I really like this question because it's so true! Leadership can break a lot of trust by implementing incorrect KPIs for a segment. Experienced sellers will get angry they are treated like SDRs, etc. The best thing leaders can do is watch, listen, observe, and then replicate. What have the most successful reps done in this position? Are they having 10 calls a week, 2 on-sites a month, and 1 "high value activity" a quarter (like exec intro, hackathon, etc)? Standardize from the top and make excellence the norm.

The main differences to me between an Account executive and a Senior account executive comes down to organization, pipeline management, and using a solid sales process like MEDDPICC. Senior AEs always have their CRM (like Salesforce) up to date, accurately forecast QoQ, and know how to multi-thread deals. More Junior AEs tend to have "Closed lost reasons" such as "Wrong Decision Maker/Not the DM" or "Client went dark" This typically shows an inability to build strong relationships or following a consistent sales process.

There isn't a one size fits all approach, however, this framework is a good place to start in order to deeply understand your customers. I like to position each obstacle as a "how might we" question in order to solve: 1. Assess & Define Customer Lifecycle: What are the behaviors of our most successful customers? What did their customer journey look like? How were they onboarded? What are the behaviors of customers who expanded? How might we scale the successes and learn from the failures? 1. Awareness: How might we get our product in front of more customers with the right messaging at the right time? Which channels are most/least effective? MQL by source. 2. Evaluation: How might we customize the customer experience to solve specific pain points to drive customer acquisition? How do we get to realized ROI faster, specific to a use case? 3. Acquisition: How might we drive time to value faster and reduce onboarding so customers expand sooner? What onboarding hurdles can we eliminate? How might we automate onboarding and reduce internal resources to support our customers (turnkey vs. CX resources needed). 4. Value Realized: How might we drive quantifiable impact faster and get multi-threaded across the executive team to instill value at the business level? What value do we provide at the departmental level vs. corporate/business level to solve organizational wide challenges? 5. Rules of Engagement: Audit exisiting process, identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. Interview your current team and customers to understand current challenges and customer needs. 1. What is your CX team responsible for? How might we put together a comp plan that incentivizes the outcomes we're aiming to drive with our customers? 6. Customer Support: How might we drive impactful QBRs with our customers in order to be a mission critical solution globally? 1. Product Led: To reiterate, how might we automate more of the onboarding process? 2. Customer Maturity Model: Prescriptive with our customers by creating custom milestones of achievement throughout their contract to guarantee renewal. 3. Segmentation: Defining where CS/Support resources are best spent based on CAC. How might we remove internal blockers to our CX team so they can spend all of their time with our highest valued customers? 2. User Engagement & Referral Programs: Encouraging existing users to refer new customers can be a cost-effective way to expand the customer base * Insert referral bonus in our product * Incentivize G2 review post positive implementation 3. Data Monetization: Leveraging product insights to determine which accounts have the highest propensity to expand & which should be flagged as churn/contraction risk. * Advocacy: How might we build a customer advisory board as a revenue stream? How might we get our customers on stage touting about the impact our solution has on their organization? * Churn: How might we reduce regrettable churn? How do we measure customer health? How might we get ahead of customers moving to a “red” stage? How might we identify at-risk customers sooner in order to reduce risk of churn? * NRR: What is driving the most successful NRR outcomes? What can we replicate in our motion across each segment of our customers to drive renewals? How might we drive more multi-year contracts to drive longevity with our customers? How might we get in front of our customers far before renewal to ensure they’re healthy (reiterating the customer maturity model from day 1 of onboarding) 4. Expansion: How might we get multi-threaded sooner and provide more use cases to our customers? 1. Create expansion playbooks & account plans for high growth propensity accounts (ARR threshold, employee size, etc.) 2. Training CS on discovery (value selling, multi-threading, solving for outcomes, driving solutions vs. selling features) 3. Enable your entire revenue organization on how to negotiate (give/get) 4. CS opportunity to build muscle by identifying opportunities. Incentivization around expansion pipeline creation (% payout for expansion deals) 5. Customer Health: Define, report, measure, analyze customer health to ensure gross revenue retention? How might we create a customer maturity model that guides our customers through custom journeys to realize ROI quickly? 1. At Risk: How might we implement a system to identify at risk customers in order to act quickly to eliminate regrettable churn? How might we get to a fast yes/no sooner to ensure we don't waste resources on renewals that are already lost. What learnings can we take?

* Demonstrate an absolute commitment to solving problems for your customers and do it even when it feels like no one is watching. People are always talking and sharing examples of great. * When you've done your research and put in the work, shine a light on it by asking execs to weigh in or get involved. Too many try to run and hide from this but there is no faster path forward than to have your work critiqued, making clear your commitment to solve problems especially when you didn't have it right the first time around. * Ask for the time. It's much harder to see what is not in front of you. If you want to be seen, ask.

To build a strong enablement culture within the sales organization, it's important that we: 1. Understand the impact of the enablement. How will this help them do their job better/faster? Will they see the results in more time available, more opportunity to pursue, more money? 2. Allocate the time and resources to complete the enablement. Ensure you're delivering the training in the best mode possible for the highest outcome. Does this need to be delivered in person or will virtual sessions provide the same impact? Is the learning something that can be done through a job aid or process document, or will it require hands-on experience? 3. Offer the opportunity to practice and gain an understanding of the learning in a real-world application. Watching recordings of a skill can help in theory, but practical application will make all the difference in an individual's absorption of the material. 4. Demonstrate the success of the enablement. Create buy-in from leadership as well as the individual sellers by providing proof of the impact and what it means to the individual seller, their leadership and teams.

