Champify: A fresh approach to the most efficient revenue channel
Today we are publicly launching Champify and announcing our recent $2.4m seed round led by Altman Capital (brothers Max and Jack, CEO of Lattice), Unusual Ventures, and prominent B2B entrepreneur angel investors such as Joe Thomas (CEO of Loom), cofounders of Heap, Goldcast, Ethena, Stemma, Airplane, Dover, and GTM execs from Lattice, Sonder, and Simon Data.
Your customers: educate once, acquire once, enable once, sell to >3x times throughout their careers.
Most successful, tenured sales reps have sold to the same buyers multiple times at multiple companies. And most SaaS companies have received quick inbound deals from former customers.
However, with tens of thousands of customer relationships (users, buyers, and other stakeholders) and individuals changing jobs 2x as often, there has never been a good way to centralize this process and ensure these “blue bird” deals happen more often. Enter Champify.
After 6 months in stealth working with leading B2B revenue organizations, today we are publicly launching Champify: a Sales Intelligence platform that helps sales and marketing teams leverage pre-existing warmth to build new pipeline, mitigate risk and strengthen customer relationships.
We are starting with the most valuable channel, previous customer and users (aka Champion Qualified Leads or CQL), as they typically have 4x the reply rate and 2x the win rate compared to cold outbound channels.
Most B2B revenue teams are trying to optimize broken channels
Based on my experience scaling the initial sales team at Square, leading sales at Heap for 6+ years, and most recently advising a portfolio of high-growth B2B startups within Unusual Ventures, I’ve been fortunate to be at the forefront of innovation in sales intelligence. It started with the rise in popularity and innovation in the sales engagement category - Outreach, Salesloft, Sendoso, and a slew of others that dramatically helped GTM teams increase their activity, standardize winning plays, and increase efficiency per rep.
Now, however, these are heavily adopted by most B2B sales organizations. They are no longer a competitive advantage, and getting buyers attention is harder than ever. I took a look across the landscape along with my cofounder, Stephen Ruff - previously a top rep at Heap - and thought there must be a better way to generate consistent pipeline.
Hubspot revealed that, in the past two years, outbound email volume has doubled and response rates are down 40%
The number of quality conversations per sales rep, as defined as “a connect or response where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned” is down 45% per rep since 2014. In conversations with top AEs and sales leaders, there is a general understanding that this is acutely felt and accurate.
The question becomes - how do those responsible for generating pipeline react? What can revenue teams do to avoid those tough conversations with their CEO about plans to miss the number? How can they feel more confident about the plays they are giving their teams to run?
At some point, most smart teams have gotten creative trying to surface and prioritize warm connections such as previous buyers and ex-power users. They tend to have a handful of reps duct-taping something together with a general-use prospecting tool (like SalesNav or ZoomInfo), which results in low coverage, minimal adoption, and underwhelming results.
So,why is this the case? Seeing if someone changed jobs seems simple?
General purpose prospecting tools miss 90% of the opportunity, even when investing significant resources
- Maintaining an employee graph with thousands of customer contacts is challenging. Your customer community is constantly growing and changing as you close more deals, more users join customer accounts, and 20% of your customer contacts change employers each year.
- Continuously updating relevant job changes with product usage history, account firmographics, ICP fit, and the routing/alerting workflows associated means that teams are missing out on huge opportunities.
- Having someone try to hack this with CSVs or general-use tools is error prone, inconsistent, takes a lot of time to get right, and even more time to clean/enrich the data.
Nearly impossible to operationalize
- Changes need to be surfaced up to the right person in the right place. Your customers will change company sizes and into accounts owned by other reps, meaning one person's departure is another person’s lead. Generic use tools are not built to handle this since the data lives in one person’s external login and doesn’t integrate properly with the ever-changing account assignments in your CRM.
- GTM teams are already inundated with tooling and complex workflows. The last thing reps need is another login to juggle or workflow to learn. These leads should be handed on a silver platter within existing tools and workflows (CRM, Sales engagement, Slack, email).
Turn your prospects and users into raving fans - they will come back
Based on our experience and key insights from 25+ leading sales leaders in our advisor and investor network, we’ve built Champify to address these problems and optimized for a few criteria:
- Simple: revenue operations teams have a lot on their plate, and sales reps already have 8+ separate apps to juggle as part of their daily workflows. By living within Salesforce, automating the grunt work, and delivering data into existing sales tools (Slack, Outreach, Salesloft, Marketo, Catalyst, etc), Champify minimizes lift for ops while maximizing ease of adoption for Sales.
- Actionable: You shouldn’t have to question whether data is accurate or if the leads are relevant to your business. When a new employment is surfaced, your team should understand: What was this person’s relationship with us at their last company? Does their new job match our ICP? Who on our team do they know? What’s their new contact info?
- Flexible: Every GTM team has different workflows, sales operations, and pipeline strategies. By living within Salesforce, integrating with key GTM tools, and providing customizable salesforce operations and alerting, your team can engage “former customers” with the same workflows you’ve enabled for other lead channels.
- Impactful: Our customers are seeing 4x higher response rates and 2x higher win rates for the Champion Channel. In today’s environment, we can help decrease ramp times, increase efficiency per AE/SDR, and lower the cost per opp. It needs to be as easy as possible for reps to prioritize former customer leads, and know how to re-engage them at their new job.
What’s next?
The best place to sell is where you’ve already sold. Creating a “champion graph” where teams can follow former users and prioritize warm connections is very impactful, but it’s just the beginning. Our third cofounder and CTO, Dan Loewenherz, who has extensive experience building multiple software products used by tens of thousands of users, is already working with early customers to find adjacent pain and opportunities that we are uniquely equipped to solve.
We will continue to work with our forward-thinking customers to extend the intelligence offered to GTM teams. There is so much information that can help sellers break into and navigate an account such as past engagements with your team, past usage of competitive tools, personal connections to people within your organization, similarity to other buyers, educational background, and likelihood to respond based on historical outreach.
We aim to arm B2B sellers with the same type of intelligence B2C advertisers have become accustomed to. Sellers will have instant access to all relevant information about their prospective customers - to help them work smarter, establish strong relationships, and grow their company.
Today, our customers are finding quick wins and having meaningful impact on pipeline and revenue targets. If you want to see the product in action, try it, or discuss the potential impact to your business, get in touch below to learn more.
To unlocking a new pipeline channel,
Todd
