Centralizing the upfront research & legwork for your next deal
Revenue is always a primary focus for any business. It’s such a big thing, that pay structures for most sales-related roles are directly tied to a person’s ability to generate revenue for their company. When you look at all the activities leading up to booking revenue, the event that everyone is fixated on is the close itself. Did the revenue come in the door? That’s the primary question for so many of us when selling. If it did, great! If not, well, onto the next one.
There are two broad strokes for approaches when selling — quantity of leads/opportunities and quality of leads/opportunities. Quantity is easy, repetitive, and often encouraged. The more swings at-bat, the higher chance for the home run, right? Quality on the other hand is more thoughtful, harder to replicate, and harder to justify, especially when other individuals are focused on quantity.
Quality is tough to grapple with. On one hand, if you don’t put in enough effort on the front end, each at-bat you may be flying blind. On the other hand, if you do put in the effort, and it doesn’t materialize it feels like a total waste of time since you had a limited number of at-bats, to begin with.
For purposes of this post, quantity in our minds means volume. The more phone calls, the more emails, the more bids, the more proposals. Quality means research, leg work, and a knowingness that even though there is less volume, there’s hopefully a higher likelihood of conversion.
Both of these are hard to come by, but with Giraffe we help to automate the quality aspect — ensuring that teams can have both, a higher likelihood of conversion coupled with high volume.
When we look at the quality bucket, there is so much leg work that goes into deals: customer background, previous purchases, previous vendors they’ve liked, the previous tech they’ve used and disliked, the list goes on and on.
This leg work feels like a big lift every single time — namely because it is all localized, personalized, and not reused across teams and sales organizations. With Giraffe, we figured there ought to be a home for this stuff so users can re-use this leg work and research moving forward giving them a higher likelihood of conversion. Seeing how research leads to conversion rates in certain channels, presents a unique opportunity for sales departments to not just work smarter and reuse assets, but book more revenue. By a similar token regarding renewals, when a customer’s Health Score changes, a signal is created for a CSM to reach out to the customer — they need to figure out the right approach, promotion, and strategy given the situation. With Giraffe, CSMs can queue up relevant assets automatically to best serve the customer in particular situations.
Being able to centralize research, upfront legwork, and frameworks in one location lets team members reuse working docs, and assets moving forward so there isn’t a need to reinvent the wheel.
In past roles, our team worked on lots of these types of deals. Every deal felt like team members were scrambling to look for templates, inputs, customer information, and materials in a very unorganized way. We’d ask a certain colleague for slides to a previous presentation, look on our intranet for templates and digital assets (rarely there), ask for input on our position as it pertained to a particular topic, and perform due diligence on a particular customer from whatever info we could find. TLDR: every deal was a long disorganized process.
This is why we created Giraffe — to address this cycle of inefficiency and make sure that teams can start working smarter, with the content they’ve already created!
Instead of, I don’t care how it gets done, just close the sale, we’re helping teams rethink their ability to reuse research and work to streamline the process so teams are able to increase their revenue.
Example:
Bidding on a proposal for work, and the client asks for your firm’s response within a week, addressing how you’ll help them tackle the problem.
Without Giraffe: Working around the clock to gather pieces of content, ask colleagues for their input, and research the client. Time spent just compiling the overall client response vs time spent on differentiation and pursuing more deals.
With Giraffe: Searching in one platform for responses to similar proposals, client research, and perspectives on topics as they relate to what you’re bidding for. Time spent putting the finishing touches on your response vs spending valuable time just tracking all of this stuff down.
Anything with a URL can be added to Giraffe. Our Chrome extension lets you add docs, trackers, notes, and presentations to Giraffe in just one click. Once info is added to Giraffe — GiraffeBot (our AI Assistant) suggests Tags to organize your content based on your usage i.e. you’re adding a lot of spreadsheets and docs related to Dunder Mifflin 2021 Renewals… on your next spreadsheet, GiraffeBot will suggest Tags of Dunder Mifflin, 2021 Renewals, and Northeast Paper.
With your team’s content and info organized topically — you can find everything you’re looking for in one place.
Here’s a look at how teams topically organize content into Giraffe to address this very problem — responding to more deals, while producing and reusing quality content that other teams have already built.
If this is something you could use on your next deal to streamline the research and upfront legwork — sign up for our waitlist!
❤ The Giraffe Team
