is the deal firm, upside or pipeline?

We have our sales reps assign a status to each deal that they are working – firm, upside or pipe-
line. These status reflect the likelihood that the deal will close within the forecast period.

Firm is assigned to deals that we expect to win within the forecast period. We may
not have received official confirmation from our decision makers and may still be
working toward final budget approval or legal sign-off, but there are no major
blockers we can see that will prevent us from winning the deal.

Upside is assigned to deals that we have a chance at winning within the forecast
period, but we’ve identified obstacles that first need to be resolved. For instance,
our prospect may still be comparing us with competitors, the budget may be up
in the air, or we may not have executive buy-in. Oftentimes with upmarket deals,
having to go through legal or procurement can delay the deal from closing.

Pipeline is assigned to deals that have the potential to be won in the forecast period
but are unlikely to cross the finish line. Deals with the status may have major obstacles
preventing them from closing, or they might simply be earlier in the sales cycle.

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We track all of this information in our sales analytics tool, which lets us quickly update key data
points like deal stage and size, track real-time changes to our pipeline, efficiently create rollup
forecasts and dynamically project revenue performance.

How sales forecasting drives growth

To create rollup forecasts, each week individual sales reps provide their managers with a forecast.
Sales managers then give a forecast for their team, and directors provide a forecast for their
territory. Together we look at the trends and projections for our high volume deals on the
lower end of the market and track our large key deals on an individual basis. On a granular
level, we look for:

Sales tactics that are and aren’t working

Deals that are at risk and need immediate action

Impact of changes to our process or tools

As sales leaders, we then use these forecasts to set revenue expectations with the C-suite and our
go-to-market partners. This rollup drives accountability throughout the entire sales organization.
It holds every person responsible for delivering revenue to the business.

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While it’s important to know how much revenue you’re projected to drive, what’s even
more powerful is finding trends through your forecasting process and figuring out how to
capitalize on them accordingly to accelerate growth. For instance, if we see that a specific
segment in the UK is increasingly considering Intercom as a solution, we can very quickly
decide to deploy more resources toward winning market share there. This might mean more
sales team members physically on the ground, outbounding to more companies and so on.

Takeaway: The sooner you start, the better

Your company is never too small and it’s never too soon to implement rigorous forecasting
practices. By committing to actively managing your pipeline, your sales managers will be
better equipped to coach their sales reps and drive more revenue for the business. Your entire
organization will have the visibility necessary to grow your pipeline, move deals forward –
and achieve predictable growth at scale.

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LESSON #2

BUILD A GROWTH STACK, NOT A SALES STACK

When implemented correctly, sales tools can provide a clarifying view of our most valuable
prospects and customers – and the next steps we need to take to efficiently nurture opportunities,
close new business or grow existing accounts. The right tools can improve how we practice all
parts of sales, from forecasting and pipeline management to analytics and reporting.

But too often, sales stacks are cobbled together from existing tools and workflows that have
haphazardly developed over time. When it comes to adding a new tool, we undoubtedly
consider how the tool will interact with others in our stack. But the question we actually need
to be obsessing over is, can this new tool propel our business to the next stage of growth?

At Intercom, we approach tools and workflows from the mindset of building a growth stack,
not a tech stack. Put another way, we look to build systems that unlock new ways of selling and
better customer relationships.

Adopt better tools, not more tools

It is tempting to believe that simply adding tools will make your sales team more productive or
drive faster growth. In the world of SaaS, it’s easier to sign up for a new tool than it is to hire a
great sales rep or make a prospecting call – but adding a tool doesn’t equate to progress.

Tools won’t replace your team’s ability to perform mission critical tasks like building rapport
with prospects or closing tough deals. But they can help a world class sales team work better
and faster. Here are some examples of what sales tools should or should not do.

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Making sure the tool meets your business needs is paramount. You can’t build your sales stack
on the back of “nice-to-haves.” Most vendors will want to show off all the things their product
can do, but more important than scoping out cool features is figuring out if it will enable a more
efficient workflow for your sales motion.

Our framework for evaluating new tools

One of the ways we like to determine whether a tool or process is needed is by assessing routine
work on a regular basis – is it high or low in value? Does it require a high or low touch? Based
on those answers, we determine how to better manage the work:

Here’s how we put this framework into practice:

Automate repetitive tasks like collecting basic demographic information by using a

chatbot to automatically engage and qualify website visitors.

Accelerate our sales cycle by having our inbound SDRs use live chat, instead of
email or phone, to talk to leads in real time when they’re on our website.

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Assist our sales reps in the buying process by using data enrichment tools to gather
more information about our inbound leads, including their company and industry.

Eliminate low-value work by automatically routing support questions to the right

team or having a chatbot quickly serve up answers to frequently asked questions.

Any sales tool that we add either increases value or decreases time for our sales reps – and
ideally both. Remember, adding new tools brings an operational cost, and the benefit to your
sales team needs to outweigh the cost of purchasing and implementing the tool.

3 ideal outcomes from your growth stack

Here are some areas that we look to enhance with new tools, where improvements lead to that
magical combination of increased value for our customers and time saved for our sales team.

Accelerate speed to lead

We know that time kills all deals. A
study from InsideSales.com confirms
that waiting just five minutes to respond
reduces your chances of connecting
with a lead by 10x. When leads come
to our website, we don’t want them to
sit idle or, worse, leave. It’s FOMO, the
fear of missing out, at its best. That’s
why we use tools like chatbots and live
chat to connect with prospects in real
time. Plus, this way, there’s no oppor-
tunity for our competitors to swoop in.

Make customer handoffs invisible

Fragmented handoffs at any point in the
prospect’s journey can seriously dampen
his or her trust. If a prospect feels our
internal processes at work, then we haven’t
adopted the right tools. Just think about
all the handoffs involved in the sales
process: from SDR to AE, from AE to

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the relationship manager, and between sales and support. Whether it’s in Salesforce,
Intercom or another tool, we want our sales reps to have easy access to a
prospect’s history and previous interactions.

Measure and attribute success

At the end of the day, everything we do ladders up to one metric: revenue. But not ev-
ery activity will have the same impact on our bottom line. To understand what activ-
ities – from sales demos to upsell initiatives – affect revenue the most, we need our
tools to support an integrated data model, dashboard and set of metrics.

Takeaway: Grow your business with the right tools

To stay competitive in today’s crowded marketplace, your tech stack needs to do more than just
drive efficiency. It needs to build faster growth. The key to building a growth stack is investing
in tools that will meaningfully enhance your sales reps’ ability to drive revenue and unlock
better customer relationships.

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LESSON #3

FREE UP YOUR SALES CAPACITY WITH LIVE CHAT

If you’ve worked in sales long enough, you’ve likely heard the pleading cry, “We need more
salespeople!” It’s the brute force method of increasing your sales capacity, or your organization’s
ability to generate revenue.

But hiring more salespeople comes with its own share of problems. It’s expensive and time
intensive, and its impact is far from immediate. Even if you were able to hire 10 sales reps
tomorrow, you’d still have to wait three to six months for them to fully ramp.

A more scalable strategy is to optimize your reps’ current capacity through better enablement
and tools. Working at a company that’s in the business of messaging means one of our primary
tools is live chat. Based on feedback from our team and efficiency gains, we can confidently say
that live chat by far is the most impactful investment we’ve made at Intercom.

Enable your team with the right tools

Before we implemented live chat, our inbound SDRs primarily worked marketing qualified
leads (MQLs) who came in through traditional channels like web forms and content downloads.
While these were promising leads, the process of converting them to sales opportunities
took a lot of time.

Think back to the last time you purchased software. More likely than not, you waited two to
three days for an SDR to do their research and reach out. Then if you didn’t respond, that same
SDR probably emailed and called you 12 to 18 times over the next two to three weeks. Yikes.

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Live chat increases your sales capacity by dramatically improving the speed to lead. Instead of
three weeks of email and phone tag, our SDRs are now connecting with prospects in real time.
What’s more, live chat leads typically take less than five minutes to execute. That’s far more
efficient for our SDRs and better for our customers too.

A capacity planning model for live chat

You’re probably thinking, “Okay, that’s great, but how many SDRs do I need to run this new
channel?” It sounds counterintuitive, but the truth is: all things being equal, fewer than if you
only had a traditional sales funnel.

Live chat provides a major efficiency gain. SDRs can handle at a minimum 20% more live chat
leads per month than they can MQLs. Let’s walk through the math:

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Let’s say in your traditional sales cycle you get 10,000 MQLs a month, and each SDR can handle
350 of them per month. You would need 29 SDRs to work the MQL volume.

Now let’s add live chat for sales to your page. We found that about half of those same 10,000
MQLs come straight through live chat. For the 5,000 remaining traditional MQLs, you need 15
SDRs to work the MQL volume. But for live chat leads, each SDR can handle 500 new live chat
conversations per month, which requires just 10 SDRs.

So it only takes 25 SDRs to run both the traditional and live chat funnels. That’s 13% fewer SDRs
than in the traditional sales funnel alone. Live chat increases your overall capacity by making
the sales process – and your SDRs – more efficient.

Takeaway: Optimize first, then add headcount

By maximizing sales capacity before bringing on more people, you accomplish two things:
driving immediate revenue impact and building for scale. With live chat, we’ve significantly
increased our win rates, and our SDRs have been more productive than ever.

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LESSON #4

CREATE NEW EFFICIENCIES THROUGH

STRATEGIC AUTOMATION
Poll any sales team, and you’ll find that sales reps spend a lot of time doing repetitive, tedious
work. Scheduling follow-up meetings? Updating lead information in the CRM? According to a
Salesforce study, 64% of a typical sales rep’s week is spent on these non-selling tasks.

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While these tasks are necessary to the operation of the sales organization, they are rarely the
most efficient way for sales reps to be spending their time. That’s where automation has been
so powerful for our team. By automating away low value activities, our sales reps are able to
reclaim their time to focus on their most important work: selling.

At its best, automation helps our sales team spend their energy where they can provide the
most value – not on the tasks that simply take up the most time. Here’s how you can use
automation to pave the way for new sales efficiencies.

