Streamline your saas sales process for teams

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[Music] our kind of keynote speaker right now is Russ Armstrong so Russ is a sales and finance leader and co-founder of limelight platform the world's first experience on marketing cloud he now heads up business development in the eastern regions for both capital the only SR and IDI automation solution on the market welcome Russ thank you very much pleasure to join you guys here today I'm going to go ahead I guess kick it off here I'll share my screen and kind of go through my deck and everything so I'm just going to get that going here I just want to make sure everybody can see the screen okay is it coming up the SAS sales playbook looks good to me looks good all righty cool so I mean I developed this from limelight so we raised about 10 million dollars scaled our sales and sales team and pretty much off the back and once I left I started to write down just kind of my sales playbook and this is really for early-stage companies and founders who were trying to transition away from like the founder lead sales process I mean that is the key to early-stage growth but this is where where I develop this to really kind of give some people some pointers and you know obviously there's a lot of reading that you can do behind the scenes on this but these are kind of like the Coles notes of the SAS sales playbook to really you know put your put your growth in to the next level so I mean this is difficult what you can see with early-stage companies you know founders with domain expertise they might have a rolodex and that's what's gonna make up the significant you know the sales at first you know it's their baby you know it's their idea they've thought about it they sleep about it they think about it that's why they're so good at selling it that's why founders are so good at the early stages on that sales side but it does get to a point where you need to step away you need to hire a team there's other things in the business you got to do if anyone's ever tried to fundraise and lead their sales process you know you're gonna have problems because fundraising in itself is a full-time job so how do I turn what you've done and they're really sales and success that you've had how do you turn into a eatable scalable sales model like how do you daddy do this like one of the first steps where do I go about how do I remove myself as CEO and not completely remove yourself you're obviously gonna be involved but how do I take a step back and start to transition this off to my team that's the real core of what we're trying to get out here today so when I talk about repeatable the repeatable part of it is obviously a lot of family really really good at their message and getting their message across to people but how do you turn this into a value proposition that resonates with your audience that you can then hand off to somebody and they can go to market with that and that's a key to that repeatable side of it then the scalable side of it is what is the process I need to lay out put in place that allows new hires to stay on script to ramp up quickly to achieve their quote as to achieve our sales targets or our sales goals what process do I have to put in place you know gone are the days where you hire superstar sales reps and you know you just say yeah off you go and you know they can sell anything to anybody you need to develop a process and a methodology around this to really help people succeed and that's what we're gonna be talking about a little bit further here today so there's a bunch of different ways we can talk about revenue growth obviously there's you know increasing your average selling price increasing biasing buying frequency and then obviously what we're looking really about is customer acquisition how do you get more customers how do you get more users and so we're gonna dive into a little bit more today and there'll be there's other avenues that you can go down but let's focus on that first side there so really what you need to do is define your customer and I think people usually have a good idea about kind of where they're going but I mean like hyper targeted let's really dive into who is going to be buying my product and some of this you've probably developed and you know some of your you know industry analysis when you're doing your investor pitch in your first couple ones with your tamp Samsung and understanding that side of it but really driving home who that you know ICP is from from a bottom-up analysis how many of that specific ICP are there in the market I want to know to the likened to the to the exact number are there 500 companies that could buy it are there five thousand companies are there ten companies and really mapping that out who's that industry what company are they from you know are they similar verticals different verticals one of the similarities of those ICPs what are the differences because all of those things matter when we start to build our value proposition so really diving into that East TP ICP and knowing who they are second piece of that is within each ICP because you might have multiplied CPS you're selling into really mapping those buyer journeys and those buyer journeys are directly down to those job titles the personalities responsibilities the challenges that they have in a daily basis the KPIs the things that keeps them up at night the things they're worried about all those buyer personas so really this could expand out pretty large but why we need to do this is because when we're talking about why and why your buyer cares about what you're selling you really need to drive home the why for that specific buyer because the y41 buyer might be different for another so really mapping this out and understanding what those trigger points are for those buyers will help you get a lot further in your sales process and speed up those sales cycles so we'll be working on that the value proposition I'm gonna talk about this a ton because the value proposition is so key and not talking about what your product does it's talking about the value that your customer gets from using your product and really driving that home so