In my experience, communicating the performance & progress of your sales team to
the company helps to connect all employees to the mission. It can create
transparency into the health of the business, aligns individuals within the
company more closely to the voice of the customer, and enables you to more
easily activate resources when support is needed.
On a Daily Basis...
* Every time a deal is Closed/Won, a "Congratulations" email is sent out to the
whole company, and a Slack message is posted in our "team" channel sharing
the details of the deal & the "Win Notes" (ex. the customer, the value of the
deal, the "why" behind their purchase, any learnings, and shout-outs to
teammates who helped to close the deal)
* For the biggest deals or most special wins, I'll also create fun memes
showcasing the rep & the customer and share that via Slack & email too
On a Weekly Basis...
* I'll create a Freehand with 4-5 slides sharing our progress (Closed/Won
against Target, Pipeline Generation over the last week, etc.), shouting out
the biggest & most prominent deals of the week, and sharing the most relevant
& interesting customer stories. Then I'll record a 3-4 minute video walking
through the content, adding my commentary & perspective, and then I'll share
the video & the Freehand in our "team" Slack channel so everyone in the
company can watch it & engage with the content
* I also look for opportunities and encourage my sales managers & sales reps to
post in our "sales" Slack channel any interesting stories or learnings
throughout the week. Sharing snippets from chorus calls, best practices for
generating conversations or overcoming objections, and capturing the greatest
success stories helps to raise the overall knowledge of the organization.
On a Monthly Basis...
* During our company All-Hands, I'll provide and expanded version of my weekly
Freehand & video, and also look to provide the platform for 2-3 of our sales
reps partnered with their account or customer success managers across
different segments/regions to share their customer stories with the entire
company.
And keep in mind...it's as important to celebrate the journey just as much as
the wins, especially if you're in an earlier stage organization. Communicating
the behaviors, the mistakes, the learnings, and the process behind your sales
motion is often even more valuable for your entire organization than the wins
alone.
Sales Team
1 answer
Vice President, Global Sales, InVision • January 21
1 answer
Vice President, Global Sales, InVision • January 21
Good question! Taking a sales function up market in an existing business can be
one of the most challenging but lucrative transformations of an organization.
Often in the early days of your business and go-to-market motion you'll tend to
focus on smaller, more nimble customers to validate your product-market fit and
refine your go-to-market approach. During this phase, your supporting business
structures of product development, finance, legal, security & compliance, etc.
will mold to fit the requirements of your business at that point in time.
Wayne Gretsky famously said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not
where it has been."
So, when it's time to go up-market, one of the most important things you need to
do first, is help your supporting business structures evolve to meet you where
you are headed, not where you are.
To do that...
1) Be clear on your objectives - what does success going up-market look like in
the next 90 days. Advice: be modest in your expectations, as it usually takes
longer than you would have initially anticipated, and focus on the next 90 days
at a time
2) Identify the gaps & be explicit about the resources you need - within your
existing supporting business structures, what is required for them to evolve to
meet you where you are headed?
* Product development - are they prepared to adjust the product roadmap to the
needs of larger clients? what is the mechanism for recieving, triaging, and
prioritizing those requests?
* Finance - are your finance policies & systems prepared to be flexible to more
customized payment terms? do you have a process for completing vendor set up
forms?
* Legal - do you have the resources to negotiate MSAs, DPAs, security terms,
etc? do you have proper policies & documentation in place to ensure
compliance with GDPR, CCPA, etc?
* Security & compliance - do you have the necessary policies & procedures? do
you have the certifications required by the new market you are serving (ISO
27001, SOC2, FedRamp, etc.) ? do you have a process for completing security
questionnairs & audits?
3) Up-level your team - going up-market can sometimes mean you need different
skills, experiences, and roles within your sales organization to best support
your larger clients. Begin to as yourself questions like:
* Does my existing team have experience selling into larger organizations? or
do I need to recruit additional talent?
* Do we need to re-segment our accounts into new territories and books of
business to create better alignment?
* Does our current structure support a more mature selling motion? or do we
need additional resources (customer success managers, accounts managers,
solutions consultants, etc.) to take it to the next level?
