1. Human Resources: * The human resources team handles hiring, onboarding, training, and development of sales personnel. * Alignment with human resources ensures that the sales team is effectively recruited, onboarded, and supported in their roles. * Collaborating with human resources facilitates the development of training programs, career paths, and incentive structures that motivate and retain top sales talent. 2. Finance/Operations Team: * The finance/operations team manages financial planning, forecasting, and reporting. * Alignment with the finance/operations team ensures accurate tracking and reporting of sales metrics and performance. * Collaboration with finance/operations helps ensure that sales strategies are financially viable and aligned with budgetary constraints. 3. Marketing Team: * The marketing team generates leads, builds brand awareness, and supports sales efforts through content, campaigns, and messaging. * Alignment with the marketing team ensures consistency in messaging, positioning, and lead generation efforts. * Collaborating closely with marketing facilitates the development of targeted campaigns and initiatives that drive sales pipeline growth.

Communicating value effectively isn't about having the perfect pitch. It's about having a system that enables you to drive credibility, identify real pain, and maintain momentum throughout the journey. Here are the core considerations to include in your system: 1. Establish credibility – Be someone worth listening to, early on. This means coming prepared, demonstrating expertise, and speaking their language. Credibility is earned by showing you understand their industry, challenges, and the outcomes they care about. 2. Identify & implicate pain – Discover the problem beneath the surface and highlight its impact. This is about asking the right questions to uncover hidden issues and then framing those problems in a way that connects emotionally with stakeholders. 3. Reference relevant use cases – Show them they’re not alone, and that others have succeeded with you. Share stories of similar organizations that faced similar challenges, and how your solution helped them achieve tangible results. 4. Map pain to value – Demonstrate clearly how your solution addresses their specific challenges. Create a direct line from the pain points identified to the value your solution provides, making it obvious why your approach is the best fit. 5. Sell a thoughtful evaluation plan – Guide stakeholders through a process where everyone knows their part and what’s next. A well-structured evaluation plan helps build confidence and ensures that all decision-makers are aligned on the steps to move forward. 6. Align on investment – Ensure they agree: this is a problem worth solving with time, energy, and budget. Make sure each stakeholder understands the cost of inaction, and that solving this problem is a priority worth their investment. 7. Establish ROI – Use value engineering to build an ROI model that lives across a worst case, most likely, and best case threshold. This will help quantify the value and show different possible outcomes, making it easier for the committee to see the financial impact of your solution. 8. Push professionally – Keep everyone focused and committed to moving forward, even when things get busy. Be respectful but assertive, maintaining momentum by setting clear expectations, follow-up actions, and deadlines. When selling to an executive committee, it's important to understand where the power lies in the organization and pressure-test your champion on their ability to wrangle team members to test your value story. The dynamics of a larger committee often mean multiple perspectives, varying priorities, and different levels of influence. Navigating this effectively requires knowing who holds decision-making power and ensuring that your champion has the influence to bring others along. Each time you're meeting with new decision-makers, you're running through the above system or process. You'll need to start a new mini sales cycle all over again. The objective is to align everyone who has power to get a deal done to your desired outcome, which, of course, will align perfectly with your champion's desired outcome. Value selling is an ongoing commitment. It’s not about pushing product—it's about helping others realize what's possible when real problems get solved.

There is a give and take with standardizing KPIs but also having enough variance to account for things segment, (Strat, Ent, MM, Growth) number of accounts, and so on. The easiest way to have consistency and also provide a lens to inspect forecast is by implementing standardization when possible. No matter what segment you're in or how many accounts you have, if a deal is 345 days old... that's going to tell me something about the forecast accuracy of the stage it's in. I am a big fan of ensuring reps are training that in the mid point of the quarter or month, whatever your quota and cadence is, deals with a close date in quarter or in month must be in Best Case, Commit, or Closed. Nothing can be in "Pipeline" or "Omitted"