we're gonna go into a little bit more about that in a bit and one other one else matters to this customer you know trends fear of missing out the ROI sales what what matters to this customer that's really gonna drive them as a reason to adopt your product or service whatever you're selling so what matters to this person and really driving that home and then again with all that building this out you need to create a content strategy because you're gonna have to drip them content in a way that's going to engage them it's going to educate them it's gonna make them understand what your value proposition is and it's gonna make them want to actually convert and go through your sales process and down that buyer journey and that content is gonna support this and you're gonna have to map against this and it this will help you increase those sales cycles but it will also give you a clearer idea of where you might be falling down so we're gonna talk about styles of positioning right now you know and there's three main styles positioning there's a head to head and that's clearly when there's no you know category exists and there's no clear leader there's nothing wrong with any one of these positions just to kind of put that out there competition is a good thing but you just have to have a very clear kind of execution strategy as to why you're going to win if you're going head to head and there's no clear leader what is it that you are gonna have that's gonna help you drive that second one is big fish small pond so you know take a sub-segment of a large industry so you think about you know salesforce only two crm market but there's a ton of niche crm solutions out there that have certain features that are very attractive for certain sub ICPs and industries so you can position yourself that way and understanding who you are and the last one and the most difficult one by far is category creation category ation was something where limelight existed and we were trying to sell an automated workflow for experiential marketing really didn't exist at the time we were going to market so we need to educate our buyers that they had a problem because they didn't know they had a problem because you don't know you have a problem if you don't know there's a solution or you're not doing it right so really have to educate them about there could be a better way of them doing their work get them to buy into that and then show them the solution across the way so that's creating a new game which is definitely the hardest and longest sale cycles but also as a pioneer it has the ability to be the largest segment that you can go after as well so here's what I like to talk about in terms of value proposition and this kind of a little exercise you can kind of do yourself here to understand it so in certain simple terms what value do you provide to the user and this is a great one I got and everybody's probably know what I'm referring to when I say the ride-sharing marketplace the rights are your marketplace if you're a techie or you know you probably understand what a ride-sharing marketplaces or even what a marketplace is two sided marketplace but when you're talking to a lot of buyers out there in the market they might not even understand these words so how do you create the right words the right language around this to get your value proposition across to someone without the jargon or without the rest of it so you know one way to do it is like to ride in four minutes or last well now I'm like well you got my attention because you're really talking about value proposition in a way that makes people understand it and this is from uber actually when they went public it was arrest one filing and I saw this in their s1 filing and I was actually quite interested in this because think about the words they're using here when they talk about their value proposition so they're saying they're a safe reliable affordable and convenient trip within a few minutes of tapping a button that is value proposition that directly relates to the buyer that directly relates to that user and understanding it yes I want something that's safe affordable reliable convenient and I want to have it within a few minutes every button that does value proposition to find at its best way and that's what I really like about it it's not saying hey we're the newest ride-sharing marketplace out there because you're gonna lose people right away what does that mean what's a value proposition I don't even know but really diving down into those exact terms so are you cheaper are you better are you faster are you safer are you more reliable value proposition driving that home and that's really when you need to focus on when you're in your early stages of your sales process all right so another quick exercise you can kind of write this down just to kind of get an idea of where you kind of live in this so your competitive analysis if you didn't exist what would your customers use what is the workflow that they currently do and I love I love the visuals of this when you're kind of mapping this out what did people do before your solution came around and what were the pain points did it take longer to do that what were the cost points around that did it cost more whether you know more people involved what were those you know equivalent cost of those and really mapping this out because really what you want to do is drive home the cost of doing business the old way or without your solution and the cost of doing business the new way and that could be from increased efficiencies it could be from you know headcount it could be from a number of things but really you want to drive that home in a way where you're presenting a business case through your buyer for them to really understand it so trying to come down with that competitive analysis what would what would people do if you weren't around and then also the ear key unique attributes so what features or capabilities do you have that an alternative can this is one of the major major things when we talk about sass and some of the benefits of having a automated solution there are features that features and capabilities that can obviously be duplicated through manual effort