Identify the right opportunities for automation

While automation is a powerful tool for any sales team, it isn’t meant to eliminate everything
that sales reps do. Let’s revisit our framework for optimizing sales work. The sales tasks that we
believe are best suited for automation should meet two criteria:

They take up a lot of time (high touch).

They don’t require human decision making or oversight (low value).

A straightforward example of this is collecting basic demographic information from leads. This
is something our SDRs used to do manually via live chat, email and phone. It’s time consuming
and it doesn’t require a human touch to do well, so it’s a prime candidate for automation.

A helpful way to identify all the tasks your team can automate is with a time and motion study.
For this study, each sales team member times their tasks for an entire day. They measure:

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What task they’re doing.

How much time each task takes.

How many times per day they do it.

The end goal is to identify repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time. For example, when we
tracked how our inbound SDRs were spending their day, we noticed that they were spending
five to ten minutes going back and forth with prospects over live chat, just to get their email
address and company name. If they chat to 25 prospects a day, that task alone eats up at least
two hours of their time.

Implement automation to reduce inefficiencies

Once you’ve identified your opportunities for automation, you need to find the right tools to
handle it. We use a combination of our own product’s automation capabilities and third-party
solutions that integrate with Intercom.

To increase the efficiency of lead qualification, we now use chatbots to pre-qualify leads.
It enables our inbound SDRs to spend less time chasing answers to basic questions, which
would only drag out our sales cycle, and more time talking to prospects about their pain points,
use case and timeline. We even have our chatbots push the data straight to our CRM, saving our
SDRs time they would’ve spent filling out the same fields.

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Here are two more automation examples from our own sales team that have proved useful:

We use Intercom’s account-based marketing features, together with our CRM

integration, to proactively engage prospects from high-value accounts who chat
with us. Then, we automatically route them to their assigned sales rep for a
one-to-one experience.

We’ve brought our sales reps’ workflows into their inbox in Intercom. Instead of con-
stantly switching between tabs, reps can now seamlessly update a lead’s stage in our
CRM and check their billing history while they’re chatting. This makes it easy to
keep our tech stack in sync, so reps aren’t wasting time copy-pasting data.

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When implemented correctly, automation increases your sales reps’ efficiency and the velocity
of your sales cycle too. Sales reps spend less time on high touch, low value work and, as a result,
are able to move through and close deals faster.

Takeaway: Make selling the lion’s share of your reps’ time

Automation doesn’t leave your sales team with nothing to do. Instead, it relieves them of the
routine tasks that take up most of their time. This way, they can focus on what matters most:
connecting with prospects, learning about their needs and finding the right solution for them.
In simpler terms, it enables them to focus on selling.

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LESSON #5

LEVERAGE SALES ENABLEMENT TO MAXIMIZE

PRODUCT LAUNCHES
Shipping product fast and often means more opportunities for your sales team to delight
customers and engage with prospects. But sales reps need a lot more than an email on
launch day to maximize the revenue opportunity that product launches present.

At Intercom, our sales enablement team is responsible for ensuring reps have the training they
need to capitalize on product launches. We partner with the marketing and product teams to
assess what’s coming down the line and determine the best way for our sales team to get new
features into the hands of prospects and customers. At a high level, our process looks like this:

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Our goal is to make sure, through a robust, cross-functional approach, that the investment we
make in our product pays off in the market. Here are the six steps we follow for every launch.

1. Assess the complexity of the new feature

It’s important to look at new features from two perspectives, the reps’ and the customers’.
The level of complexity associated with what’s being launched is a leading factor in the sales
enablement activities we execute. When we launched our new Messenger, for example, we
assessed the complexity of the launch using the following questions:

How different is the new Messenger from the old one?

How different is it to what’s available on the market?

Does it introduce new concepts to customers or the market?

Will our team need to sell it to a new audience?

2. Determine the potential opportunity or risk

The upsides of some product launches are immediately apparent. If we’re releasing a new
product with its own pricing plan, that’s a clear opportunity to drive new business and up-
sell customers. But other changes might be received negatively. For example, if we’re retiring
a feature, customers might react by deactivating or contracting their accounts. Our goal in
sales enablement is to give the sales team ample time and assistance to prepare.

3. Decide on your sales enablement activities

Now we can make an informed decision about what our sales reps need to make the most of
the product launch. It may seem obvious, but the more complex the product launch is and the
bigger the risk or opportunity tied to it, the more training we do. Here are the kinds of activities
we’ll do, depending on the launch:

In-person sessions on messaging and competitive landscape: Be selective which

product launches you do this for, because it takes reps away from selling.

Product walkthroughs: Showing reps the end-to-end workflow for new products
and features is important so they can explain it in sales conversations.

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Pitch decks to use in sales meetings: Giving reps the content they need to sell
new features is crucial. They should be spending their time working deals, not
creating decks.

Internal communications plan: There are a lot of things vying for reps’ attention. A few
well timed emails about an upcoming release can help get reps excited for launch day.

4. Create and execute your sales enablement plan

Preparing for a product launch is a deeply cross-functional process. Stakeholders from marketing,
product and sales all need to be speaking the same language and fully aware of one another’s
goals. We create one document that serves as the source of truth for product specs, product
positioning and sales assets. Here’s a snapshot of the plan from our Messenger launch:

5. Be prepared to react quickly on launch day

On launch day, we are prepared to react quickly to any problems or opportunities that arise.
Even the most rigorous sales enablement plan can’t predict every potential issue or road-
block. We monitor customer responses to messages in our sales team inbox and ask our reps
for ongoing feedback to see how our product messaging is resonating.

6. Measure the impact of the product launch

There are two types of feedback we look for with product launches: feedback on the product
and feedback on the training. We want to know: did our sales reps have the right resources and
feel confident taking the new feature to market? How did prospects and customers respond?

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We gather feedback by surveying the team two weeks after the launch. All of this information
gets funneled into the process for the next launch and, for big wins or learnings, shared with our
stakeholders in marketing and product. Here’s the survey we sent after our Messenger launch:

Takeaway: Capitalize on every revenue opportunity

After months of hard work, releasing a new feature or product into the wild is a magical
experience. What we tend to forget is that launching it is just the beginning. The launch
means absolutely nothing if we cannot transform this momentum into something
meaningful: paying customers.

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Foreword by Stan Massueras, Director of EMEA Sales, Intercom

There is a myth about sales that many of us are taught during our training: that there is one best
way to sell to all your prospects. Whether the company you’re selling to is fresh out of an early
stage accelerator or an industry titan like Verizon, they should all get the same experience.

In theory it’s hard to imagine why a prospect wouldn’t want us to roll out the red carpet. In
reality we’ve found that providing hyper-personalized experiences – with a discovery call,
demo and pilot – can actually be counterproductive. Oftentimes it slows down the deal for
the wrong reasons, for the sake of the sales process instead of added value for the customer.

For many modern buyers, speed is what matters most and something they’re willing to pay for.
In our survey of B2B sales professionals, 91% of sales reps said responding instantly to a lead has
helped them close a deal. We’ve taken this to heart at Intercom through our real-time
sales methodology.

Powered by live chat and chatbots, real-time sales enables our sales reps to move as quickly as
prospects are willing to go. They are now having live conversations about things that would
have previously taken days to find out, like use case, budget and timeline. And our customers
spend less time waiting and more time solving their business needs.

Real-time sales has become one of our biggest levers to close more deals and accelerate our
revenue growth, while optimizing our internal resources.

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LESSON #1

CAPTURE YOUR INVISIBLE PIPELINE OF LEADS

When we talk about leads, we typically put them in one of two buckets: inbound and outbound.
The first is owned by marketing and the second by sales. But there’s actually a third – your
invisible leads.

These are the invisible buyers who visit your website, check out your product and even research
your solution on a site like G2 Crowd or Capterra. But ultimately, they never get in touch. And
unlike your inbound and outbound leads, your invisible leads can’t be called or emailed.

The idea of an invisible pipeline was first introduced to us by the sales trainer Richard Harris,
and his point was simple: if we let these leads stay invisible, we’re leaving money on the table.

Every business has an invisible sales pipeline

For most companies, the invisible sales pipeline – all of the people who visit their website but
will never fill out a contact form – represents the vast majority of their visitors. According to
Unbounce, the average conversion rate for landing pages, across 10 industries, is just 4.02%.

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Yet most businesses, ours included, spend thousands or millions of dollars annually to drive
these invisible leads to our websites. And we do it for a good reason. By building brand
awareness and educating prospects, we hope that by the time people reach our website,
they’ll be ready to buy or, at the very least, be interested in learning more about our product.

But here’s the problem: when these prospects do finally arrive on our websites, most of us
throw up barriers to getting in touch with us. Lengthy contact forms – we’ve all seen pages
with 10-plus fields – are the fastest way to turn hot leads into frigid ones. Worst of all, even if
leads are interested enough to reach out, they wait an average of two days to hear back.

So what can we do to engage the 96% of leads who aren’t going to fill out a form, and better
serve the small minority of hand raisers who will? (We’ll give you a hint: talk to them.)

Shine a light on your invisible leads with real-time sales

The fact of the matter is, buyers are no longer content to purchase the old way. Just as we chat
with our friends, family and coworkers everyday over iMessage, WhatsApp and Slack, we’ve
now come to expect to be able to talk to businesses this way.

In a recent study from Twilio, nine out of 10 consumers said they want to be able to use messaging
to talk to the businesses they from. Put simply, they want real-time sales.

They’re willing to pay for it, too. When we analyzed an aggregate dataset of 20 million live chat
messages sent through Intercom, we found that website visitors who chat are 82% more likely
to convert – and pay 13% more – than those who don’t. For our own business, real-time sales
has increased our number of won deals by more than 19% and our average deal size by 20%.

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MORE CONVERSIONS, MORE REVENUE

On average, website visitors who chat are 82% more likely to
convert to users and pay 13% more than those who don’t.

That’s because live chat and chatbots make it possible to sell to leads at the exact moment
when they’re most engaged – when they’re on our website. And once we’ve started a conversation,
we’re able to qualify them on the spot, answer their questions and move the deal forward.
We can also show them how different Intercom products work together, so they’re equipped
with all the tools they need to grow their business. No barriers, no forms, no callbacks, just
conversations with sales-ready leads in real time

Real-time sales enables you to finally shine a light on your invisible leads so you can grow your
visible pipeline and convert it into revenue faster.

