“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?’” Maggwa Ndugga told The New York Times recently. A 25-year-old Raleigh, N.C., native, Ndugga admitted that the foam resin clogs are “not the most appealing things to look at,” but he has made peace with his response to the question. “This is how I’m going to live life for now.”
The Crocs brand has found a wellspring of sales success in recent years. Its sales have increased by nearly 200 percent since 2019. The company’s stock value has risen 167 percent since the onset of the pandemic. And though the need for post-pandemic presentability was supposed by many to signal an impending end to the clog company’s recent popularity, Crocs’ sales are continuing to outpace pre-pandemic numbers.
Are there takeaways from Crocs’ sales successes? And can those takeaways be employed to better help a company’s sales reps succeed?
While it’s tempting to attribute Croc’s recent successes to circumstances, in many ways they are the result of a six-year-old strategic pivot. According to CEO Andrew Rees, that pivot turned the company around by celebrating strengths of Crocs’ existing product while broadening its consumer base through collaborations with designers and fashion brands.
In this light, Crocs’ strategic pivot is not unlike the one Teamwork Head of Partnerships Logan Lyles outlines with regard to co-selling below. At a time when Teamwork’s clients are scrutinizing every dollar spent, embracing its network of solution partners in order to broaden its appeal has been a boon for the company. “Co-selling with partners and teaming up with them to deliver services complementary to our product allows us to alleviate customer concerns and close deals we may otherwise miss out on,” Lyles said.
Read on to learn more about how sales teams are empowering their reps and strategizing to turn tough times into areas of opportunity.
Freshworks creates cloud-based software solutions for marketing, sales, support and IT teams with businesses of all sizes.
What are some ways your team at Freshworks stays on top of trends or market conditions that may impact your customers or your sales process?
As an account management team, we are tightly knit with our customers. On customer or prospective customer calls, we must constantly be a thermostat, reading the temperature of the room and figuring out where challenges may arise. Outside of calls, we value intent and market trend data sourced by our internal teams. This data helps us to find prospects who may already be thinking about a change or customers that might be facing challenges and looking at options.
When it is time to change strategies, we take the approach that more brains are better than one. We work with our marketing, customer success and professional services teams to come up with new ideas for sourcing revenue and formulate communication around our plans. Working as a team, we are able to utilize one another's templates, campaigns and sequences and change them to match our target market or persona.
What are some ways Freshworks has adapted its sales strategies recently in light of market shifts?
In the current environment, we are seeing customers and prospects looking for a higher value. In Covid-19 years, our value selling was good — but not great. We were able to rely on the fact that we had a great product, and prospects had budgets burning a hole in their pockets.
Now, prospects — and their leadership — are scrutinizing every dollar and ensuring they are vetting the competition. This requires our team to be better sellers and solution-sell through every step of the deal cycle, starting with our prospecting methods. We need customers to know that we are a partner through thick and thin, and that starts with listening to their problems and coming up with solutions that are viable and affordable.
We adore our value assessment team for this reason; they help the customer reach an understanding of exactly how much impact our products can have on their bottom line. With no end in sight to current market conditions, value assessment will be kept very busy over the coming months.
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your reps?
We haven't had enough time in the deal cycle to truly tell where we will end up. This strategy is not ground-breaking; it’s simply re-honing a skill that has been under-utilized for a period of time.
Our strategy is tried and true, and we will continue to learn every day to become better. We learn from every deal we win, but we learn more from every deal we lose. Evaluating your losses and performing a postmortem as a team allows the group to understand where we lost, what we could have done differently and how early we saw the potential issue pop up. The same is true for our wins, and there have been plenty. I am so proud of my team as a whole for tackling the first quarter of this year and coming in ahead of my expectations.
Teamwork’s SaaS client services platform allows customers to manage their daily workflows — including project planning, budgeting and time tracking — for improved automation, productivity and profitability.
What are some ways your team at Teamwork stays on top of trends or market conditions that may impact your customers or your sales process?
We’ve found the best way to stay on top of trends that affect our customers is to intentionally spend time listening to our customers. We’ve done this in two specific ways recently.
The first is via customer visits. After onboarding several new reps in our new Denver office, we arranged several customer visits over the course of two days. We asked questions about their day-to-day, their challenges and the work they do for their clients. Our reps learned so much by attending these sessions and listening to our customers outside the context of sales calls.
The second way is through LinkedIn. We recently launched a course in our learning management system for our sales team to learn to use LinkedIn more effectively. We focused less on account list building and cold outreach tactics and more on living in-market where our buyers spend time. We built a list of content creators and active LinkedIn members sharing content about life through the eyes of our ideal customer profile. This has allowed them to hear consistently from those in our market and engage with that community outside of sales calls.
What are some ways Teamwork has adapted its sales strategies recently in light of market shifts?
We’ve started to engage our network of solution partners more often in our sales cycles. Oftentimes, we’ve found that prospects may see the value in our software, but they may have hesitations around proper implementation and change management. With buyers being a bit more cautious with their spend, and the prospect of instituting any major changes within their org, you can’t simply ignore those concerns. Co-selling with partners and teaming up with them to deliver services complementary to our product allows us to alleviate customer concerns and close deals we may otherwise miss out on.
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your reps?
We’ve noticed a larger than average annual contract value on deals involving our solution partners. Not only can co-selling with partners increase our win rates and speed up our sales cycles, we’ve found that it often leads to larger deal sizes as we gain even more trust with our buyers and consult with them on even more of their business challenges.
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