but takes longer it takes a long time what really sets people apart are the key attributes of a solution that can only be duplicated with software and that could be data data aggregation for simple dashboards it could be AI solution that combs new data a lot quicker but one of those key attributes that your solution provides that are really going to differentiate you from everybody else value we kind of just talked about this or your value proposition what is the value that people get out of this so really driving at home what is the customer what do they get out of this and driving that and who is it this is again coming back to that ICP who cares about this who's going to really want to see a solution like this in place in the market and then what is the right timing in your market for you to win what is the right scenario what is the right buyers landscape look like that's gonna allow you to win this solution all right so that's kind of going over some of the early stage stuff that you really need to document process right out have lined up for you to be able to hire a team to ensure success but then you kind of have to understand what does your team look like well where do they come from so really you know just trying to map this out in a simple way what are the different divisions within my group or my different roles and responsibilities from my go-to-market team from marketing to business development PDRs to account executives to customer success what are the activities that they should be doing what are the KPIs that I can track at a high level so from the marketing side you know giving them the responsibilities of SEO SEM those webinars events PR social organic and paid and then really having a top level nql or topic api of a marketing qualified leave may have some definitions in here a little bit further we can dive into that but I'll probably just say that for a little bit later but these are really what your marketing your marketing team is trying to drive MQ LS for the rest of your and then they'll pass that off to the BTR's to try and convert that into an actual SQL or an SI Ella still qualify the inner-selves accepted lead so what are they doing one of the activities that bead ers are doing that we're focusing on inbound qualification outbound lead generation so those are the defined areas where they're looking into from there they're gonna be measured on the number of sql's they create the number of opportunities that they're creating in the pipeline number of meetings that are booked so these are some of the metrics that you need to put in place for those BTR's to really understand what they're doing and if they're having success from that BDA are you gonna pass this off to an account executive and that account executive is gonna work the pipeline they're gonna be providing demos they're gonna providing workshops they're gonna be negotiating they're gonna be doing sales engineering to understand how it's gonna work with the solution they're gonna be doing objection handling and they're gonna be really measured on bookings how much are they adding to the bookings line for the company and that's what those account executive are looking at done the last part and something I'd say I might have been a little bit guilty of myself at limelight was customer success and really hiring talented people and hiring up in the customer success area and really to farm to grow to upsell and cross-sell within that customer a lot of times when you're selling you know as you go higher up into the enterprise world often you're going to have to have people who are going to grow accounts who are going to nurture accounts to grow them across the organization you might get a tiny foothold into an organization and then you know it's let's tip of the iceberg you know the real value of that customer and acquiring it is going to become in the latter half of that when you're selling across that organization when you're using champions from one division to sell into another division to sell into another division it ends up if you do this well it's going to decrease your customer acquisition cost you're gonna acquire them a lot cheaper and it's going to help grow organically across the organization a lot more so KPI is in that customer success world will be around upsells renewals churn and NPS so obviously within each one of these you can die even further into another sub segment of this which is obviously but this is kind of laying the top-level framework of the things you need to think about when you're trying to create this process for your team so some of the most basic metrics everybody's probably heard of a lot of these metrics but things that you're going to have to know on a daily basis as a founder you probably already know these especially if you've already gone to market to try and fundraise these are some of the core things that your investors are gonna ask about because they're gonna want to understand your unit economics they're gonna want to understand the viable nature of your business now and in the future at scale will this work at scale and how are you going to scale it so your customer acquisition cost really how much does it acquire a cost to acquire a customer your ARPU your average revenue per user and your lifetime value obviously the lifetime value of a client so for early-stage founders some of these numbers aren't necessarily apparent maybe I've been signed enough or you don't have enough data points you always have to make an assumption on these because you do need to have something in place that you can make the decisions you need off of having a question mark there does not help you make a decision going forward so have assumptions in place have reasons especially a lifetime value you might not have a true lifetime value if someone signs a three-year deal in your second year of operations but you need to have some assumptions around this to really guide you to the right direction and obviously what you're shooting for is a goal of three to one on a lifetime value to cockers you know and I'm noticing a spelling error in my my deck here perfect and then obviously on a one-to-one ratio that's your payback your lifetime