Back
min read

Algolia drives sales and marketing alignment to move upmarket

Algolia

Algolia helps businesses across industries quickly create relevant, scalable, and lightning fast search and discovery experiences. Algolia’s mission is to make every search interaction meaningful and rewarding. Our hosted platform reduces the complexities of building relevant digital experiences. More than 5,000 companies like Weight Watchers, Lacoste, Twitch, Medium and Stripe rely on Algolia’s enterprise-grade APIs to manage 40 billion search queries a month.

Founded in 2012, Algolia is backed by $74M in funding from Accel Partners, Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital and Storm Ventures. The team is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris, London, New York, and Atlanta. To learn more, visit www.algolia.com.

The Business Challenge

As Algolia scaled, they’ve learned that small businesses want to use the product themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, enterprises prefer white-glove onboarding. That ultimately presents two very different customer journeys, where the roles of marketing & sales are weighted and oriented differently.

These different types of users created a lot of friction between Sales and Marketing because it wasn’t clear who was responsible for whom, for what, and when. The organic traction that had created Algolia’s initial success meant that lead generation continued to grow. However, the large quantity of self-service leads outshadowed the entreprise leads and Marketing wasn’t able to measure their success. This created friction with the sales team who saw the company goal of moving up-market misaligned with the leads they were talking to on a daily basis.

A wedge in the relationship between marketing & sales formed as there was no common definition of what a good lead looked like, how to prioritize them for ABM and therefore what success for each team looked like. The team started asking difficult questions such as:

  • How do we differentiate self-service VS enterprise leads?
  • Should we offer the same types of services (SLAs) to both buckets?
  • How can we keep attracting and growing the number of leads for both buckets?
  • How can we offer a great experience to SMBs and Enterprises at the same time?

How MadKudu Helped

After discussing with Algolia’s team it became obvious that the teams were misaligned.  They didn’t know what was within their control and what wasn’t. They didn’t know how to impact their numbers. By looking at the data, MadKudu realized that they could help by offering to divide the customer journey based on personas. The team could then segment the different journeys by teams and everyone gained clear ownership. Thus offering great customer experiences to both of their segments.

Marketing knew that they needed to attract great leads from these two buckets. They planned their strategy accordingly and they started using these metrics as their north star. They could follow the pipeline generated on a daily basis so they could course-correct whenever something was off their targets. The Marketing team also started sending emails and onboarding small businesses through their Marketing Automation system, Pardot.

Sales was able to focus solely on Enterprises. As they started receiving alerts in Slack as soon as Enterprises signed up, they could reach out in minutes, not hours. Not one minute was wasted to close the deal. They were also able to prioritize their actions by looking at who was the most likely to convert down the line.

All of the systems used by Algolia (Salesforce, Slack, Segment, Pardot) had a one-click integration with MadKudu. It only took a couple minutes to connect their accounts and scores started sending in seconds.

The Results

MadKudu quickly became the backbone unifying Sales and Marketing around a common goal. With that knowledge, Marketing was able to bring in more and better leads every month while Sales was able to drastically improve their productivity prioritizing the best leads.

"MadKudu has been instrumental to align sales and marketing around an agreed-upon definition of "good" leads"

- Fanette Plessis-Jobard, Lead, Demand Generation at Algolia

Company
Algolia
Industry
Software
Company Size
320
Location
Berkeley, CA