Takeaway: Don’t leave money on the table

Modern prospects expect to buy in real time, and they’re now demanding that all of us in sales
operate in this way. If you continue to wait for leads to fill out forms, your invisible sales
pipeline will only grow, and you’re going to keep leaving money on the table.

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LESSON #2

CONVERT MORE LEADS WITH A REAL-TIME

REVENUE FUNNEL
The promise of real-time sales is being able to connect with qualified leads faster. But if you’re
running a high-growth team, you can’t help but think: how well does live chat actually convert?

What we’ve found is that, although it requires a new muscle you need to strengthen, deploying
a real-time sales funnel can be done efficiently, while also growing your pipeline. Not only are
the leads coming in through live chat of higher quality, they’re also more likely to convert.

In our survey of B2B sales professionals, 72% of sales reps who use live chat reported it has a positive
effect on sales velocity and revenue. Let’s look at why this is the case.

The problem with the traditional sales funnel

For the past 30 years, B2B companies have executed
their inbound sales funnel in a similar manner.
And even today, the funnel on the right is how
salespeople are taught to view the buyer’s journey.

Much like the word funnel suggests, it’s based on the idea
of filtering out the visitors and leads who aren’t ready
to buy or aren’t qualified. To move deals through each
of these stages, sales reps make multiple touches – calls,
emails, various calls to action – through a structured
playbook of how they should interact with prospects.

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If the traditional sales funnel sounds tedious, that’s because it is. Many prospects who land on
your website and fill out a form require a lot of work before they become opportunities.
According to advisory firm TOPO, an inbound SDR touches a prospect an average of 15
times over the course of 20 days.

Suffice it to say, the longer it takes your SDRs to make that first connection, the less likely they
are to ever connect with or convert a prospect.

Speed up your pipeline with a real-time sales funnel

Every salesperson wants to engage qualified prospects at the exact moment when they are
ready to connect. But lead forms don’t allow for this.

With real-time sales, our sales reps can instantly qualify inbound leads – thanks to chatbots,
this step is taken care of for them – and do a light discovery, all within a couple minutes. In just
a single chat conversation, they’re able to find out things like:

Why are they interested in our solution?

How are they solving this problem today?

What are their goals and objectives?

What are their concerns and questions?

And other qualifying questions.

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As a result, our sales funnel now looks like this:

The most impactful change from an efficiency standpoint is that the first three steps are now
one. With real-time sales, we’re connecting with prospects when they want to connect and
moving from qualification to a light discovery instantly. Our sales reps are now talking to leads
who previously would’ve had to fill out a form and sit in a queue.

Takeaway: Invest in sales conversations, not touches

Live chat is an essential part of any modern sales process and for good reason. It enables sales
organizations to run better and faster, by connecting sales reps to qualified prospects in real
time. At Intercom, real-time sales has been a step change in how we deliver against our revenue
targets and is now a key growth lever for the entire business.

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LESSON #3

A THREE-STEP FRAMEWORK FOR

PRACTICING REAL-TIME SALES
If you want to win business today, you need to connect with prospects when it’s convenient
for them and their intent is at its peak, not hours, days or even weeks later. That’s the power
of real-time sales for high-growth companies.

But implementing a real-time approach can seem daunting. What does this mean for your
sales motion? Do you have to completely change your sales process? And what about your
prospects’ experience and the overall buying journey?

We had the same questions. That’s why we’re sharing our playbook for getting started with
real-time sales. Here’s how live chat enables you to level up on three fundamental sales stages:
acquiring, qualifying and converting leads.

Acquire: Fill your funnel with promising leads

The key to real-time sales is being proactive. The conversations on your website should never
be one-way traffic. But that also doesn’t mean your sales reps have to talk to every lead.

Identify the best leads on your website

You should target visitors who match your ideal customer profile. That way you can ensure

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your sales reps are spending time on the right leads. We use a chatbot to automatically qualify
leads based things like industry, company and number of employees. You could also do this
by enriching your website with a tool like Clearbit.

Focus on pages where the intent to purchase is high

The most obvious place to engage leads is on your homepage. After all that’s the page with
the most visitors, right? While that might be true, a better approach is to think about what
your leads want to accomplish on a given page – are they just browsing or choosing a pricing
plan? We found that visitors are 45% more likely to convert on pages where the intent to
buy is high, like our pricing page.

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Qualify: Identify your sales-ready prospects

Properly qualifying leads is the difference between landing lots of business deals and wasting
your energy going after the wrong people.

Use qualification data to send leads down the right path

You can qualify leads manually, by having your sales reps chat to website visitors one on one, or
automatically with a chatbot. At Intercom we have chatbots collect additional qualification criteria,
like use case and intent. With these data, we can send leads down different paths, whether that’s
to our nurture cadence, a product trial or a sales rep in real time.

Fast track qualified leads to your sales reps in real time

One of the advantages of real-time sales is that you are able to move prospects through the
funnel as quickly as they are willing to buy. When a qualified lead indicates they want to chat to
sales, we connect them directly to a sales rep. That way, we can move the deal forward by doing
a light discovery to better understand their pain, budget and timeline.

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Convert: Accelerate the deal in real time

In sales, speed is everything, so it’s important that once you’ve acquired and qualified your
leads, you keep up the momentum for converting them.

Book follow up meetings with your

best leads
While you are talking with a lead is
the best time to schedule a follow-up
meeting. Typically, we have our sales
reps insert the Google Calendar app
into their live chat conversation to let
prospects automatically book time
with us. That way, we can avoid the
annoying back and forth over email,
and let people choose from the times
both of us are actually available.

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Move leads through your funnel with

demos and calls
If your sales motion allows, you can take the
next step in real time and hop on a demo
or even close the deal. With the Aircall and
Google Meet apps for Intercom, you can start
a call and screen share right from the chat.
The Stripe app enables you to convert trial
users to paid customers in less than 30 sec-
onds.

Takeaway: Remove friction from the sales process

To be successful in sales today, you need to be where your prospects are and remove any friction
around taking the next step – whether that’s a chat, a call, a demo or a purchase. The more
hoops you make your prospects jump through during the sales process, the greater the odds are
of losing them. Real-time sales is about enabling people to buy the way they want to buy,
instantly and conversationally.

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LESSON #4

HOW TO RAMP UP YOUR REAL-TIME SALES CHANNEL

Bringing real-time sales into your organization can boost revenue, increase efficiency and
improve the buyer’s journey. But actually getting your sales team set up to effectively leverage
live chat is easier said than done.

When you come from a world of email cadences and phone calls, knowing how to manage a
real-time sales channel isn’t always obvious. When we first implemented live chat, we had to
revisit a number of assumptions about how our sales reps would work, from when they would
engage leads to what tools they needed to be successful.

Here are three tips for quickly ramping up your team on live chat, so you and your team can
start reaping the benefits of real-time sales.

1. Set the right upfront expectations

“Helloooo?” “Anyone there?” “It’s been 20 minutes…”

If you’ve ever used live chat to communicate with a business, you’ve likely had this experience.
It’s the reason that so many buyers associate live chat with long wait times, poorly scripted
responses and a crappy customer experience.

Source: HubSpot

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When we embraced real-time sales at Intercom, we prioritized setting proper expectations with
our sales reps. For live chat to be valuable, our first reply needed to be as fast as possible. Today
our sales reps respond in under 90 seconds, on average, and for conversations that are started by
our chatbot, the response time is just a few seconds.

That doesn’t mean your sales reps have to be available 24/7, even if you have a chatbot responding
to prospects around the clock. Here are some steps we take to set proper expectations with our
prospects in live chat:

Establish our expected reply time upfront.

For all website visitors who write in, we
automatically let them know how long they
should expect to wait to hear from a person.

Clearly state our office hours. These are

the hours when we expect our sales reps
to be online. Our chatbot will step in and
remind prospects when we’re away.

Use the “away mode” to reassign

conversations. Whenever one of our sales
reps isn’t available to chat, they turn on
“away mode,” so their conversations are
automatically reassigned and prospects
still get a speedy reply.

2. Arm your sales team with the information they need

The more context your sales reps have on hand, the more successful their conversations will
be. Unfortunately, the average interaction worker – salespeople included – spends 19% of
their week just searching for and gathering information, according to a study from the
McKinsey Global Institute.

That’s why we’ve made it easy for our sales reps to access the information they need in real
time. Say, for example, that [email protected] starts a conversation. In Intercom, our sales
rep Jane can quickly see that he’s in the middle of his 14-day trial. She can review his past
conversations, check his product usage and even look at his Salesforce profile, all without
ever having to step away from the chat.

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Centralizing your prospect information also improves the customer experience. Remember
the last time you were on the phone with your bank? The absolute last thing you want to do
is recreate the dreaded exercise of having to repeat yourself over and over again. It slows down
the conversation, and you are likely to lose the deal along the way.

3. Embrace automation to scale real-time sales

When implemented correctly, automation
enables you to scale real-time sales without
taxing your team. Chatbots, for example,
have made it possible to accelerate our speed
to lead by handling the low-value tasks that
our sales reps used to have to do. And many
sales teams are using chatbots in the same
way. In our survey of B2B sales profession-
als, 58% of sales leaders said they currently
use, or are planning to use, chatbots to
improve response time and conversion.

We use Intercom’s Custom Bots across

our sales cycle, from qualifying leads and
answering common questions to routing
prospects and scheduling meetings. This
allows our SDRs to spend their time selling
to high-intent prospects instead of doing
administrative work.

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Chatbots are good for our bottom line too. Our analysis of more than 20 million conversations in
Intercom found that conversations assisted by chatbots convert 36% better than conversations
that aren’t, likely because bots can respond faster than humans for most repetitive tasks. It’s
a win-win: our prospects get what they need immediately and our sales reps are able to focus
on high value work.

Takeaway: Set your sales team up for real-time success

Real-time sales has the potential to be a powerful growth lever for your business. But in order
for this live channel to be effective, you need to set the proper foundation. Done well, real-time
sales will improve your prospects’ experience and make your sales reps more efficient too.