value equals your tackk that's great you've paid it back but you have the rest of your operational expenses that you need to cover so the three to one ratio will allow it for a metric that allows you to drive in a positive unit economics in your business all right so early stages so your early stages you're a small team and you're really just starting to look at how to build out your team the earliest sales team structures are called islands and an island is really when you are doing everything you have a full sales cycle sales team and they're doing prospecting they're converting closing they're activating they're doing customer success this is very typical and early-stage companies because you know the resources or really the data points are round specializing people yet you're still testing some of your hypotheses you're testing some of the market that you're going to and you're really trying to gather more information around this where you have these end and sales team definitely when you're going through the hiring process hiring these early-stage people you want people comfortable across the spectrum and some people are and some people aren't really understanding that because you do need someone to kind of work across the spectrum of the sales cycle in these are early stage companies and then as you move a little further along you're gonna start to specialize those stages so introducing business development reps who are gonna pass leads to AE hiving off marketing in his own department so marketing is going to lead to PDR to AE SAEs pass over the customer success so that's your assembly line and then further specialization will be pods that will target certain industries or verticals or geographies whatever it might be but further specialization a lot of that specialization will come down to if you're going by country it might be different laws or different languages different customs in place that they need to have specialization around to be able to be successful in selling that product obviously a lot further down the cycle than what it is right now alright so I guess this is something I kind of hinted to earlier and making sure that you have the right team in place when you're doing this so I think the traditional model for salespeople in the past was you hire somebody who's really good and that person is good at selling anything to anybody they're a rock star they're a superstar and then you create a process around the superstar you put in things in place that they need that they want that they've been successful with and that's not necessarily how you wanted to design your sales process you want to design your sales process so you could put anybody in there and there is the script the guidelines the structure in place where anybody and I can say anybody but there is a higher likelihood of dropping somebody in and they're going to be successful so you start with the process you start with them you start with the whole understanding of who you're selling to the process the contents the journey and then you enable them with technology that's going to help them increase their efficiencies on their outbound dial quick or talk to more people and then really focusing the other way so building it process first and driving it up versus really focusing it on hiring the greatest people that you possibly could one of my favorite charts just to kind of outline the different styles of selling across you know where you might live so across your bottom line here you have your average contract value your a CV and up here you have your deals per month so obviously these are the different types so obviously if you're only selling a CV so average contract deals of you know less than a thousand dollars your customer acquisition cost is going to be have to be a lot lower so you're gonna have to rely on a more marketing generated sales process so that could be freemium solutions or web sales kind of into your online sales the web sales and things these are things that are a little more commoditized in terms of solutions out there they're probably a little bit more niche or not in each products widget products where they have one use and they're not kind of a system of record type business so that would be Kinnear in your web sales and then as you kind of move up the chain you know once you kind of hit into the twelve thousand five hundred plus a CV you can start to look at what a inside sales team would look like I want you to start to get higher than that you get to field sales and local sales so an interesting thing about this is really understanding kind of where you live here because there are very big differences on how you're structuring all these different teams based off of what your contract value is now once you get even further down the road you might have two types of product lines and two types of ICPs you might have a product line that only sells for an ACV on the lower side and you might have a product line that's 500 plus well you don't want your local sales reps selling the low product line because it's not going to work and you don't want the opposite to be true so really understanding where they are renting it out in understanding where your products are and where they live in here because there's also different ways you know transactional sales solution selling consultative selling provocative selling EBM strategies and these all vary across the board but understanding kind of your ecv your LTV where you live within that and do the unit economics make sense for you to deployed some of these strategies and again these are just high level thoughts to really get you thinking like where do you live in here you can read books on books on all the different solutions within your consultative selling solution selling provocative selling account-based marketing and even increase marketing it doesn't have to be purely enterprise you can have some really low cost solutions for account based marketing as well you just have to read up to understand how you're gonna execute some of those things I got an interesting story just on the inside sales front I just wanted to share at this point so we were launching a line like we were selling