A rapidly growing, scale-up company needed to level up its ability to sell into new markets. With 321’s help, Virtual Gurus got their sales, marketing, and customer success teams aligned for growth.

The Challenge: Get strategic about targeting new markets.

For many early-stage, rapidly scaling companies, expanding sales beyond their local markets is a formidable challenge. The sales and marketing approaches a company uses early on aren’t usually sufficient to take it to the next level. Selling into new markets, especially with enterprise clients, requires tight alignment and high-level execution across sales, marketing, and customer success. 


For the team at Virtual Gurus, a rapidly growing tech company with a talent marketplace that matches organizations with highly skilled remote assistants, their ambitions to scale-up led to an inevitable conclusion: they needed a strategic approach to target new markets that would affect functional groups across their business. To make the leap, they partnered with 321 Growth Academy on a private training program for their sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

We saw immediate ROI on our 321 experience. We met our revenue targets the month after our program finished thanks to the upselling process our Customer Success team developed with 321.

Jeff Thomas, EVP Revenue & Growth

The Solution: A customized training program that built skills and alignment across the company.

321’s team of experienced entrepreneurs worked with Virtual Gurus to develop a highly practical, customized training program. Every element of the program was designed to directly address the areas that would help catalyze the company’s growth. These ranged from the strategic (building a targeted sales strategy, reframing the customer success team as an extension of the sales team so they could help drive growth) to the tactical (improving their overall marketing and copywriting skills, building sales processes to support growth objectives). 

The program included hands-on, in-the-weeds activities and learnings that Virtual Gurus could immediately implement into its business. And, as the Virtual Gurus team grew and learned, the 321 team adjusted program planning in real-time to optimize the value each participant got out of the program.

I loved how customized our program was. The 321 team built the program we needed and even adapted their curriculum to address critical opportunities we identified during program delivery.

— Marci Laurence, Head of People & Culture

The Result: An organization aligned and ready to grow.

Coming out of its 321 program, Virtual Gurus saw wins across three areas of its business:

  • Sales: The Sales team built alignment around new and refined sales processes. They developed understanding of the use of ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) and clearly defined the ones they were targeting. They then used that framing to help them develop an approach to target prospects and communicate the organization’s value.
  • Marketing: The Marketing team leveled up on crafting messaging tied to ICP pain points and built a shared understanding of the buyer journey and how to craft messaging across its key stages.
  • Customer Success: The Customer Success team learned to move away from being reactive and take a more proactive approach to effective upselling. That included development of a process to assess and score ‘customer health’, which fed into upselling opportunities.

These wins all contributed immediately to ROI. In fact, the Virtual Gurus team met their revenue targets the month after they finished the training program – purely through Customer Success team upselling. This would have been impossible if not for the 321 program.

Finally, and perhaps just as importantly as any specific tactical learning – the 321 custom training workshop brought alignment across the Virtual Gurus organization – from new hires to established veterans of the business, from sales to marketing to customer success – so each group and each person understood their role in executing the sales strategy.

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