Get answers from sales leaders
Andrew Zinger
Andrew Zinger
Fastly Senior Director, Global Sales EnablementJanuary 10
Ah.. a great question and something that I have yet to see perfected, but continues to get easier as many enablement and development professionals know and argue that companies cannot afford NOT to invest in the soft skills development of their employees. Historically I have seen that budgets typically allocated towards soft skills learning initiatives are all too often the first to be cut because of the difficulty of proving an ROI of sales soft skills versus hard/technical skills. Below are a couple of approaches I have seen, taken and partnered with internal teams around indicators of success within soft skill initiatives: Platform Engagement Rates: One area of my business I look to when measuring the impact of 'soft skill' enablement is our internal LMS & CMS platforms that tracks learners’ usage, knowledge retention and engagement rates. If a platform or specific collection of content is being used and consumed on a regular basis, it is a sign that employees are getting value from the company's soft skills training. If engagement and consumption levels are lacking, it could be a sign that the platform is not easy to navigate, that the content is untrusted or not engaging. Track Sales Team Productivity Rates: Over time I have started to see the increase in how soft skills such as multitasking, proactivity, communication, and creative-thinking have had a positive impact on sales productivity rates at companies that prioritizes employee development. Identifying and tracking success metrics across the sales team upon implementing soft skills initiatives is a great way to measure program impact. Sales Team Retention: Sales team churn is a major cost to any organization, and something that is easily measurable and can tell an important story. A recent 'Workplace Learning' report out of LinkedIn suggests that 94% of employees consider staying longer with companies who invest in programs aimed at career development. Impact of Process Optimisation: When organizations and teams see soft skills like successful teamwork, great communication, and strong time-management become ingrained in a company's culture, processes are optimised, and sales motions are completed more effectively and efficiently. Looking at the time it takes sales opportunities through the full deal cycle is a useful way to present an ROI to the business.
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Jon Boyer
Jon Boyer
Zapier Director of SalesApril 25
One of the key attributes I like to test for in interviews is the candidates self awareness and grit. My favorite question to ask here is "What is the most difficult feedback you've received professionally? How did it shape your career?" The quality of the answer demonstrates the candidates ability to internalize feedback and take action.
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961 Views
Roee Zelcer
Roee Zelcer
TikTok Head of Sales, Products & ServicesFebruary 9
Essentially, scaling a successful sales team all comes down to the people you hire. The members you are adding as part of your team will define the team culture. I always aim to hire people that help create a culture that fosters innovative thinking to enable growth and progress. Similar to adding ingredients to a recipe, scaling should be done slowly and steadily. Try to find the right people who share the passion, vision and values that you foster within the team. At a later stage, after you have found and hired the right people for your team, make sure you are creating a structure that will enable all team members to grow. Eventually, you will scale up to a point where you will need to develop managers within your team. Make sure that you are nurturing the right people that have the qualities that you look for to make them leaders.
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3186 Views
Eric Martin
Eric Martin
Vanta Head Of SalesNovember 28
It's a great question. I believe that all reps are continuously motivated by earning potential and career growth opportunities, regardless of the stage of the company. To get more nuanced, you'll see earlier hires more motivated by the combination of equity and cash, and you'll also see earlier hires hoping to leverage their early arrival to accelerate their career growth (vs later hires). As an aside, one of the real joys of leading and scaling sales teams is rewarding those deserving early hires with promotions, additional equity grants, etc. We've had the opportunity to do a lot of this at Vanta. More broadly, my advice is to spend a lot of time thinking about the design of your compensation plans (revisiting them at least annually) and also to map out levels and definitions for career growth sooner vs later. Make sure that you're putting your team in a spot where they believe they can hit their goals, and where they understand intimately what career growth means for them, and how to unlock it. Easier said than done. :)
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791 Views
George Cerny
George Cerny
Iterable VP, Growth Sales, B2B2C Sales & LATAMNovember 15
