Pear Deck sees exponential growth in sales qualified leads

Pear Deck Director of Sales David Frayser was ready to make what was perceived as a drastic change to his team’s approach to selling technology in K-12 education. His inside sales team was working outside of any specific approach and experienced varying levels of inconsistency. 

With the inability to maintain their entire funnel effectively, Frayser started looking outside the team for new methods that would improve conversion rates and pipeline value but struggled to justify any move without proof of concept. 

“So it’d be like this rollercoaster where we built the funnel and then we’d stop building the funnel,” Frayser says. “And we closed a lot of business, but our funnel would crash and we’d build a funnel, and then it would crash. So we just realized over time, this is the same pattern over and over, across every single territory. So how do we find a system or proof of concept that is going to prove that we need to bring a team in to focus on it?”

So Frayser and Pear Deck turned to FuelK12 to address the various challenges they were facing.

The results were immediately promising. 

Armed with a market-validated, fleshed-out playbook FuelK12 helped create — one that specifically outlined the ideal approaches for value-based outbound demand generation to K-12 districts and schools — and a team of outsourced sales development representatives (SDR) ready to begin effective outreach, Frayser saw fast-paced progress and freed his current sales team to focus on closing deals — created by prospecting done by SDRs in many cases — at higher velocity rather than being bogged down by less focused outreach efforts. 

“(FuelK12 SDRs) understood the verbiage of education and our buyers really didn’t feel any hiccups in the process,” Frayser says. “It actually made it a much smoother transition for them because they got a quick outreach.”

Those results weren’t just based on how leads moved between the two entities, but also on the number of deals that progressed through the funnel. 

“We went from two to three qualified sales leads the month prior to 15-20 per month working with FuelK12,” Frayser says.

After seeing the FuelK12 concept effectively proven, Frayser hired two FuelK12 SDRs for full-time positions selling Pear Deck, which was later acquired by GoGuardian. By directly hiring them, Pear Deck greatly reduced onboarding and ramp time, attaining full production much faster. 

“When you work with FuelK12, you … get the benefit of somebody else spending the time to train them on your product and working to understand what it means to sell Pear Deck and within K-12,” Frayser says.

Challenges:

• They struggle to address the entire pipeline efficiently with territory managers unable to conduct outreach effectively while maintaining the entire funnel. 
• When the funnel is full, managers couldn’t commit time to closing leads while also continuing their outreach efforts. This results in a brief boom of activity, followed by a period of inactivity due to the funnel not being properly managed.
• Even though they knew making a change was necessary, it was difficult to provide any proof of concept to justify the nature of said change. 

Results:

• Frayser saw 2-3 qualified sales leads become 15-20 within a month of working with FuelK12. 
• Pear Deck decided to hire two FuelK12 SDRs who had gained experience selling their product in the K-12 education environment under the FuelK12 approach. Those SDRs were on the phones for PearDeck within two days of starting their positions. 
• Those SDRs were imperative in helping PearDeck fully adopt these new methods and assisting the current team as well as new additions with understanding the approach.