* How do we develop the skills of our team and implement a more mature sales
motion with concepts like territory & account planning, champion building,
business case generation, etc?
4) Join as many customer conversations as you can - by getting in the field
yourself, you are able to develop an intimate understanding of the common
objections & gaps within your offering or go-to-market motion, and you can
provide your reps more relevant direct coaching
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Vice President, Global Sales, InVision • January 21
When you are the first sales leader at a company establishing the function,
you're going to constantly battle the demands on your time. Personally, I tend
to use a mixure of the Eisenhower Matrix combined with ruthless diligence of
writing down my Top 3 priorities for the quarter, the week, and the day.
By being able to quickly take stock of my Top 3 priorities across each of those
3 time horizons, I can quickly determine the importance of other asks as they
relate to those priorities. Unless there is an important task that is
immediately urgent, I'll strive to complete my Top 3 daily priorities before I
tackle any other projects or tasks. That way, I know regardless of what the
remainder of the day has in store, I was able to move forward on the most
important work.
Typically, I've found as a sales leader, I tend to focus my priorities across
these 3 areas ranked accordingly:
1. People - most important is the investment in your people & culture that you
create. Diverse hiring, providing personal coaching & development, promoting
inclusive belonging, demonstrating empathetic leadership, etc. all result in
disproportionate leverage across the other 2 areas
2. Customers - second only to your people is your customers. Meeting with them
directly on a weekly basis, helping your team manage deals & relationships, and
delivering value needs to always be a focus
3. Operations - finally, setting up the operationing structure for your team to
execute within. Everything from defining your buy/sell process, building sales
playbooks, refining reports & dashboards, etc. all contribute to an environment
of consistenty & excellence
Any other demands of your time that do not fall into one of those 3 areas need
to be Scheduled, Delegated, or not done at all.
1 answer
Vice President, Global Sales, InVision • January 21
In my experience, two of important KPIs that most sales teams miss are:
* Number of purposeful conversations
* Number of experiments
And it makes sense because both of these metrics harder to 1) define and 2)
measure over time. However, if done well they can be can be two of the biggest
unlocks and fastest ways to progress a developing go-to-market motion.
Number of Purposeful Conversations
Many sales teams measure number of contacts sourced, outreaches made,
calls/demos completed, etc. While these metrics all help better understand the
economics of your sales funnel, they all miss the context of the conversations
your team is having (ie. the quality).
In order to measure "purposeful conversations", first you need to define what
that means for your organization and sales motion. Each company may define
"purposeful" slightly differently, but ultimately it needs to be a conversation
in which both parties were engaged, explored problems that your solution could
solve for the customer, and lead to an honest discussion about the viability of
your product or service helping that customer's specific pain points. If there
are tweaks or additional critieria you need to add on to customize the
definition for your organization, go for it!
The next step is to determine how you’re going to measure it. Usually I've seen
this done as a new "Activity Type" in Salesforce (or whichever CRM you use). It
requires training your team on what qualifies/does not qualify as a "purposeful
conversation" and then enablement on how to properly log it in your CRM.
By orienting your team around this type of a metric, it unlocks the quality of
conversations and gives you as a sales leader the opportunity to probe in more
deeply with your reps to understand why certain conversations were purposeful
while others were not and allows you to begin to see patterns to focus your
efforts towards generating more purposeful conversations.
Number of Experiments
Whether you’re first getting started and in the early stages of validating
product-market fit, identifying your ideal customer profile, or refining your
sales motion; or even as you mature as an organizion and are looking to move
into Enterprise, launch new products, or break into new
markets...experimentation is critical.
To find the right recipe for success, you're likely going to need to test
different personas, outreach techniques, messaging, narratives, objection
handling, etc. The more experiments your sales team is able to run, validate in
the market, learn from the results, and share those learnings, the faster your
sales team is able to find success.
Work with your team to build a light weight framework for tracking & documenting
the experiements you have in flight. At the very least, make sure you capture:
* What you want to test? (Hypothesis)
* How you plan to test it? (Experiment)
* What did you learn? (Learnings)
* How those learnings will affect your next experiment? (Next Steps)
If your sales team gets great at documenting your go-to-market experiments &
learnings and is able to scale the number of experiments running at anyone time,
there is no greater unlock to your velocity.