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LESSON #5

THE 3 SKILLS SALES REPS NEED TO SELL IN REAL TIME

On the surface, real-time sales is no different from the traditional approach. You still have to
execute demand generation programs to drive leads to your website, qualify them, nurture
them into sales opportunities and close the deal.

The important difference is that with live chat and chatbots, this is happening in real time,
which requires your sales reps to exercise new muscles. You’re turning impersonal funnels into
personal connections – the kind of connections that grow your pipeline and your revenue.

So how do you prepare your sales team to sell in real time? Here are three crucial skills that sales
managers need to help front line reps build in order to maximize the benefits.

Treat chats like phone calls or in-person meetings

We have our chatbots automatically qualify website visitors before we pass the conversation
to our sales reps. That way, our sales reps are only spending time with prospects who have an
intent to purchase or a good fit for our product.

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Once reps have connected with a lead, it’s important for them to remember they’re having a
live conversation with the person on the other end. That means a warm introduction, being
personal and answering the prospect’s questions before earning the right to ask their own –
just like what you would do if you were talking face to face.

Be prepared to tackle tough questions in real time

It’s no secret that prospects are more informed than ever. They do their homework in
advance and research solutions on sites such as G2 Crowd and LinkedIn before reaching out.
First-time conversations over live chat will run the gamut, from detailed pricing inquiries, to
technical product questions, to tough questions about how you stack up against competitors.

Because the conversations are live, reps need to give prompt replies that have just the right level
of depth to build credibility while moving the conversation forward. At Intercom our sales reps
practice by leveraging battle cards, tailoring sales scripts on the fly and role playing.

Know how to accelerate the sale and close the deal

When the rep has finished doing a light discovery, it’s time to move leads onto the next step –
scheduling a meeting, following up over email, closing a deal or dropping them into a nurture
track until they’re ready to buy. Admittedly many of these steps are similar to the ones the
rep would follow for leads who had filled out a form.

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But only with real-time sales can reps do the following:

Loop in teammates for an instant demo: If reps realize their lead is eager to go
deeper, they can immediately pass the chat to an available AE who can take the
lead through a full discovery and demo. Our AEs routinely start video calls or do a
screen share while they’re chatting so prospects don’t have to wait an additional
two to three days.

Close deals in real time: Your team can help the prospect complete a purchase in the
same conversation. And if the lead is in a trial, you can have your AEs upgrade them
right then and there with the Stripe app.

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Takeaway: Talk like a human, sell like a human

With live chat, as with any sales channel, your sales team needs to flawlessly execute selling
fundamentals – engage, qualify and convert leads. But the nature of live chat requires reps to
develop new skills to effectively sell in real time. At their core, these new skills are about
having a deep understanding of who your prospects are and what they need.

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Foreword by Stan Massueras, Director of EMEA Sales, Intercom

Too often when we talk about sales techniques, we’re talking about the kind of tactics that
give our profession a bad knock in the world – subject lines that mislead prospects into
thinking we’ve met before, or attempts to guilt prospects into buying products we know they
won’t use.

The best sales techniques take the salesperson out of the picture. They aren’t about us and our
quotas. They’re about inspiring prospects, through a series of interactions, to make the
potentially nerve-wracking decision to become a customer and then grow with us.

To ensure our techniques scale efficiently, we need to align our resources not just to our
customers’ needs but also to our resources as a business. Having really expensive salespeople
do bespoke work for prospects who are downmarket and want to buy on demand will never
work. It won’t be repeatable over the years, and the math simply won’t work out.

Because we have embraced a real-time sales methodology at Intercom, we’re constantly

working to strike the right balance between having a human touch and leveraging
automation. That’s crucial if we want to maintain the velocity that makes real-time sales
so valuable to our sales reps and our prospects.

When designed correctly, sales techniques should first facilitate what our buyers want to
accomplish and then, as a secondary result, accelerate deals for our sales reps. Never the
other way around.

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LESSON #1

USE CHATBOTS TO ACCELERATE YOUR

SPEED TO LEAD
A great customer experience is about meeting people where they already are. And today there’s
one channel where more high intent prospects are than any place else: live chat.

But not every website visitor is interested in chatting to sales or will be a good fit for your
product. That’s where chatbots have had the greatest impact for our team – by accelerating
our speed to lead without creating extra work for our sales reps.

Chatbots are enabling our sales team to be more efficient, while maintaining a positive
customer experience. We’re using them to handle the upfront, repetitive parts of the sales
process, from engaging website visitors to booking meetings.

Chatbot principles to keep in mind

When implemented correctly, chatbots will help your customers and sales reps get the best
outcomes from any interaction as fast as possible. But it’s not always clear what makes a bot
successful. Here are best practices we follow when building our chatbots:

Personalize the chatbot interaction: Not everyone who visits your website will
want to do the same thing. Some will be happy just to browse, while others might
arrive with the goal of chatting to sales. Your chatbot should send leads down
different paths based on who they are, what they need and how valuable they are
to your business.

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Keep the interaction incredibly simple: Chatbot interactions should be short and
precise. If your website visitor wants to schedule a demo, the bot should quickly col-
lect their details, help them book a meeting and then get out of their way. In this case,
we have our chatbot insert the Google Calendar app to automatically schedule time
with the right sales rep and skip the back and forth over email.

Never send a visitor to no man’s land: Too often, we treat chatbots like dressed up
forms. We expect leads to answer a barrage of questions, but once the bot is done,
we leave them with nowhere to go. At Intercom we take care to conclude every
chatbot interaction with a relevant action, whether that’s helping the person on
the other end register for a webinar, book a demo with our team or start a trial.

Interactions that move deals forward

We have more than 10 chatbots running on our website at all times. The chatbots do different
things based on the page they’re on and what visitors tell us about their goals. Two that have
been game changers for our business are our Qualification bot and Demo bot.

Qualification bot
Live chat can open up a fast lane to your hottest leads, giving them a direct line to sales.
But not every website visitor is going to need or even want to chat. By having a chatbot
pre-qualify leads, you can ensure your sales reps are only spending time with the visitors
that have an intent to buy.

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Our qualification bot runs on our homepage and product pages. The bot triggers after six seconds,
and for new website visitors, it gathers the person’s company name, email address and personal
name. Automating this step reduced our SDR team’s inbox by 50%.

Demo bot
When a visitor first hits your website, their interest in learning about you is at its peak. Not 20
minutes and 20 webpages later. If you think modern buyers are happy to fill out a form and then
wait for you to do your research before they get a follow-up email, it’s time for a reality check.

Our demo bot runs on our pricing page. The bot triggers almost immediately after a lead lands
on it and offers assistance with choosing a plan. For prospects who are ready to chat to sales,
we connect them in real time with one of our SDRs for a light discovery.

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Takeaway: Grow your revenue, 24/7 and at scale

Chatbots have enabled us to dramatically speed up the buying process – to automatically
qualify leads, schedule demos on the spot and connect with high-value prospects in real time.
Our customers get more of what they need, immediately. And our sales reps spend less time
on routine tasks and more time selling.

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BUILD YOUR OWN CHATBOT

STEP ONE: TARGET THE RIGHT WEBSITE VISITORS

To capture quality leads, add bots to the pages that your highest-intent leads are
visiting, like your pricing or demo page. You want to make it as easy as possible for
them to chat to sales.

STEP TWO: WELCOME YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS

Engage your high-intent visitors by sending them a welcome message. Offering multiple
options will allow them to select the option that best matches what they’re looking for.

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STEP THREE: PERSONALIZE PATHS BASED ON WHAT YOUR LEADS NEED

Send leads down different paths based on their replies. If a lead wants to chat to sales, have
the bot collect important information from your leads so you can qualify them on the spot.

STEP FOUR: GIVE DIFFERENT LEADS DIFFERENT FOLLOWUP ACTIONS

Set followup actions based on how valuable leads are to your business. For high-value leads,
route them to your sales team and invite them to book a call with a member of your team.

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STEP FIVE: PREVIEW YOUR CHATBOT AND SET IT LIVE

If you have the Intercom Messenger, you can preview your bot privately on any webpage
where it’s installed. Once you’re happy, set your chatbot live.

STEP SIX: SEE HOW YOUR CHATBOT PERFORMS

Review your stats to see how your chatbot is performing. Track how many emails are
collected, leads created, meetings booked and more.

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LESSON #2

UNDERSTANDING YOUR PROSPECTS IN REAL TIME

In sales, the ability to connect with leads in real time can’t be undervalued. According to our
analysis of more than 20 million live chat conversations in Intercom, exchanging just six
messages over live chat makes a visitor two and a half times more likely to become a customer.

But as powerful as real-time sales is, it has one challenge you also find in email and many other
digital channels – if you can’t see or hear your leads, how do you quickly establish rapport?

In live chat you have to be even more attuned to the contextual clues that prospects are
leaving behind. Here are a few we watch for that say an awful lot about a potential customer.

Assess the opening dialogue

Qualified leads who have specific questions
should be your first priority. If someone
opens with a question and skips the niceties,
it says a lot about the importance of the
question to them.

Your lead is ultimately looking for more

than an answer, but for the moment, they
are simply looking for a fast and accurate
response. Many of these questions we get
tend to be narrow and related to our
products’ current or future features.
Of course, you will also have questions
you need to ask, such as determining their

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timeline and use case. When transitioning to doing a light discovery, we always provide
context for what we’re asking to avoid prospects feeling like they’re in an interrogation.
We also leave it open for our prospects to continue asking questions rather than simply
plowing ahead with our own.

Read between the lines

It’s important to match your tone, writing style and speed of conversation with that of your
customers while using live chat. We watch these three details closely.

1. Diving headfirst into technical terms

Match the prospect’s style.

A fancy vocabulary is not for

everyone. You want your response
to be understood above all, so it’s
best to err on the side of clarity
when it comes to word choice.

2. Writing in a more formal email or

essay format

Time is probably less urgent

in these situations.

This is a good sign that you can go

into a bit more detail. You should
feel comfortable offering proactive
information in addition to
answering any questions.

