Lattice’s CRO on Lessons learned from Scaling a Rev Organization to $100M+

That's me. That's you. What's up, Saastr? Hello, I'm Deanie Mehta, CRO at Lattice. Very excited to be here to talk about a topic that is very close to my heart. People-first sales leadership. Sales is the lifeblood of startups and people are at the center of sales. Yet most of the conversation around growth, revenue, sales has nothing to do with people. So here I am, super excited to share some of my core lessons in scaling revenue organizations from the early days to $100 million+ in a people-first way. Let's get started. Before that, let me tell you how I got started on this journey. Never in a million years did I think I was going to be here taking the path that I've taken. I grew up in India, born and raised there. Shout out to my immigrants in the crowd. And I wasn't one of those kids who was like 7 years old, had a lemonade stand, knew I wanted to be in sales. Nope, that wasn't me. My folks sent me out to the US for school hoping I would become a doctor or an engineer. Too bad for them, wasn't in the cards for me. And I found my way to Silicon Valley, fell into tech, And for the first few years of my career, I fought sales. I don't want to be in sales. I got my idea about sales from movies like The Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross, and I was like, nope, not going to touch that. It's about pressure tactics and lying to people, and I want no part of that. There are also not a lot of people that look like me in sales. And so here I was early 20s, doing every other job in the go-to-market except for sales. And then I quickly realized that sales is this unique profession where your input, your activity is directly related to your output and your success. You can earn an acceleration of your career, you can earn acceleration of your income. And so I was like, that's going to draw me in. I was lucky enough to work at some great companies, and for the first few years it was hard. Because the barrier to entry in sales is low. But to be great, you have to be really good. Eventually found my way to the top of the leaderboard, as you can see, and was awesome. I was making more money than I'd ever made before, and I was like, this is great. Never thought I'd be making this money, being here on top of the leaderboard. And yet I felt empty alone. While I was successful, I felt isolated. I had friends that I onboarded with that were about to get fired, but I couldn't help them because they weren't on my team. I had friends that were struggling and we weren't allowed to share secrets because I was coached, we're not on the same team. And so here I was, 20-something-year-old, found my American dream, but didn't want to be in that environment where I felt the way I did. So I had two, I had two options. Either I leave sales, find something else, or take the best parts of sales and see if I can create a different type of org. And so that's where my journey with people-first sales leadership started. When you think about sales orgs, they are built on fear, on scarcity. One team against another team, one person against another person. And it drives short-term results. I've only worked with startups, so I get it. It drives short-term results. It just doesn't work long-term. It's not sustainable. Here's where it lands us. Here's the reality of sales orgs today. 27% annual turnover for salespeople. The average tenure of a rep in tech, 18 months. And it's not cheap. It costs us 150% of a rep salary to replace them, 4 months to find them. And while 50% of women are in frontline roles, only 26% are in sales leadership. And we all know the advantages of having women in sales leadership. You double-click into these metrics. Here's the top causes. These are all of the things I felt Didn't feel connected to my work, wasn't happy with the culture. Work-life balance didn't exist. I didn't know what's next for me besides close bigger deals and have a bigger commission check. So I just didn't feel connected. I know what some of you are thinking right now. I know it. I see you skeptics in the room. You're like, this is great, Dini. People first, values driven. They don't drive results. You can't get salespeople to care about anything else except for their commission. They're coin-operated. Who's used that term before? Empathetic sales leaders are great, but they're just a hard group to please. They do great for culture, but they're not great for performance. Let me show you some numbers to change your mind. This playbook that we're going to walk through has driven 33x growth in a 48-month period. In a sales-led motion. That's your triple, triple, double, double, double. It's, it's— we've gone from 7 to 150 employees with a 90% plus engagement score and driving 100% quota attainment year after year. 41% of our new roles are filled through internal promotions. We have 50% women in sales leadership. We've been, we've been awarded the National Stevie Sales Team of the Year Award. There's 12,000 organizations that apply for this, and we've been— we won this last year, and we're nominated the best, best place for sales reps to work by RepView, which is the Glassdoor for sales orgs. And my favorite stat of all, less than 3% voluntary attrition over 4 years. I'm so proud and privileged that the team is spending year 4, year 5 in the same company helping us build and scale. Hopefully I have your attention now. So let's get, let's get into it. What does meaningful work mean? There's 3 things that make up meaningful work: growth, purpose, and community. All of them are important, and I'm going to walk through some 7 lessons that are built on that foundation. Growth, purpose, community. Whoa. High wind days. Lesson number 1, your sales culture, not your sales plan. Your sales culture starts with your annual planning process. This is what you do with you when you sit down with your CFO, your finance team. Here are 4 tactical things. That you need to think through. Number 1, sequence your support and management hires before your capacity-based roles. This is a classic trap. You spend all your planning cycles talking about top-down, bottoms-up. How much quota do I need? What quota capacity do I need on the street? How much is ramping quota? All important stuff. But if you don't have enablement, operations, HRBPs, managers in seat, for reasonable ratios, none of that matters. You're setting yourself up to fail. So start with your infrastructure hires first. Two, the shape of your business is gonna change every year. When you do planning, you have some core assumptions