Intercom On Sales
Intercom On Sales
INTERCOM ON SALES
What we’ve learned about sales on our
journey to scaling a billion dollar business.
We’ll spare you the legal mumbo jumbo. But please don’t share this book or rip off any
Got questions? Head over to intercom.com and get in touch through our Messenger
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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
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
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.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PEOPLE 10
FOUNDATION32
METHODOLOGY
56
TECHNIQUES79
COLLABORATION
102
GROWTH 118
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Intercom on Sales
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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LESSON #1
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.
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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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 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.
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.
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.
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LESSON #2
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.
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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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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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
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Intercom on Sales
Because this is also a closing role, our real-time AEs need experience in:
Pitching solutions
Managing trials
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.
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LESSON #3
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.
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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?
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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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.
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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Intercom on Sales
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.
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LESSON #4
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.
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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So, as a sales organization, how do we get better each and every quarter? There are two main
ways we adjust for overperformance:
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.
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LESSON #5
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.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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LESSON #2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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LESSON #3
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.
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.
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.
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LESSON #4
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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.
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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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.
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’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.
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LESSON #5
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.
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.
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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:
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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
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.
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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.)
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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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.
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LESSON #2
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.
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.
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:
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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.
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LESSON #3
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.
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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.
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LESSON #4
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.
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:
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.
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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.
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LESSON #5
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.
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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
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.
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.
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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LESSON #2
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.
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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.
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LESSON #2
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.
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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.
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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.
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:
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LESSON #4
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.
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.
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 :).”
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LESSON #5
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.
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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LESSON #2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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LESSON #3
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.
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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.
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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LESSON #4
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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LESSON #2
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.
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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.
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.
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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?”
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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Pete Prowitt, a manager on the relationship management team, and Jeffrey Serlin,
our Senior Director of Sales & Support Operations.
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LESSON #3
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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LESSON #4
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?
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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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.
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.
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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139
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the
generosity, wisdom and expertise of so many, including
(in alphabetical order):
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