It’s a good idea to avoid SMS

abbreviations, emoji and other
chat-speak, as it might not be
fully understood.

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3. Writing in short bursts, abbreviated

vocabulary, or both

Speed and urgency are crucial

here.

These customers might be a bit

more familiar to chat-based
shorthand, and perhaps more
used to the messaging format in
general.

Takeaway: Learn as you chat

With real-time sales, your relationship with a prospect starts the instant you begin chatting.
For this to work, you need to pay close attention to key contextual clues and engage your
prospects in an authentic way tailored to them. Ultimately, making a sale comes down to one
thing: having high-value, high-quality conversations.

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LESSON #2

DRIVE FREQUENT AND SMART USAGE

DURING FREE TRIALS
Letting people to try your SaaS product before they buy it is a great strategy for acquiring lots
of prospective customers. But free trials also mean those customers don’t have to commit. They
can leave as fast as they joined.

The easier your software is to try, the less value a potential customer might attribute to it.
Without the commitment of buying a product, the prospect loses some of the intent to buy.
This means that the urgency to dive deep into the product doesn’t exist, which leads to a
dismal trial-to-paid conversion rate.

That’s why we believe it’s essential to:

Get tons of people to sign up.

Make sure each trial is a huge success.

Free trials drive leads

Sales teams love to work with leads from trials. That’s because someone who has entered their
email, selected a product and perhaps even put a credit card on file is a prospect with signifi-
cantly higher value than someone on a cold call list. Here are three strategies for effectively
converting trialling leads:

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Understand the prospect’s use case, fast. Try to find out why they’ve started a trial
as soon as possible.

Drive frequent and smart usage. Trials are a chance to quickly demonstrate value.
But this can happen only if the prospect is using the product frequently and in the
right ways.

Reduce in-trial friction. A free trial shouldn’t feel like an ordeal. Friendly, seamless
onboarding, enablement and support are crucial.

In-app messages are a great way to engage new trial customers quickly. For example, we
might send a note to dig into a customer’s specific needs so we can help them get the most
out of their trial:

A prospect’s intent to buy decreases as time goes on, especially if the product isn’t easy to
grasp immediately after activating a trial. When engaging, either via an in-app message or
email, we try to find out the prospect’s reasons for trying Intercom. Then we work with them
to set the right expectations and goals for the next two weeks.

Make the most of your messages

It’s important to be thoughtful about the messages you send and avoid “just checking in.” If
there’s no direct call to action (or a specific, open-ended question), these messages are easy
to ignore. Message fatigue will set in, especially within a limited trial period.

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You should ensure that every contact is a meaningful one. Send messages based on what the
user has or has not done. For example, if someone has signed up to try Intercom’s Inbox
product, they might receive a message like this:

The medium you use to message is important, too. When someone is getting their hands dirty
in your product and trying to figure out if it is a viable, long term solution, the last thing you
want to do is interrupt their experience by bringing them back to their inbox. In-app mes-
saging means you can have a real-time conversation with the user and make it easy for them
to take the right action now.

Don’t waste their time or yours

You are asking a lot of a prospect during a free trial: to install your software, to set up their
account, to learn the tool, to optimize – and hopefully, to see results. You don’t want to tie up
this time in support requests and conversations.

Providing real-time support and offering custom onboarding flows are two great ways to
increase the amount of time prospects spend doing exactly what they need to. This can be as

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straightforward as asking them what their goal is for using your product and sending them a
relevant product tour:

Takeaway: Make every moment count during the free trial

Fast, collaborative communication is the key to a high conversion rate and sets customers up
for long term success. When a company communicates with customers quickly and correctly,
those customers are going to be more receptive to paying money in the future.

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LESSON #4

INCREASE SALES VELOCITY WITH GROUP DEMOS

It goes without saying that the best salespeople make the process of buying a new product or
service as simple as possible. The more friction you introduce, the fewer deals you’ll close.

But when we think about the buyer’s journey, we tend to assume it’s identical to our internal
sales process, that it moves through the defined sales stages of qualification, discovery,
evaluation, decision, negotiation and, finally, close.

While this might hold true for larger prospects, we have found that startups want to optimize
for speed. To bring velocity to our sales process while maintaining a personal connection, we
have introduced group demos for our smaller accounts.

Scaling up our product demos

Startups evaluate software quickly, and they don’t care for long, drawn out sales cycles. In
many cases, a lengthy discovery call and highly tailored demo are more unwieldy than helpful.
After all, their growth depends on how quickly they can jump on new opportunities.

By introducing carefully crafted group demos, we can cater to a small number of similarly sized
companies at once, while expediting the evaluation period for all of them. Every week we run a
live group demo for no more than 10 prospects.

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The benefits of this approach have been obvious. For one thing, it scales nicely – we are able
to offer an evaluation demo to multiple prospects at once, while keeping the content of each
demo relevant to our specific group of prospects. We can spend more time on the areas our
audience has signaled are the most interesting to them.

Even more than that, each prospect becomes involved in a broader discussion about how they
can use our product, learning about other uses through the questions asked by prospects at
similarly sized companies. Many of our attendees sign up to trial another Intercom product
after attending a session, beyond the product they had initially inquired about.

3 tips to run successful group demos

Here are some of our key tips for running scaled demos.

Have a great demo tool in place. We use a real-time webinar tool, which facilitates
questions and polls and allows us to share our slides with ease. With the Zoom app
for Intercom, prospects can sign up for the demo directly in the Messenger. You can
even send them the Zoom app while you’re chatting. You want a tool that makes the
process seamless from demo signup to follow up.

Make sure you know what your prospects are interested in seeing. We collect this
information when each attendee signs up and also ask the group at the start of the
session. That way, we can tailor our presentation to their needs, making sure it will
resonate with them. If they’re interested in automatically acquiring more leads, for

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example, we’ll spend more time explaining how they can use Custom Bots to
engage and qualify website visitors.

Keep the demos short and sweet. We aim to run our sessions within 30 minutes.
This makes it easy for prospects to fit the session into their day.

Since implementing group demos, the positive response has been overwhelming. “Loved it,”
wrote one prospect. “You already gave me some great ideas with the different types of on-
boarding messages, networking etc.,” wrote another. And as one person put it: “You seemed
so passionate about your product I had to subscribe :).”

Takeaway: You don’t have to sacrifice being personal for speed

These group demos have allowed us to increase our deal velocity, while maintaining a sense
of a personal connection, which is crucial for us. People buy from people. For our prospects,
seeing our faces on their screen and getting immediate answers to their questions lend
credibility to their decision to purchase Intercom.

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LESSON #5

SCALE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS WITH

CUSTOMIZED VIDEO
If you want to build a sustainable business, you need to know exactly what brings your customers
value. By helping your customers grow their businesses, you can grow your business too.

In the beginning, forming deep customer relationships is fairly straightforward: have your
sales team talk to every new customer. The only problem? When you have tens of thousands
of customers, having one-on-one conversations isn’t feasible (as much as we wish it were).

One way we’ve tackled this problem at Intercom is by having our relationship managers create
personal videos. Pairing automated live chat messages with videos has enabled us to strike the
delicate balance between being efficient and being human.

Enable customers to learn or accomplish something

Messaging tools like live chat and video can be a blessing and a curse to sales teams. On the
one hand, it’s really easy to send a message to 50 customers and say, “Hey, just checking in to
see how you’re getting on!” On the other hand, it’s now really easy to spam 50 people.

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Untargeted outreach like this is the

business equivalent of getting a “’sup?” text
from an acquaintance you barely know and
haven’t seen in ages. It feels lazy and looks
spammy, and it more than likely isn’t going
to garner a response, because – guess what
– everyone else is doing it too.

The best messages help customers learn or

accomplish something. You could be sharing
best practices, scheduling a video call or
training them on new set of features.

The first time we tested customized videos was to encourage customers to fill out a survey on
satisfaction and usage. We suspected putting faces to our names would make customers more
likely to respond and would plant the seeds for future conversations. So we used the video to do
two things: introduce ourselves and explain how the survey would help us better serve them.

Our hypothesis held true. Nearly 50% of our customers opened our first video message. That
was huge considering that, on average, only 26% of in-app messages are opened industry wide.

3 steps to put your video message together

Once you know what your goal is, filming your video and setting up your message to customers
should be straightforward. Follow these steps to prepare and send your message via the
messaging tool of your choice. In our case, we used Intercom.

Keep your video casual: Customers want to feel like they’re connecting with a real
person. You don’t need fancy video equipment; a comfy corner and the video camera
on your phone or laptop will do! Remember to use your normal tone and voice – after
all, nobody wants to talk to a robot – and try to keep the video under a minute.

Define your target audience: You should be intentional about which accounts you’re
targeting. If you’ve already worked with an account, sending an introductory message
will seem spammy rather than personal. By relying on customer behavior, such as
if they’ve responded one of your messages before, it’s easy to identify who could
benefit from seeing your video.

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Design your customer interaction: We use chatbots to send targeted messages to our
customers when they’re live on our website. That way we can give them multiple
paths to choose from – in this case, they could chat to us or go straight to the survey.

From our first video message, we were able to drive more than 950 customers to complete the
survey, enabling us to glean valuable information about them. We were also able to identify
opportunities to educate them about the products they were already using or show them how
other Intercom products could help different parts of their business grow.

Takeaway: Continually solve the problem of one-to-many

As your business grows, you’ll inevitably have to think about how to make your outreach
efficient but still human. The best solution we’ve found is prioritizing the sweet spot of activities
that are meaningful to your customers and scalable for your team. For us, video messages are
just one important touchpoint among many.

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Foreword by Jeffrey Serlin, Senior Director of Sales & Support Operations, Intercom

Alignment – it’s a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot today. Despite our new obsession
with it, alignment is actually an age old problem faced by all businesses of scale. If you look past
the jargon, the question we’re really trying to answer is: how can we partner to drive growth?

I’ve long believed that the key to collaborating cross functionally is having a shared list of
priorities. At Intercom we agree on our strategic growth levers as a single go-to-market (GTM)
team. GTM includes all organizations that affect revenue – including sales and marketing but
also product, engineering and analytics. Planning isn’t an exercise that one organization does
and then charges ahead with or hands off to the rest of us.

