How Coupa got in front of prospects at a scale equal to having 4 additional full time SCs.

The Challenge

Coupa has been in high-growth mode for several years, creating a steady surge in demand for presales resources from both sales and customers. In their ongoing quest for true scalability,  Coupa looked for ways to decouple the growth of the presales team from the sales team/revenue growth.

As growth through hiring wasn’t viable, they needed scale to lift the team’s overall effectiveness and efficiency, but the traditional methods—enforcing best practices, getting smarter with deal qualification, collaborating with Business Value Engineers (BVEs)—simply was not enough. 

Ronan Kerouedan, Coupa’s SVP of Global Value Solutions Consulting, sought a partner and gave his team the mandate to “imagine a platform that listens to prospects and presents to them what matters most.” Ronan determined the most important criteria for a solution was the ability to take inputs from prospects and automatically produce a self-service experience with the most relevant content to the individual, and then do it at scale. 

The Solution

Coupa launched a small pilot with Consensus across of 40 mid-market reps. Adoption was largely driven by Dennis Belavich, the Head of Global Value Solutions Consulting for the MidMarket segment and one of Coupa’s most aggressive internal champions, who oversaw content creation and adoption. 

AEs found immediate value in the ability to guide their prospects self-service, interactive demos and in organically discovering new stakeholders. In the last quarter (Q3) alone, they discovered over 900 net new stakeholders at target accounts—people they were not talking to before—and they’re still in the process of rolling out their full deployment.

Since the pilot, the average view time has been going up steadily and demo view rates have consistently been over 30%. Often internal win announcements call out Consensus as a major factor in closing deals. Shares within buyer groups have remained high, and, interestingly, the average view time for demos is almost 8 minutes, which means people are actually engaging!

With the initial success of Consensus, Coupa strategically created a focused team led by Tom Karki, Senior Director of Digital Presales, to accelerate their digital transformation.   This not only allowed them to grow the library to over 250 demos, but also to achieve the enablement of almost 400 reps across their enterprise, mid-market and corporate divisions, with an additional 100 more to come in the 4th quarter alone.

Presales has consistently maintained a steady flow of new content, which they’re localizing to individual markets including in Japanese, French, Spanish, and German. “We feel like Consensus listens to us,” Ronan said. “There’s good alignment, which is important because we’re initiating a transformation to redefine how businesses buy software. Consensus is a big part of that, and we’re just getting started.”