The most successful AEs that I've worked with have a long list of key attributes that set them apart from the rest. These attributes include * responsiveness * curiosity * resilience * authenticity * collaboration * rapport building * not being afraid to fail * thriving on challenges Important tactical skills which I see in top reps are around strong sales execution behaviors. Skills such as thorough preparation, stakeholder management, ability to multi-thread, drive urgency, and create contingency plans are how Account Executives consistently win deals. They also make sure to never take their foot off of the gas when it comes to prospecting. They know its the only way to ensure they have the pipeline needed to execute. It’s this combination of sales execution skills and the attributes associated with a relentless drive to exceed goal and build strong relationships which enable reps to consistently be at the top of the leaderboard.

I am a firm believer of meritocracy. So when it comes to pay raise especially in sales roles it should be very black and white for a sales rep to determine when would they qualify for a pay raise. It should be very easy for sales people to chart out their salary hikes based on their performance. The more consistent you are in delivering and over achieving your targets, the faster you should get to your pay raise. Needless to say, that there is no compromise when it comes to ethics and integrity when you are achieveing your targets.

I'm going to include some red flags on resumes since I have already talked about common mistakes people make in sales interviews. Some resume red flags: * Resume is multiple pages long (people pay most attention to the first half of the resume so if it's very dense, you will lose your audience) * Having every single job the person's ever had listed on there (relevant job experiences only please) * Having little-to-no quantitative results (e.g. % attainment, conversion rates, etc.) on the resume, especially for sales roles * Basic spelling or grammar mistakes (shows that there was no detail to attention if you have a lot of them)

So much of the sales KPI tracking has been automated (# meetings, Pipeline generated, funnel progression) so I find the manual ones more difficult to track, but move the needle the most. ie: how many on-sites did a rep conduct this quarter? It's a manual process for reps to log into a CRM and update a meeting field as "in person" and often gets over looked in an organization. There is no substitute for in person meetings. Another example that's difficult to track things like how many new business units or contacts from other business units you broke into in a month, quarter, or year.

As a Sales professional we are often under a lot of pressure to close deals and meet our targets. If you're not careful you can quickly burnout especially when quotas reset each month or quarter. Over the years I’ve had to become more intentional in creating boundaries and finding new ways to recharge. Here are some ways that I’ve found success to prevent burnout and recharge: 1. Prioritize self-care: Prioritize self-care activities such as exercise, meditation, and getting enough sleep. Pay yourself first physically and mentally to stay energized and focused. 2. Take breaks: Take regular breaks throughout the day to rest and recharge. This could include going for a walk, having lunch with a friend, or breathwork between meetings. I also plan a trip each quarter to make sure I'm spending quality time with the family. 3. Set Boundaries: Improving my time management skills and creating clear boundaries between working hours and personal/family time. This can help you prioritize tasks and manage your workload more effectively.

It's essential to first understand the expectations of your sales leadership, common denominators between successful reps who achieve those expectations, and availability of data to your enablement program. Here are a couple of questions to ask before you get started in creating a measurement plan: * What types of habits do they need to be able to do their everyday work by Day 30-60-90 days? * What are the expectations of your leads? Compare this to enablement insights on what can reasonably be achieved based on historical benchmarks. * Which reps have the most successful ramp numbers? What's the common denominator between all of them? * How long is your onboarding program, including reinforcement training after boot camp? * Do YOU have the data and reports that can show comparative data between reps? A lot of these questions really focus on setting benchmarks on four factors which I've seen are generally performable by many teams: 1. Confidence levels (Subjective): What are your reps' confidence levels around knowing and selling your products increasing over your ramp period? Is there improvement over time? Are you asking this based on various categories such as product, sales skills, and tool usage? 2. Lead Assessment (Subjective): Have their leads fill out a scorecard with guided skill categories based on your sales methodology following your reporting cadence. Make sure that there is guidance on what each category means to minimize the need for calibration. 3. Tool usage (Subjective and Objective): Do your reps know how to use their tools? Do they know where they can access the supporting documentation and guidance after their onboarding program? Are they accessing these tools and using them in the first place? How do they measure up to usage benchmarks - focus on effectiveness later after ramp as I recommend that these should be measured after reinforcement training past onboarding/ramp. 4. Activity, Deal Velocity and Attainment Benchmarks (Objective): How many calls are they making? How many prospects are they sourcing and reaching out to? How many deals are at various stages by 30-60-90 days - are they building and moving deals through their pipeline? Are they achieving the benchmarks/objectives your team has set for win rate and ramp attainment numbers? Hopefully, these categories help to start somewhere. Curious to hear what other enablement leaders have used as well.

Here is my approach to aligning quarterly/annual sales OKRs with broader business objections: * Define business objections: Identify the key regional business objectives for the quarter or year. They should be specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound. For example, increasing central enterprise region revenue by 20% in the next 180 days. * Determine sales objectives: Based on business objectives, establish sales-specific objectives that support broader goals and are tied to revenue targets. For example, increasing Stage 1 conversions by 20% within the next 90 days. * Assign projects: Assign specific projects to members of the sales team based on their skills, expertise, and areas of responsibility. * Align individual OKRs: Connect individual projects to sales team OKRs by setting individual key results that contribute to overall sales objectives. * Success Criteria: Clearly define the success criteria for each individual project and how they contribute to the overall sales objectives.

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?

First off, I'm going to assume that the question here is whether or not I have any advice for a "junior seller" who is a first sales hire. My advice is to ask your company leaders to help you find a sales mentor or sales coach. Asking for something like this is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of maturity. Your company leaders clearly see something in you (that you also hopefully see in yourself). You should operate from a place of confidence, but also seek out someone who you can also continuously learn from. As a junior seller in a first sales role, you should also assume (if your company is smart) that future sellers will probably have more experience than you. That's a great thing! If you're the legacy rep who's been finding a way to get the job done, and who has enough humility to know what you know and what you don't know, you're going to be incredibly well respected as the team grows.

By conducting a bi-annual survey and constantly checking in with them regularly. Attending their weekly meetings is a great start to becoming part of their team and really begin to understand what they need and how you can provide it to them. It is also a great idea quarterly to interview about 15-20 sellers to stay connected to their requirements.