into automotive big OMS and we had an inside sales team and were in the toronto market up here in canada and a lot of the OEMs have their headquarters in toronto so our inside sales team had a huge success in going to market in the toronto area but we were co-located so our inside sales team was actually acting like a localized sales team in the canadian market and we went to duplicate this strategy in the u.s. the US market was very different OEMs are located all over the US you've got some in Atlanta some in California Detroit New York and based off of this our inside sales team in Toronto had a hard time duplicating the success that we had in Canada because it wasn't a true local sales model when we got to the US but it wasn't Canada so again you can separate this by having different pods focusing on different regions or locals or dis distributing your sales team completely so these are the kind of things that you kind of have to wrap your head around when you're designing this process from a definition standpoint I think the decks are all shared and presentations are shared after so I mean there's reading beyond this but these are just some guidelines for you gotta look at from what's the difference between you know your online your web sales and whatnot well you know I get also get a big question what's the difference between web-based sales online sales web-based is kind of like you can click through and purchase your own as you kind of move through it online sales might be more through chat and chat BOTS but allow you to still kind of sell through that online process it's just a little bit of a higher customer acquisition cost in that process and then reading upon reading you can obviously go through transactional selling solutions settling consultative selling provocative selling I'm definitely not the expert on those there are books on books written across all of these so if you want to read up on those if it fits into your category of where you think your go-to-market strategy is definitely pick one up and you can dive even further into how to build up that process obviously account based marketing have been big for two three four years now if not longer really count based marketing is flipping your funnel upside down it's really knowing who those icps are and going after who is Milo most likely buyer and identifying them at the top and then finding influencers within the organization engaging those key players and creating advocates from those so that's the key difference there versus the original funnel is really just focusing on top of funnel prospects and not creating a strategy at the organizational level to really penetrate within here you know one of my key things that I always looked at for account based marketing was the circle of influence on a buyer and how do you get to someone and I always had a number of my head if I could get to somebody three independent sources that were referring to my solution so that could be you know the buyer who's my buyer persona they saw us at a conference they had you know a PR campaign I was talking about us they had outreach and then maybe you know somewhere through a friend mentioned us so if there was like three or four independents influencers about us they were more likely to convert throughout our process and that was just some of the numbers I tracked so how do you think about it holistically of getting to that buyer and how do you circle them they influence around them so they're seeing you from independent sources and not just from some guy picking up the phone and calling every day or emails you know think about it holistically how do you influence them across the board so obviously you know your definitions throughout your sales funnel you know in your early stages people are going through an awareness section there are you know getting educated about the solution is the selection of who they're going to be and then obviously defining those metrics across the board one of the key things you see early is when you start to implement people is really having strict rules about what those definitions are the key that you need to have people on board with those definitions is if you want to have usable data across all of your team and your sales rep as you move everybody's got to be marking things and measuring things based off of the same definitions otherwise garbage in garbage out if you're bad dad is in it's not gonna help you kind of dictate how to make proper solutions going forward so really having us define set of solutions around that so defining what your prospect is defining what your marketing qualified lead is defining what an SQL is a sales qualified lead and defining what a sales excepted lead is across the board so really understanding those definitions have your team understanding what those are so everybody is marking people the same way because really what you're looking for I haven't even got to there yet and we're not gonna go into the definitions of this because obviously we can share those with people later and we can get to some Q&A a little bit earlier here but obviously the prospects and just understanding what those definitions are and ql' definitions they're putting this into your playbook so your team knows it knows what's happening sales qualified leads did they hit certain qualification metrics I've always used Bantz for a qualification for my sales leads budget authority time and need so really defining that and then going deeper into that and even defining your Bant even further in terms of qualifying somebody and making sure that the right questions are asked the right number of people are asked one thing we always did from an account-based perspective was another interesting stat we tracked was when we were trying to sell him to enterprise we were tracking the number of si LS we had within an organization we were even tracking how many times we had been on site presenting a workshop had we presented to the entire team did we talk to CRM did we talk to those key components yet and we had to hit certain thresholds before we thought we were in a proper position to really have a chance to closing a deal so you know just making sure that you track