Excellent revenue leaders turn into outstanding revenue leaders based on how and who they hire. Your number one job as a leader is to hire the right people, followed by supporting them. If you only hire A+ talent, your team will only need you for strategy vs. blocking/tackling personnel and process issues. Some things to consider: 1. Define the sales culture: 1. Talent density: Slow down to speed up. We only hire A+ talent. Those who embody the innate skillsets that are difficult to teach (i.e. humility, hustle, high IQ/EQ, curiosity, relentlessness) 1. Create a robust recruitment process to ensure you don’t deviate from top-tier talent. Great books to reference: Who & No Rules Rules 2. Crystal clear on your mission, vision, values, and the importance of maintaining a strong culture especially at the age of our business. 3. What are the skillsets and behaviors of your top performers today? You use the current examples of what you have to help define what sales excellence means to your business. 4. Create revenue incentives to drive the right behavior (i.e. AE & CS comped off expansion so they can work together to drive customer outcomes) 5. Recognize and reward top talent, while also celebrating the struggles and failures in order to learn and grow 2. Define and create a revenue motion: 1. Define clear roles & responsibilities for all revenue 2. Define clear KPIs, both shared and individual 1. Expectation setting on performance/winning culture 2. Performance management. Make tough decisions early and often 3. Create and constantly iterate a revenue playbook in order to drive repeatability in our motion and forecast 4. Leverage data to gain insights into sales performance, customer behavior, patterns of successes/failures, and leverage leading indicators to guide decision making 3. Establish virtuous revenue training: 1. Clearly defined onboarding program to reduce time to ramp. Learn from your previous new hires. Every new hire should help iterate the onboarding playbook for the next round of hires 2. Continuous call reviews to ensure our ICs are following your sales methodology. MEDDPICC can be fairly outdated. I recommend building a model from several methodologies that get your GTM team to understand customer use cases, challenges, desired outcomes, how to solution sell vs. feature sell, key risks within deals, executive alignment, multi-threading, etc. 1. Custom training dependent on findings (i.e. value selling, objection handling, negotiation, competitive positioning, etc.) 3. Foster collaboration, problem solving, sharing best practice 4. Sell 90 initiative: ICs spending 90% of their time with the customer. This means we remove all internal inefficiencies. 1. Technology overhaul: What’s working, what’s not? 4. "We are customer obsessed": 1. Customer-first mindset. Maniacally focused on value selling, understanding pain, providing solutions, and making your customers' lives easier. 2. "We pride ourselves on building long-term relationships" 3. "We don’t put the competition down, we’re trusted advisors and know our competitors gaps inside and out"

* A clear perspective backed by data and customer examples * Brevity while still ensuring substance * Creativity in finding solutions that may not align perfectly to only the thing you had in mind. I screwed up both these things on two separate occasions in highly visible roles where the cost to me (and my sanity on the days that followed) wasn't small. I didn't let the work nor my commitment to finding a suitable resolution fade into the background. Instead I doubled down my commitment to find creative solutions, digging more deeply into the data and customers and using 1:1s and quick actions to show my commitment to seeing solutions through.

Great question - I find incorporating customer feedback and the insights you learn from discovery discussions into your sales process is key to driving future engagement and increasing your deal win rates. Here’s how I approach it: 1. Structured Documentation – Ensure your sellers are capturing customer/prospect insights in a standardized way (e.g., using Gong, Salesforce, or methodology templates) to track customer/prospect pain points, priorities, and desired outcomes. 2. Tailor Your Value Propositions – Then you can use these discovery insights to refine messaging, aligning your solutions directly with the customer’s needs and challenges. This makes sales conversations more relevant and compelling to hte people you are connecting with. 3. Leverage Competitive & Industry Insights – I find it key to review feedback across accounts and opportunities to identify trends, customer objections, and gaps in your positioning. It is vital that these insights get fed back to your product, product marketing and sales teams for future adjustments. 4. Training & Enablement – Enablement is key to the success of any sales process - from new hires to continuous learning. To help engrain this into your organization, equip sellers with playbooks and frameworks that incorporate real customer insights, enabling your sales team to adapt selling strategies based on real life experiences rather than relying on generic pitches. 5. Feedback to Product & Marketing – As mentioned above, work to ensure these customer insights flow back into the organization, influencing roadmap decisions, content strategy, and your competitive positioning.

