GWI.

SalesScreen: Why don't you tell me about GWI and what you guys do?

Josh: We're a SaaS market research firm, and we support companies of all sizes, from small, independent one-man-bands up to really large enterprise clients, in understanding their consumers. We created a platform that allows marketing managers to build custom audiences and understand their consumers in granular detail. We're lucky in the sense that we have a fantastic roster of clients across loads of different disciplines. For example, we work with pretty much every big football club around the world, Chelsea Football Club, Liverpool, and Newcastle. Plus, tech or social companies like Meta, including Instagram and Twitter, and we also work with Apple.

SalesScreen: That's very cool. What about you, your role, and your team?

Josh: So I have been here for about six years, I started off as an SDR, and then I was lucky enough to move into a management position. Currently, I’m the director of sales development globally. I have a team of 62 reps, and they're based in New York, London, and Singapore.[Our team has] grown considerably in the last 18 months. I think we've probably hired about 45 SDRs over the last 6-12 months.

SalesScreen: What has that been like for you as a manager having to onboard and bring on all of these SDRs in such a short amount of time? And across all different regions and time zones? How has that been for you?

Josh: Yeah, I'll be honest, it's been stressful. It's been great even to have the opportunity to do it, and I feel like, if I were somewhere else, maybe I wouldn’t have this chance. So happy that I've had the opportunity to build a small team into the global team that is now, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't come with challenges. The timezone thing has definitely been an issue. Not having many managers up until recently, tracking performance and making sure there's a competitive nature.

The London office is our headquarters, and everything comes from London in terms of best practices for managing our SDR teams. What I found hard was trying to copy that across the board and also track performance at the same time. If senior management wanted to see the number of opportunities your team created increase over the next quarter or month, it was hard to find something to help drive that.

For instance, I love competitions. I had them when I was an SDR and loved driving them when I was a manager, even before we had SalesScreen. The difficulty has always been the tracking of competitions, right? So I would have a whiteboard and every day the numbers on calls made or whatever it may be, and it always came down to how active I could be on keeping that competition up to date. If there were days I slacked, it would fall off quite a lot. And having teams across more than one location, I can't be in all those locations at once. So having a platform that can track that consistently. And also for senior leadership to be like, Okay, when we run a competition, this is what the ROI will look like, this is what the outcome is. That has been invaluable in terms of scaling the team but also seeing the success that we've seen over these last couple of months as well.

SalesScreen: When you were looking for a platform that was gonna be able to do all of that for you, were you looking for a gamification platform? Or were you just looking for some kind of platform that would be able to like automate competitions for you?

Josh: Yeah, I'll be honest, at GWI, we're not lacking in a number of tools. We have every tool under the sun, and we love using them. It was funny enough, I went for lunch with an old manager. And I asked, how do you have such a large team and keep them engaged, make sure like they're on track, and keep that healthy competition up? He had a tool, which was one of your competitors, and he was really selling it to me. So I looked into it, as well as other tools on G2, and that was my introduction to SalesScreen.

SalesScreen: I love that you started with our competitors first, why did you choose SalesScreen?

Josh: Yeah, I used to be in a sales excellence role. So before moving back into SDR management, my previous position was to bring on tools and processes and help with workflows like training and onboarding. And so, for me, one of the things that I found was that it really matters to me the partnership that you get afterward. The tool can be all singing, all dancing, but if you don't have an account manager or someone that you can work with around issues that might arise or the best ways of working, then in some cases, it made the tool redundant kind of later on down the line if it wasn't able to grow or move as your kind of company grows. 

And we've seen that a lot with tools that go on to be massive enterprise tools that if I have a query or an issue or something I need to address, I have to log in at like seven o'clock in the evening to be put onto a support call. And I could be there all night trying to get something sorted versus a company that isn't as big where I get more support. And as my team grows, we'll always have requests that come up last minute and to be able to work with someone versus an automated service makes a massive difference.

SalesScreen: I would love to know the major differences or improvements that you guys have seen since implementing SalesScreen.

Josh: The main thing for me has been the ability to track performance in competitions, which I was never able to do before. So, for example, we're running multiple competitions at the moment, which I couldn’t do previously to build a use case that I share with my CRO to say these are the outcomes, activities have gone up 30%, opportunities have gone up by 20%, and so on. So I think the ability to run a competition and prove the ROI really quickly made a massive difference.
So that's one, two, what I never thought I was buying the tool for, which has been massively useful, is the analytics. We recently bought a tool to track our team's performance, my team's activity, and their output. But after looking at the way that you integrate with the platforms like SalesLoft and Salesforce and how easy it is to build custom reports, I found it easier than using Salesforce.

SalesScreen: How has the team been enjoying it?

Josh: As I mentioned in the beginning, we have so many tools at GWI, especially for SDRs, and the difficulty, especially when someone new joins, is learning everything about the company but also learning the tools and how they integrate together. I think the great thing about SalesScreen is it's pretty self-explanatory. So it hasn't been hard in terms of getting reps in the tool.

SalesScreen: Nice. All right. I feel like I haven't the answer to this, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. What is your favorite feature?

Josh: I like the dashboards. I think the analytics are better, and in terms of building something bespoke, SalesScreen is the easiest and best to look at. I'd say the UX is another part of what I really like about SalesScreen. I think it looks fantastic. The competitions look great. When it's up on the screen, everyone gets engaged. So the UX and design of everything and then the analytics and customer support, as well.

SalesScreen: Yeah. Awesome. And then last question, any results to share?

Josh: Before SalesScreen, our SDR-driven pipeline opportunities were around the 2.4 million mark for the global team, whereas last month, we got around 4.3 million. There are other factors that come into it, but I can definitely attribute SalesScreen for making it easier for me to track the team's performance, make them more competitive and have them work more closely together. And it’s easier for me to track what they do on a day to day and work with their managers at the same time.
The main thing for me has been the partnership aspect, which has been amazing. It's not a tool that you onboard, and then you don't work together to improve how it is working. And I feel like any feedback that I have given has been listened to, and some cases have already been implemented or put on the roadmap. It's been one of my favorite tools and one of my favorite teams to work with, for sure.