Imagine if your number one sales tactic stopped working.
This was the situation Soluno BC’s Head of Sales, Christian Hed, encountered back in 2013. One by one, his staff approached him claiming they were struggling to close deals. Their tried-and-tested tactics were failing and slowly but surely their pipeline was drying up.
Christian was worried. His team was solid so what the problem? Was it Soluno’s
brand? Was it their product? Or was it something else?
He decided to do what any good leader does – lead by example. He hit the phones and started cold calling. But after a couple of days, he’d come up with nothing.
Something was deeply wrong.
Joining the in-crowd
Christian soon learned that he wasn’t alone. Cold calling wasn’t just failing his sales team, it was failing everyone.
This was around the time that sales experts in every market were waking up to a stark truth – buyers have changed. Now that they have the internet to research products themselves, they’re less likely to respond to unsolicited sales pitches.
Christian needed a whole new approach. This was when he discovered inbound – the practice of attracting customers with great content and nurturing them along a buyer journey.
He was intrigued by the mechanics of this approach. However, unlike many, he came at it from a sales angle. This made him look at inbound as a sales-enabler, rather than “just” another marketing tactic. He quickly understood that it required true collaboration between sales and marketing, something Soluno BC had not considered before.
In practice, this meant establishing cross-departmental workflows, encouraging transparency and centralizing accessible and reliable data.
This would change the processes his team relied on, the people they hired and the technology they used.
So, Christian gave us a call.
A platform for change
Soluno had high growth targets and the pressure was on Christian to deliver. So we helped Christian build a revenue engine that unified sales and marketing.
This was more than a sales tool. It combined CRM and marketing automation with advanced analytics, third-party data, and multi-channel capabilities.
Soluno could segment buyers, nurture prospects, track leads, and create comprehensive reports – all within the same system.
The platform was easy to deploy and even easier to connect to Soluno’s existing environment – including their CMS, rich data provider and PBX. And it had an immediate impact – cold calling was abandoned in favor of strategic cross-departmental engagement campaigns.
The result? Today, meetings are almost exclusively sourced from inbound leads, with an impressive 70% conversion to won opportunities. Christian and the rest of the senior team can also track progress in real-time with detailed and specific reports on performance.
Christian himself is now Sales and Marketing Director at the company and was awarded ‘B2B Commercial Director of the Year’ at the 2017 Sales Conference, the Nordics’ largest sales event for B2B.
“Upsales was a game-changer for us,” says Christian. “We’ve unified sales and marketing to create one team that’s laser-focused on revenue. We’re not just generating more leads, we can understand why people are buying from us, where new opportunities lie and how we can improve our engagement programs. This is what modern sales and marketing look like.”
Who are Soluno BC?
Soluno BC is one of the largest and most expansive operator-independent telecommunications companies in the Nordics. They offer one of the most advanced switchboards on the market and 24-hour year-round services, including consultancy, support, and repair.