How Pyramid Analytics Modernized Their Outbound Prospecting Process

About Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid Analytics is a global enterprise data analytics software company headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With $66.5 million in funding over 3 rounds by renowned investors like Sequoia Capital, Pyramid Analytics is one of the hottest enterprise BI scale-ups in the world.

Pyramid’s SaaS solution propels the enterprise organization’s strategic data vision, and cultivates analytics excellence throughout the business. It was built from the ground up to be the first truly collaborative, universal enterprise analytics environment. Large enterprise customers like Volkswagen Group, Blackboard and Siemens are using Pyramid to easily analyze, visualize and present their data.

Challenges

Pyramid Analytics’ global sales team is largely composed of senior Enterprise sales directors. They’re responsible for running full sales cycles, from setting up their own meetings to closing large enterprise deals. Proactive outbound prospecting is an important part of their day-to-day work, and a key source of net new revenue. But, as goes for most companies, generating a sufficient amount of high quality sales meetings isn’t easy. Especially getting a seat at the table with busy senior executives at Fortune 500 companies requires a modern and differentiated way of outbound prospecting.

With the Enterprise sales directors being experienced and well-connected sales professionals, Pyramid Analytics’ global sales leadership team opted for an Account Based Sales approach. That means every rep has selected between 50-100 target accounts they feel have the highest chance of successfully selling into. From a tech-perspective, they’re using HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo/DiscoverOrg to get in front of the right buyers faster.

Grabbing the attention of Directors, VPs and CXOs at some of the world’s largest businesses takes no small amount of research, credibility and creativity. Before we started working together, Pyramid’s sales team was mainly using traditional prospecting techniques. They’d use standardized email templates and LinkedIn messages to generate discovery meetings. And although these methods weren’t ineffective, the global sales leadership team was looking for additional ways of connecting with key decision makers. But what else could Pyramid Analytics’ sales reps do to outcompete industry giants like Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and SAP?

Goals

The key user requirements were defined as:

Generate more discovery meetings with enterprise decision makers
Personalize messaging for specific industries, target accounts and buyer personas
Test and incorporate personalized videos into outbound prospecting process
Differentiate cold outreach from data analytics competitors like Microsoft and Tableau
Get more value out of HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo/DiscoverOrg

Solution

You can’t change a prospecting process in one or two days. It’s a process and it will take time. So together with the global sales leadership team, we decided on an 8-week Digital Prospecting Program. Per week we had two 60-minute online sessions over Zoom, including 10 senior sales reps from the UK, USA, Israel and the Benelux.

Over the course of interactive 16 sessions we touched on several key prospecting topics. Through group discussions, role plays and homework we helped the sales team grasp new concepts and methods faster. And they did great!

Buyer personas and their specific challenges
Problem-based sales email copywriting
Sales automation with HubSpot
Video prospecting with Vidyard
Social posts and polls on LinkedIn
Researching and personalization with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

One of the most effective ways of improving your prospecting efforts, is learning from each other. As Pyramid’s sales reps and sales leaders had been working in the data analytics industry for years, as a team they got tremendous value out of sharing experiences and best practices, and brainstorming about new hooks to grab their prospect’s attention.

Results

Improving your prospecting efforts requires practice - especially if you sell to busy executives at Fortune500 companies. But after the 8 weeks, we’d given Pyramid Analytics several new tools and ways of reaching out to these enterprise decision makers.

One of the biggest improvements we made, was on how the sales team thought about personalization. Before, a large part of their sales emails and LinkedIn outreach was focused on Pyramid Analytics’ value proposition and less on their customers.

Modern buyers - especially those who receive prospecting messages every single day - expect sales reps to understand their business challenges and professional frustrations. But today, just understanding your buyers’ challenges isn’t enough anymore. You have to be able to communicate that understanding in such a way it compels the reader to start a conversation with you. And that’s not easy. So throughout the program, we spent a lot of time on problem-based messaging and creative researching on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

The sales team also incorporated personalized videos in several parts of their sales process. If done well, video prospecting and selling can help sales reps connect with potential buyers on a much more personal level than in a written email. In Pyramid’s sales team, some used video to make their cold outreach feel more human. Others found it more effective to use video a bit further down the buying funnel; for example when answering buying questions or recording brief demo videos for other buyers in the DMU.

In the end, cold prospecting is still cold prospecting. However, this group of enterprise sales directors now has more modern and better ways of connecting with decision makers at some of the biggest companies in the world. We have no doubt that Pyramid Analytics has the potential to become one of the best companies in the global Business Intelligence industry!