like what are the similarities of closed deals what has worked in the past and trying to you know duplicate those efforts and really tracking the data around that so obviously with you know tracking your data across your conversion rates you know you're gonna have a certain amount of prospects that convert into NQ ELLs a certain number of mq ELLs that are computer than sql's SI LS this is where you really want to start thinking about cohort analysis and tracking data not only across your you know yearly but if you're releasing new features or you released new messaging where you release new sales strategies going to market you want to track the cohorts there because you want to see how that's impacting your conversion rates everywhere in the funnel maybe you release new messaging and your converting way more prospects to mq ELLs but people are still getting stuck in the later stages you probably need to start looking at some of your messaging your contents within your later stages to help people convert there so that's why that data is so important about your process is to really dive into where things are getting bottlenecks where things are slowing down and trying to address and correct the behavior there and then obviously with that you're gonna try and map the your content to your buyer journey so creating content for people in the top of the funnel creating content for people in the middle of the funnel and creating content for people at the bottom of the funnel so those are come some of your key things that you're gonna want to have to take a look at to really understand across-the-board so you know bottom of funnel stuff might be actually having you know real ROI stories or creating case studies that are specific to your client you know think about it this way from like a customer acquisition cost you know if you have if you're you know really on the big side and your whale hunting and your customer acquisition costs you know or your lifetime value could be like three million dollars you know your customer acquisition costs gonna be a lot lower for it still to be make sense so you can create some documentation you can create custom workshops you can fly your team down so really think about it from an LTV a lifetime value perspective what can I spend to acquire this client because you can spend a lot more acquiring larger clients than you can on your smaller clients but you know you have to think about with those strategies and what makes sense what is that LTV on those clients all right so that's kind of like a quick summary on that side of it the last thing I thought was really helpful for me was really understanding industry averages because I was in the market and I was you know building my team and my strategy and really trying to just understand am I in the middle of the pack am I an outlier or am i doing this right and I always use the analogy if you have the blueprints to build a house you're gonna be a lot quicker building that house then if you have no blueprints and you don't know which direction you're constantly looking up you know YouTube videos on how to build this and how to build that it's gonna take you forever to build the house but if you have the blueprints you're gonna move a lot quicker so understanding how you relate to those industry averages will help you make sure that you're moving in the right direction that you're not you know an outlier in terms of what some of your numbers are so one key thing kind of in your early stages is you need to take into consideration is how long does it take for an account executive to ramp up and on average it's three to five months so that's important for when you're creating your pipelines your quota estimates your commission schedules how long does it take for someone to ramp up how long does it take them to actually put people in their pipeline before they start closing and on average it's three to five months so that's something to keep in mind while you're building this out and for anyone who's you know on the CRL or mapping some of their their revenue and they're kind of their sales quotas across the board you know you got to remember that you know rep tenure in the industry is around two point four two and a half years so there is going to be people who are falling off and we'll have that ramp up period which will always be less than what your total quotas are when you're doing those numbers and plugging them into your models all right so some of this makes a lot more sense so as a function of your average contract value the percentage of your pipeline increases from steel development reps so as your contract value goes higher obviously you're gonna have more likely to have STRs as part of the team so that's an interesting thing to kind of take aware of if you're mapping to this so obviously on the lower end of the spectrum if you're selling ATVs that are on the lower side around you know five thousand or so you're probably not gonna have the specialization to have multiple people on your team you probably not gonna have SDR is handing it off to AES if you're selling low ECB's so just kind of intuitive but something to keep in mind as you're building out your team also the percentage of pipe source from marketing so obviously on the lower end of the spectrum when you're selling lower ACP solutions you're gonna have more of your pipelines sourced from your marketing initiatives and then as you go up you can imagine into big enterprise sales you're gonna have even less source from marketing and the reason for that is obviously you know to close a half a million dollar deal you are going to be very much more whale hunting you're gonna be on the road at conferences that meetings doing workshops great and they're you know it more involved with the whole sales process so less likely that it's going to be derived from marketing sources at what point do I start to move to an assembly line when does it start to make sense so in assembly line being I have an SDR that passes to an ad that passes to customer success account management and these are kind of the stats around that so seeing that in the ACV level of around twenty five to fifty sixty four percent of the teams