This applies to all of our growth initiatives. It could be improving the end-to-end user experience
or championing a real-time approach to sales. We collectively optimize our capacity against
our joint priorities to maximize our revenue potential. Any one of us can make incremental
progress, but at the end of the day, acquiring new customers and expanding existing ones
requires a unified GTM approach.

One big thing I’ve learned is that buy-in needs to happen at every level. It’s not good enough
to have alignment at the top if your sales reps on the front lines aren’t on the journey with
you. Everyone needs to understand the value of our shared GTM initiatives, our individual
roles in supporting them and the importance of collaborating cross functionally.

We often pay lip service to alignment, but real cross-functional collaboration requires effort
to achieve and an ongoing commitment to maintain. It’s crucial if you want to successfully
execute on the growth levers you have in front of you. Companies can’t grow or scale in silos.

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LESSON #1

ALIGN SALES AND PRODUCT USING

PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED
In the first few years of selling a new product, your primary goal is to introduce as many people
as possible to your product and get them to buy it. As a sales team, it’s rare that you have the
time or resources to reflect on how your experiences on the front lines could add value to the
product roadmap. When we created our first sales function in 2014, that’s the exact situation
we found ourselves in.

But what works at the beginning doesn’t always translate to later success. Eventually, you’ll
need to reboot the way your teams work together to build and sell your product. As we moved
upmarket, we began to acquire customers whose business pointed out the ways Intercom did
and didn’t work for larger teams – and it forced us to ask some hard questions:

Where does sales fit at a company driven by product strategy, not short term revenue?

How can salespeople give a voice to what’s happening in the market, and grow our
share of it too, while respecting the long term product vision?

We had to look with fresh eyes at the problems our new customers needed to solve, and build
a healthy partnership with the product team to turn these roadblocks in the sales cycle into
solutions that customers would love. Here’s how we did it and what we learned along the way.

The problem: growing pains

In the beginning, our sales and product teams often felt like ships passing in the night. As
salespeople, we were used to talking to prospects about their goals and providing concrete
recommendations based on product functionality. That meant taking a prescriptive approach
and going to our product team with the exact solutions our customers had requested:

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But creating one-off builds for a handful of customers puts you on a fast track to a Frankenstein
product and a customer acquisition strategy that doesn’t scale. It was hard to see how these
requests would benefit all customers, and it was far more likely for the product team to say no.

As a result, we switched to a thematic approach. But in doing that, our suggestions became
far too broad, and our product managers had to guess what we meant:

While we wanted to deliver value to our upmarket customers, we were actually underplaying our
hand. Our strength as a company has always been our innovative approach to problem solving,
and by first being too prescriptive and then too broad, we prevented the product team from
doing their best work.

The solution: aligning around “why”

After a lot of trial and error, we realized we had to go back to first principles. We had to peel
back the metaphoric onion and ask, why do our prospects and customers need X or Y feature?
By focusing on “why” instead of “what,” we were able to give our product team the information
they needed to solve problems without limiting how they did it. The key for us was to be more
specific and less prescriptive:

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Today, we crowdsource answers to our problems from both our sales and customer solutions
teams. We ask the team at large to rank their requests using anecdotal and quantitative data
from our CRM. Then as sales leaders, we curate the list and decide on an order of magnitude
ranking. We bring the top 25 requests to our roundtable with the product team, where we
discuss what it’ll take to get a viable solution into the market and get consensus as product
and sales leaders on our top priorities for the quarter.

3 tips for making product requests

It’s easy to get carried away coming up with product requests, especially when you’re catering
to upmarket customers with sophisticated needs. Here’s how to keep product requests
actionable and well defined:

Focus on the problem, not the solution: Rather than prescribing what should be
built, describe the roadblocks customers are facing.

Get granular: Be specific about the problem. For lead qualification, that might be
distinguishing leads from customers or enriching email addresses.

Rank requests by impact: Identify which problems need to be solved first based on
order of magnitude, e.g. blockers for new business, reasons for churn.

Takeaway: Collaborate on problems to be solved, not features

As your existing customers grow their businesses and larger companies sign on, your sales
team will have to approach your product – and your relationship with your product team – in
entirely new ways. By collaborating on root issues instead of features, you’ll increase customer
happiness and deliver more revenue too. That should be your bottom line.

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LESSON #2

WHY SALES AND MARKETING SHOULD HAVE

A SHARED REVENUE PLAN
A successful sales and marketing partnership is based on a mutual understanding that we’re
all manufacturing the same thing: revenue for the business.

Sometimes, however, blockages can develop in the pipeline. They can be difficult to diagnose,
and if sales and marketing don’t have a healthy relationship, things can quickly devolve into
pointing fingers instead of working together to find solutions.

Ultimately, it all comes down to communication. Here’s how we ensure that information
flows freely between our two organizations, from planning to execution.

Create and commit to a shared revenue plan

Sales and marketing tactics will vary, but to succeed, the teams need to be aligned around a
single revenue plan – not separate sales and marketing plans. That means one spreadsheet,
one set of metrics and one approval process.

Research from the Aberdeen Group confirms the massive impact that investing in this crucial
relationship can have. Businesses who prioritize sales and marketing alignment see higher
average deal size, greater sales team attainment and more annual revenue.

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We lean on our finance and analytics teams to facilitate the planning process. Having them in
the room introduces a natural tension where we’re encouraged to ask one another, “Is this
initiative going to be impactful? And how are we going to manage it?”

For example, when we first implemented live chat, sales and marketing had to come
together to discuss how we would build one continuous supply chain. Marketing needed
to drive a high enough volume of leads to our website for live chat to be a valuable sales
channel. But we could only reap the benefits if we had the capacity and processes to
support a real-time sales motion.

When done well, the revenue plan accounts for every inflection point – every metric we’re
measuring, all the definitions for the sales funnel we’re using and even the way our systems
are set up to capture and report on progress to our shared targets.

Set the right incentives for both teams

One of the areas of tension between sales and marketing teams is incentives. In sales our
compensation is tied to results, in terms of deals closed and revenue generated. That’s true
across our organization. But the same is not true for every person in marketing.

So how do you ensure that your shared objectives are meaningfully felt by every person on
the team? There are two ways we’ve approached solving this:

Build in variable compensation: This makes the most sense for marketers who can
directly impact our pipeline by generating MQLs. But that’s hard to do globally
because marketing is made up of so many different activities. The content team’s

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contribution to the pipeline isn’t going to be the same as the email team’s or the
operations team’s.

Create a revenue-oriented culture: In a lot of cases, having the right culture

trumps the first option. Regardless of variable compensation, there needs to be an
expectation across both teams that our ultimate goal is to drive revenue for the
business. It doesn’t matter that we contacted 300 leads or held 15 webinars if we
missed our number.

Sales and marketing should be measured against the same metrics, so that anything we decide
to work on, or not work on, serves our shared goals. Sales shouldn’t have to tell marketing
that the volume or quality of leads aren’t where we need them to be, and marketing shouldn’t
have to tell sales that our conversion rates are trending in the wrong direction.

Takeaway: One supply chain, one objective

At the end of the day, sales and marketing belong to the same supply chain, and they should
be driving to the same key performance indicator (KPI) – revenue. When that happens, you
can keep sales and marketing in sync, tackle problems head on and stay focused on the
business of accelerating growth

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LESSON #3

SALES AND SUPPORT SHOULD BE FRIENDS, NOT FOES

Sales and support teams usually aren’t seen as having much in common. In fact, at most
companies a certain amount of tension between these two teams has come to be expected.

When the perception is that salespeople will say anything to close a deal, support teams
worry about being left with the mess of having to deal with upset customers after the sale.
On the flipside, after working an account for months, the last thing a salesperson wants to
think about is a new customer ending up disappointed and in the support queue.

Here at Intercom, we’ve invested in nurturing a positive dynamic between sales and support and
created workflows that allow our teams to collaborate in ways that better serve our customers.

Working the front lines

Sales and support reps are the face of your company’s communications with prospects and
customers, especially over live chat. With so much on the line, these teams need clear workflows
to remove ambiguity about which team covers what. At a high level, here’s how we think
about the responsibilities for each team:

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Support – The support team owns the vast majority of the frontline conversations,
because their directive is to provide real-time answers to questions about our product.

Sales – When the conversation is about buying Intercom, whether it’s with a new
lead or a current customer, then the sales team steps in. Being selective is important
in order to reserve the sales team’s bandwidth for growing our company’s revenue.

Routing the right questions to the right team

We’re constantly working to optimize the way we communicate with website visitors who
initiate a conversation with our team. People place a premium on the speed of response,
especially for a real-time channel like live chat. But having a support rep start a conversation
with someone only to realize that person should be talking to sales, or vice versa, isn’t a good
use of anyone’s time.

That’s why we use our chatbot to automatically greet all website visitors and get context
on their inquiry before routing them to a rep. It’s a matter of asking one simple question:
“Who do you want to chat to?” If they say sales, we’ll ask a few more qualifying questions
like company name and size. If they say support, we’ll ask for their email address, so we
can pull up their account.

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Sharing context is key

Nothing is more frustrating for a prospect than being passed along to yet another rep who
asks the same five questions. That’s why it’s essential to share important context throughout your
teams. When passing a conversation to another teammate, we use internal notes to eliminate
guesswork about who the prospect is and what they need help with.

A strong relationship with support means quicker learning

Our support team improves our sales process by sharing feedback from customers who have
expressed frustration or confusion around our product offering, pricing or value. What we
learn helps us refine our sales strategy and tactics. If our sales team iterated in a silo, we
would take longer to make meaningful progress. By working together, we learn twice as fast.

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Takeaway: Sales and support should champion the customer, together

When your front line teams partner closely, your prospects and customers get more value
from your product. That means happier buyers who will advocate on your behalf and,
ultimately, purchase more too. You’ll also learn and iterate faster as a sales organization. A
healthy relationship between sales and support is just good for business.