around your win rates, your new hire ramps, your sales cycle lengths. And one of the classic traps is like you set the plan on Jan 1 and you forget about it. You keep hiring based on the plan, even though the assumptions weren't right in the beginning. Once you get to operating, the spreadsheet may look different. This is especially important if you're an inbound business where you wanna avoid the trap of overhiring. And so create a cadence with your finance team to unlock new hires so you don't accidentally overhire. This is an obvious one. Your comp plan is your not-so-secret way to drive the right values and the right focus for your team. I'm a huge fan of team quotas. Early first few years of your sales org, put people on a team quota. It goes against traditional thinking, but it works. It gets people thinking not just about how they can perform for their own role, but how they can help the company. Even today at Lattice, a big portion of our management team has some portion of their variable comp attached to the global number. Because it doesn't matter if we do well and the company's not doing well. We need both. Another one that goes against traditional advice. Typically you're building plans off of 70%, 80% attainment because you wanna de-risk the plan. Build for 95%, 100% rep attainment because that creates a culture of winning. You're gonna build a foundation where crushing numbers, doing 100% is the norm. That is what we expect from each other. Create that culture of winning. Start with 100% attainment. All right, now you have your plan. Lesson number 2, you've gotta hire the team because the team you build is the company you build. It is critical to get the right people in place. Here's some hiring trap patterns. We need to hire from our biggest competitor because they obviously already know this space. They know what they're doing. We need to hire. They need to have SaaS experience. I hear this all the time. They need to have worked at one of the big tech companies because they've already been trained by some of the best of the best. I don't have resources to train them, right? Wrong. I'm going to tell you my framework for hiring salespeople at the different stages. When you're first entering the market, what you want is generalists, people that are entrepreneurial, people that are resourceful, people that'll figure it out, people that are creative and curious. Don't worry about what's on their resume. Don't worry about their functional experience. You just want to set the right expectations around what this role is going to look like. All right, now you've got some deals coming in, you've got some repeatability. You're scaling. Uh, what do you hire for now? This is your first cohort of the sales team. They're going to set the foundation of your future culture. You still want generalists that can specialize as you learn more about the business, the market, your customer segments. You want people that are coachable and caring, people that can work cross-functionally. Here's where you can start layering on some of the functional fifth pieces like state-specific experience or deal-size experience, motion experience like inbound or outbound. And then the final stage is this is where you've got multiple teams, you've got multiple managers, regions, and you hire specialists. Now you know what works for your business, for your market, for your specific team. And so take those learnings and then hire the specialists that you need. Here's where you can also layer in persona-specific experience. Fun fact, my first 20 hires at Lattice hadn't sold to HR, me including. And this like blew every recruiting agency's mind. They're like, that's not your must-have HR track? Nope, it's not. It forced us to innovate because we weren't tied down by what can be done. And so think outside the box. Don't pattern match resumes. Higher for your values, higher for your mission. All right, you've got the team. What's next? You've got to set the right tone. We appreciate effort but celebrate results. This is one of my operating principles for my team. When I first started in sales, my perception of the sales culture, an outsider, outsider just observing, was it was about flashy parties. President's Club, that was this exclusive thing that some people got to go to. People got fired privately and then we'd find out about it 3 days later. And the weirdest part was the shadow culture. We'd go to a team meeting, manager would say, we're doing this thing, X, Y, Z. We'd all say, yep, we'll do it. We leave the meeting and then we do the exact opposite. And everyone knew about this. The manager was okay with it. The reps knew about this. Managers would share specific information with specific people. It was inconsistent and felt unfair. I don't wanna be part of that. I think the best teams are built on trust. Trust is the foundation of a great team. And how do you create trust? You create trust through psychological safety. That's on us as leaders to create space for different opinions, create space in your meetings where people can challenge the status quo, because when you do that, you drive team engagement. And once people are bought in, you have accountability. We are accountable to the business. The business is accountable to us. We're all accountable to each other. And one way to drive accountability is transparency of expectations. So this is a priority tree for one of our roles. And we publish this saying your ultimate goal is to drive quota attainment. But if you're not hitting quota, I care about how much pipeline you've got. If you don't have enough pipeline, then I care about how many new opportunities you're adding, how many meetings you're having. But if you're getting to your quota without the map that we've published, say we, we tell you you need 7 opportunities to get to your quota, but you get there by 2 opportunities. Great. If you hit your quota in 1 hour a day and take the rest of the day to go to the pool, awesome. I wanna treat you as an adult because you're accountable to the business. Alright, you've set the tone, what's next? The biggest thing we sell is the fact that we care. This is also something my team probably hears weekly and is sick of it. But there's always a different product out there with better features. There's always a different platform that's ahead of you, that's got better branding, better resources. People buy because they feel cared for. And how do you get your sales team to care? By caring about them. If you care about your people, your people will take care of business. How do we do this? I'll share 