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so i've been at wakme almost four years and when i joined about four years ago walkme was a very heavily enterprise focused organization really focused on field sales big deals big lands fortune 500 companies and the idea was could we take this complex highly customized tool and sell it with an inside sales team now what is an inside sales team this means people sitting at home in the comfort at home now back in the day at their desks selling via zoom right so less field cells less hitting the ground running less less whining and dining and more of a repeatable process efficiency fast sail cycle ideally one that is a lower resource and could efficiently and effectively cell walk me so that was the challenge i walked into several years ago over my four years we've seen dramatic improvements across the board and i'll walk through some of these metrics and and how we did it today so increase conversion rates by 150 percent grew asp by 4x average sales price increased our renewal rates by 10 percent and hit that holy grail of attainment of 80 percent of the team hitting 80 of their number uh when i came in i had 16 uh head count and now i've got close to 50. and this past june walk me ipo'd i was very proud to get to go on stage on the nasdaq and ring the bell we got lucky we we threaded the needle and got to go to new york and those few weeks in june when everyone thought covid was over was a really wonderful and euphoric celebration that i'm very fortunate i got to be a part of so i'm going to walk you today on how i did it how i took this team from just a few inside sales reps to a big high performing team that was able to ipo so let's start off with why did walkme want to invest in inside sales if we're doing field sales well if we're you know having a great uh you know great time with field sales big deals big whales why even invest in inside sales well a few reasons one it's high velocity it lends to predictable revenue so you have these big deals you're trying to close throughout the year inside sales provides a monthly recurring revenue stream that you can rely on it's fast cycles which means that you can iterate you can experiment you can try things it's really hard to experiment with a million dollar deal you want to do everything by the book but when you've got fast cycles you can take some liberties you can try new things you can test hypotheses and figure out what's working and what's not working we kind of call ourselves that walkman the innovation hub this is where we test things out it's our breeding ground for new ideas i'm proud to say that the pricing model at walkme was created within my team and the commercial team we kept trying new ideas we came up with a pricing model i called one tooth read that it worked really well we sold it like hotcakes the rest of the organization adopted it it also means you can build a team with fewer resources it's not as investment heavy to build this sort of organization you have a lower sales engineering csm and bdr ratio which means it's lower cost to build it so for for organizations thinking about trying to get in the lower end of the market not the fortune 500 you know we sell to companies anywhere from startups just a few few employees up to about four thousand five thousand employees think you know the drop boxes the twilios of the world um if you're thinking about focusing on that market inside sales might be a great place for you to start um the final thing to mention is a talent pipeline so you heard me mention bdrs before at wakame we've got this really great talent funnel you start as an sdr sales development representative where you're qualifying inbound leads you move to a business development representative where you're doing outbound cold calling and then you move on to my team and inside sales where you can learn how to sell before you move up market into field sales i'm excited to say that yesterday anthony i don't know if you're listening in but one of a bdr we've moved to my team in october closed his first deal yesterday it's always a great moment when we see these bdrs move on to the sales team and you know he had a 10 week ramp there was able to close a deal i'll talk a little bit more about time to ramp today and why that's an important metric as well so let's dig in all right so you're going to build an inside sales team where do you start step one collect data i'm a really big advocate of starting out with a good crm tool um you know funny story for my my startup credentials here i was the first employee first sales employee at mixpanel back in back in the day what was it 2012 employee number eight and when i joined um they had no crm it was a google document and i said guys i need a crm tool i cannot effectively sell i can't collect data i can't make good decisions without a crm tool so i actually went and put salesforce on my own credit card did the implementation myself i am now a systems integrator with salesforce uh mixpanel is probably still paying the price of having me do that original implementation i don't recommend putting it on your sales rep uh but it was so critical to me even back then as the only ae that i was willing to just do the upfront work to get it done don't make your aes do that get them a good crm tool sales forces is the best on the market it's uh it's you know there's an upfront cost implementing it but it will pay dividends i also highly recommend a forecasting tool i use clary i love clary it shows you how your forecasting is changing over time it gives you predictive analytics and how you're trending compared to previous quarters uh it doesn't let the aes hide anything from you can see exactly how their forecast is changing week to week and then finally my favorite tool is gong this is a call recording tool there's also a tool out there called chorus what this lets you do is not only see what's going on with your with your sales team and understand exactly what's happening in the calls but give you analytics around those calls so