By far the most over-hyped KPI is total pipeline created. This is certainly a key metric to track week over week as a health check, but it provides little insight into what's actually going on. The problem with total pipeline created, is at no point should the conversation end with that KPI. If it's low - why? If it's high - why? Was it one large opp? Was it a bunch of baby opps? Was it quality pipeline? Was it from one AE/Segment/Business Unit - or is everything firing on all cylinders? At best it provides directional guidance to tune into major variances and inspect. At worst it provides false confidence in a pipeline that won't get you to goal. Typically addressing total pipeline creation falls into one of two camps: 1. Mention & move on. These are meetings where the metric is called out, compared to last week and it's either * Good - "great job, let's see if we can stretch this 10% higher next week" * Bad - "we really need to prioritize pipe gen this week. Get on it." 2. Paralysis by analysis. These meetings show the metric, and then dive into 40 slides with individual permutations of how everything performed over the past week; leading to information overload and very little insight into what actually needs to change. This is why instead of just tracking total pipe creation - we want to take a three-pronged approach: 1. How are we tracking towards our pipeline generation goal (which is a leading metric against future bookings)? 2. Identify the factors that are contributing to the current results. 3. Define strategies to optimize the path to goal The standard discussion described above hits the first objective, skips number 2, and the only strategy is often "do more." We could write an entire post on steps 2 and 3, but here are a few variables that can take your basic "total pipeline creation" reporting to the next level * # of opportunities created & average opportunity value. This controls for the one big opp skewing results. You generally want more big deals, but don't want to have to rely on only one big deal to hit the goal. This helps monitor quality & quantity. * Split by region/segment/AE's - this allows you to identify people and parts of the business that are doing well and understand why (do more of it, share learnings, double down). It also ensures that those who aren't doing well don't hide behind overall success of the business and get neglected. We want to identify why they're struggling, and ideally get them unstuck to improve performance. * Pipeline by opportunity source - attribution can lead to some sticky conversations, but tracking where the pipeline is coming from is necessary to improve the overall output. This isn't meant to start a blame game, but you can't optimize something you don't measure. So if AE's, SDR's, Marketing, Partnerships, or PLG is slacking - what can we do about it? If something is working incredibly well - how can we do more? * Pipeline conversion metrics - how is the pipeline that's coming in converting through the funnel to closure? Are disco to demo conversion rates improving, declining or staying the same? What about win rate? Any new trends where we should ride the wave? Anything that's not working which we should stop doing? These metrics will give you a much deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to current results and lay a strong foundation so you can define strategies to help optimize results. With a strong team and partners in marketing, partnerships, SDR and RevOps leadership - you're a brainstorming session away from having your best pipeline generation quarter yet.
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1659 Views
Charles Gryor Derupe
Charles Gryor Derupe
accessiBe Director of EnablementFebruary 7
I'll be honest, I've been in the Sales Enablement industry for a while and this is something that takes so much time to master and has so much nuance depending on your organization's structure. Here are some tactics I use that have helped me get 80+ people in my last annual strategy review. It boils down to these three things: 1. What you did: I LOVE quarterly business reviews. Now let's be honest, I HATE writing them, but they are very effective in getting engagement. The two questions you want to ask here are: 1) Who's the audience(s) I'm trying to activate? 2) What information are they looking for that would gauge proof of investment return and guidance? For me, I typically stick to a common format: * Divide the document by program * In each program, share objectives that you've set at the beginning of the quarter/year, what major projects were activated to address these, achievements, key insights and feedback, and next steps (how you're building on it, how you're pivoting away from it, and what you need help with by cross-functional department) * Tag specific people you know that would be interested in areas that pertain to them * Create a read-through event and ask folks to add comments and tag others who would be interested * Leave room for discussion of key themes at the end 2. What you're going to do: In addition to the quarterly business review, I do an annual review that considers any strategic plans for our key audiences, mostly this will be Sales Leadership's north stars. If you don't have these plans, go off of the business goals and vision for the year (team restructuring, market expansion, change in target audiences, etc). Here's my typical format: * Goals and objectives from the previous year and share loosely what your team achieved * Key insights that are going to guide you in the new year - changes in team habits, cross-functional partnerships, industry changes * Identifying those business objectives and the strategies (the direction, not the roads) you'll be taking to get address them - focus on why you are doing this from an enablement professional perspective * Divide the following sections by quarter, refer back to the objectives and strategies and key initiatives. Make sure to call out dependencies, financial/cross-functional resources needed, priority levels. This is a great place to be clear about who you need these from and ask for DRI's from their teams through comments * Give gratitude to your partners for making this happen and look forward to the collaboration needed to make this happen 3. How it's doing: These are weekly or monthly updates on those objectives and key initiatives. Share your current state in achieving those objectives and the deliverable progress for key initiatives. I also include some key themes and insights that we see in the data and feedback we hear from reps. This is also a great place to share what you're hearing from the industry/enablement world and how you plan to integrate them. All of these have really jumpstarted interest in our programs by being clear on guidance for why and how your partners can help will get it going. Make sure that you secure clear partners, project owners, and recurring times set to meet with them. Hope these help!