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LESSON #4

HOST SALES DAYS TO BUILD BRIDGES BETWEEN

YOUR COMPANY AND YOUR CUSTOMERS
Sales is a customer-facing role. Over time, you accumulate a lot of knowledge regarding who
your customers are, what business problems they commonly face and how your offering
could address their needs.

The same is not true for everyone else at Intercom. Depending on your role, speaking to our
customers may be a very small part of your job, or not part of it at all. That’s why we have introduced
Sales Days – a structured opportunity for employees to shadow a member of the sales team.

Sales Days encourage people throughout the company to step into our shoes for a few hours. They
remove the layers between the people who make our products and the people who use them.

The benefits of hosting Sales Days

Sales Days are a priceless way to share internal knowledge. The format involves shadowing reps,
sitting in on calls and following the sales team’s processes. They provide fresh insight into how the
sales team pitches Intercom and what our conversations with prospects actually entail.

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Everyone likes to think they know what their customers want at all times, but at a certain
stage, maintaining that clarity becomes a task of its own. Having a setup like a Sales Day
creates an invaluable vehicle for cultural transfer. Everyone across the organization benefits
from having a clear idea of what customers need and care about most.

5 tips for a successful Sales Day

Make the experience as personal as possible: We pair each person who wants to
participate with a member of our sales team. That team member is responsible for
sharing a holistic overview of the sales team and how we work. They’ll also break
down our sales funnel, the buyer’s journey and our organization’s structure.

Get people in front of real prospects: The next part of the Sales Day is shadowing
one of our inbound SDRs. The goal is to share how we manage live chat conversations
in Intercom, including qualifying new leads and doing a light discovery.

Walk them through a deal: We give every person an opportunity to sit in on a

30-minute call with one of our AEs. Most of the time, this will be a discovery call.
The AE will deep dive into the prospect’s intended use case, problems they are
experiencing with their current workflows and how Intercom can bring them value.

Show them how we grow our accounts: The final part of the Sales Day is a sit down
with one of our relationship managers, who are each responsible for a book of accounts.
The relationship manager will explain how we retain and grow our customers.

Collect feedback from participants: At the end of the day, we send a short survey to
understand what people liked and didn’t like, so we can make our Sales Days better.

Using Intercom to sell Intercom

What is unique about our sales organization is that we use our own product, Intercom, to sell
Intercom. Our SDRs use our Messenger to qualify leads and do a light discovery in real time.
Then we pass prospects to an AE to negotiate and close. For our smaller accounts, we might
win the deal in the same live chat conversation.

Sales Days make it possible for everyone at the company to see how we are using Intercom
internally and then connect it to the value that our customers get. For engineers, for

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example, a Sales Day can provide valuable context for product requests. It’s not always
easy to understand why one feature could block a deal or even result in churn, until you
experience it firsthand.

Sales Days give a voice to our customers and our product, in a way that internal docs and
demos simply can’t.

Takeaway: Everyone should understand why customers buy your product

This exercise enables cross collaboration along with culture and knowledge sharing. By hav-
ing every person in your company – from engineering to HR – understand the value of your
product and how that value is realized by prospects and customers, you can foster an entire
ecosystem of passionate (sales)people.

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Foreword by LB Harvey, Senior VP of Sales & Support, Intercom

When I joined Intercom, the sales department was just beginning to stretch its legs. Eoghan, our
CEO, had hired the company’s first salesperson only two years earlier. While the team had grown
to more than 40 people, they had a singular focus: converting leads who were in a free trial.

The question I was brought on to answer was, how can we transform sales into a growth lever
for the long term? Our revenue was growing quickly, but the structures required for scale had
not yet been built. We had a sales assisted motion when we needed to add one that was sales
owned and core to our organization, along with a new outbound motion.

That was my first order of business – investing in the functions, processes and relationships
that would pave the way to our next inflection point. These are the lessons we’ve shared over
the last five chapters. But here’s the thing: if you want to maintain your momentum in the
market, you can’t stop there. Growth is a race with no end.

My job is to constantly be on the lookout for our next million dollar opportunity. Where
can we increase our inbound win rates and raise our average revenue per account? Are we
strategically expanding our market, and are our outbound motions effective? How will new
subteams impact our revenue trajectory? These are the questions I ask every single day.

Here’s my advice to other sales leaders. The secret to growth is to prioritize ruthlessly and
focus on the small subset of activities that will really move the needle. Everything else,
including your email, can wait.

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LESSON #1

FOR FASTER GROWTH, LOOK BEYOND

HEADLINE SALES KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization – the right people, processes and
strategy, to start. But today, the underlying backbone of faster growth is the right data.

As a sales leader, that means you have to be able to interpret and use data about your team and
organization throughout the sales cycle. If you’re forecasting short on your global revenue
target, do you know how you’ll make up the difference? That’s not a rhetorical question.

Your ability to drive revenue growth hinges on how well you can translate everyday metrics
like lead volume, win rates and ARPA into an actionable plan that moves the bottom line. Here’s
how we use sales KPIs as strategic levers at Intercom.

Beware of headline KPIs

When defining your sales KPIs, it can be tempting to focus all of your attention on headline
KPIs – those numbers like organizational attainment and net new revenue that make a
powerful statement about the performance of your sales organization.

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Charts like the one below provide a concise summary of what you’ve accomplished, especially
when reviewed monthly or quarterly. But they are often shallow in information and rarely
paint a full picture of how or why you hit (or missed) your targets.

That’s why we spend just as much time examining our underlying KPIs – lead flow, pipeline
creation and more – in order to drive action for our team. Say we notice, as in the chart below,
that we’re overdelivering on sales eligible leads, but our stage one opportunities – new leads
that our SDR team marks as qualified and passes to our AEs – hasn’t increased proportionally.

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We can interpret this in one of two ways: either we have more leads of poorer quality, or we
haven’t staffed up our SDR team to convert the increased volume. Both can be addressed.
If we were only looking at headline KPIs, we’d miss this crucial opportunity to course correct
before it impacted our ability to hit our revenue targets.

Use your sales KPIs as strategic levers

When leveraged correctly, sales KPIs will do more than just help you diagnose wins and risks
within your sales organization. They’ll also help you become an even more strategic asset to the
company. Here are two very different examples of how we’ve used sales KPIs as growth levers.

Example #1: Secure executive buy in for new initiatives

The work of your sales organization has to ladder up to what the company wants to accomplish
at the highest level. Recently, we saw an opportunity to test outbound sales as a way to move
upmarket and increase our global revenue. In theory, it’s simple: hire a few outbound folks and
start selling to larger companies. But the math also has to work out.

We worked with our finance team to establish the return-on-investment (ROI) metrics and
appropriate timelines. That way, we could say to our executive team, “The target is to have
an ROI of 4X on each outbound SDR, and it’s forecasted that we’ll achieve this run rate in no
more than 12 months.”

The inputs that define your outbound initiative are your sales KPIs – the number of opportunities
created per head, win rate, net new revenue and average revenue per account. Together these
numbers are your game plan for how and why outbound sales will drive meaningful growth for
your business.

Example #2: Turn product launches into revenue

Often when people think about product launches, they think about building and shipping new
features. But what comes after – how you market and sell those features – is just as important,
and sales plays a crucial role in ensuring that work pays off in the market.

When we launched Custom Bots, our chatbot for sales and marketing teams, we set a specific
target for net new revenue. For our relationship managers, that trickled down to a certain
amount of net expansion dollars for Custom Bots they had to close among their book of customers.
By having dedicated KPIs, we were able to maximize the revenue impact of the launch.

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Whenever you have a new initiative, whether it’s a new feature, plan type or focus area for the
company, you have to be able to come up with clear, data-driven objectives for your team.

Takeaway: Data can be a powerful lever for growth

For ambitious companies, leveraging the right metrics is the difference between driving scalable
growth and seeing your revenue flatline. But KPIs on their own are just numbers on a dashboard.
They become meaningful only when you dig deeper, start looking for underlying trends and
themes and use them to take the next step toward faster growth.

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LESSON #2

GROW YOUR REVENUE BY CREATING NEW TEAMS

WITHIN YOUR EXISTING SALES ORGANIZATION
As your sales organization scales up, how you structure your team will need to change too.
Just as you will move from seeking out generalists to hiring specialists, you will likely split
your new and existing business into “hunters” who acquire customers and “farmers” who
grow them.

When we made the transition, we realized we had a huge opportunity in front of us to invest
in our existing customers. Many of them were small businesses, and while they didn’t require
the full-time attention of a customer success manager, we believed they could benefit from
scaled account management. This hypothesis became our relationship management team.

The journey from the seed of an idea to a full-fledged team – one that has delivered more than $10
million in revenue impact – hasn’t come without challenges. Here are five lessons we learned
about growth.

1. Relentlessly measure impact

When starting a new sales team, the most important question you can ask is, “Is the juice
worth the squeeze?” If you’ve decided to hire new talent, onboard and support them and
change your customer coverage model, the answer needs to be a resounding “yes.”

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In our case, when we created our first relationship management team, we decided we needed to
see at least 2.5x ROI. We tracked customer churn, contraction, expansion and overall health.
A/B testing confirmed our initial hypothesis, and we saw more than 5x ROI.

2. Bias yourself and your team toward “yes”

In building a new team from the ground up, you have to constantly evolve your ideas and
assumptions. Early on, we hypothesized that relationship managers would primarily use
email to drive customer retention and expansion. After four months, our team had created
more than 20 email campaigns, yet we had little direct impact to show for our efforts. When
the campaigns did produce results, more than 90% of the time at least one customer call was
also involved. It became clear that the campaigns themselves weren’t driving retention and
expansion; rather they were inviting follow up conversations that were.

Situations like these demand strong opinions, weakly held. You have to be willing to
change your hypothesis as new information emerges. After we realized that making
customer calls was crucial for relationship managers, we started looking for salespeople
with extensive phone experience and helped our current relationship managers become
skilled at making sales calls.

