How Ceros Transformed Its Sales Prospecting Strategy to Drive 18% Growth in SQLs
In today‘s rapidly evolving business landscape, the old "volume over value" approach to sales prospecting simply doesn‘t cut it anymore. To achieve sustainable growth, companies need to work smarter, not harder, by gaining visibility into the entire customer journey and leveraging data to deliver personalized, impactful outreach at scale.
Ceros, a cloud-based content creation platform, learned this lesson firsthand during a period of explosive growth. As the company tripled its headcount in just five years, its sales team found itself drowning in disconnected tools and processes that hindered rather than helped their prospecting efforts.
Leads were slipping through the cracks, reps lacked context about prospects, and productivity was tanking. Something needed to change – and fast. That‘s when Ceros decided to completely overhaul its approach to sales prospecting.
In this post, we‘ll take an in-depth look at how Ceros leveraged technology, data and a focus on the customer experience to increase SQLs by over 18% year-over-year. We‘ll break down the specific strategies and tools they used, share advice from Ceros‘ sales leaders, and provide actionable tips you can implement in your own organization.
But first, let‘s start with an overview of Ceros and its evolution as a company.
The Ceros Story: From Reprographics Shop to Content Creation Powerhouse
Founded in 2012, Ceros has undergone quite the transformation over the past decade. What started as a reprographics business eventually morphed into a full-service digital agency. But the Ceros team had even bigger ambitions.
They saw an opportunity to change the way content is created on the web by putting the power of creation back into the hands of marketers and designers. No coding required. Their mission became to "inspire and unlock creativity" with an intuitive, cloud-based content creation platform.
Fast forward to today, and Ceros has established itself as an industry leader, empowering major brands like NBC, United Airlines, and Snap Inc. to quickly build immersive content experiences without relying on developers. The company now employs over 250 people across six global offices.
The Double-Edged Sword of Rapid Growth
While this type of rocket-ship growth is the goal of most startups, it didn‘t come without challenges for the Ceros sales team. As the company scaled from 100 to 250+ employees, its "more is more" mentality to sales prospecting started to break down.
"We were trying to fuel growth via more tech and high activity volume," explains Doug Botchman, Director of Revenue Operations at Ceros. "And that kind of approach doesn‘t work forever. Ironically, the more we added to our systems, the less productive we became."
Without a unified view of the customer journey, Ceros‘ sales reps were trying to navigate a mess of disconnected tools just to do their jobs. Important details about prospects were scattered across Google Docs, spreadsheets, Post-It notes, and Slack threads.
Not only did this make it nearly impossible to get a clear picture of pipeline health, it also meant reps weren‘t equipped with the context they needed to connect with buyers in a meaningful way.
"Prospecting was like playing darts in the dark," says Kelly Parks, Senior Revenue Enablement Manager at Ceros. "Ultimately, the lack of visibility and time meant our reps weren‘t able to connect with prospects, and our customers suffered because of it."
Shining a Light on the Path to Purchase
To address these challenges head-on, the Ceros team knew they needed to fundamentally change the way they managed and engaged prospects. The first step was to break down silos and unify customer data across the organization.
"We placed all of our products and brands under the same umbrella," says Botchman. "This gave us the ability to see the entire customer journey from one single place, regardless of which pipeline the customer was in."
Ceros turned to HubSpot‘s CRM platform as the centralized source of truth for all its customer data. The revenue operations team also implemented HubSpot‘s Business Units feature to associate data with specific product lines and analyze cross-sell opportunities with pinpoint precision.
"Now, instead of collecting data that ends up sitting – unused – in disparate tools, we can bring it all together to visualize what audiences are using which products and how we can effectively sell to existing customers," explains Botchman.
With this foundation in place, Ceros layered on automation to surface actionable insights for its sales team. Reps began receiving real-time notifications whenever a prospect visited the website, opened an email, or engaged with a piece of content.
This allowed them to tailor outreach based on the prospect‘s interests and accelerate deals through the pipeline. "We‘re moving leads through the process faster than ever," says Parks.
Optimizing the Lead Qualification Process
Of course, more visibility into the pipeline also meant the Ceros team needed to be strategic about which leads they invested time and resources to pursue. A critical piece of their new prospecting approach was implementing a robust lead qualification framework to prioritize accounts with the highest revenue potential.
Using HubSpot‘s CRM, Ceros built out custom fields to capture key information from discovery calls like budget, authority, need, and timeline. This data automatically flows into dashboards that visually depict how leads are bucketed into different tiers based on their qualification score.
"The ability to capture key details and share them seamlessly gives the team more time to build strong, personalized connections with high-value customers," explains Botchman. "Lead scoring has been a game-changer in helping us prioritize our pipeline and improve conversion rates."
The Results: Ceros Sales Team Achieves Record Growth
In just a few short years, this strategic shift has made a massive impact on Ceros‘ bottom line. The company has seen an impressive 18-20% growth in sales qualified leads (SQLs) every year since implementing its new approach to sales prospecting.
But perhaps even more importantly, optimizing its tech stack and processes has empowered the Ceros sales team to work smarter and provide a better experience to customers.
"Instead of throwing darts in the dark, we‘ve been able to turn the lights on and continuously hit the mark," says Parks. "A smarter approach to prospecting has allowed our reps to focus on bringing in valuable leads and transforming those connections into positive, long-lasting customer relationships."
Key Takeaways to Improve Your Sales Prospecting
While every company‘s sales process is unique, there are several universal lessons we can glean from Ceros‘ success story. Here are a few key takeaways to help you optimize your own prospecting efforts:
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Align marketing and sales. Make sure both teams are working towards the same goals and have visibility into the entire customer journey.
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Leverage technology. Implement tools to automate manual tasks, capture important customer data, and surface actionable insights.
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Prioritize data hygiene. Establish your CRM as the single source of truth and build processes to maintain data accuracy and consistency.
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Personalize outreach at scale. Use context from your CRM to tailor messaging and content to each prospect‘s unique needs and interests.
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Focus on continuous improvement. Regularly analyze performance data, collect feedback from reps and customers, and optimize your playbook over time.
By putting these strategies into practice, you too can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales prospecting process. It won‘t happen overnight, but with the right mindset, tools, and processes in place, you‘ll be well on your way to predictable, sustainable pipeline growth.
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