How Sales Transformation Group grew MRR 5x in 1 year using Close

As a salesperson, you practically live inside your CRM. After a few months, you could probably create tasks with your eyes closed and know exactly how many times you click to enroll your prospects into the perfect sequence.

If you’re a salesperson who sells to other salespeople—you learn CRM wizardry even faster.

Ryan Groth and his team at Sales Transformation Group have a mission to help roofing and contracting companies around the U.S. improve their tech stacks and take their revenue to the next level. This means they know how to assess a sales team’s current tools and workflow, and coach them to remove the roadblocks. They help unlock efficiency and optimizations their clients’ sales teams have never experienced before.

So when it comes to a CRM, the STG team is a trusted source on what works—and what doesn’t.

Here’s how Ryan and his sales reps grew their MRR by 5x in 2020 while using Close, and how they plan to hit the gas pedal even more this year.

Switching from Pipedrive to Close to increase scalability

Last year, Ryan made the decision to move his sales team into a new CRM because he knew the clock was ticking on his ability to scale his team in Pipedrive. When a connection referred him to Close, he knew he didn’t need to shop anymore.

“Pipedrive is great, it has a lot of features,” Groth says. “But we sensed as we wanted to grow prospecting efforts, its features were limited. We could build a remote sales team with Close in a more scalable way.”

Scaling their mission was the name of the game in 2020 for Ryan as a CEO and sales leader.

"I took this team from three to 16 people in just under a year. We’re ready to help growth-minded contracting teams feel like a real sales organization, not just a bid shop. When they know how to build and sell—but they don’t have the confidence or freedom––increasing sales is that freedom."

Gasoline on the fire: Prospecting in Close to fill the pipeline

With 9 sales seats on their Close Business plan and an easy onboarding, the STG team committed to Close without hesitation.

Close is our central hub now. We have sales reps who are setters, others who are closers, a sales manager, a director of marketing, and now our customer experience team also uses Close for post-sale growth––we even use it to follow up on payments.

Prospecting drives our sales pipeline, but we’ve also created custom fields and UTMs from forms and created sources to track ROI on paid ads for visibility. We automate everything we can, and watch our KPIs closely in Close.

Ryan’s scaling strategy to hit one million MRR in 2021 revenue is by building a prospecting powerhouse. His team imports prospects, creates Smart Views for prospecting, and fires away with sequences. They pair personalization with automation to get the perfect balance of efficiency and effectiveness.

Sales Transformation Group’s favorite Close features:

“Smart Views have had the biggest impact on our business,” Ryan says. “We make views of prospects who open our emails so we’re focusing on our warmest leads, then use texting and the Power Dialer to connect with them that day.”

STG’s revenue roadmap

As a sales leader, Ryan is working to align his team and give them the tools they need to reach that lofty 2021 revenue goal. But increasing their prospecting volume isn’t the only way he’s motivating his team:

I’m trying to set our reps up to become thought leaders, themselves: helping them get speaking gigs, creating dedicated landing pages for each rep that promotes videos and case studies specific to them, and automatically book time on their Calendly. I want to help them pour more time into calling and texting.

But overall, I want to help them build relationships. We have highly relational prospecting meetings and pretty deep prospecting methods. I’m excited to upgrade this process even further.

Ryan and his team are also crafting a new product line to help them add revenue as a team:

"We’re starting to accept new mentorship opportunities from high-ticket course, coaching, and remote sales companies. We’re starting to help other companies do what we do. If you’re a sales trainer who has only 3 clients on retainer––and you want to break that glass ceiling of 20k MRR but don’t know how––we can help you do that."

“Scaling with a 100% remote team isn’t easy,” Ryan says, “but we do our best to stay connected. And we feel connected with Close.”