are structured that way I thought that was very interesting just to see if you're falling into that category or not and then obviously just some basic guidelines don't just pay and what people are paying you know the basic for a lot of it is a 50/50 split between your base salary and your OTE so based off of that you know structuring what that OTE will look like so one of the things when you're trying to figure this out I see this question quite often in a lot of chat rooms and Sattar chat rooms being like what do I pay people and I guess one of the biggest things and you know do some reading on the Renaissance Rep which is a great kind of term for early stage sales people who are involved in product are involved in development or involved in marketing they're involved in sales are involved in sales process and strictly producing a commission structure that's based off of sales for those Renaissance red well ultimately result in a failure you're gonna have to be a little more creative on how you compensate people in those early stages and that could be through more KPIs it could be through you know a percentage from meetings booked a percentage from you know demos conducted on-site visits value that's created you're gonna have to be a little more creative on how you can create the commission structure to get those early stage reps they hit their own to eat because those sales numbers are just not that predictable at that early stage so just making sure that you have a structure in place that compensates them a second thing especially in early stage companies you know some years are great early stage before you hit you know the hockey stick growth it might be two three years before years before you hit the hockey stick growth and measuring someone just on those revenue numbers you need to measure people on the performance throughout the funnel so measuring people on conversions in their activities throughout the funnel and performance on that and you know compensating people based off of those activities and not just results is very key to creating a solid team to creating a happy team and create a motivated team to keep them working sales reps like to win allow them to win if they're constantly failing they're gonna be you know unmotivated they're gonna be looking for other jobs where they are actually winning all right I think of it the wrong way they're here going back this way so this was just the levels of activities what should I expect from my team so dials per day were thirty three quality conversations were six per day demos per week whatever's at seven and obviously this ranges across your spectrum of what you're selling if you're selling $500,000 you know NetSuite solutions for ERP systems for your clients you're gonna be demoing a lot less than that probably going to one and then if you're on the flip side demoing something online where the conversion rates very transactional you're gonna have a lot more but just that idea of where it might fall into and then the last piece is just really like what are the tools that people are using to really augment their sales process and that's kind of interesting as well just understanding what one of the first tools that I should have besides the CRM I mean those people are gonna know that but the first thing people are buying is email automation tracking and Cadence's second thing people are buying is contract data intelligence third thing people are buying our contract signatures so you signed whatever it might be LinkedIn Navigator now these are just averages obviously but just understanding when people are buying those and what makes sense and where they are in the pipeline you know everybody's solutions are going to look different but you know for some of the email automation tools that sales rep can use really really increase the efficiency of them so understanding that putting that into your customer acquisition cost with kind of the solution set that you're gonna provide to your team to help them be more efficient is quite important so here's some plans that are kind of dictated out there that people could kind of mimic for their own solutions out there and then obviously hiring management's and hiring the team as you kind of move up and what a VP of Sales and what a manager director and these are just broad numbers but you know for me I was googling this over and over again trying to find some basic guidelines on where I should be looking and here's some numbers just to kind of provide you with some early indications of what that should look like so that was it for me for now excited to share that with everybody and would love to dive into some Q&A at this point thanks very much awesome why don't I pose the questions to you I've been kind of moderating a little bit monitoring the chat just before we get into regular Q&A will you be able to I know that we've got these slides will we be able to share them with everybody after your presentation yeah absolutely feel free to share them happy happy to talk about that and you know share my insights and further insights as long as much as I can okay perfect well then what we'll do is we'll make sure to put those in the slack channel and then if people have any other questions around them after Q&A then they can ask you there all right first question so Franco is with a b2b SAS company with an ideal ACV around 100k a year what strategy do you recommend the most ABM yeah so I kind of mentioned this briefly so ABM strategies don't need to be this outrageously expensive strategy you can find an ABM strategy that is right for you and it just has to do with how generalized the your outbound reaches within the ABM solution so I'm a huge fan of ABM I'm a huge fan of bottom-up analysis to really understand who that target is and who you're going after understanding your key players knowing more about them than what they know that's your key to really selling and knowing your buyer knowing those personas knowing what matters to them so I would definitely recommend trying to find an EVM solution that works for you guys nice another anonymous attendee asked what the reference was for the data that you were presenting and if it was based on a