Naturally, in most cases, sales teams are mainly measured against revenue. This could come in many forms such as potential revenue such as leads, MQLs, SQLs, etc., or actual revenue from active and existing clients. I think there is one main KPI that is commonly overlooked, and that is the quality of the relationship with the client. This is a critical aspect that more often than not, is not measured. And I completely understand as it is incredibly difficult to do so. While a great and trustful relationship with a client will not always correlate with revenue in the immediate term, this is the key metric that will ensure long-term partnership and mutual accountability going forward. A great sales representative will forgo short-term gains in order to build a long-term partnership.

The biggest reality of sales is that you are as good as your current quarter. No matter how well you may have done in the previous quarter, the meter comes back to zero at the beginning of the new quarter/new year. I have been in sales for more than 2 decades and have seen numerous quarter ends/month ends. The trick to avoid burnout is to ensure that you disconnect from work every now and then. I try to take 5 days off every quarter to re-energize myself and get back on the grind. I also keep on taking up a new hobby which also is a great way to destress yourself without having to go on a week long holiday. At present, I am learning how to play the guitar :) 

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.

Moving from a Manager to a Director means that you have the skillset to not only take action on tasks or initiatives given to you, but to be the one that provides the strategy and vision that creates the initiatives and tasks. Being proactive in identifying risk or future problems, thinking through possible solutions and what is best for your business, employees and customers, is key to moving from managing to directing. As a Director, you become more concerned with the broader business outcomes and how your team(s) impact those outcomes, as well as you take ownership in providing insights to the business to influence and determine the strategy. You can start to build these skills as an individual contributor. Don't wait for a leadership opportunity to learn when to speak up and provide information that can help the business, don't wait for someone to call on you to help solve a problem. Be proactive, think broader than your job, and be willing to do work that you're not compensated for to achieve the overall business goals.

I enjoy companies that operate from a set of core values & principles. Step one is to call out learning as core to the business's success. Next, you should consider: * Praising knowledge sharing * Driving a learning culture from the top-down * Offering easy ways for people to share their learnings * Embedding learning where sellers & leaders need it most

As important as any KPI is why the metric is being measured, how you intend to reliably collect and review the data and the frequency you will get together to review the trend good or bad. In entering new markets, however difficult and unpredictable, you need to establish what you do believe to be true: size of the TAM, ICP definition and owners of each stage and target conversion of part of the funnel. Once you commit to the process - and give enough time for the work to show meaningful results, perhaps then can discuss what might feel arbitrary. If after all that there is still uncertainty about what goals might be realistic then commit simply to make improvements each week until there is enough data to set the right goal. Or take a leap of faith, set the goal and over communicate how and why you set it and what you'll do and why if you need to adjust at some point.

Thanks for the question! There are three ways that we go about this: Focus Groups, Open Requests, and Analytics. First, I'll mention that all content should point back to your team's goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve as an organization and business? Who are your target audiences? Will you be focusing on your ICPs or perhaps reinforcing the weakest sales opportunity? Are there any spots in the buying journey that have gaps and need to be addressed? These will ensure the content and strategies are giving you a north star and some hypotheses for the tactics below: For focus groups, we typically do a quarterly check-in with leads and they will recommend a few folks who are passionate about content. This helps us to get a pulse on what their biggest pain points are and we then diagnose and prescribe content. Typically specific pieces here are more general, like requests for "case studies" - which require more digging. For open requests, this is a typical form that our reps can go in and request content throughout the quarter. We send out a blast to the team reminding them, which is typically paired with a survey. Lastly, for analytics, we take a look at some factors: * Content searches with no results (what they want but aren't available) * Content most used but with low engagement (to help us understand what needs to be edited or made more of) * Look for reps who are using your content the most and the least and go back to focus groups to interview them Hope these help!

Let me answer this from the perspective of one of my key cross-functional partners—Product Marketing (PMM). When we first sit down with PMM teams, they usually have a lot of information they think will be helpful for sellers regarding a new product launch or initiative. However, much of it tends to be 'fluff'—nice-to-have details that often overshadow what sellers actually need. I always ask PMM to think like our sales teams and focus on two key questions: 1. "What's in it for the seller?"—Essentially, how can sellers make money? 2. "What's in it for the customer?"—How can sellers use this to make money? If their content doesn't answer these questions, it’s likely just noise. At the end of the day, content creators want their work to be consumed, and helping cross-functional teams understand this sales-focused perspective ensures that everyone wins.

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?

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!