AMA: Databricks Director - Sales Strategy & Operations, Ken Liu on Influencing the C-Suite

In my experience, the most successful way to convince leadership for more HC is by adopting one or more of the following best practices when submitting the ask: 1. Show how the request will directly/indirectly improve the bottom line 2. Quantify the impact of the incremental HC 3. Demonstrate how the HC will positively impact your department or company's OKRs or priorities Improve the bottom line - you can frame most requests in terms of how it can either grow the top line or reduce savings. If your department is tasked with ways of growing revenue, model out how much incremental revenue the HC will drive in year 1, year 2 or whatever investment ROI timeframe your team uses. Similarly, if the HC will result in outsized savings (a penny saved is a penny earned), model out how much in savings the company can expect from the additional HC. Quantify the impact - do your best to model out the dollar impact (incremental revenue and/or cost savings) of the HC request. Having a quantified impact helps leadership better compare and stack rank the HC requests against that of others 1. Find a balance between accuracy and complexity, and avoid over engineering the model 2. Find sound assumptions to base your model upon 3. Partner with your friends in Finance to review your model and test its assumptions Align with company OKRs - you will gain more interest and favor from HC decision makers if you can show how your HC ask will help leadership meet or exceed their KPIs and OKRs. For example if the company OKR is focused on: 1. Reducing turnaround time for qualifying leads - show how the additional HC will decrease the backlog of leads, improve conversion rates through improved vetting of qualified leads, and/or drive more revenue through more conversions per month 2. Improving customer satisfaction within the renewals team - show how HC can conduct more activities per month that directly/indirectly lead to CSAT scores, which in turn lead to x pts in renewal rates or y months in increased subscription tenure, which in turn drives z dollars per customer per year Additional Best Practices 1. Ideally have a committee, like a center of excellence, that meets regularly to review HC requests. This COE should have representation from a diverse set of stakeholders and functions to help ensure fair and regular review of HC requests. 2. Develop and use a standardized template for submitting HC requests. This helps expedite HC reviews by ensuring that the necessary info is needed and structured in a consistent fashion for easier review of HC requests 3. As noted above, loop in your friends in Finance to help test your HC modeling requests, and consider including them in your HC request COE to help evaluate the ROI and merits of the HC requests

When you're facing this unenviable position, I recommend adopting these best practices: 1. Ensure both execs' strategy is trying to solve the same problem statement 2. Help the execs review how well their strategy aligns against a company and customer first principle 3. Ensure there is a holistic evaluation of the pros and cons of each strategy 4. Flesh out what needs to be true from a time, money and people requirement for each strategy, as well as what are the risks Align on problem statement - this might seem obvious, but it's surprising how often I've seen executives interpret have different interpretations of the problem statement. If all parties are not aligned on the exact problem statement they're addressing, then any comparisons are a non-starter. Operate from Company & Customer First Principles - disagreements in solutions often arise from strategies that have an element of politics. People may have ulterior motives for a strategy (e.g. strategy may benefit his/her department and/or is easier for his/her group to implement) that is difficult to debate around. However, if all parties can define a strategy that clearly articulates how it puts the customer (end user or internal customer first), the strategy is more defensible from a first principles perspective in that it should maximize company and shareholder value. Holistic Evaluation of Pros/Cons - it's easy for stakeholders to become focused on the merits of the solution, especially when they become entrenched in justifying the strategy. However, rarely is a strategy perfect, and a proper comparison of strategies requires a balanced scorecard. Help define a scorecard (or checklist of criteria) that both parties can agree upon to review the merits of their strategies. Populating the scorecard enables a more fair and comparable comparison of the strategies. You can also consider having an unbiased 3rd party help review the scorecard for both execs to vet both solutions. Define Resources Requirements and Risks - related to defining a balanced scorecard, both parties should clearly articulate what are the resources (time, money, people) required to execute each strategy. You can also provide a level of effort (LOE) analysis where on one axis you help map out the relative effort/difficulty of deploying the solution and on the other axis you define the impact (L/M/H as a proxy for expected rev, cost savings, etc.). Additionally, you should articulate all the key risks and trade-offs associated to each strategy to help enable a holistic comparison of each strategy.

I was fortunate enough to have access to client C-suite early in my career at Google when I was part of their ad sales teams. Within the sales team, I specialized in marketing analytics, where my job was to help calculate and present to clients the digital media ROI they would receive from investing with Google ad products. While in this role, I used some best practices that helped grant me access to the client C-suite, including: 1. Understand what keeps the CXO up at night, and have an innovative solution to solve it 2. Once you have the CXO's attention, use every opportunity to learn more about their business challenges, and continue offering unique insights to help them address these challenges 3. Adopt a customer first mentality for the CXO when proposing solutions, even if it won't directly benefit you, and you'll earn their trust Understand the CXO's Business Challenges - you need to earn the right to access the C-suite. Spend extra time up front researching what are the CXO's business priorities and challenges. Once you understand their priorities, employ all your resources to create a unique POV or solution to address the solution. For example, my Google sales team managed health insurance clients in our book of business. I learned a health insurance client's CEO wanted to understand how to pivot their marketing strategy when Obamacare upended their industry. Using proprietary Google search data, I created and presented to the CEO a digital media strategy showing how the company could use different digital media at different parts of the insurance purchase journey to maximize sales while meeting ROI targets. Grow the CXO Relationship - once you've caught the CXO's attention (see step 1), build upon that relational momentum and continue asking what are other challenges they face and providing unique data or POVs that help address them. Referring back to the previous Google example, the CEO embraced my strategy, which gave me confidence and permission to ask the CEO and his team follow-up questions around their business strategy and challenges. Armed with this information, I continued to come back with additional insights to help inform their marketing strategy. This relationship eventually led me to becoming the head account executive on the account while also being the analytics lead. Adopt a Customer First Mentality - you gain access to senior leadership when you gain their trust. Gaining trust is dependent upon various factors, including your minimizing your self-orientation. To help minimize self-orientation, adopt a customer first principle. When problem solving for CXOs, think about what solutions would be best for their company in light of the different business dynamics they company faces and what challenges they're facing, even if the solution may not necessarily be optimal for yourself. At Google sales, I had a quarterly sales quota. Despite my desire to optimize to against the quarterly quota, I would try to apply a customer first mentality when defining digital media strategies for my clients. This often meant proposing solutions that would net less digital spend initially. But by demonstrating that my solution was optimized to the customer's interest, I gained their trust, and was able to propose and ask for more aggressive solutions that drove greater long term media spend.

