How an SaaS platform helped Princeton Review rapidly boost $170K in sales

The Princeton Review sales team reported a $170,000 increase in additional revenue in less than two months using Software as a Service (SaaS).

Director of Sales at Princeton Review, Christopher Penn, said their sales team increased the number of closed deals by almost 200 for the same period, just several weeks after implementing SaaS platform, SalesWings, which generated a significant improvement in the way they identified the best leads.

Saleswings monitors, captures and analyzes data from leads. Its predictive algorithm is anonymous and monitors who are the strongest leads who are visiting a business’s website.

I spoke with Co-Founder and CEO Philip Schweizer to find out more how SalesWings works, and how it is able to significantly boost sales for clients like The Princeton Review in such a short period of time.

Schweizer noticed that there was a problem in the sales industry, especially with lead generation, so he set out to fix it.

To him, the bravery of salespeople cannot be underestimated as they are under constant pressure to produce quality results every single day. Rejection always lurking.

“Brave salespeople are people who have to sell everyday. They have a tough job because they are always trying to hit their quota,” says Schweizer.

Part of the problem that the CEO identified was that people in sales were constantly complaining that leads were bad. When research teams generate poor leads, sales has trouble closing, and many marketers have trouble identifying strong leads.

The beauty of SalesWings and its “hot or not” lead scoring, is that is compatible with just about every major CRM software out there, and it is complimentary to services like Clearbit, which give accurate company profiles, but don’t go into how strong those profiles are.

Instead of forcing SMBs to adopt a fully fledged marketing automation solution, the Saleswings Predictive Lead Scoring add-on upgrades any existing email marketing solution. Its algorithm is pre-configured, automatically adapting itself to each company website and number of leads, as well as integrating with third party web forms – including Gmail, Outlook, and even LinkedIn.

Rather than swamping teams with a huge amount of irrelevant or distracting data, leads are categorized into three simple buckets – hot, warm, and cold – providing clear guidance on where best to focus their resources.

It “gives internal sales teams real-time visibility of the hottest leads – that is, those closest to making a buying decision,” explains Schweizer. “Traditionally, companies had to spend massively on implementing and configuring marketing automation solutions to get good lead scoring. SalesWings is plug-and-play, simple, and predictive.”

With all that ammo at the SaaS platform’s disposal, including years of experience from its founder, SalesWings was able to quickly increase revenue for the Princeton Review.

The outbound sales team received hundreds of new student leads every week, but was struggling to prioritize their sales calls in a way that would reach the best leads first. While some leads that were contacted were “HOT” and about to take a purchase decision, others still “COLD” and were not worth the time of the sales team.

The Princeton Review tested SalesWings first with 7 people and has increased the number of deals closed by over 160 within just a few weeks, leading to incremental revenues of over $170,000 – compared to the previous period.

The sales team now ensures that the most interested student leads are the first ones to receive a call, assistance, and an offer.

The Princeton Review now has 30 salespeople relying every day on SalesWings’ real-time lead scoring capabilities.