Óla and Toni from Falcon.io, which was recently acquired by Cision for an undisclosed but apparently huge amount, told us about how they made a turnaround in their sales process. In 2016, the sales situation at Falcon.io had slowed down to a disturbingly low level. The venture-backed company was burning cash much faster than planned due to poor sales results.
The equation in question was the “CAC Payback”—basically, the time it took to recoup the total costs to land a sale. By mid-2016, it was 20 months and, ideally, it should have taken a maximum of 12 months. So Falcon.io—Óla and Toni—got the task to get things back on track.
They analyzed every channel and cohort—marketing, outbound, inbound, country, industries—to find out what worked and what didn’t. Anything that didn’t contribute to a CAC Payback of 12 months or less was prone to termination.
They realized that the most effective channel they had was outbound sales calls. Though it can be tempting to automate marketing and sales and build a low marginal-cost automated sales machine—it turned out that human interaction really cut through the noise more effectively than anything else.
Action and result? Falcon.io cut marketing costs by 50 percent. And in three months, it got down to a CAC Payback of 14 months that has been improving even further since then. As Toni and Óla put it, “You never buy a B2B solution from an ad on Facebook. And you don’t receive that many sales calls during the day. So, if you think about it, it makes sense that outbound sales calling is an effective measure.” The human touchpoint still works.