things like how many questions are they asking what is interactivity what sort of topics are coming up what indicators do we see indicate or lead to a closed deal all right so you've you've got your stack in place you're ready to go the next step is analyzing your sales funnel so here's a sample funnel this is uh what it looked like it walked me at one point in time so basically deal comes in you qualify it it's a sales qualified lead the next step you move it to some sort of poc or solution design this might be a trial this might be a custom demo i put in sample benchmark conversion rates here you'll see a pretty high conversion rate between qualified sales qualified lead and some sort of proof of concept most people who come in and and have that initial call like your product will want to move to some sort of testing period you'll also see a fairly high conversion rate and depends so much on the software but typically you'll see a fairly high conversion rate from the solution design to asking about price where you see a big drop off typically is asking about price actually getting through and negotiating and contracting um so this is a fairly typical funnel 30 a sort of industry benchmark from sales qualified lead to closed one opportunity so you can take a look at your funnel and say do i see any red flags are there any steps here where i see a big drop off that i'm not expecting so this is the first thing i did at walkme and i found something interesting i found that between stage one and stage three and i got we're missing a stage two here long story on that one um but between stage one and stage three i noticed we had more like a fifty percent drop off which ultimately meant we had something more like a twenty percent conversion rate and i thought that's weird why are we losing so many people after the intro call you should see a pretty high conversion rate there and i'll dig into more of that in a second but this should be your first area where you focus and you understand what does my sales process look like step to step are there any red flags all right after you've done that the third part is experiment and this is my favorite part of my job test hypotheses what if we try this what if we did this can we do this should we run a trial differently should we not do a trial should we do a paid trial should we do only custom demos should we uh try a new pricing model should we price differently should we present the pricing at a different point in the cycle right these are all the things you can experiment with and start to see how they impact your cycle and again the luxury and the beauty of an inside sales team is you have enough cycles where you can run this experimentation so i want to go back to that intro called drop off and walk a little bit more about how i navigated that and the impact that i had in the organization i'm really proud of this story um so when i first joined as i mentioned i saw about a 50 drop off rate after that intro call and i thought what on earth is happening here so first up gong looking at these intro calls the first thing that jumped out at me is we were doing hour-long intro calls i thought why on earth do we need an hour to do that discovery call you know intro call your typically just tell me about your organization tell me about your pain points your typical discovery call right that rarely takes an hour i mean maybe a really good sales rep can extend that to an hour but usually you see that more about a 30 minute session so i thought what on earth are we doing in this intro call so i started listening to them guess what we were demoing the product in that intro call to me this is a big no-no i always tell my team as a sales rep you've got two really big pieces of power you've got two things that a buyer really wants from you you have the demo and you have pricing and once you give those up you really lose your power you lose control of the cycle they don't need you anymore so you should hold on to those two things as long as you can and get as much as you need from your buyer before you give up either the demo or your pricing we were demoing right off the gates which means we were probably showing a pretty shoddy demo it wasn't well put together it wasn't customized it wasn't tailored it wasn't thought through we weren't getting access to power because we weren't asking them to bring their executives to the call in return little give get in return for that demo we were just giving it to them right out the gates and then horror of horrors sometimes we were even giving them pricing in this original call which blew my mind um so what did i do i did a pretty draconian measure and i said guys we are no longer allowed to have one hour long intro calls we are doing a 30 minute call and we're calling it a discovery call so i went to the sdr team and had to say you know change their behavior instead of cold calling and trying to get a one hour long intro call book they had to get a 30 minute discovery call booked i had to change our preconditioning emails this is what to expect in this email in this call it is not it's not a demo it is not a demo it is not a demo it is not a demo it is a discovery call we're going to learn about your organization how we could potentially work together i got so much pushback from the entire organization on this i put this quote and read down at the bottom because this is what i kept hearing if i don't demo in the intro call they won't get the value i couldn't disagree more with this if you demo in the intro call they will not get the value the intro call should be a discovery call where we understand what they need to see what value looks like to the buyer and then we build a tailored demo that caters to that it also means we bring the right people to the table we have the sales engineer whoever we need on our site on that call and we run a well thought through well-structured demo so this is what we did and guess what happened this is probably the most impactful thing i've done at wakney i don't know people might disagree