I would recommend to share KPIs very early on. Transparency helps to set expectations and progress. It allows to celebrate success and also to identify areas for improvement. It also creates a competitive mindset which we want to see amongst sales teams. (In a healthy manner!) If the question is referring to the planning phase, then I would say to socialize KPIs with the management team (cross functional leaders) and only share once they are confirmed

To effectively define the metrics for which you should hold sales accountable, I look at a few things: 1. Understand the "Sales Math" of the business across some core universally applicable SaaS Sales metrics 2. Compare the performance of the top 1/3 AE's against the bottom 1/3 AE's and look for which metrics contribute the most to high performance. 3. Go deep in those categories and correlate the activities top performers do differently to achieve these results. Quantify these activities to define supporting metrics which will lead to success. To break this down, let's understand the foundational "Sales Math." This is the equation to hit quota. The equation is fairly simple, but everyone's vernacular is different. It is actually extremely important to have very well defined steps in the equation to get consistency across your entire team. For example, we use opportunity stages with clear exit criteria for the buyer & seller to provide consistent insight into our Sales Math. So I would actually use a Stage 1 Opp Created - instead of Discovery Call, and Stage 3 Opp instead of Demo. For the purposes of this article, I'll use general sales terms that each business should be able to use as a starting point and customize from there. Here are the metrics that go into the Sales Math equation: * Activities to create a Discovery Call * # Discovery Calls per quarter * # Demos per quarter * Discovery Call to Demo conversion ratio * # Closed Won Deals per quarter * Demo to Closed Won conversion ratio * Average Deal Size * Average Deal Cycle These metrics will allow you to create the math to hit quota. If the current team's metrics do not consistently lead to the results you're looking for, then the Sales Math may be aspirational. If your team is executing against plan, then this may be your actual current metrics. Regardless, this is what you should feel confident telling AE's is the realistic, attainable and surpassable way to hit quota. For example, it could look like: $250k Quarterly Quota Average Deal Size of $84k 3 Deals to hit quota Close ratio of 33% 9 Demos needed per quarter 60% conversion ratio of Disco to Demo 15 Discovery Calls needed per quarter 50 Activities to create a Disco 750 Activities needed per quarter* *one note on activity. It's a metric I'll always track to understand a baseline level of effort, but I will often leave this out of the Sales Math when dealing with higher complexity sales and more senior AE's. Up to you if this should be in your Sales Math equation. Now take your Sales Math, and map your high performers against your low performers to look for which metrics have a high correlation with success. This exercise can be extremely surprising, so be open to what the data shows you, and hold your strong opinions loosely. Let's extrapolate this exercise across two different scenarios: Scenario 1 - Enterprise Here's how the exercise played out when running it against a more enterprise business (numbers are directional): 1. Activity, Discovery Calls and Demos were almost identical across high & low performers. This told me that pushing "more activity" was only going to have so much impact on performance. 2. The Closed Won conversion of top performers was 46% vs. 25% for the low performers. This was a huge gap, and had major implications on the Sales Math. 3. The Average Deal Size of top performers was $160k vs. $70k for low performers. This is also a huge gap compounded the success or struggles of each group when combined with the stat above. So the key metrics to optimize were Average Deal Size and Demo to Close Ratio. We wanted to maintain our activity levels, but really lean into increasing ADS and strategies to help with Deal Execution. Based on this knowledge of what would have the biggest impact in high performance vs. low performance, we added in some metrics & activities that would contribute to these results: * Updated our account prioritization to ensure a focus on the top deals & tracked activity against Priority 1 accounts * We blocked off time each week to prospect into our top accounts & scheduled strategy sessions to help get more meetings with these accounts * We tracked # of Discos with P1 accounts * # of Demo's with $100k+ Opportunities For Deal Execution * We tracked multi-threading in each account * Have we made an executive connection? * We created a cross-functional meeting to lean into competitive differentiation strategy * We set a threshold for accounts that needed a key deal review & updated our process to improve efficiency and make room for more accounts reviewed each week. Scenario 2 - Transactional Here's how the exercise played out when running it against a more transactional business (numbers are directional): 1. There were two camps of high performers. Those with extremely high activity, and those with higher disco to demo efficiency. Our most consistent top performer was a combination of both. Low performers fell into a similar pattern of either low activity or low conversion of discos to demos. 2. Deal size and win rate didn't have dramatic differences outside of 1 AE who closed the largest deal in segment history. This wasn't repeatable so we eliminated that result instead of putting too much time in hunting whales. 3. Average Deal Cycle for top performers was 39 days vs. 52 days for lower performers. Top AE's were closing deals faster, which allowed for more time to close more deals. From this data we defined additional metrics and activities to drive better results: * Upped the baseline activity volume expectations - there is a diminishing point of returns, but higher volume was almost always a component of success. We raised the bar, but also coached our highest volume AE's to lean more into their efficiency metrics instead of pushing to just do more. * Managers went deep on quality of discovery calls coming into the funnel * Title & Seniority level of Prospects - lower conversion was correlated with lower titles. * Was the company in our Ideal Customer Profile? Quality of company greatly impacted conversion * Why now? Did we offer someone a gift card or just bug them until their defense was worn down? Or was this call predicated on funding, a new hire, an inflection point in the business, intent or some other business catalyst? * Managers inspected quality of prospecting messages * Managers inspected quality of discovery calls * We rallied around creative promos to help the team close deals faster * We replicated decks top AE's were using to build value and establish trust faster In both Scenario 1 and 2 - we started with the baseline Sales Math, and through comparison of top performers vs. low performers we were able to lean into the 2 key metrics that had an outsized impact on performance. We then defined key activities and additional metrics which we could hold the team accountable to, that we knew would correlate towards greater success across the team. How easy was that? :)

