Anticipating sales needs in a downturn with Vymo

What

Vymo is a sales engagement platform for financial institutions. The company’s main product is a personal-assistant app for salespeople, and is currently used by more than 250,000 employees worldwide. 

Why

According to Venkat Malladi, Vymo’s Co-Founder and CTO, sales teams will face major challenges in the coming months due to headwinds—especially when it comes to business fundamentals as well as employee retention. Companies may react to a potential recession differently: whether doubling down on their sales teams to make up for losses, or squeezing revenue from existing sales teams, or downsizing. But across the board, these companies want to retain their best-performing salespeople, which also requires providing them with the right technologies to facilitate their work and make staying with their employer worthwhile. “That's sort of the opportunity that was not there before but that is presenting itself right now,” Malladi said. 

Many of these challenges existed before current market uncertainties, and can trace their roots to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Salespeople suddenly had to work remotely, which necessitated a rapid digital transformation. Vymo saw major growth in demand during that period. Vymo also realized during this period that financial services had the most promising ROI for sales teams, and so it revised its product to be FI-specific rather than a broad enterprise solution. 

How

Malladi and Vymo’s core leadership approach the company’s sales and growth strategies through the lens of their product. In particular, Vymo is currently pitching both existing and new customers on its efforts to modernize Vymo’s user interface, which leadership thinks will help grow the company and boost retention rates. It’s tailoring its sales pitch according to the sales strategies of potential customers in the face of headwinds: whether they’re hoping to scale their sales teams, maximizing revenue from the teams they already have in place, or moving to retain their top talent. 

To Malladi, Vymo’s product features and use cases make for the most compelling sales pitch. Viewing prospects, scheduling meetings, ranking and prioritizing potential sales, engaging with existing customers, and mapping out corporations and households are all sales team needs, and Vymo can provide for them in a single app. 

However, Malladi expects headwinds to affect Vymo’s own sales strategy. He anticipates slower turnaround in closing deals, but thinks that the various needs of sales teams due to upcoming volatility won’t force Vymo to downsize. “Productivity continues to be a core theme even in a recession, as does trying to retain talent,” he said.