Get answers from sales leaders
Brian Tino
AlphaSense Director of Strategic Sales, EMEA • January 25
Good question! I evaluate every sales candidate who is interviewing to join my team on the same 3 criteria: 1. Sales Skills & Knowledge - key expertise & skills required to be an effective salesperson (ex. conversation generation, discovery, relationship building, business case construction, managing a closing process, etc.) 2. Core Behavioral Competencies - the characteristics that can contribute to success as a salesperson (ex. motivation, presence, adaptability, coachability, etc.) 3. Alignment to Company Values - the main values we expect to be shared by all employees within the organization That said, there are aspects that tend to separate the GREAT from the BEST sales candidates. As a I reflect back on the VERY BEST salespeople I've worked alongside and had the opportunity to lead throughout my career, each of them also embodies the following: 1. Intellectual Curiosity - an innate curiosity of the world. Individuals who are deeply facinated by people & relationships, the problems or challenges they may be facing, and have a perpetual hunger to continue learning from others. These individuals tend to be the best at truly understanding a customer's objectives/pain points which enables them to provide the best solutions. 2. Resilience - formed through tremendously challenging experiences outside of their career. Each of the best people I've worked with has done something incredible in their lives before I met them. They've had success in the face of adversity. By being able to acheive their goals amidst chaos, they learned how to maintain focus on the most critical behaviors, keep themselves above the line, and weather the headwinds. These individuals tend to be the best at managing through the biggest downsturns of a life in sales. 3. Leadership - not operating behind a title, these indvidiuals embody the truest aspects of Leadership. Always putting the team's development & success above their own self-interest, these individuals find opportunities to innovate within their sales motion, and go out of their way to share their learnings & best practices with the team.
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Charles Gryor Derupe
accessiBe Director of Enablement • February 7
This answer is purely based on opinion, so please keep this in mind. I believe that any new tactics and strategies need to be relevant to the sales methodology set by the enablement team. Why? Reps, especially those that are "green" to the field, need a repeatable, consistent skill development structure. Additionally, this methodology should be where onboarding, ongoing reinforcement training, and content should map to. Adding new sales tactics and strategies are most effective for experienced reps who have already mastered their own selling methods. This doesn't mean you shouldn't or can't share some cool articles or resources for these new tactics and strategies - especially cool non-enablement resources and tools they can use to implement those methodology-mapped skills. A good example of this is how to sell through social media, where selling skills like good discovery, creating interest, and driving the next steps, etc. can still be incorporated into this new selling channel. Sharing knowledge should be part of the Sales culture. However, enablement programming should prioritize established methodologies for consistency and to make your impact measurement as easy as possible.
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George Cerny
Iterable VP, Growth Sales, B2B2C Sales & LATAM • November 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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Alicia Lewis
Culture Amp Senior Sales Director • April 24
There's a few different ways to gauge a candidate's autonomy in a sales interview. 1. Behavioral Questions: Ask situational questions that require candidates to describe times where they had to work independently to achieve sales targets or overcome challenges. For example one of my go to questions is, "What's the most creative, out of the ordinary, or above and beyond thing you’ve done to win a customer?" 2. Past Experience: Review the candidate's resume and ask about specific examples where they demonstrated autonomy in previous sales roles. Inquire about their sales process, strategies they implemented independently, and decisions they made autonomously. 3. Problem-solving Scenarios: Present examples of current sales scenarios and ask how the candidate would approach them. Evaluate whether they demonstrate the ability to think critically and make decisions independently in real life situations that arise. 4. Role-play Exercises: Conduct role-playing exercises where the candidate must handle a sales scenario independently. We ask candidates to run a discovery call and give them basic information on the team. Observe how they handle the situation and objections without much assistance or input.
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Nick Feeney
Loom VP, Revenue • March 9
OKRs can vary depending on how your specific business and team are measured. It is crucial to first understand what the business OKRs are before you can be prescriptive in delineating key objectives to your respective team. Team metrics: * Data trends - SCL, ACV, WR + pipeline (3x) * Days within stage * ACV (average contract value) * ASC (average sales cycle) * Delineated by stage * WR (win rate) * Delineated by stage * New logos * New logo vs. expansion revenue * SQO to SAO production (sales qualified to sales accepted opportunity) * Your team should have ~3-4x pipeline coverage in order to feel confident in attaining the number * Activity to SQO production (how many activities until a meeting is booked) * % to quota attainment * There is a fine balance. ~125%+ attainment across the team to me means the number is too attainable. I like to see performance average ~90-95% attainment across a team by region. Business Metrics Great metrics to ask in an interview * Run rate vs. growth rate * Path to profitability * At scale, do these unit economics work? * Revenue now vs. targets for the year vs. projections * Revenue streams * Market share * CAC (Customer acquisition costs) * NDR (Net dollar retention) * What is the current valuation vs. projection for next year
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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.