certain industry and was wondering if you had any links to a study or a report and I believe this question came in around the time you were talking about a like comp structure for a es yeah sure so that was it gets Bridgewater he's not Bridgewater associates there was a I'd have to I'll look it up and I'll sugar the record on it I'll share a link on the chat after they do a report every year on this that really goes through it all and kind of dictates some of that so I'll share that after and get that to everybody are you thinking about the bridge groups bridge group that's it I've seen three two water but it's a bridge group yeah it's pretty good reference yeah cool well we can find that and we can get that thrown in slack as well so that you guys can take a look and so the next one here is from Evan and they are about 1.5 years into creation of their sales process using many aspects of what you're presenting now that they have some baseline data where would you start in refining the process I think the answer to that question lies within your data I mean really it's understanding where your holes are from that data I think as founders sometimes we get drawn into the illusion of our solution is going to work one way but you know we're not trusting the data of what's what we're seeing you know especially in the early stages or category creation so you might have data that you know you look back at it and you're like wow like 85% of our revenue is coming from this specific kind of area but if I look at my outbound reach for my sales team we're spending 50 percent over here now that's not lining up if my if that's like a consistent stat throughout so I think it's just aligning it and really trusting the data that you have and that's why creating a process to track and understand the data throughout your process is so key because you know it's that that blind faith that you're like trying to go in one direction but the markets telling you something completely different you know follow the data that is your friend you know following your gut might hurt you sometimes it's an accent so that's what I'd be focusing on really nice and artoo asks what is your a CV for my for my current company where we're at our a CV is per year about 20,000 per year and then lifetime value is about 50 or 60 so that's kind of where we are nice and our last one in here if anyone has any other questions you can pop them in QA now but the last one for now is from Ryan Schultz he says that was great rest tons of info can you talk a little bit about comp former kidding have you comped marketing based upon performance kpi's yeah absolutely and I guess any type of comp structure I think there's I mean there's a lot of criteria that goes into it and you know for early-stage companies I think the resources you have to manage a lot of these are your challenging parts of it you don't want a comp structure that takes a long time to design takes a long time to implement takes a long time to calculate it slows you down just as a founder so you know one of the key things is you know you definitely want to comp against it and if you do have the time those different channels are all very different and you're gonna have you don't want someone altima you don't want people to gain your comm structure so if you're only comping on m ql s and m q ELLs come through a certain channel 90% of the time but you really want to explore some other channels it's really tough to motivate that person to go explore these other channels if they're not compensated for that effort so it's just really that balance and you know having somebody aligned with what their comp structure is for for the goals that you want to do if you want to go test the new channel because you're influencing a new strategy how are they going to be compensated for working in that channel as well nice thank you so much and Daniel you just asked what channel we're sharing slides in I believe that one of my colleagues has take that answer there for you let us know if you're still looking for that and if anyone else has any other questions now's your last chance well it's not really you can still ask them this black community last chance for a live answer but yeah Russell be hanging out in that slack channel for a little while after this anything that you didn't get answered you can ask there we'll make sure to include the slides there so if any other questions come up how about afterwards if people kind of take the slides have a look and then they've got more questions for you maybe in the days to come how can people reach out to you how can they learn more yeah for sure so I definitely connect me on LinkedIn I've got a couple other presentations on my LinkedIn profile you go take a look at target around earlier stage you know how to create pitch books or pitch decks and pipeline velocity and stuff like that so happy to share some other content there so reach out on LinkedIn and you know excited to be part of the part of the session here we go today nice well thank you so much rest there was so much great content there I'm looking forward to kind of scrolling through those slides again myself I think there's definitely a time to take in super super valuable thank you so much for for being a keynote for us and thank you to all the attendees who were in this talk for those of you that are signed up for the next one the next talk is going to be on the next normal attract talent in a postcode world becomes even harder I'm sure that's something that we can all kind of we feel all resonates right now so that's gonna be with Nick and I'm actually not sure how to pronounce his last name Colin I'm gonna defer to you on that one yeah put me on the spot I don't know either I'm gonna guest krama des okay I'm guaranteed ask so we'll get make fun of me for my terrible pronunciation I'm perfect yeah so you guys are if you're signed up for that you can check your emails for the link to that room if you're watching on twitch just hang out and we'll be chatting to Nick in just a couple of minutes here thanks again rest thanks Sarah thanks Colin thanks Russ great seeing you again buddy yeah your team you take care guys right on Cheers [Music]