Customer Discovery · Case Study
Proved outbound viable at a 16% VP/C-suite response rate and refocused their go-to-market.
- Industry
- HR Tech
- Funding Stage
- Seed
- Engagement
- Customer Discovery
The CEO of Sunlight, a seed-stage B2B SaaS and ed-tech startup based in London, wanted to work with JJELLYFISH to develop a repeatable outbound sales strategy within the U.S. market. Sunlight was interested in speaking with HR executives to validate their target market and value proposition before hiring expensive full-time sales resources. Sunlight is a Learning & Development platform that helps companies grow an engaging learning culture by facilitating an organization's access to any book, event, or course in the world.
Sunlight continues to operate its London-based learning and development platform, with clients including Wonderbly, Skimlinks, and Typeform.
The Challenge
Sales was founder-led and the focus was solely on converting inbound prospects. To date, outbound had not worked for the team despite their best efforts, which meant increased risk if the inbound well dried up. There was a knowledge gap around which buyer and company segment to target in the U.S. and, more importantly, which related unmet needs were critical for HR executives to solve. Lastly, although Sunlight's product is uniquely positioned, gaining executive mindshare in such a crowded software market (i.e. ed-tech) was a common challenge.
The Solution
JJELLYFISH deployed a senior consulting team for 90 days to (a) crack the code on cold outbound in a sea of other vendors and (b) conduct expert Discovery discussions with executive buyers. This meant our team refined Sunlight's current prospecting process, developed new messaging, generated meetings (i.e. the results that validated our outreach strategy), and led, in partnership with Sunlight's CEO, the VP/C-suite-level discussions.
The JJELLYFISH team tested four key commercial assumptions, using their Discovery framework, to provide Sunlight the necessary evidence to inform critical go-to-market decisions. This meant poring over hundreds of pages of transcripts to extract the most meaningful GTM and sales-related insights.
The Results
The project has validated that outbound is a viable channel for Sunlight, as the market response rate was 16% (substantially higher than Sunlight had been able to achieve previously). Additionally, the impact of learnings unlocked by the Customer Discovery process extended into Sunlight's fundraising strategy and narrative.
Juan Lagrange, CEOJJELLYFISH was key to validating our key assumptions and target market. They brought a professional, methodical and data-driven approach that was light years ahead of what our team was doing.
This allowed us to change our approach and therefore save countless hours and resources going down the wrong path.
I personally learned a lot about sales outreach and generating initial engagement, which will help generate future revenue, as well as save valuable time.
