How Perceptyx Transformed Its Revenue Engine & Increased ACV By 56%

At Perceptyx, business is personal. The employee listening and people analytics company leverages its unique blend of innovative technology, professional services and consulting to help drive powerful and repeatable results for its customers. With “market-leading” customer retention and NPS metrics, Perceptyx strives to be more than a partner to its customers; it acts as trusted stewards of any company’s most valuable data: The voice, sentiments and collective knowledge of its employees. 

The Challenge

Perceptyx’s focus on customer success and innovation has led to rapid growth. Over the past two years, the company made three strategic acquisitions to deepen its continuous listening capabilities, expand market share and cement its leadership in enterprise-class employee experience. Those acquisitions include:

• Waggl, an employee feedback solution that crowdsources comments/ideas in real-time;
• CultureIQ, a research-backed solution for assessing current culture and closing culture gaps; and
• Cultivate, an AI-enabled platform that provides text and sentiment analysis, coaching, nudges and proactive feedback.

While these acquisitions presented growth opportunities, they also brought a challenge: How could Perceptyx align disparate sales cultures while maintaining the momentum demanded by a growing organization?

The Solution

The company decided to align its GTM function around one principle: The value it brings to customers. Leadership needed a reliable way to drive sales effectiveness and productivity at scale, sell higher and expand customer relationships. Most importantly, leaders needed to transition from a transactional mindset to value-based selling.

“We wanted to grow the business profitability by consistently and effectively demonstrating the value we can bring to customers to help them solve unique business issues,” said Jason Hahn, Chief Revenue Officer of Perceptyx. “We chose ValueSelling Associates because they gave us a very simple, yet very powerful, methodology to work from.”

Hahn — alongside the company’s SVP of Enterpise Sales, VP of Customer Sales, VP of RevOps and Growth Enablement Manager — launched a sales transformation to enable sellers to uncover and share the unique value Perceptyx could provide customers. The transformation included four components:

1. A ValueSelling Framework, which included ValueSelling workshops to align the revenue engine across internal teams, tailored resources to apply the methodology and implementation of the eValuePrompter (eVP) tool in Salesforce with eVP user trainings;
2. A sales training program, featuring a bi-weekly sales training program for the entire revenue team, monthly individual team trainings, instructor-led ValueSelling workshops and multiple live onboarding trainings per new hire;
3. Marketing collateral in the form of customer-facing materials aligned to the ValueSelling Framework to ensure consistent messaging and build brand trust; and
4. Sales assets to drive adoption of ValueSelling, including revenue playbooks, sales proposals and a growth enablement charter.

“Two things really stood out for us around ValueSelling,” said Sarah Stites, Growth Enablement Manager of Perceptyx. “The first was the customization of the program. The content was highly focused on our buyer personas and their unique business issues. Second, the ValueSelling sales methodology supports multiple customer-facing teams. Having a marketing workshop and a revenue leader workshop in advance of the sellers was key to aligning teams and fundamental to our success.”

The Results

Within a year of implementing its value-based sales approach, Perceptyx realized:

• A 56% increase in ACV; and
• A 30% increase in multi-year contracts.

Additionally, the new approach helped Perceptyx close the largest deal in the company’s history and secure two of the most valuable logos in their marketplace.

By training everyone from marketing to revenue leadership on the ValueSelling Framework, Perceptyx created an ecosystem to drive adoption. Specifically:

• Marketing created standardized, customer-facing collateral aligned to the methodology;
• Sales gained the skills to have more impactful business conversations at the CHRO level, transform their qualification process and sell on value;
• Revenue leadership gained more accurate data and was equipped to have more productive coaching sessions; and
• The company implemented a mentorship program that provided veteran sellers with a framework for replicating best practices and communicating that information to new hires.

The shift to value-based selling has transformed Perceptyx’s sales culture. It’s equipped the sales team with a common language to more effectively communicate deal strategy and provided selling tools that reveal why they win, why they lose and how to differentiate from the competition based on a client organization’s unique business challenges. Enabled with a consistent, proven way to approach opportunities and the supporting collateral to integrate ValueSelling into their daily routines, seller confidence is at an all-time high. This sales culture of collaboration and consistency has also enabled Perceptyx to significantly decrease new seller ramp time.