with me but this had such a huge impact on our conversion rates right away we shot it from 20 to that holy grail of 30 uh and it was funny i was i was sort of on a road show shopping this around the organization saying this is how we should be running things across the board not just an inside sales we should be doing this in field sales we should do the stock market and i got a lot of pushback initially no no no no people need to see a demo they won't get the value as soon as i show the results here's what happened here's our conversion rate you can bet the entire organization is now doing 30 minute discovery calls so anyway that's a story i'm really proud of again it started with the data it started with me looking at our sales funnel and noticing a big drop off using gong to figure out what on earth was going on making a change it was not easy and seeing a really fantastic result so you've heard me drop a lot of metrics so far today i just want to stop and pause and and tell you a little bit about some of the metrics i focus on the metrics that matter so asp you've heard me talk about average sales price this is a really important one this is your bookings right your annualized um revenue per deal you'll hear me talk about conversion rates so when i talk about conversion rates i'm usually talking about a sales qualified lead an opportunity created through a closed one deal age is really important average sales cycle on my team it's about 90 days this impacts a lot of things from forecasting to pipelines it's really important to understand what your average deal age looks like time to ramp so you heard me earlier talk about anthony and how excited i was to see him close the deal and hit his quota um in 10 weeks that's a 10 weeks ramp that is that is a really critical piece of information to building out your expectations your forecasting your hiring plan the shorter your ramp the better you'll be um so focusing and onboarding focusing on making reps successful at the gates is really critical to your organization and have a little bit more on that later on and then finally breadth of performance so that 80 by 80 percent it's cheaper it's better for organization it's better for the aes it's better for morale um if you have not just the feed the eagles starve the vultures plan where you're you're rewarding really high performers and starving low performers in an ideal world you want everybody to be making roughly their ote right so that's why breadth of performance is important to focus on it's fiscally better for the organization and it's also long term better for the aes and for retention rates all right moving on to another example asp which i just talked about average sales price so when i joined walkme and the inside sales team and the commercial organization our aries is about eighteen thousand dollars um and i noticed when i joined we're closing a lot about 18k deals uh 18k seemed to be what the reps started with right out the gate how much is your your tool cost 18k uh but i did notice there were a couple of outliers or a couple of reps who had more like 50k as their asp and i thought what on earth are those reps doing differently so i analyzed their calls again going back to gong and listening their calls looking at their indicators where were they giving pricing how are they talking about pricing what were they doing differently well for one thing they were doing it much later in the cycle they were holding out pricing until really all the value had been proven until after the proof of concept after the demo really after they had executive buy-in after everything was done only then were they disclosing pricing the other thing they were doing i call this anchoring high they were giving pricing much much higher they were never just coming in at 18k they were they were quoting more like 50k on that or 60k on the pricing um and this had this you know anchoring high is is a pretty well known uh negotiation and sales tax tactic the higher you anchor the higher the deal will likely end up there's very little downside to it unless you're maybe in an rfp or everything's done blindly over email i usually always recommend anchoring as high as you can so what do we do we introduce price floors you don't get credit for a deal below a certain threshold and of course the reps immediately moved up to uh that price form began saying higher and higher and higher the team asp today i'm proud to say is much closer to 60 000 which is almost a forex increase of where it was when i joined the team and that's a that's a very um uh highly respectable sales price for an uh an inside sales team with a 90 day sales cycle uh another example renewal rates um so at some point in my walk me career uh i was still congratulations you're now running renewals as well um so the first thing i did you know i went hired a couple renewal managers and then i thought okay how am i going to build the comp plans you know comp plans to me are one of the most powerful tools you have as a sales leader they impact so much of behavior they impact so much of results they're really the most important tool in your belt and i i tell people this a lot when founders or ceos come to me and say i'm building a sales team what do i need to know i say obsess over the comp plan become a student of the comp plan i'm gonna you know have one more slide on that one that i'll get to in a minute um but what i thought about when i was designing this comp plan was let me first look at the data and see if i can find any indicators of which organizations are more likely to renew so ran and crunched all the numbers and found a couple things that jumped out one more intuitive than the other the first was that it turns out the more people paid for our product the more likely they were to renew i don't know if that's intuitive or not part of that actually surprised me uh and and there are a lot of reasons i think you could you could wonder why this is the case maybe people are just more invested in something they're paying more for maybe they value it