An enormous blue ocean, and no clear way through it
In May 2022, Alli Manning joined Challenger Inc as Vice President of Revenue Operations (she's now the COO). Challenger is a global leader in sales training and consultation, owned by private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners and best known for its bestselling book, The Challenger Sale.
Growth meant taking on new products, a bigger team and changing market conditions all at once. For Alli's team, that meant reprioritizing accounts and redefining Challenger's territory model in a two-month window, while keeping sellers happy.
The market was both the opportunity and the risk. “Almost anyone can consume Challenger. That leaves us an enormously large blue ocean,” said Alli. But not every account was worth chasing: “Just because you can get a deal doesn't always mean you should, especially as it relates to our kind of goals.” Reps needed clear direction on which accounts to work.
And the territory model itself was getting in the way.
Our geographical, state-based territory approach was categorically not working. We were unable to accommodate the seasonality of leads based on where a company was headquartered. It became very difficult to route our leads because there was so much complexity in the lead routing rules.
Alli ManningChief Operating Officer, Challenger
The model was over-complicating routing, driving inequities and leaving top accounts uncovered. Alli needed a new approach, without the spreadsheet work, internal conflict and wasted time that usually come with territory changes.
Redefine, reprioritize, redesign
This is a BoogieBoard customer story told in partnership with Rev. Rev found the right accounts; BoogieBoard turned them into territories.
1Redefine the ideal customer, with Rev
In the middle of the November planning season, the target customer had evolved and the CRM data wasn't cooperating. Alli's choice: “do we invest time, effort, energy, augmenting and enriching our very complex, very outdated CRM to try to understand our customers ourselves? Or do we invest in the cutting edge AI machine learning option that allows us to kind of skip a level in terms of how sophisticated our data ends up being?”
She enlisted Rev, which helps companies find their next best customers before they show intent. Challenger gave Rev a seed list built on five years of history: “we optimized for our ideal customer, which for us means they renew for at least two and a half, three years. They stay with us, they spend at a regular clip.” With lifetime value, renewal rates and buying structure layered in, Rev built an aiCP — a living model of the ideal customer — and ranked every company with a Rev Score.
2Find the accounts they'd been missing
Ranking wasn't the only goal. “Rev was able to provide 1,200 new accounts that we simply didn't see. We simply didn't know these companies even existed, which is staggering when you step back and think about it. … So it's a bullseye within a bullseye.” Through Rev's Salesforce integration, the new accounts landed in Challenger's CRM with enriched data — two strong lists of “customers we wish we could clone,” one enterprise and one SMB.
3Divide and conquer, with BoogieBoard
Instead of assigning reps to states, Challenger moved to “a clean named-account approach [that] offered visibility into outbounding, time zone efficiencies, and allowed us to distribute the Rev accounts in a way that optimized for the sellers' location.”
The team fed the new market and its sales team structure into BoogieBoard, which balanced accounts on Rev Score, company size and seller location. It produced several coverage options, each built for equity and minimal disruption. Challenger picked the one that best fit its goals, pushed the new assignments to its CRM, and sellers got to work.
It was very important to us as a leadership team and as a Rev Ops team, to engender trust by distributing the accounts that we got from Rev equitably. Ultimately, we ended up with some strong lists and very happy sellers.
Alli ManningChief Operating Officer, Challenger
Balanced for time zones, too
Alli didn't want reps calling across time zones, and didn't want to give up equity to avoid it. BoogieBoard's GeoAware balancing can factor in rep location, keeping accounts within specific geographic areas or loosely clustered by state, ZIP code or time zone while every book stays balanced.
Challenger also used the carve to test an idea: “Maybe if we give every seller half of one segment and half of the other, we can see who can emerge as being a specialist at one or the other — is there one seller who's amazing with those big companies and another seller who's amazing with the smaller ones?”