The most important skills for account executives are also the most important skills for many roles. I believe a successful AE needs to be great at the following: 1. Active listening: first rule of sales is to listen to your buyer and truly comprehend what they are saying and what they need 2. Problem solving: handling the many challenges, distractions and roadblocks that come up in the sales process 3. Storytelling: relaying information in an engaging, authentic manner that drives the point across 4. Mentalizing: understanding non-verbal queues, empathizing, emotional intelligence, etc. Process and product can be taught by the company that you sell for - but the above skills, no matter the company or the role, will be invaluable in your career.

I often hear a few common concerns from enterprise prospects. These usually revolve around worries about the price, potential risks, getting locked into a single vendor, and status-quo objections. Cost Worries: When prospects bring up cost concerns, I like to highlight the value our solutions bring. I show them how our offerings are designed to solve specific issues and bring tangible returns. Plus, I work closely with our financial experts to offer flexible pricing options and demonstrate the long-term benefits of their investment. Mitigating Risks: It's only natural for enterprises to be cautious about adopting new tech. To address this, I point to our track record of successful implementations, backed by glowing customer testimonials and case studies. I also stress how adaptable and scalable our solutions are, fitting seamlessly into their existing setup and future growth plans. Avoiding Vendor Lock-In: Some prospects worry about being stuck with a single vendor for the long haul. I reassure them by emphasizing our focus on interoperability and open standards. I highlight our wide range of integrations and partnerships, underlining the flexibility and freedom our solutions offer. This way, they know they can integrate with other platforms and technologies if they need to. Validating with Proofs of Concept: Given our emphasis on proofs of concept aligned with the customer's future goals, prospects often want to see real results. I suggest starting with a smaller pilot project or proof of concept that's tailored to their specific needs. This hands-on experience helps build trust and confidence in our solutions, often leading to broader adoption. By addressing these concerns with a mix of personalized value propositions, strong case studies, and adaptable implementation strategies, we can show how our solutions align with the prospect's big picture vision while easing worries about cost, risk, and vendor lock-in. This approach ensures that our tactical opportunities lead to long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with our enterprise customers. Status Quo Resistance: Another common objection we encounter is a hesitancy to disrupt the status quo. Many enterprise prospects are comfortable with their current processes and systems, even if they may not be fully effective. To tackle this, I approach it as an opportunity for growth and improvement. I share success stories of similar organizations that made the leap from their familiar routines to our solutions, showcasing the positive impact it had on their operations. By highlighting the potential for transformative change, we can overcome the inertia associated with maintaining the status quo and inspire prospects to embrace innovative solutions aligned with their strategic vision. This approach empowers them to envision a future state that not only meets their immediate needs but also positions them for long-term success. By addressing these concerns with a mix of personalized value propositions, strong case studies, and adaptable implementation strategies, we can show how our solutions align with the prospect's big picture vision while easing objections about cost, risk, vendor lock-in, and status quo resistance. This approach ensures that our tactical opportunities lead to long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with our enterprise customers.