I’m Champify’s first Sales Rep - I’ve worked at Oracle and Heap, and I’m thrilled to join Champify because I really believe in the product and vision. Cold outbounding is becoming less efficient and in order for reps to be successful, they really need to leverage smarter ways to connect with customers.

My introduction to the software sales world was back in 2018 when I started as Business Development Representative at Oracle. During our 2 week training, sales enablement preached the importance of “hammering the phones” and having the greatest email output on the floor. Everything was activity driven - and activities turned into real pipeline. I found early success through these methods and always strived to be at the top of the leaderboard for calls and emails.

When I transitioned into a closing role at Heap, I tried to carry this same mindset over. I was in an eat what you kill role, so driving my own pipeline was critical. To start, I didn’t have the luxury of inbound leads - I was solely focused on outbound. So I used my Oracle training and hit the cold outreach hard -  but this time around, I wasn’t seeing the same level of success. With email tools like Outreach and SalesLoft becoming more prevalent, everyone had the ability to put up high volumes of activity.  With this significant increase in cold outreach, prospects weren’t taking meetings to the same degree that they were before. Hard work alone was no longer leading me to more pipeline or meetings created. 

I quickly realized that it was time to think outside the box and get a little creative. As I experimented with new tactics to drive my own pipeline, one channel of outreach was more effective; tapping into former buyers. 

I spent hours trying to copy long lists of our customers into LinkedIn SalesNav in order to find prospects who may have worked with us in the past. This was hard, tedious work but was driving results. Having this warmer approach into accounts allowed me to connect better with prospects. I found this to be a more effective way to break into an account due to the fact that they had passed the educational phase, had some sort of familiarity with my product and already were aware of what a buying process entailed. Besides the fact of getting more meetings, this helped me better other sales skills as far as creating strong champions, relentless focus on buyers who were actually going to move a deal forward and getting comfortable asking the hard questions. Although this workflow was leading to more meetings and qualified pipeline, this process was very manual and that there was a good chance that I was missing opportunities to reach out to some customers that were flying outside the bounds of my manual search.

When I started talking to Todd and Stephen about Champify - I knew this was a place that I wanted to be. At Heap,  40-50% of my deals were from past buyers or users. I knew that this idea of prospecting towards familiarity needed to be operationalized. I am so excited for this opportunity and this product to make a huge difference in the life of a seller. Now more than ever, sellers need to find more effective ways to break into accounts, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to help solve problems that I have been experiencing throughout my career and help sellers tackle this head on.

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