Customer Stories
Offering the most feature-rich, online image and video management solution available, Cloudinary is the media management platform for developers and marketers. More than 5,000 customers and 300,000 users around the world rely on its cloud-based software to cover their every image- and video-related need.
Garrett Serviss is the Director of Global Sales Development for Cloudinary. He has successfully grown the SDR team from himself to a high-performing team of 12
that contributes to the company’s rapid growth and profitability.
Improving Conversion Rates
When they were first starting out, Cloudinary’s conversion rate for turning meetings set by SDRs into qualified opportunities was stuck at around 70%.
Garrett knew there was room for improvement. He recalls, “[Our goal wasn’t to] create noise by setting tons of meetings. We wanted meetings that would close.”
But discovering how to increase meeting conversion rates had some obvious challenges.
The SDRs booking the meetings had no visibility into how their meetings played out between the account executive and the prospect.
They rarely understood why a meeting they booked was qualified or unqualified. Feedback from the account executive helped, but it was often incomplete, secondhand, or hard to come by.
As a result, they had no way to improve their outreach or qualification during their next round of prospecting.
Struggling with Onboarding
Additionally, Garrett was tasked with ramping new SDRs to hit full quota as quickly as possible.
This was a tall order, as Cloudinary’s product is highly technical with hundreds of features. It takes a while before SDRs understand the product and its value well enough to speak resonantly with their account list.
Garrett tried a few approaches to make this happen.
He trained SDRs on product knowledge himself, but found it was eating up far too much of his time.
He even experimented with having sales engineers train SDRs, but quickly discovered they were an incredibly expensive resource.
Finding Gong.io
Garrett got the go-ahead to roll out Gong.io across the sales and sales engineering teams to automatically capture and record all of their meetings and demos.
This had a profound impact on the SDR team.
Every meeting the SDRs book for the account executive team is now automatically captured and recorded.
These recordings serve as the ultimate learning tool to help SDRs understand why the meetings they book go well or poorly.
SDRs can quickly review any recorded meeting they schedule. They can better understand why it is or isn’t a success, and use what they learn to improve their outreach and qualification skills.
As a result of this constant learning loop, Cloudinary was able to increase meeting conversion rates by 29%.
Furthermore, since sales engineers’ demos are now captured and recorded in Gong.io, new SDRs can use them as a learning tool to quickly master product knowledge.
From day one, new SDRs watch a top-10 list of sales engineer demo recordings to learn everything they need to know about Cloudinary’s product, and the value it provides.
In turn, Garrett and the sales engineers spend 40% less time on product training, while successfully decreasing ramp time for new SDRs by 33%.
The Takeaway
“Having Gong’s recorded demos mean our sales engineers are essentially training new hires without the cost of doing that in person. New hires watch the best demos and come to me when they’re ready to demo the product. The amount of product training I do has dropped by at least 40% and our new hires are ramping faster than ever,” Garrett says.
As Cloudinary continues to optimize their sales process, Gong.io is excited to help along the way. Read more about the Cloudinary team here, or view their case study in its entirety.