Great question! A big one too…for a startup GTM hire looking to develop and own KPIs, I’d recommend working with leadership to align to the KPIs that are most imperative to driving success for your business. For a startup, it can look like steps to traction in a space, or finding the first few customers — in that case, focus your KPIs on pipeline generation, lead creation, and more. I’d even say that you should be setting KPIs for inverse ICP discovery—what are we learning about the market that we should not be in? For a more established company, focus on owning KPIs that are within your realm of action. If you can’t influence the KPI, you’ll be hard pressed to meet them.

Good question. I have seen these people in my time as a leader as well. However, not all sellers fall in to this bucket, so KPIs should be in place to support the rest of the team and encourage consistent behaviors. I have seen sellers that are more junior in their sales career or new to a business ask for KPIs (reflective of the top sales performers within the team) so that they can add more structure to their day/week and help them formulate a plan that will eventually get them to a positive quota outcome.

There are two primary paths for sales professionals who want to continue to level up in sales. The individual contributor path and the management path. Individual contributors might start as an Sales Development Rep or Business Development Rep. These are entry level sales roles that involve appointment setting for a more senior Account Executive who then takes a meeting and works to close business. At most tech companies, the most junior Account Executives work in the small business division, and more senior reps sell to progressively larger segments. So career progression might look like BDR -> Small Business Account Executive -> Mid Market Account Executive -> Enterprise Account Executive On the other side, if you pursue the management track, you may promote in any segment from account executive to manager. Typically this involves taking on leadership responsibilities (something like a team lead program to get experience) and coaching peers to development the management skillset. This could look like BDR-> Account Executive -> Sales Manager -> Director -> VP of Sales.

This is a critical question and often the root cause of inefficiencies and confusion when scaling a business development function. First Rule for Discovery Prep: Keep It Simple For SDR-led discovery, the primary focus should be on disqualification criteria. Define the minimum requirements to disqualify and make these the core of the SDR qualification process. Avoid asking SDRs to conduct complex, value-driven discovery calls with senior evaluators unless you are actively looking to transition them into a sales role. Their focus should be on determining whether a meeting should qualify as pipeline—nothing more. In situations where there's no SDR qualification and meetings are directly booked via web forms, adjust the process to streamline the first call. Replace the generic “You're all set to meet with us” email with a high-level qualification email that sets expectations for the call and prompts a response. This approach ensures AEs are equipped with enough context on the buyer’s pain points to avoid a cold discovery call. Example Email: Hi [Prospect], Thank you for your interest in [YOUR COMPANY]. Could you share 2-3 sentences on what prompted your interest or the initiatives you’re looking to solve? This will help me prepare and ensure we make the most of our time together. If there are others you’d like to add to the meeting, let me know and I’ll include them. This type of message invites the prospect to share their priorities. An engaged buyer (a sign of a promising deal) will provide details that often allude to specific pain points—a valuable signal that can help position the solution effectively during the call. * Pro Tip: When a prospect responds, cold call them briefly to clarify key points. Keep it concise, with just one or two follow-up questions to show curiosity without overstepping. The aim is to build rapport, not conduct a full discovery. Be brief, be bright, be gone—just enough to establish a connection and show value. With this approach, you'll head into the first call with confidence, having already created a personal connection and gained an early advantage over competitors. Building a Point of View (POV) To prepare for a successful discovery call, it’s essential to develop a robust POV that demonstrates your understanding of the customer’s account. For this, you’ll need: 1. A standardized set of attributes that helps you "know" your customer. 2. Tools that provide the data needed for this POV—such as Salesmotion, ZoomInfo, LeanData, CopyAI, Copilot, Warmly, or 6Sense. Attributes for an Effective POV: * Company Name: Identify the target company. * Attendees: List who will be present and their roles. * Purchase Motivation: Understand why they would buy your product. * Urgency Factors: Assess why they would buy now. * Pain Points: Capture any expressed challenges. * Meeting Goal: Define your primary objective. * Customer Expectations: Understand their desired outcomes for the meeting. * Key Moments: Identify key impressions you aim to leave. * Product Features to Highlight: Focus on relevant features for the discussion. * Potential Pitfalls: Be mindful of areas to avoid. * Company’s Offerings: Get familiar with their key products. * Growth Bets: Where are they focusing their growth strategy? * Business Themes to Align With: Important business statistics and themes. * Competitors: Be aware of their competitive landscape. * Success Stories to Reference: Use key wins to build credibility. * Discovery Questions: Prepare questions to understand their process and pain points. Leveraging this structured approach ensures that each discovery call is unformed, and better yet, meaningful, ultimately building trust with the prospect and effectively positioning your solution.

To be an effective sales leader, you must have strong communication skills and be driven by data and process. Strong communication, especially a coach-like mindset, is extremely important in terms of supporting reps to achieve quotas. Positive and effective communication between a leader and their reps allows for a smooth flow of information, which creates an environment that motivates the team to work towards achieving goals. More than ever, being analytical and process driven is key to creating and scaling a high performing team. It’s important that leaders understand the story in the data, make impactful decisions based upon it and motivate their team with data. In terms of nice to haves, having an eye for great sales talent is something that can take time to develop as a sales leader. I’ve been in sales my entire career and being able to identify great talent is something I'm always working on. If early on in their tenure a sales leader can hone in on a candidate's desire to learn and succeed, they are set up for success.