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Listed on ASX, Xero is a cloud-based accounting platform that caters to small businesses and has more than 3 million subscribers globally. It allows small business owners and their advisors to view real-time financial data on any device at any time and from any location. Xero has a large ecosystem of over 1,000 third-party apps and over 300 connections to banks and other financial partners. It was recognized as a leader in the IDC MarketScape's assessment of worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled small business finance and accounting applications vendors in 2020. In 2020 and 2021, it was included in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.
Being heavily reliant on a main source for leads often poses a risk to a company's growth, especially when the source is close to exhaustion. With a CRM that was running low on new leads, Bryan, Partner Development Lead at Xero, had to find alternative channels to pursue revenue growth. “The team needed to find a new way to generate more leads and acquire more channel partners,” said Bryan. The key focus on Bryan’s role is onboarding accounting firms as channel partners. Bryan’s team tried gathering information on potential leads using local directories but found the information too general to do any segmentation (e.g., sizing), and the process too time consuming. Even when they sought help from one of the largest local directories, they were unable to meet their requirements and sales support was sluggish. Using LinkedIn was also limited. “With LinkedIn, not all accounting firms necessarily have a profile on it, and that would limit the pool of prospects,” explained Bryan. The inefficiencies made researching a list of prospects a huge challenge, so his team decided to search for a new solution.
That’s when Bryan heard about The Grid through word of mouth and decided to see for himself. He had a good first impression with the sales rep who was responsive and knowledgeable in addressing questions concerning local nuances. But even more impressive, was the prospect discovery function, which solved the challenge of finding leads. His team could easily discover prospects based on different segmentation criteria and move them along the pipeline. When he realised that The Grid could provide the depth of information his team had been searching for with a high degree of localisation that catered to their target market, choosing The Grid was a straightforward decision. Ever since, the customer success experience has been great: “On numerous occasions, The Grid was able to promptly get in touch to resolve product navigation issues, and also provide good advice on how to use the platform to identify prospects that fit Xero’s ICP”. By combining The Grid with outreach automation tools and other lead enrichment resources, Bryan’s team has been able to supercharge Xero’s sales conversion, meeting ambitious sales targets for his team.
The Grid has been an invaluable addition to Xero’s sales technology stack. Comprehensive industry and company coverage has significantly reduced search costs for them so they can focus on selling and closing. “It used to take the team one man day per week to curate leads; now it simply takes 1 hour. That’s more than 300 hours saved per sales rep in a year,” exclaimed Bryan. “Not only that, the team has been able to hit their challenging monthly targets regularly”. To date, the revenue attributable to The Grid represents a ROI of 440x.
“Compared to using other tools or combing through the internet, The Grid saves us so much time in terms of generating a target list of prospects that fit our ideal customer profile and getting contact details, so that my team can spend more time on sales outreach.”
“In the past, we relied on personal contacts or previous sponsors, but now we are starting to get new sponsors from various industries including hospitality, fashion, entertainment and consumer electronics that we have never worked with before ... because of The Grid’s ability to find key stakeholders in human resources and marketing departments.”
