Akord provides businesses with a secure decentralized vault. Built on Arweave, the protocol facilitates permanent storage (public and end-to-end encrypted), private message and collaboration through key rotation.
Challenge
Akord wants to expand their revenue opportunities, but tackling new markets required them to build a sales team. The problem was two-fold. Sourcing and interviewing candidates is time consuming and finding the right sales talent that can lead a technical sale, scale up new leads and start closing business was elusive.
Solution
Akord chose to use Infrastructure Co. due to our deep domain knowledge of selling Web3 technology to enterprise businesses. They reduced time and ensured greater success by using our experience to find the right talent profile and GTM approach to build a sales team from the ground up. Specific activities include:
Talent Sourcing
We analyzed Akord’s customer persona, buyer journey and the company’s culture to identify a candidate profile. After two months, we selected candidates for the Sales Development Representative and one candidate that could grow into becoming a Business Development Representative. We also provided advice on compensation structure.
Market Insights
The Infrastructure Co.’s sales team gathers information from industry analysts and conferences to provide clients with critical trends and insights via a monthly newsletter on best practices across the industry. The sales team has access to industry research reports and analysts, which provide Clients of the Infrastructure Co. with market intelligence to help make decisions on market entry, sizing and customer needs.
Sales Training and Mentoring
To help Akord’s sales team come up to speed fast and reduce time to revenue, Infrastructure Co. created a sales onboarding and training program. The program included modules, including topics such as industry/customer knowledge, customer requirements analysis, market positioning, 30/60/90 plans to achieve goals and customer journey mapping. Alongside this, the Infrastructure Co. had a senior sales representative provide mentor support, including insights on customer engagement, building a sales pipeline and office hour every 2 weeks to address any questions.
Results
Greater Productivity: In two months, Akord was able to set-up a sales team that brought in new customers within the first 30 days of hire.
New Opportunity: Working with Infrastructure Co., Akord identified two beachhead markets that provided five business opportunities in just 2 months.