Tenable boosts productivity by 30%, increases pipeline coverage by 40%, and generates millions of dollars in efficiency gains.
Tenable®, Inc. is the Cyber Exposure company. Over 30,000 organizations around the globe rely on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk. Founded in 2002, Tenable customers include more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500, more than 30 percent of the Global 2000 and large government agencies.
Founded in 2002, Tenable is the leading provider of cybersecurity solutions to the Fortune 500 and more than 30,000 organizations around the globe. Over the past two decades, Tenable has scaled its sales and customer success teams to hundreds of reps worldwide, which created a number of operational challenges. Tenable needed to find a way to track activity from lead to post-sales, so they could see what was working and what wasn’t. Additionally, sales engagement is led by marketing at Tenable, but they didn’t have the visibility or control to ensure sales alignment and follow-through. Management also had limited visibility into sales activities. Tenable solved all of these challenges and more with Groove. Tenable quickly rolled out Groove to all of its revenue and account teams and even won over experienced enterprise reps. Thanks to Groove’s ease of use, advanced activity capture, and collaboration capabilities, Tenable gained visibility into its reps’ activities and achieved sales and marketing alignment – all while improving overall productivity and pipeline generation.
Tenable had grown its sales and customer success teams to hundreds of reps across the globe, which posed a significant challenge in understanding how all of their activities were translating into positive sales and customer service outcomes. Further complicating matters, Tenable’s marketing department owns sales engagement, and they lacked the visibility they needed to ensure sales alignment and follow-through. Tenable knew a sales engagement platform was essential for the digital transformation they had planned for its sales, marketing and customer teams, and they quickly singled out Groove as their ideal partner.
“As our reps engaged with leads from the beginning of the relationship through to post sales, we had no idea about what was working, and what wasn’t from a messaging standpoint,” said Matthew Mullin, Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations and Technology at Tenable.
Groove enabled us to solve this visibility challenge quickly with an easy-to-use platform that would benefit all of our teams, from SDRs and AEs to CSMs and our entire Global SE team.
Matthew Mullin, Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations & Technology, Tenable
Tenable’s first priority was to provide Marketing with the visibility it needed to ensure alignment with sales and optimize the performance of its campaigns. As head of Global Marketing Operations, Matt led the project to bring on a sales engagement platform, but from the beginning, he recognized the impact it could have across the entire revenue and customer success organizations.
“When looking at platforms, I took a very Marketing-agnostic approach to ensure that whatever we selected would bring value to the entire organization,” said Matt. “Groove stood out as the only platform that could be customized by role, which we knew would be essential for getting all of our teams on board.”
Tenable first rolled out Groove to its SDR teams to demonstrate the value it could have for other teams. Shortly after Tenable’s SDRs began using Groove, they started seeing results.
“Our SDRs took to Groove right away, and almost instantaneously, we saw conversion rates from the lead funnel go way up, plus we started to see coordinated engagement and a command of message from their use of Flows and shared templates,” said Matt. “After seeing the success that SDRs were having with Groove, I had the Global Commercial reps asking if they could use it. It snowballed from there, with Customer Success and our Global SE team coming on board shortly after.”
Tenable initially saw the strongest adoption from newer reps who were more familiar using technology in their day-to-day workflows. However, Tenable was also able to quickly win-over more experienced enterprise AEs.
Tenable has a lot of highly experienced reps who are pretty set in their ways, but once they saw how Groove could make them more effective at planning and collaborating with their selling team, they were all in.
Matthew Mullin, Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations & Technology, Tenable
“Our enterprise AEs love using Groove’s Spaces to collaborate with their SDRs and create attack plans based on real-time activity and intent data from Salesforce,” said Matt. “With Groove, we’ve effectively answered their number one question when it comes to any new technology: ‘What’s in it for me?’”
Groove has played a key role in enabling Tenable to achieve one of its primary objectives – sales and marketing alignment. Tenable’s Marketing organization leads sales engagement and part of that is establishing a calendar of marketing campaigns and sales communication blitzes to support them. Making sure reps had the sales plays they needed for these blitz days was a very manual and complicated process that made the plays difficult for Marketing to roll out and for Sales to adopt.
“Before Groove, rolling out sales plays to our reps was ugly,” said Julie Cartensen, Marketing Manager for field, ABM and channel sales at Tenable. “We sent out a sales play with a raw list to dozens of reps, provided some training, and then they had to find their accounts and figure out what to do.”
The process wasn’t just complicated and inefficient, Marketing had no insight into whether reps were following through on those sales plays. Groove changed all of that.
“We took all of our existing processes for rolling out sales plays and put them into Groove,” said Julie. “Now, we just create the email templates and target lists in Groove, and our reps have everything they need for their blitz days. Groove also reinforces the structure and timing of their communications, and there is no extra effort for the rep to track results.”
Marketing also relies on Groove Spaces to look at activity and engagement with accounts targeted by the blitz. Visibility into performance of their campaigns has enabled Marketing to optimize campaigns based on which sales plays are driving results, which aren’t – and the results speak for themselves.
We’ve seen huge gains in pipeline since switching to Groove, and we can now attribute that growth back to specific sales plays.
Julie Cartensen, Marketing Manager for field, ABM and channel sales, Tenable
“Now, when we send out plays through Groove, we can see what impacted its performance – was it the message or follow-through by the reps?,” said Julie. “By providing these valuable insights, Groove removes any guesswork and helps us build stronger alignment between sales and marketing.”
Groove has increased the productivity of Tenable’s front-line reps by 30% and improved their overall performance by automating manual tasks and providing valuable account information right when and where they need it.
The hours and hours that Groove saves our reps every day easily adds up to millions of dollars in efficiency gains.
Matthew Mullin, Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations & Technology, Tenable
“Instead of spending their day switching back and forth from Salesforce to manage opportunities, update tasks, identify buyers, and send emails, reps are saving hours every day by doing those same activities much more efficiently through Groove.”
Groove Flows have also enabled SDRs to effectively scale their outbound messaging and measure the impact of their efforts.
“We have increased productivity per rep exponentially,” said Ivan Gomez, Senior Director of Sales Development at Tenable. “We also have more touches per MQL than ever before, and the Groove data allows us to see which messages are working and which are not.”
For their part, Tenable’s account executives are using Groove Flows to improve their account coverage and drive better results. They now have near total lead coverage, which is a 30% to 40% improvement.
“It’s been amazing seeing everything come together for the sales organization since implementing Groove,” said Matt. “From outbounding to creating deeper relationships with customers, Groove has given us the ability to do so much more, without doing too much more.”