Published on Jul 13, 2021 by Luz Yusti | 10 min(s) read time

How Stephen Antuna CRO at Reggora went from event-generated leads to a successful outbound outreach program.

The residential appraisal process can take weeks. In a world where we can hail a personal driver within minutes and track exactly how many blocks until our pizza arrives, why should the experience of getting an appraisal be any different? That’s where Reggora comes in.

Reggora offers an All-In-One, free Appraisal Platform that simplifies and shortens the entire appraisal workflow, from automatic order allocation to comprehensive quality control, all in a single platform.

This means that mortgage lenders and appraisers can spend less time and money on tedious tasks and more time on appraising.

“We’re shortening turn times, increasing transparency, and making the appraisal process easier and faster for everyone involved.”

Situation

Traditionally, Reggora generated the vast majority of its leads by attending industry conferences. This allowed them to showcase their technology to large groups of potential customers and it served them really well to drive interest and awareness.

However, when COVID hit, and industry conferences, in-person meetings, dinners, and various events came to a halt, Stephen and his team had to urgently redefine their sales process in order to survive the “new” marketplace dynamics.

Task

Their goal was to create a durable sales process that was helpful for their prospects, who were used to close in-person relationships with vendors in order to do business. 

This new strategy needed to include an interesting and equitable proposition for a market that was also trying to figure out how to become more virtually adapted.

Action

The steps Reggora took to accomplish this goal centered around looking at the building blocks they already had and create on top of that a successful outbound outreach:

1. Adapt an outbound sales process: 

Initially, they were reaching out to their prospects mainly via blast email, but other than that, they didn’t have enough of a sales process that could generate the expected revenue. 

So they added cold calling to their initial outbound outreach to increase the number of sales conversations with prospective customers and compensate for those inbound leads from conferences that were no longer an option.

2. Get really specific about the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): 

They started by cleaning out their data, concentrating not only on the companies within their industry but on the personas they could target within those companies.

Their market is not as large as other industries, so it was vital for them to have really good information and identify what their ideal customer profile was.

3. Create more targeted messaging: 

Their customers were also going through a major transformation as they moved to a virtual environment and their attention was very limited. 

This meant that reps had to reach out to them with messaging that was aligned to some of the symptoms and circumstances that their buyers were experiencing. They used a general conversation guide to navigate those interactions and look for various rebuttals and objections. 

They also scripted out Reggoras core value and got used to verbalizing it, which helped them build that competency through trial and error. 

4. Getting the right tech and learning how to use it: 

They partnered with an external firm, The Pipeline Group, to help their sales team become more proficient using the new sales technology they needed to effectively sell outbound. 

One tool, in particular, was a power dialer that enabled them to make up to 500 dials a day, per BDR, which is, at least 2 or 3x what you would get from a standard dialing tool. 

But just getting used to the technology took some time. 

5. Empower sales reps to qualify prospects: 

The outbound strategy really allowed the sales team to get to the heart of a lot of the challenges that the lenders were facing. 

This meant that not only were they able to use the interactions to further personalize their sales conversations, but also, that they could make better decisions about which prospects would be the right fit for what they were selling and create better opportunities for their account executives.  

Results

Just in terms of their lender engagement, the number of conversations that they were having, and the number of meetings, their pipeline grew almost 3.5x. 

Stephen is confident that the changes they made will make hitting the growth Reggora is targeting for 2021 a lot more feasible, which, as a venture-backed company, are pretty ambitious targets.

Stephen’s advice for other sales leaders

Knowing that we're in a new environment and some of the levers that you used to pull to drive deals, drive awareness, build a marketplace are not available to you and there's no magic bullet...don't be afraid to experiment. 

It's okay to fail in that regard. I think you're not learning if you're not failing a part of the time. So, I’d say, continue to push those boundaries.

There's so much more information publicly available with different industry sources. Revenue Collective is a great example of thinking about sales and the go-to-market as a profession. 

So I think, leverage your industry peers. I think they're more willing to talk about their stories, their wins, their challenges than they ever have been before. 

So just keep your eyes open for that stuff and invest in the process.