Revenue operations provides utility to the C-suite in various capacities, ranging from revenue forecasting, to process optimization to data and analytics. These are all core functions of rev ops that drive value to CXOs. Regardless of core rev ops function, I've found these best practices to always hold true for my career: 1. Identify the problem statement - never jump head first into the next big project until you align with stakeholders and management on what exactly is the problem or challenge you're solving. Many execs are drawn by a shiny star project that is flashy, interesting, or just a cool thought exercise. But any cycles spent on a project means time taken away from another potentially higher value project. Just taking a few minutes to ask what exactly is the problem statement for a task or project you're asked to drive can literally save you months of work that becomes shelfware because it wasn't addressing a core problem. 2. Align on KPIs and stick to them - invest time upfront to define a concise and clear list of KPIs/ OKRs for your org. Once defined, make every effort to stick to them. I've been in many orgs where KPIs were created quickly in the interest of rapidly pushing out anchor metrics. However, insufficient time was invested in ensuring they were the right KPIs, were easily measurable, or had sufficient operational rigor to support their inspection. This in turn caused churn on the KPIs, which greatly impaired organizational focus by moving around the cheese for the KPIs. Do the right thing by taking time to define the right KPIs; it will save you and your org much time and expedite achievement of OKRs. 3. Vet your ideas with the field - ensure you socialize your Rev Ops' key strategies, ideas or workstreams with the field for feedback. In the interest of time, rev ops teams often inadvertently operate in any ivory tower by coming up with recommendations and ideas without running them by actual sales teams that are impacted. Doing so risks jeopardizing the idea's success by ignoring valuable field feedback from sales team and reducing trust in the solution from the field since their input was not solicited. Do the right thing by running Rev Ops' proposals against trusted members of the sales field, and you'll greatly increase the success of the solution within the field.

Having access to the C-suite can be helpful for your career from a learning, career growth and networking experience. Some ways to gain access to the C-suite include: 1. Working on projects that have visibility to the C-suite 2. Assisting with events that have C-suite attendance or sponsorship 3. Attending all-hands, fireside chats or skip level meetings w/the C-suite Projects w/C-Suite Visibility - you can have exposure to the C-suite through a myriad of ways, either directly in meetings or via offline channels. The key to having this exposure is to work on opportunities and projects that are on the C-suites' radar. Examples of potential opportunities include 1. Engage on top priority projects - work with your manager to staff yourself on a company priority project that is reported to the C-suite. Through this project you may unlock opportunities to attend C-suite meetings where the project is discussed, or at least be included on comms where the C-suite opine on the project and have exposure on their thoughts. 2. Opining on threads that have the attention of the C-suite - the C-suite may occasionally ask direct feedback from entire departments, functions or even the company. For example at Databricks the CEO sometimes sends an email to the entire company asking for input on various top-of-mind topics. Use this opportunity to provide your perspective, become viewed as a thought-leader among the C-suite, and increase your exposure to the C-suite and rest of the company Volunteer on C-Suite Events - you can insert yourself into forums where C-suite are present by assisting in events and meetings that they're attending 1. Volunteer at Events - the C-suite often are sponsors for various company initiatives (e.g. veterans network function, Employee Resource Group champion). See if you can help volunteer at one of these events, and this often gives you exposure to the sponsoring C-suite. 2. Help with Exec Meetings - Additionally, you can sometimes join C-suite meetings if you help with organizing or prepping their meetings. For example, by helping with organizing the meeta agenda or content, or helping capture meetings notes, you may be able to earn a seat in the meeting. Even if you're not in the meeting, you may still be involved in email threads/slack discussions related to the meeting which gives you exposure. Attend Forums w/the C-suite - many companies, especially those that are mid-size or smaller, often hold all-hands with the C-suite where they open up the floor or message boards to the company for Q&A. There are also occasional fireside chats or skip level meetings with members of the C-suite. Take advantage of these 'free' opportunities to engage w/the C-suite. Some additional thoughts re: C-Suite Exposure 1. Non CXO exposure - you can often learn just as much by having access to non CXO leadership. Ask your mentor, manager and others who you trust for the names of leaders from which you can learn. Additionally, these employees may have more bandwidth and/or opportunities and projects where you can have exposure to them. Employ the same strategies noted above to gain access to them. 2. CXO debriefs - even if you can't have direct exposure to the C-suite, you can learn a great deal indirectly from the C-suite by regularly asking for key take-aways and general notes from C-suite meetings that your manager or their managers may have attended.