Company profile
| Company | Orbit Logistics Software (composite) |
|---|---|
| Business | Logistics software for mid-market shippers |
| Stage | Series B, about $14M annual recurring revenue |
| Team | 85 employees. 18 in sales, 4 in marketing, 6 in customer success, 1 finance manager running order-to-cash |
| Systems | CRM, marketing platform, renewal spreadsheet, email-based booking |
| Situation | Second region and a larger funding round planned within twelve months |
Background
Orbit had grown by accumulation. The CRM was chosen by the first sales hire, the marketing platform was added later, renewals lived in a spreadsheet kept by one person, and closed deals reached finance by email. Each piece worked on its own. The operation as a whole had never been designed, and the planned expansion and funding round would put load on every seam between the functions.
The challenge
| Measure | Starting point |
|---|---|
| Leads with no owner after 24 hours | 22% |
| Renewals visible to leadership 90 days out | 20% |
| Days from closed-won to booked | 5 |
| Reports giving an answer on current pipeline | 4 (four different answers) |
| Reps attaining quota | 38% |
| Weekly pipeline review time | 2.5 hours |
Sales and marketing had no shared definition of a qualified lead or a handoff rule. Customer and subscription data sat in three places, with duplicate company records. Quotas were set top-down from the revenue target with no capacity model, and attainment was skewed to the extremes.
Approach
1. Shared definitions. Sales and marketing wrote the lead definition and the handoff rule in one working session and enforced them in routing.
2. One governed record and defined flows. Renewals moved into the CRM with a standard stage structure and a named owner. Closed-won deals created a booking task in the finance queue in place of an email. Duplicate accounts were merged under written rules, with parent and subsidiary treated as a hierarchy.
3. Planning on capacity. Territories were redrawn against actual account distribution and quotas were rebuilt from a capacity model. The model showed the plan about nine percent beyond what the team could deliver at current productivity. The company closed part of the gap with two hires and part with a lower first-half quota.
4. One reporting layer and named ownership. A single dashboard replaced the four reports. Each system and measure received an owner and an escalation path, and a weekly, monthly and quarterly cadence was set against the dashboard.
Results
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Leads with no owner after 24 hours | 22% | 2% |
| Renewals visible 90 days out | 20% | 95% |
| Days from closed-won to booked | 5 | 1 |
| Reports giving an answer on current pipeline | 4 | 1 |
| Reps attaining quota | 38% | 61% |
| Weekly pipeline review time | 2.5 hours | 45 minutes |
The second region opened on the same definitions, record and reporting as the first, leading to a launch that added no new systems and no new reconciliation. The data requested for the funding round, a retention curve, pipeline coverage and an expansion cohort, was produced in an afternoon, leading to a diligence process that did not wait on the operations team.
About this study
Illustrative: modeled scenario, not a client engagement. Orbit Logistics Software and its figures are invented and modeled on patterns common to growing software companies. The method reflects the author’s revenue operations work.