InVision turns to Marketing Qualified Accounts for the Enterprise
InVision provides a design collaboration platform for startups, corporations, and design agencies. It lets users research, design, review, and test products, offers tools for prototyping, task management, and version control, enables users to create and craft things for Web and mobile platforms, and allows users to design prototyping, sharing and presentation, feedback and commenting, meetings and whiteboarding, and organization and collaboration.
InVisionApp also offers Studio, a screen design platform tool that allows users to extend the product experience; and real-time insights, team activity, project management, team management, workflow integration, enterprise grade security, single-sign-on integration, custom branding, and asset storage and sharing solutions for enterprises. InVision has more than 5M users, including 100 percent of the Fortune 100, and organizations like Airbnb, Amazon, HBO, Netflix, Slack, Starbucks and Uber. The company was launched in 2011 by Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel and is one of the largest completely distributed organizations in the world, with employees in 28 countries.
The business challenge
InVision operates a freemium sales model which allows users to signup and have access to the product for free forever as long as they keep their usage within certain boundaries. This freemium along with the free-trial model are prominent in B2B SaaS because they allow for viral growth loops allow for exponential scale. InVision has been very successful in their freemium endevors and have reached close to 5M users worldwide on the platform.
The sales and marketing operations teams at InVision are among the best you could ever meet. They deal with a massive volume which allows them to iterate and learn very quickly. When they engaged with MadKudu, they started by optimizing their best leads: the hand-raisers. This was swiftly done and the team moved on to optimizing for Product Qualified Leads (PQL). PQLs are leads that are interacting with the product and whose behavior along with their fit warrants them being promoted to sales. Their number is astronomical which is why using a tool like MadKudu was of paramount importance for InVision.
The best PQL leads now identified, the sales team was running full speed on them, however the conversion rates for target accounts were low (especially compared to qualified hand-raisers). Even though they were seeing a growing penetration in target accounts, most kept using the free or self-serve versions. When digging into the Sales SLA and speaking with the team, it was clear that Sales was reachinng out to these target account PQLs, generating meetings but they were often faced with the same objection: "our company is not yet ready to upgrade to an enterprise plan". At this point MadKudu suggested leveraging account scoring to surface the accounts that were ready to buy (MQA) instead of the PQLs.
How MadKudu helped
MadKudu account scoring performance
Leveraging MadKudu's advanced machine learning, InVision could identify the 15% of target accounts that generate 90% of enterprise opportunities
MadKudu was already connected to Segment, Hubspot and Salesforce and therefore already had a 360° view of customers and prospects both at the lead and account level. The MQA model was trained to isolate Ent. and target accounts that were ready to buy an enterprise license from InVision.
The MadKudu platform started pulling conversion information about Invision's historical leads. MadKudu automatically started enriching leads, deriving features (aka potential predictors) to predict conversion both with firmographic data as well as behavioral data. Using advanced machine learning, MadKudu identified which combinations of features were highly predictive of the potential of an account and its sales-readiness . The results were staggering and showed that MadKudu could identify the best 15% of accounts that accounted for over 90% of the Ent. opportunities.
Furthermore, when looking into the scores of whitespace accounts (not named), MadKudu found there was a high potential to generate Ent. opportunities from accounts the team had never been exposed to because they were not promoted to target accounts..
Better alignment
Instrumenting the MQA through Salesforce alerts helped drive strong adoption
The results
InVision was able to create alerts for the sales team whenever an account would hit a threshold of readiness to buy. These alerts included signals to help the team understand why the account was considerd ready along with the most likely champion and most likely buyer for the reps to contact
The benefits of using MadKudu are now two-fold. It has enabled the sales team to prioritize only the high potential accounts that are ready to close. It has also enabled marketing to identify some "white-space" accounts that were ready to convert on an enterprise plan even though they were not part of a target account list.
MadKudu MQA feedback
Sales has been vocal about the success of MQA roll out!
