How Jellyfish doubled their ACV through an outbound motion

“Champify and Closed Lost contacts signal to us which accounts are our warmest and highest quality. We tier them the highest and place the most attention on them because we know we can score here.

Every BDR knows that to hit their stretch goals, we need to be on top of everything, especially our warmest signals like Champify. A BDR knows that if something isn’t followed up with persistently with high quality messaging, they are missing an opportunity that can have a potential significant positive impact on our business.“

Anthony Antonellis - Director of Business Development

How Jellyfish doubled their ACV through an outbound motion‍

Meet Anthony Antonellis - Director of Business Development at Jellyfish. 

Anthony has been a BDR, AE, and BDR leader at CloudHealth (acquired by VMWare) and is now leading a team of ~15 .

Two years ago Anthony was hired to help level up the outbound team. He inherited a team that relied heavily on automated emails, and was given a mandate to boost conversion across the funnel and move up market. On top of that, Anthony and the team are tasked with testing and inventing new GTM plays – being creative and change management are two of the most important levers on the team.

Here’s his playbook to running a successful BDR team in one of the toughest economies tech has seen:

Step 1: Creating a north star metric

Influencing closed won revenue is our ultimate goal. We are creating pipeline that progresses at a 50-60% rate and doing so by knocking on doors. It is easy to field inbounds all day, but it is mission critical to have a team that can spin up  significant pipeline out of a mix of signals or outright cold messaging via research. 

Step 2: Creating a culture of one team with something to prove

We prioritized collaboration, we set our mission everyday to be empathetic and team-first, striving for success for everyone. We have instilled an aura of confidence and we constantly talk about “pressure is a privilege.”

We love the challenge, we want the challenge, we love to beat goals, and we know our group is special. 

“I am very proud to lead a team that has the privilege of being heavily leaned on for pipeline generation- a down month could have a significant impact on the business and my whole team knows it.”

Two ways he achieves this mindset:

1. His team is the core group who has returned to office, with over 80% of our team in seat 3 days/week, building tighter affinity and making it easier to share wins
2. He leads a standing Monday morning Positive Affirmations session to help drive positive self-talk and being in the moment. In a rejection heavy role, finding the wins, focusing on improvement, and staying positive is critical to success

Step 3: Remove the silos across reps

In a remote world, we had reps in silos doing all different things and we lacked a clear strategy and playbook. We took a step back to organize and spread all best practices across the team. 

Once we had clear best practices in place, we held each other accountable to ensure nothing ever slipped through the cracks.

Step 4: Revamp the playbook to move upmarket

1. Every first message must be completely personalized - and not surface level. 

That means we’ve trained the team to actually dig through the company’s financials & news. This doesn't just mention what has happened, but relates recent events to how Jellyfish can provide value in their current situation, and why it should matter to the individual we message. 

We are completely focused on finding relevant triggers, always on the hunt for signals whether that is pings on our website, PE/VC mutual portcos, Closed Lost campaigns, or customer job changes through Champify. 

We always want to prioritize warm contacts & accounts and be very pointed in our message with thorough research.

2. Go wide - it’s about the whole account not just one contact‍

We placed an emphasis on how many contacts we worked per account with set goals by segment; we’ve embraced accountability through transparent sharing of leading indicators like this. 

For example, when 1 person hits our website, downloads content or 1 person changes roles to a company (which we get alerts for through Champify) - we start with them but use this signal as a reason to research and action the entire account. 

3. Embrace multiple channels

We embraced LinkedIn & calling, which grew from 10-20% of sourced meetings to 50%. 

4. Focus on nurturing engaged prospects‍

We closely track hot prospects who have opened emails, connected with us on LinkedIn, evaluated us (Closed Lost), left a current customer (Champify) or taken any significant action. 

We call this our pre-pipeline and we nurture these contacts with many “gives” - like relevant content updates and industry news/best practices.

Step 5: Get Good at Experimentation

The only thing that’s true about the BDR role is that what works is constantly changing. You need to build a culture that makes it easy to iterate and roll out new plays. Some tactics to do this successfully include:

1. Consult your most tenured BDRs first: if they don’t like it, it probably won’t work
2. Run a test with a small group or tiger team before rolling it out globally
3. Create clear rules of engagement and ownership
4. Roll it out with proof points to the rest of the AEs/BDRs

For example:

For Champify, it started with decoding the different plays and what that meant for outreach. How would we handle a Champify lead who was attached to the original Closed Won opportunity? What about a lead that worked at a current customer? 

To be successful, there had to be clear roles of who would lead outreach for the different signals. 

We also wanted to ensure our messaging was personalized every time and not a canned email →  what is our hypothesis for what is top of mind at the new account - what is their annual R&D spend, what are their growth metrics, are they rolling out new products, etc. 

Once proven, we made it part of our daily behavior to comb through Champify reports for new signals and new targets to add to our growing “hot prospects” or pre-pipeline lists for personalized outreach. 

"By paying attention and not letting anything slip through, we are on top of this super valuable signal and there is excitement around the team because we know we can convert these at a very high rate."