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Eric Martin
Vanta Head Of Sales • November 28
This is a good, and interesting question. Like many of the other questions, answering this properly requires more context, so I'd ask that you DM me to find some time to chat. A couple of questions that come to mind when reading this question include: How similar or different are the ICPs for these two products? What are the ACVs of the products? How do their sales cycles compare? Are your product and marketing teams investing in both of them equally? Etc. While many might know Vanta as automating SOC 2, we have many products that our sales team sells today, and all of those products are pretty complex (the world of compliance is about as subjective as it gets). One thing that we've seen in asking reps to sell multiple products is that they're going to focus on the products that are easiest to sell, and the products that will make them the most money. The art and the science here is being really thoughtful around pricing and packaging methodology, and also sales compensation incentives, so as to drive the results that you're looking for. Once again, hard to answer this one directly without more context, so please reach out to me directly!
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Maria White
Cornerstone OnDemand Vice President Sales Enablement and Education • April 6
How to convert ClassRoom Enablement into 'real world' experiences Effective account discovery can be the subject matter to be trained on. Normally these enablement sessions would use case studies based on potential experiences that could happen during the account discovery steps, giving insight but no "real world" examples. To convert your training you can do this in five simple steps. 1. Use an example case study - this is to expand on techniques for effective discovery. 2. Get each attendee come prepared with three accounts they can work on during the workshop. Create exercises that allow time for them to work on their own account discovery during the workshop. This will allow them to apply what they learned directly to their own accounts. 3. Get feedback from each group. What did they uncover during the exercise? Encourage feedback. 4. During their discussion allow the class to share their own approach to discovery expanding on their experience with the "own account" exercise. 5. Make sure you have a note of all the accounts they have worked on during the sessions to prove the value of these workshops. How to scale this across an organization in 3 simple steps. 1. After running a few sessions you should be able to prove the value of the workshop. Build documentation outlining the number of accounts that were worked on during the session and quantify the pipeline value. 2. Once you have secured agreement from stakeholders to run this workshop at scale get volunteers from the Sales community, you can then train them to assist in the roll out globally. 3. It is critical to schedule sessions in advance as well as having back up trainers ready just in case. Measure the success of the program and keep your stakeholders informed of the success of your program.
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Beau Noonan
Matterport Enterprise Sales Director • June 7
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.
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Tim Britt
Freshworks Senior Director of Channels Europe • April 11
When joining a startup as the Head of Sales where there hasn't been a dedicated sales team before, it's crucial to establish a solid foundation while driving rapid growth. Here's a breakdown of goals for the first 30/60/90 days: First 30 Days: 1. Understand the Business: * Gain a deep understanding of the startup's product or service, target market, unique value proposition, and competitive landscape. 2. Assess Current Situation: * Evaluate existing sales processes, if any, and identify areas for improvement or gaps in the sales strategy. 3. Define Sales Strategy: * Develop a clear sales strategy aligned with the company's overall goals and objectives. * Determine target customer segments, pricing models, and go-to-market strategies. 4. Build Sales Infrastructure: * Set up essential sales infrastructure, including CRM software, sales enablement tools, and reporting mechanisms. 5. Hire Core Team Members: * Begin recruiting key sales team members, such as sales managers or account executives, to help execute the sales strategy. Next 30 Days (60 Days Total): 6. Refine Sales Processes: * Streamline and optimise sales processes to increase efficiency and effectiveness. * Implement standardised workflows, sales scripts, and objection handling techniques. 7. Train and Onboard Team: * Provide comprehensive training and onboarding for new sales team members to ensure they are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. 8. Start Generating Revenue: * Focus on generating initial revenue by closing deals and acquiring new customers. * Identify quick-win opportunities and prioritise efforts to drive early sales wins. 9. Establish Metrics and Reporting: * Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and establish systems for tracking and reporting on sales metrics. * Monitor progress closely and make adjustments as needed to stay on track towards goals. Next 30 Days (90 Days Total): 10. Scale Sales Operations: * Scale up sales operations by expanding the sales team, refining processes, and investing in additional resources as needed. * Explore opportunities for geographic expansion or new market segments to accelerate growth. 11. Customer Feedback and Iteration: * Gather feedback from early customers to understand their needs, pain points, and satisfaction with the product or service. * Use insights to iterate on the sales strategy, messaging, and product offerings to better align with customer needs. 12. Establish Sales Culture: * Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the sales team. * Lead by example and reinforce core values that drive success in sales and customer relationships. By setting and achieving these goals in the first 30/60/90 days, you can lay a strong foundation for the sales function, drive rapid growth, and position the startup for long-term success in the market.
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