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Marleyna Mohler
Marleyna Mohler
Attentive Sr. Director of Inside SalesMay 16
Staying up to date: It’s important to pick a medium that you like for content. Whether it is Linkedin, podcasts, email newsletter, or chat based slack groups, you want to make sure you are setting yourself up for success. If the content goes unread or unlistened to, you won’t build a consistent learning habit. Personally, I find the most value in content forums where you can engage and ask follow up questions, hear multiple opinions on a particular matter, and even reach out the the original writer for a 1-1 chat! Another underutilized source of knowledge for industry trends is content from Sales Development technology vendors. It’s imperative that they stay on the cutting edge, so following a few top vendors on Linkedin will allow you to see what future the tools are preparing for. Avoiding the noise: There can be a great amount of value in public best practices. That said, there is risk in assuming that something that works for someone else will also work for you, or for implementing changes to something when you are already seeing above-average results. For example, if your content is getting a 20% reply rate, you may not want to adopt the “best practice” that moved someone else's team from a 10% to 15% reply rate. Having your own benchmarks and running your own A/B tests can help you determine where you should be altering your SDR motion, and where you should keep yours in place. Then, you can proactively search for interesting ideas to test in areas you are performing below benchmark. 
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1230 Views
Shahid Nizami
Shahid Nizami
Braze APAC Vice President of SalesJanuary 10
I stronly believe that sales people are one of the most likely people to get to the highest position in any business right upto the role of a CEO. In fact, many CEOs in global companies either come from either sales or product background. * A sales person would start their sales career somewhere as a SDR/BDR. * And then move into an account executive quota carrying role. * From there, they would either branch into management or continue to be a senior Individual Contributor (think about a Key Account Director) * I have seen successful sales people eventually getting into GM, CRO or even CEO roles
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2460 Views
Brian Tino
Brian Tino
AlphaSense Director of Strategic Sales, EMEAJune 29
One of the most important ways to help you stand out during a sales interview is to come into that interview well researched & prepared on the following: * The company & product * The interviewer * Your personal narrative * Relevant questions 1) Researching the company & product - be clear you understand what the company stands for, how they make money, and what value they deliver to clients (and be able to articulate it). You can usually do this by: * Reviewing the company website (especially blog posts, customer stories, and case studies) * Researching the company missions, vision, and values (usually in an "About Us" section) * Look at their social presence on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc. what are they posting about? * And if they have a free or trial version of the product, sign up for it & use it yourself 2) Researching the interviewer - get a feel for the interviewer's career path, their role & experience at the company, and what they personally care about. You can do this by: * Reviewing their LinkedIn profile to see prior work history & history with the current company * Check out social media Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn to see what they are posting about, and if they have written any blog post or articles themselves * See if you have any mutual connections and if you can do some back-channeling ahead of time 3) Preparing your personal narrative - make sure you have your professional story, what you want in your next role/company, and why you think you'd be the right fit for this specific role/company nailed: * Be able to tell the story of your professional journey, why you made the changes you made, and your track record of success along the way * Speak with conviction about your own personal values and what you are looking for in the next role/company (it's important there is mutual fit) * After reviewing the company, job description, and expectations, be able to speak to why do you think you are the right fit and what you can uniquely bring to the position 4) Preparing relevant questions - as an interviewer, I often get more from the questions a candidate asks because it can often provide insight into their own research & preparation, values, curiosity, and interest in the role/company: * Prioritize your questions based on what is most important to you (you'll likely only be able to get to a few of your questions in the first interview, so make them count) * Ensure the questions are relevant to that specific individual (executives will have a unique perspective on the company strategy & future, while potential peers & cross-functional partners can share more about the day-to-day and company culture) * And NEVER say you don't have any more questions (as this signals you are not well researched enough, aren't curious, and/or don't care about the role/position) Finally, as a BONUS TIP - always "close" on a sales interview by understanding definitive next steps and if the interviewer has any concerns or hesitations following your conversation
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575 Views
Sarah Mercedes (Osborne)
Sarah Mercedes (Osborne)
HubSpot Head of Corporate Sales, West CoastJanuary 24
The simple answer is that I didn't. However, it didn't take long for me to realize that in order for me to accomplish what I was driving on personally (both internally, as I thought about promo paths at the companies I've worked for and externally, when selling into other companies), I needed to ensure that I understood what the respective C-Suite cared about and find a way to tie my goals to their goals. For example, when thinking about my career progression, I make sure to align the projects and initiatives I am focused on to build out my body of work aren't just things I'm passionate about, but also things that align to the strategic focuses of the business set by our C-Suite. This leads to real impact, natural exposure with executive leadership and great reason for promo, which solves for my goals of career progression and their goals of business impact. When selling externally, I work with my team to ensure, as early in our discovery phase as possible, that we understand who the DMs are (typically C-Suite) and what they care about, so that the use cases and story-telling we lean on throughout our sales process align to the problems their C-Suite wants to solve. This is what gets contracts signed. Also, if you are able to offer a solution to a business problem vs. an IC's problem, you are far more likely to get direct access to the C-Suite, which is critical given they are the ultimate DM.
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