more maybe they prioritize it more internally but it turned out that a higher arr had a very strong correlation to renewal so of course what do we want to incentivize towards bigger deals the second thing and this one is less surprising that three-year deals had a much much much higher renewal rate so it seems if you invested in the product up front if you committed for three years by gosh you were going to make it work um and so we uh we leaned really heavily into both rewarding higher arr and three-year deals both at the logo acquisition so this impacted not just my renewal team but also my new business closers rewarding them really heavily for three-year deals and incentivizing my renewal managers almost exclusively their job was to go and convert everybody to three-year deals um and then if they couldn't get the three-year deals then the goal was to increase the arr and that was what we incentivized around so purely using sales process here without even getting into you know the csm world and and you know customer happiness purely with sales process and data we were able to increase our renewal rates by 10 so another way that data can be really impactful uh so you heard me talk about comp plans just now sometimes they're called icps individual comp plans they are your most critical tool in your belt to drive behavior with your sales organization um you know in a nutshell i would say keep it simple don't have too many things you're driving towards but at the beginning of the year it's worth sitting down and thinking what do we care about as an organization what are we driving towards is it long-term deals is it bigger deals is this more deals it's a faster sales cycle is it more lands are we finding that our reps are expanding and focusing all their time and growing existing customers but we're not getting logos in the door our renewals what matter most to you right now it'll this will vary over time year over year this will change and it's okay to change your comp plans year over year to keep up with your changing priorities but as an example if you decide you know what what we care about right now is that we've got this great product this is our moment we just need to land grab we just need to get as many new customers and new logos as we possibly can then it's really great to design a comp plan that over rewards or overpays for new logos so you could get say a 1.5 x commission rate or a kicker on any new logo versus expansion deals closed um another thing you know i just talked about the three-year deal so if you look at a carrot and stick behavior with three-year deals you could pay a higher commission rate for a three-year deal and actually a lower commission rate not full commission for a one-year deal and then you'll see a really heavy drive towards three-year deals so when you think about your comp plans at the beginning of the year analyze your funnel analyze what matters analyze what you need and then build your comp plans to incentivize the behavior that will bring you the highest quality highest retaining customers all right so i've just done a lot of talking in a nutshell hack your cycle bring your growth mindset to your sales cycle bring the concept of growth hacking where do i see drop off analyze the data and figure out where can i make small changes that have major impact on revenue so changing an intro call from one hour to 30 minutes that doesn't seem like a huge change that doesn't seem like something that will drive millions of dollars of revenue but guess what it did and you can find those sorts of processes changes within your sales cycle as well so now that you've found these great things like a 30 minute intro call and you've increased your asp you've increased your renewal rates how do you scale it this is a lot harder than it sounds but once uh one way that i found to be very effective is the the qbr so a quarterly business review is a pretty standard practice in sales organizations many sales teams run these like an opportunity to beat up the sales reps over the deals they lost we take a very different approach on my team we have a very different culture around qbr's it is our opportunity to showcase all the amazing experiments we've run and what the outcomes are where did we fail where did we succeed what worked what didn't work and when we find those moments those aha moments wow this person tried a whole new type of proof concept and oh my goodness look at their conversion rates look how they did this quarter let's try it everyone try this this is our new this is our new plan that takes a a a culture of openness it takes a culture of change management it takes a culture of vulnerability to be open admitting that that you tried something and it failed or to be open to try someone else's idea admitting they they're doing something better than i am as a personal example here i have always been very anti-trials i hate trials you lose control of the deal you know so much can go wrong i've hated trials my whole career i came in to walk me saying nope i'm not doing trials we're never doing trials and one of my reps said i'm running trials and they're working can i show you what i'm doing and i said yes show me what you're doing and he had a really good process and it was working for him and i said you know what you're right i'm wrong we're going to adopt this process and roll it out to the team so it takes a culture and of open mindedness and vulnerability to be open to these ideas and to share them the last thing i'll say on onboarding um you know it's so critical that you make sure you're not you're taking that 30 minute intro call and you're making that part of your onboarding program you're not letting old bad habits seek into your onboarding you've got to stay really upfront you've got to keep iterating on it you've got to make sure as you onboard and bring in new reps they're learning all these great tactics as well and then the last thing is you know now that you've got these these these great reps who are experimenting and growing and scaling and being