How Avalara Drives Lifetime Value For Customers With AI-Enabled Insights From Gong

Avalara, a tax compliance platform, seeks to help public and private businesses simplify their end-to-end tax compliance procedures. Avalara serves 30,000 businesses and government entities across 90 countries, resulting in a clientele with a diverse range of needs and presenting a challenge to its sales and customer success teams to uncover every opportunity and serve customers effectively.

The Problem

Revenue professionals understand the significance of selling to existing customers rather than acquiring new ones: It cuts down on acquisition costs, enhances overall efficiency, fosters enduring customer relationships and maximizes the value of each customer. With that in mind, Avalara wanted to uncover new ways to deliver greater value to its customers and optimize revenue opportunities based on their existing contracts.

"Avalara’s customer account teams handle a high volume of interactions, driving roughly 3,000 deals to close each month,” said Sean Flynn, SVP of Global Sales at Avalara. “We put great emphasis on providing best-in-class customer service to make compliance less taxing for our customers.”

The Solution

In 2021, Avalara's customer account management (CAM) team adopted revenue intelligence platform Gong to capture customer interactions — such as calls, emails, video conferences and more — to surface insights that would help teams boost engagement and increase efficiencies to drive more revenue. Leveraging Gong Insights, the CAM team was able to identify the behaviors that contributed to growth and those that hindered opportunities.

“For customers like Avalara that have a large and diverse customer base, automated insights that uncover opportunities for account growth can make a big difference,” said Ben Brownlee, Gong’s Chief Customer Officer.

These insights allowed CAM leaders to provide personalized coaching that would improve customer interaction quality. They could also communicate the value of their solutions more effectively and assist their sales teams in achieving better results.

The Results

After seeing the widespread adoption of the platform throughout the CAM team, Avalara decided to extend the use of Gong to other departments, including customer success, customer development, product marketing, sales development, new business sales and support. Gong rapidly became integral to these teams’ most critical workflows, enabling Avalara teams to:

• Achieve a better understanding of their customers, which enabled them to build robust sales pipeline and identify potential opportunities;
• Close new business deals more effectively through data-driven insights into customer needs and preferences;
• Provide a more personalized and value-driven customer service experience; and
• Analyze customer interactions and behaviors to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to maximize revenue from Avalara’s existing customer base.

“With Gong, we have accurate, market-driven insights on how to deliver the best possible experience for customers on every transaction, which has been instrumental in helping us develop a culture of value in every customer interaction,” concluded Flynn.