AMA: Loom VP, Revenue, Nick Feeney on Establishing the Sales Function

This isn’t a one size fits all approach. Every leader should bring a different focus to their 30-60-90 day plan based on their leadership style, the stage in which the company is at, industry/market dynamics, immediate challenges/goals, etc. That said, the high level framework below is something I’ve used at several companies which has proven to be quite successful: Days 1-30: Listen, Learn, Connect * Establish presence and connection with team * Roll out User Manuals: How to guides for working effectively with one another * Product, value prop, and competition proficiency * Cross-departmental tour of duty (ally building) * Benchmark data (lagging/leading indicators) * RevOps partnership/hiring is critical * Understand first before suggesting any changes * Understand the challenges specific to the business and team in exceeding targets * Never assume what worked historically will work now * Deeply understand your customers Days 31-60: Align, Implement, Measure * Align before setting unrealistic expectations * Generate path toward exceeding targets * Provide clear measurables on path to targets (SMART goals) * Drive winning culture * Leveraging benchmark data to drive process improvement * Solve process inefficiencies Days 61-90 * Establish virtuous cycle with team and peers * Generate quick wins * Create constructive feedback loop * Scaling a repeatable outbound playbook * Address team and business challenges with clear solutions * Sell 90 initiative: GTM team should spend 90% of time with customers * Performance management: make smart decisions, clearly communicate

You have to have a glutton for punishment moving from structure to no structure, take it from me, but it can be such a rewarding and fulfilling experience to build something from 0→1. Throughout my career, I wouldn’t say there have been many surprises, moreso ‘opportunities’ to put a positive spin on it. Systems & Reporting: We forget how easy we have it being at a larger organization where you have countless resources for technologies that have already been vetted and rolled out, and full funnel reporting to support pipeline/revenue trends, forecasting predictability, etc. * My advice for any revenue leader starting from scratch is to bring in a RevOps hire. This is the most critical investment you can make to build the foundation for your revenue motion. Market Positioning & Value Prop: Don’t expect a clear deck with clear customer case studies, ROI metrics, customer facing collateral, competitive positioning, discovery questions, pitch scripts, etc. As the first sales hire, you must build this. * My advice: Customer tour of duty. This is your opportunity to connect with customers to understand how they use your product, what’s resonating, what needs improvement, etc. Pipeline: You likely won’t have a marketing engine generating inbound leads, let alone an outbound engine targeting key accounts that have high propensity to engage with you. * My advice: Partner with RevOps to understand your target audience by: * Defining your ICP: company size, industry, revenue, geographic location, and technology stack * Leveraging Data: CRM, historical deals, and win/loss analysis, inbound analysis, etc. to find patterns in successful accounts * Intent & Firmographic Data: Third-party tools to gather intent signals (hiring, tech stack, funding, ICP profiles, etc.) and firmographic information (company size, geo, industry, etc.) Hiring: Do not rush this. As the first sales hire, you should be running every single deal for the first 30-60 days. Deeply understand your customers, their challenges, and how you can solve them. * My advice: You must fire “Full Stack AEs” who have something to prove and are willing to hunt, convert, close, and expand. Bring on talent who can do it all. Less is more and remember to hire for the innate skillsets that you cannot teach: grit, humility, curiosity, high EQ, perseverance, hunger, etc. Product & GTM Alignment: This is one of the most critical relationships to get right if you want to grow your revenue engine. * My advice: Create a shared vision with Product and how you plan to differentiate in the market. Create a consistent and clear feedback loop between you and your revenue team and Product where you sync often to understand which key features, workflows, and customer requests would impact the most ARR if rolled out. Communication is key, but ensuring you cut out the noise from one off feature requests is most important. Decisions should be made in a binary and objective approach (ARR).

With most of these questions, there isn't a one size fits all. Consider things like: * Company stage * Growth objectives * GTM strategy * Customer segmentation * Self serve vs. sales led * Compensation modeling AI has, of course, been a hot topic lately, begging the question of which roles will become obsolete. Personally, I think there will always need to be a human element. This AMA is a great example. If you wanted these answers you could find a generic response in Chat GPT vs. reading my response, but you are looking for the human experience aspect that ideally will provide you with more value. Below is a brief rundown of how I'd think through my org structure coming in at an earlier stage business. It's less about the actual title of the role and more about the function itself: * Inbound vs. outbound * Marketing * SDR * Partner/Channel * Customer acquisition * AEs * Customer retention * Onboarding Specialists * Customer Success/Account Management * Customer expansion * AE * Customer Success/Account Management * Customer reporting * Revenue Operations * Customer value * Sales Engineers * Solution Consultants * Leadership * Revenue * Sales * Customer Success * Revenue Operations Are all of these roles needed to get started? No. Figure out where you can create overlap in your roles by working backward on your bottoms up modeling for your revenue targets and determine how many people to need in order to achieve those goals. From here, you can uplevel the structuring into categories: * Functional: Think specialists vs. generalists. Core vs. overlay * Geographic: Location specific * Market Based: Industry/vertical specific * Product Sales: For larger organizations, this can be based on product SKU, bundle, etc. to drive certain revenue engines of the business

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?

Sales and Customer Success shouldn't be two separate islands. These groups have to be incredibly synced in order to best serve your customer base. This is why I recommend a business hire a revenue leader who oversees both customer acquisition and customer retention. That way, you have an executive who isn't selfishly focused on one area of the business. Roles & Responsibilities + Compensation Incentivization: * Be sure to clearly define roles and swimlanes between AEs & CSMs * Recommend AEs build pipeline, close deals, expand accounts (full stack AEs) * Clearly defined handoff/partnership process once initial land is closed. * Account plans are a must based on mutually identified threshold (i.e. ARR, propensity to scale) * Customer journey mapping: Outline clear partnership touch points from pre to post sales to determine contribution amongst account teams. How might you quantify services for large scale deployments? Don't give anything away for free, use your concession playbook if post sales services are included. * Recommend CSMs renew customers * CSMs incentivized to generate expansion opportunities and will get % payout of net revenue retention (expansion) * Recommend RevOps is also incentivized to hit a revenue target. RevOps is the most crucial partner to your revenue leader. They need incentivization to support the sellers get their job done. Make them feel a part of the team and reward them for their work. * Shared KPIs: * Customer obsessed culture: 1 team, 1 dream, always asking “what’s in it for the customer?” * Pipeline (conversion vs. vanity stats), new business vs. expansion revenue, NPS, retention, churn vs. contraction, product/feature adoption * AEs & CSMs must have have consistent meetings to knowledge share, discuss and implement process improvement, strategize on key accounts, share feedback from the customers, etc. Pairing AEs and CSMs by segment can drive a much more seamless working relationship internally and for the customer Don't forget, hiring A+ talent is what keeps these teams motivated most. People want to be surrounded by high performers. The moment you hire a B player, the entire attitude, work ethic, morale, and throughput of your team completely changes. Never settle for anything less than A+ talent/ * Identify needed skills by role in changing landscape. Don't hire the same profile every time. Find teammates who balance each other out. Look for innate skillsets you cannot coach (persistence, hustle, humility, selfless, grit, competitiveness, hunger) * Performance management: Atomic unit of efficiency * Continuous coaching: Call reviews * Career development: Career laddering across the entire organization. Invest in your SDRs and build a low lift, high return SMB segment to promote them into. * Sell 90 Initiative: * Frontline reps spend 90% of time on customers * Automate/remove as much manual friction as possible from outbounding to accounts to renewing customers. Your customer facing team should never worry about anything other than their customer

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"