How Certificial Was Able to Dominate and Stay Ahead of Their Market - Aligned

"Cut your sales cycle by 30%, How Certificial was able to dominate and stay ahead of their market"

See how Certificial was able to identify hidden stakeholders and bring them into the buying committee 30 days earlier than normal.

Don’t want to read the whole shpiel? No problem, here’s the summary:

The Challenge:

The solution:

Aligned’s platform brought transformative changes for Certificial:

Who is Certifical?

Developer of insurance verification and monitoring platform designed to simplify the supplier management and certificate issuance processes. The company’s platform provides immediate information, as well as a record of the entire history of a business relationship, access to real-time information sharing, and compliance alerts, enabling companies to curtail the risk of fraud, misinformation, inadequate coverage, and lapses or reductions in coverage.

Addressing Key Challenges with Aligned's Solutions

Post-implementation of Aligned, we often discovered that stakeholders were involved much sooner than previously understood – sometimes as much as a month ahead of when we were formally introduced to them. This insight gave us a valuable understanding of the amount of activity and context in advance.

This information is now being leveraged for our marketing campaigns, adding a new layer of strategy.

At its core, Aligned addressed a fundamental visibility issue in the sales cycle. It has also ensured that we avoid repetition of information throughout the process, streamlining communication and enhancing efficiency.

Champion Turnover: A Critical Junction in Enterprise Deals

Being an SMB, the velocity of deals is fast, so the seller needs to know how much time they’re investing in a client at any given moment. For Certificial, knowing how bought in the client is, very early on in the process helps them determine whether the client needs more or less time in a deal.

This served two important purposes:

The significance of these two aspects cannot be overstated. This was a powerful type of feedback loop, showing that we’re enabling the buyers to engage not just at the beginning but throughout the entire 7-8 month deal cycle. It allowed someone new to quickly get up to speed within a week, over several months of a deal cycle, and to carry it forward without losing any momentum.

Aligning Buyer Insights with Clarity and Direction

Aligned serves our buyers most effectively by offering two crucial insights:

This not only ties everything together but also fosters a collaborative relationship, as opposed to a one-sided sales push.

Streamlining Transitions in Customer Success

One significant challenge that customer success teams, including ours, frequently encounter is managing long cycles with multiple stakeholders. This becomes particularly apparent when the deal transitions to a Customer Success Manager (CSM) for onboarding. Typically, the CSM’s first question is, “What are your main priorities?” This often leads to customer frustration, as they’ve already spent considerable time establishing these priorities with an Account Executive (AE) or possibly a sales engineer, only to find themselves repeating the same information to the CSM.

Aligned has effectively facilitated a seamless transition in this area, enabling a more contextual and coherent customer journey. Instead of segmenting the experience into separate ‘sales’, ‘CSM’, or ‘marketing’ journeys, Aligned integrates these aspects into a unified process. This approach ensures that the journey is consistently managed and understood from the customer’s perspective, greatly enhancing the overall experience.

Accelerating the Sales Cycle with Aligned: A 30% Improvement

Before implementing Aligned, our typical enterprise sales cycle averaged around 10 months. However, post-implementation with Aligned, this duration has reduced to approximately 7 months. That’s a significant 30% uplift in efficiency. We attribute this remarkable improvement to two main factors:

These strategies have significantly driven our deal cycles to move faster. A 30% reduction in cycle time is substantial in the enterprise segment. It’s the difference between securing revenue within the same fiscal year and potentially delaying it to the next. This acceleration has been a game-changer for our sales efficiency and overall business growth.

The Reps' Perspective:

Sales representatives at Certificial embraced Aligned for two primary reasons:

Facilitating Growth and Collaboration in Go-to-Market Strategies

In the go-to-market community, we often engage in discussions about tools that can help us grow together. Aligned stood out in this regard. One key aspect that made Aligned distinctive was its rich analytics and the flexibility it offered, aligning with the evolving trajectory of our platform. As buyers, it’s often challenging to feel confined to what is initially offered, especially when implementation and early usage can be difficult. Over time, as our needs evolve, we tend to outgrow certain functionalities, necessitating the search for new solutions.

However, with Aligned, we found a collaborative synergy. Our teams worked in tandem, not just alongside each other. This collaboration has been instrumental in integrating Aligned into our processes, creating a more dynamic and responsive relationship that adapts to our changing needs.

Transformative Outcomes: