This is a very important question and one that not everyone will see eye to eye with me on this. But personally, it has never failed me up until now. There are a few elements that are common to candidates that have been proven to be successful: The first is tenacity. It is that inner hunger to learn new topics or master new skill sets. One who always finds ways to be proactive and push boundaries. When talking to candidates, I always look for a potential team member whom I will need to restrain rather than one I will need to nudge forward. The second is communication skills. A great seller is someone who you talk to and immediately comes off as connectable and relatable. Someone who has a clear understanding of the person in front of them. The third aspect would have to be very strong social and emotional intelligence. This goes hand in hand with having a client first mentality. A great candidate is one who will give the client the true sense that he puts their interest above anything. Earning that trust is key to building a long-term, healthy relationship.

LIke most professions, you can not lead a team well if you haven't done the job yourself. Must Haves : * You should have been a quota carrying sales rep for at least 3 to 5 years before you can transition into sales leadership. * Have a good understanding of the product. You don't want to be in a meeting with your sales rep where you are not able to answer the use cases and functionalities of your profuct to the customer without any hesitation * Good understanding of the market you operate in * Ability to motivate the team and shield any unnecessary pressure from top management * Good analytical skiils would always help you to identify trends in the market place as well as your own internal metrics * Listening skills : They are both important as a sales rep as well as a sales leader. * Focus on Culture :Though some people might put this under "Nice to Haves", I strongly feel that being focussed on culture and building a strong team culture helps a sales leader a lot. Nice to Haves * Some experience around areas of business development and customer success is always helpful * Project management skills can come in handy as you go up the hierarchy and need to work across cross-functional teams

Another topic that is always top of mind for sales leaders, and their recruiting teams, is their employee retention scores. It is a massive expense to organizations when they see talent leave, whether regrettable or not, and have to spend resources recruiting, enabling and eventually filling that seat. Programs, behaviours and approaches that may help keep your teams intact and excited about their role, can include: - providing new challenges and opportunities. This can come in many forms of internal career growth avenues, including progression through the sales segments, offering leadership opportunities, and/or programs and resources made available for personal development. - Engaging with your employees on a regular basis. Demonstrate to your teams that their feedback is welcomed, valued and encouraged. You've seen this done with internal 'employee engagement' surveys, 'ask me anything' panels with leadership, and of course it all started back in my early days with the physical 'suggestion box' (dating myself slightly). - Expand your 1:1's to be more than just about deals and quota. There is more to a seller than their ability to sell. Think of what 'behaviors' you want your team to excel at..are they good collaborators with cross functional teams? Are they a good team member and help mentor new members and don't shy away from sharing learnings? Do they show up prepared, educated, and lead with the customer first? Also, think of what sales 'competencies' you want to ensure the team excels at, such as being strong at doing 'discovery', they have the ability to tell compelling customer stories, and are they doing account plans for their tier 1 accounts?. If you build a team with strong sales 'behaviors' and 'competencies', the quota retirement will come. - Celebrate and acknowledge. Celebrate both big and small things within the sales org, and set up a recognition program outside of your 'Presidents Club' (or equivalent). Everyone responds well to their positive acknowledgment and reinforcement.

In order to get a better understanding of what you could be walking into, I suggest asking the question "What is your biggest problem and can I help solve it?" It shows genuine interest in the interviewer's pains/goals and enables you to see how you can make an impact. Aside from this key question, always make sure to check out these resources before stepping into the interview. 1. Company Website: Familiarize yourself with the company's products or services, mission, values, financials and recent announcements. 2. LinkedIn: Research the hiring manager and other key stakeholders to gain insights into their backgrounds and professional interests. 3. Glassdoor or RepVue: Read reviews from current or former employees to learn about the company culture, interview process, and potential interview questions.

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!

As the first GTM hire and sales leader at Vanta, hitting our weekly revenue target was the absolute most important thing that I could do for myself, for the company, and for my CEO. Yes, you read that correctly, I had a weekly revenue target that I had to hit (and that we exceeded on a weekly basis for the first few years). Why weekly? I think it came from some YC guidance. :) If you're taking on a first sales leader role where there are literally no sellers, it's critical that you first roll up your sleeves and prove (on a repeated basis) that you can close deals and hit the revenue targets. Once you've established that you can get the job done, it'll become obvious to you when it's time to start scaling. And if it's not obvious to you, it might be obvious to someone else, like your CEO. To put yourself in a position where you're ready to start adding bodies, be sure to not overlook investing in key systems (i.e. buying your CRM) and processes (i.e. creating an AE hiring loop). If you're taking on a first sales leader role where there are already butts in seats, your primary responsibility is still to hit the number, whatever it takes. Rather than immediately rolling up your sleeves and learning how to close a deal (though this is something you should prioritize), you might instead start by doing an audit of the sales org that you're joining. Doing an audit should help give you a better sense of how strong (or weak) of a position you and the team are in to hit the revenue targets. My advice, communicate up (to your CEO) your findings as they come, and with full honesty. As the CRO of Snowflake once told me, "Sales leadership is a single elimination tournament, if you miss your number, you should expect to be replaced." It's a bit extreme, but it's also not wrong.

Be transparent and share the “why”: Each SDR should be able to articulate the purpose of their role, the rationale behind their goals, and the methodology used to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs). While many teams have robust processes to determine these factors, they often fail to provide transparency to their teams. When metrics are perceived as being dictated without explanation or “handed down”, they become less motivating. Encourage individuality- Find areas where SDRs can flex their creativity, contribute to experiments, and express their opinions. When you go overboard with processes on an SDR team, it takes away the joy from the work and lowers the possibility of discovering impactful ideas. Create a team that defaults to collaboration and praises readily- While a slack channel, shout-out specific application, or kudos google form can be well intentioned, they often go underutilized. We know that if our team has downtime, they are probably using it to update Salesforce. Make giving praise part of an essential process that is already done!

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.

Sales OKRs should be designed to align with the overall business objectives and drive measurable outcomes that contribute to revenue growth and customer success. Here are some examples of good sales OKRs: 1. Objective: Increase Revenue * Key Result 1: Achieve a 20% increase in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by the end of the quarter. * Key Result 2: Close 50 new deals with high-value clients within the target market. * Key Result 3: Increase average deal size by 15% through upselling and cross-selling additional products or services. 2. Objective: Expand Market Reach * Key Result 1: Enter three new geographic markets and generate $100,000 in revenue from each market within six months. * Key Result 2: Increase brand awareness and market visibility by doubling the number of qualified leads generated from inbound marketing efforts. * Key Result 3: Secure partnerships with five strategic channel partners to extend the company's reach and access new customer segments. 3. Objective: Improve Sales Efficiency * Key Result 1: Reduce the sales cycle length by 20% through process optimization and improved lead qualification. * Key Result 2: Increase the conversion rate from qualified leads to closed deals by 15% through targeted sales enablement and training initiatives. * Key Result 3: Implement a new CRM system and achieve 100% adoption among the sales team within three months to improve data accuracy and visibility. 4. Objective: Enhance Customer Satisfaction * Key Result 1: Achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 9 or above by the end of the year through proactive customer engagement and support. * Key Result 2: Reduce customer churn rate by 25% through proactive account management and retention efforts. * Key Result 3: Increase customer lifetime value (CLV) by 20% by driving upsell and cross-sell opportunities and delivering exceptional value to customers. 5. Objective: Foster Team Development * Key Result 1: Implement a structured onboarding program for new sales hires and achieve 100% completion within 30 days of joining. * Key Result 2: Provide ongoing training and development opportunities for the sales team, resulting in a 10% increase in average performance metrics (e.g., conversion rate, quota attainment). * Key Result 3: Foster a culture of collaboration and accountability within the sales team, as measured by a 15% increase in team satisfaction scores. These examples illustrate how sales OKRs can be structured to align with broader business goals and drive measurable outcomes that contribute to revenue growth, market expansion, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and team development. Each OKR should be ambitious yet achievable, with clear metrics and milestones to track progress and success.

Our top reps excel at spotting potential opportunities. Since we're focused on run-rate tactical deals in the form of additional license, new initiatives, and pilots, our main stakeholders are typically at the VP level or below. The key here is mastering the art of tailoring conversations - distinguishing between "above the line" and "below the line" discussions ensures that our messaging aligns with the audience. In larger enterprises, industry trends and company direction are often widely available. It's crucial to delve into these trends, gaining a deep understanding of industry challenges and directions. This forms the basis for crafting a unique perspective that resonates not only with the business but also its key players. Once everyone's on the same page and the problem is crystal clear, we can then propose a forward-thinking solution that drives them towards their desired outcomes. What sets this approach apart is its emphasis on discovery. Rather than leading with a product pitch, we invest time in understanding the company's priorities. This makes our interactions much more aligned with the client's needs, creating a more genuine and less "sales-y" experience. This method ensures that our solutions aren't just one-size-fits-all, but tailored to fit the precise needs of each client we engage with.