vulnerable you've got to promote them from within and give them an opportunity to be a leader and then you'll see these results tenfold so in summary got the right stack got your right to the right crm tool the call analysis tool analyze the data innovate and experiment to see what's working and what's not and then monitor those critical metrics we talked about asp sales cycle conversion rate spread the performance make sure these are all headed in the right direction and when you find something that's working scale in it invest in it invest in your your aes make sure you're onboarding them well and give them opportunities to lead so that's all i've got and i'm happy to take questions okay as a vp of sales how much of your time is spent on evaluating the data that's a great session that's a great question and what i've actually found is that i need to block it on my calendar so i have a one hour block once a week with my sales ops team to go through data and look for insights and i try to encourage them to come with me to me with insights as well you know which is something i've had to sort of create as a culture is instead of coming to me with a task list come to me or a dashboard that you've created come to me with insights you're finding from the dashboard with insights you're finding from the data versus just showing the charts that you've built how are you dealing with the great resignation what is your target retention percentage for aes this is a really good question you know i have to say i um so i had a baby in november of last year and i went on maternity leave and i came back in february and i was just so caught off guard by this sort of this great resignation um in q2 of last year i you know i was so proud my first three years at walkman i did not lose a single ae not a single one i was so proud of that stat and then i came back from maternity leave and for the first time i faced a lot of aes quitting and it was really shocking for me um but you know i understand it's it's the current environment that we're in and so i you know we had to change a lot of my my tactics we had to do a lot of investing in our aes and making sure that they are happy here that we had the right leadership in place that they were getting the training and the tools that they need that we had adequately adjusted to the new world of working remotely i will say it's been one of the biggest challenges for me this year i think we finally got the the ship is righted i haven't had ease leaving anymore um i'm sure it will continue to happen because it is the new reality that we're in but that has been a challenge i don't know if i've got a target retention percentage um in the past i always said 100 because i never lost anybody i think probably 80 is a more realistic goal what was the time period over which you grew the team from 16 to 50. that was about a three year period do you ever provide pricing intro call no never never ever ever ever do that i do not allow my team to do that i get really upset when they do it it's one of my big things i'm a stickler about i'm like you know what if someone's mad at you that you're not giving pricing the intro call send them to me send them to your boss i will tell them why i feel really strongly about that policy and i've had a few people actually come to me and ask me tell me why you feel that way and i said you know what that's great i'm on board with you i'm not gonna have my sales team do that tactic uh can you share more about the internal infrastructure how many aes to one manager and any data insights to share as to why so the holy grail you typically see a 7a ease to one manager you can you can do a little bit more than that in inside sales you can go up to eight i don't recommend going beyond eight because what happens is your manager becomes so reactive and so overloaded with jumping on deals they don't have the ability to coach and it's really important that they have time in their day and their schedule to coach the aes and make them better instead of just jumping from fire to fire in terms of essies to aes we've got a four to one ratio that's gone up and down over the years at one point i think we're eight to one where we had to get really efficient and thoughtful about how and when to use ses we're a little bit better now um following your change to discovery only calls with your ies how did you manage these prospects beyond a non-successful discovery call i.e nurturing revisiting etc yeah great question um you know uh for people who we we basically called out or didn't move forward after the disco call we do call blitzes often i'm a big fan of call blitzes so um putting uh you know an hour on on the calendar we all get on zoom we're all kind of looking at each other making phone calls back in the day we were sitting at dusk doing this and calling all those disco calls that didn't make it through to the next phase all right looks like i got one more uh minute here um uh so what what levers do you pull for land and expand to get more customer share of wallet um this is a really fascinating one to me because we've really really thought a lot about this because it's so tempting to want to land with an ela right it's really really tempting when you are talking to a prospect and they say i want an enterprise-wide license i'm looking at a 500 000 deal and it's so easy to get stars in your eyes and go for that deal um what we've really learned the hard way is to cool cool your heels cool your jets and say you know what we find it's best if you work with us by starting small and growing with us and that answer builds trust and goodwill with your customer it's the right thing for both sides and it means frankly you're much more likely to close the deal it's really hard to land with a massive deal it's really hard to land with a whale it takes forever it takes a ton of stakeholder buy-in start small build the value and grow that is the right motion for pretty much every sales organization as tempting as it is to want to start with a million dollar deal [Music] you