3. Hire for ownership

Ambiguity is unavoidable when joining a newly formed team. You want to hire salespeople
who will think and operate like business owners: no job is too small, and they’re comfortable
writing a sales playbook where none exists. Having a team of owners has been a game changer

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for our relationship managers and a crucial part of the team’s performance and happiness. Here
is a slide that one of our relationship managers independently created to share his learnings
with the team:

But hiring for ownership is a two-way street. For employees to become owners, they have
to feel empowered to play that role by their manager and leaders. Striking the balance
between being prescriptive and giving autonomy can be difficult with a new team. If you’re
feeling this tension, stop and ask, “Are my actions helping my team or preventing them
from truly owning the role?”

4. Channel your inner MacGyver

You and your team will need a MacGyver level of resourcefulness when starting a sales team.
Can you build a lie detector, hotwire a helicopter and hack into a supercomputer using only
what you can find in your family’s garage?

New sales teams operate without the same systems or level of cross functional support that
established teams enjoy. The reason is simple: the team and its needs are new not only to your
sales reps and managers but also to the entire organization. We set the expectation early on
with our relationship management team that they will likely be challenged to do things that
are outside their official job description – a crash course in SQL, a last-minute churn analysis.
When you’re scaling quickly, you can’t wait for everything to be perfectly figured out.

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5. Find your village and cultivate it

As you start building your team, spend some time thinking about the people in your organization
who will be vital in your journey. Often, these will be your partners in marketing, sales operations,
recruiting and senior leadership. It’s important for you to seek them out and invest in fostering
those relationships, because at some point, you will need their help.

Pete Prowitt, a manager on the relationship management team, and Jeffrey Serlin,
our Senior Director of Sales & Support Operations.

Takeaway: To accelerate growth, embrace change and uncertainty

Starting a new sales team can feel like building an airplane plane mid-flight. As a sales
organization, you’ll test new tactics and strategies, onboard your reps to new roles and,
of course, both fail and succeed. The key to success lies in fostering a culture where change
and uncertainty are embraced as opportunities for growth.

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LESSON #3

CUSTOMER EXPANSION IS YOUR

NEXT GROWTH CHANNEL
The formula for selling SaaS is quite straightforward: acquire users, monetize them and look to
keep them around for as long as possible. But over the past few decades, salespeople have put
the majority of their time and effort into acquiring customers while retention and expansion
have taken a back seat.

Source: Invesp

It’s a simple truth that most salespeople do not celebrate renewals or upsells in the same way
that they do when a customer signs on the dotted line for the first time. Yet, research points
out that customer retention is far more financially sound for your business. According to
Invesp, increasing retention rates by 5% can increase profits by as much as 25% to 95%.

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Account plans are the cure to our acquisition addiction. They are one of the most important
weapons in our sales team’s arsenal, because they prioritize our customers’ long term success.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to turning customer expansion into your next growth channel.

Why customer expansion is the new conversion

There is no point exerting lots of energy attracting new business if you struggle to keep your
existing customers happy and subscribed to your service. Our co-founder Des has gone so far
as to say that “customer retention is the new conversion,” and we would argue that customer
expansion is an even more powerful lever for our business.

The data backs the claims up. Price Intelligently found that acquiring a new customer is 4x
more expensive than upselling an existing one and 9x more expensive than getting them to
renew. Add to that the high cost of customer acquisition and an inevitable degree of customer
churn, and you can easily find yourself with compounding negative revenues.

Account plans enable you to reverse this situation. They bring together crucial information
about your customers, your competitors and your strategy to nurture existing business.
Done well, they guide your sales reps toward growth opportunities within their book of
accounts and enable them to get ahead of contraction and churn risks.

Building your account plan

The first step of an account plan is preparation, gathering all the data points that will make or
break a customer’s success. Think of it as time spent sharpening your axe before a day full of
chopping wood. These data points will inform the five main components of your account plan:

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Business objectives. This is your understanding of the customer’s needs and how it
relates to the value your product provides.

Relationship and decision making. This paints a picture of the organization and its
stakeholders, mobilizers and blockers.

Assessment of customer. This provides an overview of the account and the

strengths and weaknesses of your current relationship.

Actions for the next 90 days. These are the steps the customer can take that will
help them see the value in your product and lead them to renew.

Actions for the next 365 days. This is the white space in the account where you can
help your customer identify new areas of opportunity. For example, meeting a
champion on a different team could lead to a more integrated tech stack and a
potential upsell.

Once you’ve filled out each of these five components, you should have a bird’s-eye view of
your strengths in the account, which in turn should reveal new expansion opportunities.

Putting your account plan to work

An account plan is only successful if it meaningfully improves a customer’s chances for long term
success with your product. That’s why you need to translate your plan into a customer-facing
presentation that aligns both sales rep and client around a shared objective.

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For the kickoff meeting, you should gather all of the account’s key decision makers, including
the budget owner and your champions. What’s crucial in this conversation is that there’s
mutual buy-in. Your account plan should reflect your deep understanding of the customer’s
business and their objectives and then recommend a series of action items that will make the
customer even more successful with your product.

By setting the stage for a consultative relationship, customers will be assured that you aren’t
selling them a product that will only serve them in the here and now, but that it’s a long term
investment with the flexibility to match their needs as they evolve.

Takeaway: You can’t afford to treat customers like they’re disposable

Nothing makes a customer feel more unimportant than to have the sales rep they worked
with permanently disappear the moment the deal is signed. Instead, encourage all your reps
to create an account plan for each client so that they are fully invested in the post-sales
handoff and ongoing customer success. That’s how you’ll grow your business for the long term.

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LESSON #4

STRATEGICALLY EXPAND YOUR ADDRESSABLE

MARKET TO DRIVE YOUR NEXT WAVE OF GROWTH
During your first wave of growth, your initial customers are very important. You have to build
a product that solves a problem and solves it in a meaningful, differentiated way. If you start
downmarket like we did, you’ll likely have a sales assisted motion on top of a self-serve model.

But if you only serve your original customers and companies like them, you are stunting your
future growth. To accelerate your revenue, you need to figure out how your product can solve
that same problem for a broader set of customers. If you decide to move upmarket, you will
have to adopt a sales owned motion where the sales team drives acquisition and expansion.

Growing your addressable market requires a coordinated go-to-market effort, from sales
and marketing to analytics and engineering. The company will not succeed if only one rogue
salesperson is bringing in larger customers and carrying the torch. So where do you start?

Decide how you will expand your market

There are three ways that companies typically grow their addressable market:

By expanding to other verticals.

By starting at the high end and expanding downmarket. B2C companies will often
start with a high end product and then create less expensive versions of it.

By starting at the lower end and expanding upmarket. In B2B, companies start by selling
to smaller businesses and then expand to mid-market and enterprise customers.

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Source: Joel York

The third here is classic disruption, and the story should sound familiar: a company provides
an improved solution to an existing problem, meets enough of the needs of upmarket
customers, often at a lower price, and as a result disrupts the incumbent players. Just think
of Slack, Dropbox and Stripe – all of whom started with thriving self-service businesses and
when the market was ready, hired large sales teams to acquire bigger customers.

Be wary of “happy ears” with upmarket customers

There’s a classic response that salespeople have when talking to larger companies – we call it
“happy ears.” It’s incredibly easy to be overly optimistic when you see a sexy new logo walk
in the door. Moving upmarket can change the entire trajectory of your business, after all.
As a result, one path that is very tempting to take when you have an upmarket customer is to
ask your product team to build to their needs. There’s a lot on the line for your prospect and
your sales team. Likely it’s been weeks, if not months, of work from the SDR and AE to even
get the prospect to seriously consider your product. For both, it’s millions of dollars at stake.

The risk of falling into this trap is wasting your company’s time on something that isn’t scalable–
you might sell something that is great for one upmarket customer but doesn’t enable you to

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sell any more effectively to others. We had the opportunity to sign a multimillion dollar deal
with a large, well known company. They came to us with a request for proposal (RFP) that had
137 lines of special requirements. It wasn’t an easy decision, but we passed in order to focus on
selling products that are valuable for many customers rather than valuable for just one.

3 ways to move upmarket successfully

The best way to move upmarket is to do it one step at a time. Moving upmarket isn’t about
making exceptions to your product or go-to-market strategy. It’s about taking a systematic
approach to growth. We’ve moved upmarket at Intercom by:

Finding customers who are one step bigger than our current sweet spot. We started by
identifying the customers who had outgrown our product. What were the core features
they were missing? Often you’ll find these are things like administrative capabilities,
reporting functionality, security protocols and integrations or APIs.

Understanding what our upmarket customers need. When working with upmarket
prospects, we discuss upfront which features in their RFP are must-haves and
which ones are nice-to-haves. If you don’t have it, you’re not good at it and the
plan isn’t for you ever to work on it, be honest with your stakeholders.

Assessing what we need to do versus what we could partner for. We’ve made the
move from product to platform. For our upmarket customers, our integration
with vertical specific solutions like Salesforce and Marketo is crucial. In many
cases, you’ll find that extending your product to partners will be just as important
as your core functionality.

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Takeaway: Upmarket expectations are different

Don’t assume you can serve your upmarket customers in the same way you serve your other
customers. Just as your expectations for a $100 meal are different than for a $10 meal, your
upmarket customers will expect more from you than the downmarket ones do. You need to
be prepared to evolve your sales motion, mature your product and optimize for scale.

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the
generosity, wisdom and expertise of so many, including
(in alphabetical order):

David Carr, Intercom

Dustin Crawford, Intercom
Lauren Enea, Intercom
Mark Hughes, Intercom
Tom Foley, Intercom
Brooke Goodbary, Intercom
Erica Grijalva, Intercom
Kate O’Hanlon, Intercom
Ashley Hanson, Intercom
Daniel Harris, Intercom
Richard Harris, The Harris Consulting Group
Sam Hoare, Intercom
Florence Kamhi, Intercom
Nicole Kohler, Animalz
Brian Kotlyar, Intercom
Asher Mathew, LeanData
Emily O’Byrnes, Intercom
Graham Ó Maonaigh, Intercom
Paddy O’Neill, Intercom
Pete Prowitt, Intercom
Shriya Ravikumar, Intercom
Thomas Sunderland, Intercom
Maya Sykes, Intercom
Des Traynor, Intercom
Orinna Weaver, Intercom
INTERCOM.COM/FOR-SALES
Intercom – The world’s first customer platform
helping internet businesses accelerate growth

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