From Sales & Marketing Strategy to Successful Execution: Highspot VP, Revenue Strategy Haley Katsman

session, and she will be discussing Turn Your Strategy Into Action: The Key to Turning Sales and Marketing Strategy into Successful Execution. Take it away, Hailey.

Hi, thank you so much. My name is Hailey Katzman. I'm so excited to be with you all here at SaaStr Scale. I'm really excited to talk to you today about turning your business strategies into action. But first, just to kind of introduce myself and tell you a little bit about who I am. I'm the Vice President of Revenue Strategy at Highspot. We are the leading sales enablement platform. And in my role at Revenue Strategy, I lead our operations, analytics, and enablement teams internally at Highspot. Have a team of about 45 people. And we are a center of excellence that partners with all of our customer-facing teams, from marketing to account executives to services, to really do a lot of what I'm going to talk to you about here today. How do we take our strategy and really turn that into action, ultimately to grow revenue and scale our business? So let's go ahead and dive in. And I think they mentioned this as well, but please, please, please feel free to ask questions, put them in the chat. We'll be monitoring them. I'm happy to answer any questions as we're going through the session. At the end, I'll also leave a couple of minutes for Q&A. Happy to answer any questions around this. Alright. So one of the first things that I wanted to start out with is the positives, some positive things that we're going to talk about here. And what I'm really going to focus in on is this concept of consistent execution. And companies that really are able to take their key business strategies and turn them into action through consistent execution see some massive uplifts in key metrics of their business. And these are some of the metrics that really matter. So they're saying an increase of about 19% of their reps that are hitting quota. One of the things that we talk a lot about is participation rate. How many of your reps, what percent of your reps are hitting attainment, that are actually hitting quota? A lot of companies will plan for something like 70 on 70% of their reps hitting quota. This really does move the needle from a revenue standpoint. 12% increase in customer satisfaction, critically important, and an 8% higher win rate, which I think we all know, you know, even a small, small uplift in points and win rate really can have a monumental impact on revenue. So I mentioned that I'm going to be talking about consistent execution. And when we think about the, those big strategies that you're thinking about to really grow your business, Most of the times, you know, whether it's a boardroom conversation or it's a leadership conversation, you know, you sit down, I know a lot of people are thinking about FY23 planning, hopefully you're well into that going into next year. But you're really thinking about what do we need to do as a business to grow revenue, to grow our customer base. And, you know, this could look like something like launching a new product, it could be that we want to really get our reps to be better at value selling. Maybe it's acquiring a new company. One of them, our recent customers that I was actually talking to, they had 5 things that they were really focusing in on. One was newly targeting the CFO persona. Another was value selling. Another was that they were rolling out a new sales methodology to really get their reps up-leveled in their skills of having those customer conversations. And they were launching a new product. So a lot of things that they were focusing in all at once. And one of the things that they actually did really, really well is that they brought their leadership team together and they got everyone on the same page. They prioritized those initiatives. They thought, okay, great, we're going to have a way to communicate these out to the team. We're even going to do something like maybe OKRs that ladder up to those top-level initiatives. But really getting crisp and clear across marketing, sales, services, customer about What are we prioritizing and how are we going to grow revenue? So you have a bunch of business strategies in place, and you want to go and execute them. The sad news that I'm going to tell you all is that 70% of initiatives fail. That's 7 out of 10. So in the case of the company that I just mentioned, that would be, you know, 3-ish of their initiatives would actually fail. You know, if you actually look, HBR, there's actually a really good article on it that we can share it after, but they talk about, you know, 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. An interesting, you know, figure to ponder. And where this number came from, McKinsey Research also suggests that 70% of change efforts fall short of desired results. And some of those— so some of those brilliant ideas around growing your business, growing revenue, whether it's again targeting a new persona, landing value selling, launching a new product. Very few of these ideas actually see the light of day. Why? It's because of that lack of ability to consistently execute with your internal teams. It might be a great idea with a customer, but you really have to have great effective change management at scale to be able to execute these things consistently. And so that's really what I want to dive into here today is How can you ensure that you are driving that consistent execution from that initial strategy of, hey, we want to launch a new product, or we want to target a new persona, all the way through to seeing that revenue number and the results of that strategy. So you're on the same page. Now what? What do you need to go and do? Well, interestingly, one of the things that I see oftentimes is that, again, It really comes down to driving that change management at scale. And it's the case that companies don't necessarily have a structured place or structured framework in place in order to take that strategy all the way from ideation through to execution. So what I'm going to talk a little bit about is providing you with an actual framework, with a process that you can follow, and some really concrete steps that you can take away from here today to drive that consistent execution of your top prioritized initiatives. Okay, so this is an eye chart here, but I'm going to walk you through it. Don't worry. So one of the things that I think a lot about in my role leading enablement at our own company is how do we really uplevel our enablement from just foundational programs like onboarding and, you know, SCO and different, you know, communication-type programs? How do we uplevel it to be strategic enablement? How do we really think about executing that company strategy, those priorities, those initiatives that we talked about, and really measure the results. It's really interesting, and a very popular Japanese proverb states that "Vision without action is a daydream, and action without vision is a