Maestro Group Empowers GoCanvas to Create a Culture of Sales Excellence

THE CLIENT

Headquartered in Reston, VA, GoCanvas allows businesses around the world to ditch their antiquated paper forms and automate how work is done. Using the GoCanvas Platform, companies can collect, share, and gain real-time insights from their data.

THE CHALLENGE

In 2016, GoCanvas Founder and CEO James Quigley committed himself to establishing a culture of sales excellence—driving continued growth and focusing on creating not just great GoCanvas salespeople, but great salespeople. The company’s training methods at the time were disjointed, and Quigley knew his team needed outside help.

THE SOLUTION

Maestro Group’s Proprietary Sales Training

Through the proprietary Phoenix Sales Transformation Method, Maestro uses audits, roleplays, workshops, and gap training to transform companies.

THE STORY

In 2016, GoCanvas CEO James Quigley wanted to truly commit to a culture of sales excellence. According to Quigley, sales training at GoCanvas at that time was unorganized at best. “I wanted to make sure that if someone had come to work here, they didn’t just know how to sell our stuff: they became a great salesperson,” said Quigley. “That was one of the pieces we wanted to commit to, and as such, we really committed to a more orderly progression of sales training at the base of everything we were doing.”

What’s the best way to commit to a culture of sales excellence? For GoCanvas, it meant hiring Maestro Group to provide sales training for the company. Will Fuentes, Managing Partner at Maestro, had been recommended by some of Quigley’s fellow CEOs. “I was impressed with his approach,” said Quigley, “and it was the right one for us when we got started.”

Quigley didn’t feel like GoCanvas’s sales methods at the time were codified, repeatable, scalable, or customized for the work that they were doing. “He (Fuentes) broke it down for us in a manner that we could digest and turn into a programmatic element.”

GoCanvas didn’t just do the training with the employees from their Reston office. Quigley flew in his entire global team from locations like Australia to be part of the training as well. “We certainly thought it was serious enough that if we were going to commit to training that we would bring our entire sales force together.”

Initially there was some apprehension from the team regarding a new training program. For Fuentes, some initial apprehension from salespeople is the norm. He finds that this quickly turns around, however, and GoCanvas was no different. “They started seeing results fairly quickly,” said Fuentes. “They started trying out some of the techniques that I was teaching them, and they would see how their prospects would respond favorably, and so that becomes pretty exciting.”

When asked what GoCanvas gained from their engagement with Maestro Group, Quigley said, “We started improving the efficiency of our sales engagements. We were able to quantify and qualify sales opportunities more rapidly. The average revenue per account started rising, and close percentages improved” He also said that the way the company hired people changed. Their engagement with Maestro helped them define what salespeople they should be hiring.

Just seven months after their engagement with Maestro Group ended, GoCanvas won gold in the Best in Biz Awards in the category of Fastest-Growing Company of the Year – Medium. This came on the heels of being listed on Deloitte’s 2017 Technology Fast 500 which lists the fastest-growing tech companies in North America. In regard to GoCanvas’s work with Maestro Group, Quigley added, “It certainly put us in a really good position to upscale our team to drive further impact.” GoCanvas’s continued growth and accolades demonstrate the truth in that statement.