Recorded Future Gives CRO Insights Yielding $16M in Opportunities

“Vivun is about showing and justifying the value of PreSales back into the business.”

Toby Penn, VP PreSales, Recorded Future

http://Recorded%20Future

About

Recorded Future delivers the world’s most advanced security intelligence to disrupt adversaries, empower defenders, and protect organizations.

Challenges

  • Toby believes that the most powerful way to raise the strategic profile of his PreSales team is to help shape the product roadmap with intelligence captured by his team in the field. But no existing tools – Salesforce, Asana, Excel, and Jira – have the effect of delivering product insights with hard data. “Generally we couldn’t quantify the customer feedback we get with real numbers.” Their product team has since rolled out Aha! to capture ideas alongside Vivun whose Product Gaps are the source of truth for what to prioritize first.
  • Wanted to look not just at metrics and activities, but at business outcomes and understand “What it takes to win.” “It doesn’t work to simply use flat ratios to justify asking for headcount – you need the real data. As a PreSales leader, I need to know exactly what my team should be doing to win more deals.”
  • Sought a data-driven way to enter into the conversation around the sales forecast, and ensure that his team had a voice. “Sales can sometimes fall victim to ‘happy ears’ – you want a repeatable, credible way to enter into that conversation with the PreSales perspective.”

Vivun Benefits

  • Metrics and activities are now captured and tied to specific business outcomes. “With Vivun, we’re able to know the time, the actions, and the costs that lead to business outcomes
  • Positive feedback loop between product and the field as customer/prospect intelligence captured by Vivun leads to significantly increased revenue, with everything supported by data.
  • Vivun’s Hero Score is used as a forecasting solution that balances out the “sales heavy” point-of-view used by the CRO. “We use Vivun’s Hero Score, PreSales Stage, and POV Stage side-by-side with Clari in forecast meetings for visibility alignment with Sales.”

Business Impact

“A single product gap highlighted by Vivun allowed my team to recover $4 million in additional revenue.”

Early in their usage, a single product gap highlighted by Vivun allowed the team to uncover $4 million in revenue which would have been overlooked without Vivun. “Product closed the gap, we went back into those deals, and we took the money down.”

“In 2022 we closed 13 gaps that related to 90 opportunities, 5 accounts, to the tune of $16 million in opportunities we can now chase.”

“Vivun is about providing the right metrics back to the organization regarding the business of running PreSales. Across all strategic dimensions – Forecasting, Product-Field Alignment, and Visibility/ Metrics – Vivun is showing and justifying the value of what my team is doing.”