How Zeotap Used Minoa to Instill a Value-Selling Motion Across Their Sales Team

Zeotap

Founded in 2014, Zeotap is a fast-growing CDP company that offers data-product solutions to top enterprises like Sky, Google, and Nestlé. Zeotap is funded by leading investors, including Silicon Valley funds. 

However, the pandemic also brought increasingly large buying committees and scrutiny from chief financial officers (CFOs) on software purchases, meaning that value needed to be proved more often than not. Zeotap needed to adopt a more value-driven sales approach but was held back by three things. 

Challenge

Zeotap faced challenges post-pandemic with larger buying committees and CFO scrutiny. Their sales process lacked consistency and efficient collaboration, resulting in disjointed business cases and lost revenue.

Solution

To address these issues, Zeotap implemented Minoa. This tool streamlined business case creation, facilitated customer collaboration, and provided access to a library of validated use cases, empowering the sales team to sell on value effectively.

Outcome

By leveraging Minoa, Zeotap improved win rates, increased average ARR, and enhanced overall efficiency. They successfully navigated CFO scrutiny and larger buying committees, setting a new standard for excellence in value-selling.

The Problem: New Market, New Challenges

The first problem was a lack of consistency. To create business cases, some of the sales team used spreadsheets and others PowerPoint presentations. Not only did this make tracking results difficult, but it was also inconsistent, inefficient, and harder to scale. 

Secondly, Zeotap lacked the tech infrastructure to collaborate efficiently with its buyers and broader stakeholders. After all, business cases are two-way projects. Spreadsheets shared with customers were cumbersome, and reps often had to guide them through them manually. This made it harder to determine value accurately, so the final business cases were disjointed and lacked substantial feedback from buying committee members. 

“In Excel, you always need to be explaining where to look. In Minoa, they understand it on the first try.” - Lorenzo Ricci, Account Executive

Thirdly, building personalized business cases from scratch was time-consuming, often taking up to several hours and days for a single one while relying on ROI spreadsheets. This inefficiency meant that the process wasn’t easily repeatable for new joiners. 

These factors made the value-selling process slow, cumbersome, and disorganized—not to mention difficult for new team members to access. As a result, many business cases fell short of addressing unique stakeholder challenges or sufficiently proving ROI to buyers.

The Solution: Using Minoa to Instill Value-Selling Motion 

Under increasing pressure from buying committees and CFO scrutiny, Zeotap introduced Minoa to help revamp their value-selling motions. Being already familiar with value-selling principles, the team could use Minoa’s toolkit, which integrates into Salesforce and their own internal forecasting tool, to sell on value in every deal efficiently. 

Rapid Business Case Building 

Zeotap sells to a range of industries, including Telco, Media, Retail, Finance, and Automotive. Each buyer has different needs and contexts, so building business cases for companies in each sector wasn’t as simple as swapping one logo out for another. The process was time-consuming and inefficient when done manually in PowerPoint or Excel. 

With Minoa, Zeotap could quickly and repeatably build personalized business cases that are aligned with their existing sales framework. Furthermore, Zeotap used Minoa to restructure its discovery process by quantifying the customer's current challenges and the potential impact of Zeotap’s solutions. More recently, they’ve leveraged Minoa’s AI to hasten the process further. 

“It’s super-fast when you want to build a business case. It takes 5-6 hours to build a business case in Excel. Minoa is very intuitive… It’s something that takes you 30 minutes”. - Lorenzo Ricci, Account Executive

Zeotap’s team used Minoa’s customization features to tailor business cases directly to the context of each customer while maintaining a high degree of standardization and consistency. 

Collaboration

Recognizing the need to empower deal champions and effectively sell into increasingly stringent enterprise buying committees, Zeotap used Minoa’s collaboration features to build business cases directly with their customers. 

Not only did this remove the guesswork and ensure that the deal champion confidently understood the business case well, but it also increased the final outputs’ resonance with individual stakeholders by being more authentic, transparent, and adapted to their specific needs. 

In one instance, a Zeotap rep salvaged a six-figure deal by collaborating with the champion to build a strong collateral. The board approved the deal in less than two weeks. 

“You cannot present something that is horrible to show. But, with Minoa, the design is already there.” - Lorenzo Ricci, Account Executive

By combining customer collaboration with the already compelling value metrics accumulated since the point of discovery, Zeotap’s sales team could present their value proposition in a unified and persuasive way. When CFOs asked the inevitable “why”, their deal champion could confidently present a compelling financial case.  

Use Case Library

Zeotap's value-selling strategy relied on deploying the right use cases that addressed specific buyer needs relevant to their company and job role. Given the diverse nature of these needs, especially across larger buying committees, these use cases needed to be pertinent. Unfortunately, building them from scratch took time. 

Zeotap used Minoa’s use case library to provide immediate access to validated use cases and facilitate a consistent, repeatable value-selling motion that could easily be brought into forecasting and account review meetings. This not only made it easier for newer reps but also massively increased efficiency across the whole team. 

Outcome: Instilling A Value Selling Motion

Before working with Minoa, Zeotap’s sales team wasn’t new to value-selling, but they weren’t making the most of it either, and they often opted to sell on features to save time. 

By streamlining the business case creation process and enhancing collaboration, Minoa empowered Zeotap's sales team to convey its value proposition more effectively. This led to improved win rates, increased average ARR, and business cases were linked to several million dollars in pipeline revenue—all while reducing the time spent building business cases six-fold. 

Deal champions could easily showcase Zeotap’s value internally, enabling them to present proposals in the six-figure range confidently. Altogether, Minoa was attached to deals that, cumulatively, were in the tens of millions.

CFO scrutiny and increased buying committee were no longer the problems they once were for Zeotap’s sales team. Not only have they dealt with these issues, but they’ve set a new standard for excellence in value-selling.

“Minoa has instilled a value-selling culture across our whole GTM team, helping us in increasing quota attainment and revenue targets at Zeotap.” - Tibor Stefán, Chief Revenue Officer

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