nightmare." And you really need that firm business strategy or vision to achieve the desired results. Then you need action in order to actually make it happen, or nothing really will ever happen. So let's take a look over here at this left-hand side. This is all about the call to action. You really need to define what you want your reps to do. And that's where that action comes into place. So let's take an example of an initiative around value selling. Companies oftentimes will say, great, we want our reps to sell more value, we want them to really, really— excuse me. We really want them to be able to sell value, but they don't necessarily get specific enough about what they want their reps to go and do. What's the actual behavior? So with one customer that I was working with, I can actually remember the example. When we got down to the nitty-gritty of it, it was the case that in order to sell value, they needed to be able to get above the line. For those that maybe know from Skip Miller, above the line means basically executive-level engagement, as opposed to below the line, a more junior person within the organization. And they needed to be able to conduct really great discovery with that above-the-line executive in the organization in order to tie what their value was to their needs as a business. And they had to do that discovery. And that was a gap that the team was missing. So really the big initiative was value selling, but when they got down to it is that they needed to teach their reps to do discovery with executive, at the executive level of engagement. So that's that call to action. Then you move into consistent execution. Once you've actually written down what you want your reps to go and do, which by the way, most companies miss that step. They don't actually write down, what do we want our reps to go and do? Then you need to have that process to actually drive that consistent execution. If you think about some of the world-class leading sports teams or performing artists or anyone who's, you know, really winning in their space, think about like a world-class sports team. They have a team of coaches and trainers, and they have a set of plays that they run in every different scenario. They're really well equipped. They're also well trained, and they have a great coach that's helping them through that process, giving them feedback, and really being action-oriented, inspecting what's happening, what's working, what's not working to ultimately drive that behavior and make them better. And then, of course, another kind of quote from Winston Churchill, "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results," right? And all of us know that. But it's really, really important to understand, you know, is the strategy actually working? What's, what's not working? How do we iterate to ultimately win more market share faster and beat out the competition? Some results that you might be looking at are really going to depend on that initiative. So when we think about value selling, the customer that I was referencing, they were really looking to shorten their sales cycle and increase their ASP. And marketing was really looking to increase their conversion rates throughout the funnel by not having people kind of drop off because they didn't see the value of their platform. So you really want to be able to say, what's that first initiative? What's the action? How are we going to equip, train, coach our reps to do that? And what business outcomes are we going to drive? So I'm going to dive a little bit more into mastering these winning behaviors. And again, equip, train, coach. These are really all of the things that need to happen in order to take that strategy and turn it into consistent execution. One of the reasons that this is critically important is especially with the Great Recession and everything that's going on in today's environment, you have to invest in your sales team. Otherwise they'll leave, they'll go somewhere else and they'll, they're going to find a company that is investing in them. Just as a top athlete would. If they weren't being trained, if they weren't being equipped with the right plays, if they didn't have a fantastic coach, they're gonna go and leave to another team. They're gonna go and find somewhere that is going to invest in them. And as we all know, I think I actually read a recent study from Gartner that said that it can cost up to $200,000, up to $2 million to replace an enterprise account executive. So it's costly to lose reps. And so we wanna do what we can to uplevel their skills and make sure that if we're increasing their quota, because we believe that we can increase the ASP to do better value selling, that we're setting them up for success in order to be able to actually value sell. All right, so let's dive into equip, train, coach. Equip is all about writing down what good looks like. And I actually mean writing it down and putting it somewhere. Aligning sales plays. These are something that where you can actually write down your strategy, you can write down what the rep needs to know, say, show, and do in order to, in this case, value sell. It needs to be right in front of them where the action is taking place, just as, you know, a play would be for a sports team. And they need context on when and how to use it. So in that case of value selling, where we need to conduct executive-level discovery, what personas, what, what do great questions look like? What does a good conversation flow look like? When we look at train, I use, with our team, we'll talk about learn, practice, demonstrate. And this is all about building the confidence to execute. They need to learn about that senior level executive and what it means to value sell. They need to practice it so that they actually build that confidence and that when they do it with a customer, it's not the first time they've ever done it. And then demonstrating that they've actually done it successfully, call recordings, practices that they can say, hey, I did this with a customer. And here's what it looked like so that ultimately you can take those best practices and amplify them across the entire team, not with just one individual, but training is all about confidence. And then coaching. Manager enablement is one of my favorite topics. So another time I'm happy to dive into that with anyone, but this is really where the mastery happens. You can't just teach someone something, throw it over the wall, and then imagine that it's going to, you know, stick. You've got to enable the managers. You've got to make them accountable and you have to measure outcomes. Give them ways to inspect. Are the reps actually conducting that discovery with those above-the-line executives? Where are they documenting it? Is it going into Salesforce? Is it driving business outcomes? How do managers inspect it to make sure that it's actually happening? And then analyzing this. One of the things that I love here is that, you know, similar to forecasting, you know, all sales leaders, you know, we