Why We Raised an Additional $2.1 Million

This morning we announced that Costello raised an additional $2.1 million from leading venture capital firms across the country. The funds will help us double the size of our product team and add sales and customer success people to support the demand for our product.

How did we get here?

We started the company after interviewing more than 50 sales reps, sales managers, and vice presidents about the challenges they face. What they taught us became the inspiration for Costello.

We haven’t stopped interviewing our customers to learn from their successes and challenges. In fact, we’ve doubled down as we work to build one of the most customer focused companies in the world. Everyone in our company talks to customers and potential customers as often as possible. Our engineers take support calls, product people interview and observe customer sales calls, marketers regularly interview sales professionals, and my co-founder and I join sales calls. Over the last seventeen months, what we continue to hear from you is that three things are changing the sales function:

• We live in a world of rising buyer expectations
• As a result, we no longer get second chances
• To win, you have to deliver a great sales experience on every sales call

It is now much harder to succeed and most sales teams are struggling to adapt. For the fifth straight year the number of reps hitting quota dropped. It’s now fallen to 53%, which is a 10% drop in only five years. The customer changed and now we need to change to keep up.

What’s the way forward?

Surveys consistently tell us that buyer’s have a hard time seeing meaningful differences between competing products and services today. There is an abundance of supply and a lot of noise in the market trying to drive attention to that supply. Competition for attention is higher than it’s ever been before.

When everything looks the same you have to find a way to stand out. Products don’t sell themselves. The way we sell is now the determining factor in why people buy. Buyers want sales professionals to deliver value to them during the sales process. So how do you do that?

• Have consistent messaging in every customer conversation from the SDR -> Sales Executive -> Client Success
• Come to every call prepared with great questions to help you understand the buyer
• Tailor your message to their needs by telling relevant customer stories
• Be ready to answer concerns and objections accurately and with confidence
• Take great notes that you can share with the customer and your internal team that will serve your customers

If you can do everything on that list, you build trust, earn respect, and differentiate yourself in a way that wins more deals. You can’t leave anything to chance if you want to win.

Smart sales teams are creating playbooks that they use during sales calls to ensure great conversations. Costello gives them a way to use those playbooks during the conversation. Instead of scanning for information in three or four places during a call, Costello brings the most up-to-date sales messages, sales questions, customer stories, and answers to objections into one, easy-to-use workflow that includes the ability to take notes, which sync to your CRM.

We’re changing the way sales teams run sales calls. Costello customers deliver a consistently better sales experience to their customers. And the results show it from the first conversation to the last conversation.

If you want to experience the difference, we would love to talk to you.

For more information on best practices of great sales leaders, check out the Costello resources below. If you’d like to see Costello in action, request a personalized demo of our agile deal management platform.

Originally published at andcostello.com on June 20, 2018.