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Vice President, Global Sales, InVision • January 21
Good question! When it comes to motivation, at any stage & maturity of a sales
organization, you need to make sure:
1. Purpose - your sales team understands the mission & objectives of the
organizations, feels connected to the purpose of what you are trying to acheive,
and most importantly, can see how their work directly impacts progress towards
company goals
2. Compensation - your sales team is well compensated and that the components of
that make up compensation (base salary, variable inventives,
bonuses/accelerators, equity, etc.) all work together to reward the behaviors
required to acheive the output the company needs
3. Development - you are continually investing in the growth of your people. All
top performers want to continue to learn, grow, improve, and ultimately master
their craft. Look for those opportunities to expand the experience of your team,
be generous with your feedback, and invest in coaching at every chance you get.
That said, as companies & teams scale, the mechanisms & resources you have to
impact motivation also evolve.
Early Stage Companies & Less Mature Sales Organizations are usually focused on
trying to find product-market fit and build a go-to-market motion to support it.
During this phase, compensation plans need to be simple, aligned more to
behaviors than outcomes, and reward progress. There is generally a greater need
to ensure alignment and connection to "Purpose", and leaders should create
opportunities for their salespeople to engage with cross-functional executives,
influence the product roadmap, etc.
If you are looking for a first compensation plan for your SaaS sales team, Jason
Lemkin's framework can provide a great starting place.
Mid-to-Late Stage Companies & More Mature Sales Organizations can then evolve to
dedicate more resources to invest in their salespeople in different ways. Things
like more formal career pathing, mentorship, and management development courses
become table stakes. Salespeople will have opportunities to work with larger
companies, build bigger deals, and raise their skillset. And compensation can
shift to allow for additional rewards and incentives through SPIFs and
President's Club.
3 answers
Global Director, Sales Enablement, Figma • January 7
Great question and something I love talking to (and sometimes 'debating') our
leaders about - the idea behind 'what's the characteristic (or two) of your best
seller you would want to clone?' For me, at the top of the list are 2 attributes
I look for in potential sales team members:
1) 'Customer first' mindset: I don't want to lead or support a team of 'vendors'
who are only interested in selling 'licenses'. I want to enable a team of
'consultants' or 'trusted advisors' that are not interested in selling
'licenses', but providing 'customer solutions' built on value. I want sales
teams built on the belief that they can differentiate themselves by showing up
to a prospect/customer meeting with curiosity and a perspective on what is
happening in the particular industry and company...prospects will pick up on the
fact that you seem genuinely interested in understanding their reality.
2) The ability to be a master customer storyteller...something I call
'storyselling'. To me this is an important attribute if you are hoping your
sellers show up like 'consultants' and sell on value. Think of how you like to
be sold to...most want to partner with someone who understands their current
situation, and desired future state. You typically buy from someone you trust,
and that trust is typically built out of 'experience' or 'subject matter
expertise'. Finally, you want someone who can paint a picture of the future, to
get you excited about the 'art of the possible' and nothing means more and comes
off as 'authentic' than hearing stories of how other customers, of a similar
size and industry, or facing the same challenge, have transformed their business
in the way you are looking to do so.
Sales Director, Clari • January 9
I'd say the one thing that winning candidates have in common is based on how
easy they are to talk to.
When an interview goes right its.
1. Focused
2. Educational
3. Inpsired
4. Interesting
5. Flows well
So, the best candidates tend to have enough knowledge about me or my business
that they are dropping references to things that are familiar and show a genuine
curiosity that helps me visualize them on a call with a prospect.
The best candidates typically have the following in common:
1. Tenacious
2. Curious
3. Executive presence
4. Creative in their thinking/problem solving/story telling
5. Positive, Excited
Vice President, Global Sales, InVision • January 21
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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Sou gerente regional de uma empresa de alimentos, líder em seu segmento, com uma
equipe com 6 integrantes em 3 estados da região Sudeste.
Estão divididos da seguinte forma:
3 - Minas Gerais
2 - Rio de Janeiro
1- Espírito Santo (atuando no ES e norte do RJ)
Nessa equipe eu tenho 1 vendedor Sênior, 3 Plenos e 2 Júnior.