love, love forecasting, because it gives us leading indicators to if we're going to hit or miss the revenue number. This is the same thing here. You should have views into that equip, train, coach. Do your reps understand the strategy? Are they actually executing the strategy with customers? And is it driving the desired business results, those business outcomes? I can tell you right now that if none of your reps are looking at the play for that value selling initiative, they're not taking the training, they're not utilizing the content around that new value selling messaging, and they're not having those customer conversations, you're probably not gonna increase those ASPs and thus maybe not hit your revenue number. And so it's a leading indicator to understand if you're actually executing the strategy and thus if you're gonna hit that revenue number that your growth targets have been built off of. So the first step that I always advise is start with one thing and do it really well. Prioritization is not just about identifying what you want to do, it's about identifying what you also don't want to do. And getting really crisp and clear around what you want your reps to do, that specific call to action, getting them really good at it is the first step to driving consistent execution. And again, as a result, what you will see is that increase in reps hitting quota, because again, if you're calculating what their quota looks like based on your ability to achieve these new initiatives and hit those revenue targets, you have to give them that path to success. Increase in customer satisfaction, because in this case, you're actually selling value, and higher win rates, because, you know, the belief is that if you can better sell value or launch this new product or target a new persona, you're going to increase your win rates. So top takeaways: agree on your calls to action across the organization, across marketing, across sales, across services, and identify how you're going to share results. What business outcomes are you trying to drive? Create a system that can equip, train, coach your reps, and then have a way to analyze what's working, what's not working, is it driving business outcomes. And then 3 takeaway from here is start with something specific. Think of one of your top initiatives going into next year. And don't just say we're launching a new product, or we're doing value selling, or we're rolling out a methodology. Start with something specific that your teams can master and really identify if that is consistently happening across the funnel. And I promise you can move your team from having 80% of the revenue carried by 20% of your reps to having that more consistent execution across the team, which as a result means more predictability in hitting revenue. And it definitely means a happier, higher morale, better culture sales team because you have more reps hitting quota and all reps like hitting their quota. So I'll pause here and we can take a little bit of time for Q&A. All right, so I see a couple of questions here in the chat. You mentioned higher seller turnover. What do you recommend, or what you implemented for combating high buyer turnover? Well, I definitely think that when I think about executing your strategy, I think that one of the things that you want to look at is Why are you having that buyer turnover? And then stepping back to say, what strategies, what priorities, what initiatives can we implement to really change that buyer turnover? I think one of the things just, you know, as advice, I would say is looking at the top of your funnel and making sure that your ICP is targeting customers that you believe can have that longer lifetime value and that you can deliver value to them is a really critical thing. How long do you give a new sales play before determining whether it was a success, if it was simply not working? Ooh, great question. So it does really depend on the sales play, but usually I would say you want to give it at least 30 to 60 days at a minimum to really allow people that space to build the confidence and begin to actually execute against that play. But I like to measure results early and often. And so having a scorecard, which is something that we do, I can actually track performance over time. Are people looking at the play? Are people engaging with the content, with the training? Is it driving business outcomes? And then what we do is we look at our initiatives on a quarterly basis, but it might be different for you. I think the more important thing is aligning on when you're going to look at those metrics at the beginning across the team so that you're not doing it in a reactive way. And then the third question, how do you continue to help reps who may be continuing to struggle to to hit their quota after training and giving them a sales playbook and coaching you mentioned? Well, one of the best ways that I think is that people really like to see examples of what good looks like. And so a lot of times, if it's something new, like change management, sometimes reps have a hard time envisioning what, you know, what good looks like if they've never done it before. And so what I would really say is that in that initial rollout of a sales play or of an initiative, if you're able to do that learn, practice, demonstrate and capture that demonstrate component of people actually doing this, in the field with a customer, you can actually take that back and say 90 days later, go back and re-enable, reiterate, reinforce so that people can see those examples of what good looks like. The other piece that I would say is that manager enablement is critical. You really want the manager to be able to get into the weeds, spend time in those coaching scenarios, and helping the rep build the confidence, but then actually put it into action. The nice thing about this is that when you do have this, you're able to see if people are putting in the right inputs, i.e., if they're actually trying and they're doing the right things, and if it's just not working because they're not doing it well, versus did they even try in the first place. And a lot of companies without that visibility are kind of driving blind. When I'm doing kind of, you know, more of the performance management, if someone's putting in the effort and trying, I'm much more likely to want to spend time coaching with them than someone who's not putting in the effort and not trying and that's not hitting their quota. So it really helps When I think about our entire management team, it helps us focus in on how to get the highest coaching ROI. We want to spend time with the people that are putting in the effort because we know that there's an ability to improve as opposed to people who aren't reading the play, who aren't taking the training, who aren't, you know, working with their manager from a coaching standpoint. Awesome.

Thank you so much, Haley, for a great session. We have to jump to the next one, but we really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Thank you. Bye.