5 things we do, but it's truly in everything we do. Number 1, every meeting starts with celebrating our people. Life events, work anniversaries, birthdays. We celebrate our people first before we get to business. Annual kickoffs, monthly all hands. There'll never be a department update or a roadmap review. Nope, not gonna do that. We'll set up a different time to do that. This time is purely for us to collaborate, connect, and celebrate. It's time to get inspired by the work we're doing and the work we're about to do. We have spiffs like every other sales org, but our spiffs are also baked in around our values. How many times are you asking for feedback with the values attached? How many times are you giving feedback with values attached? You're going to win a spiff off of that. And enablement is your secret weapon to truly create this experience for your field teams. Don't sleep on it. They can be your force multiplier. They can be an extension of your management team. Don't think of enablement as your check-the-box training team. They are critical if you're in hypergrowth. Hire for enablement early. Another reality of sales, it is a hard job. It is the most accountable, with the most amount of rejection, and it never stops. This has led to a culture of burnout. 63% of salespeople feel like they're burnt out. And guess what they do to get away from burnout? They switch jobs. Remember that 18-month turnover in tech? This is what it's getting us to. I remember working at companies with unlimited PTO, on PTO, working on a deal, 'cause guess what? I got a quota when I go back. If I don't work, it's gonna hurt me next month. I know people know this feeling. We all work. It's the running joke in salespeople. We all work on vacation. Our spouses get it. Our partners get it. It's the nature of the game. Give your team the gift of quota relief. We give our team 1 month quota relief every year. Okay, I know some of you are thinking, Dini, I'm a startup. I already don't have enough quota capacity. I can't be giving someone quota relief. I've been doing this for 3 years and it has had no negative business impact. And if anything, it gets your team happier, more engaged, and staying with your company for much longer. Give the gift of quota relief to your teams. Number 5, obsessed with retention. Another way to show care for your team. Your startup starts doing well, you start attracting some good talent, you have a recruiting team now. You've got hiring processes, you've got employer brand, awesome. Guess what you forgot? The team that got you there. Invest in your people. Don't stop at hiring and onboarding them. Continue investing in their growth. If you can align your team's growth with the company's growth, they become your foundation for scale. Obsessed with retention. I remember when I was in sales, I was like, performance reviews are such a waste of time. I got a quota. I know how I'm doing every day, every week, every month. Why do I need this performance review? But if you do, if you connect your employees' life goals with their core competencies in their role, with growth areas that actually tactically help them in their day-to-day, that's when you see real connection to performance reviews. So have all three. What do you want to be in 5 years? All right, how do I help you over the next couple years in your role And then what can we work on together over the next 2 months to get you to the next promotion? All 3 layers matter. Don't do just one generic competencies performance reviews. That's not gonna cut it. You need all 3. And this is good for your team. I believe that deeply, but it's also good for business. And here's a couple of examples. Here's Haley. She started off as a BDR. She's a sales leader today on the team. Here's Libby, also started off as a BDR and she's on our enablement team today. Here's Fiona, also started off as a BDR and she's helping us build and launch and scale our EMEA office. Here's Joe, started off as an AE and he's running our technology partnerships team. And I've got 40 other examples like this. Invest in your people. They are your foundation for scaling. Number 6. Another way to show care for your team is by raising the bar. Coach people to their potential, not where they are today. That is your job as a leader. And performance management is a key pillar in making sure you're driving this culture of accountability and showing care for your team. How do you start? You need to have transparent expectations for all roles. We publish a chart like this. This is for one of our AE teams where if you're 90% plus on your attainment, green zone, you're promotion eligible. You're 70 to 90%, we can do better. Under 70%, we've got some work to do. And what's awesome about this is yes, it drives transparency, but you create a culture of care across your org, where now teammates in the green zone are helping people in the red zone. That doesn't happen in most sales orgs. The goal of a performance management program is to demystify the steps. It's not this scary thing that HR and managers do. No. And here are my 3 facts or 3 rules of how I think about performance management. Number 1, lead with facts, not fear. Normalize constructive conversations. We're all works in progress. So make that a normal part of the conversation. Performance success plans, not improvement plans. Performance success plans should be executed just like growth plans. It's the same idea. It's an investment in your team. It's not a way to manage them out. It's an investment in their growth. If somebody doesn't want to be here, great. We don't need to go through a plan. And then finally, all of this only works if you have deep leadership accountability. If someone doesn't work out on your team and that happens— wrong company, life stage, wrong role, it happens. But when that happens, it's not just on that person. It's on that person, on their manager, on their manager's manager, on their director, on their VP, on me. All of us had a part to play to make this person successful. And if that didn't happen, it's on all of us. That's got to be a core part. All right. My final lesson. When you think about sales or when you think about revenue, you think about sales, or you may think about sales and marketing, or you may think about sales, marketing, and growth if you're a product-led company. Or go-to-market. Revenue is a team sport and the team is the company, not your go-to-market org, not your sales org, not your marketing org. It is truly a company sport. When product and engineering does their part and marketing does their part and CX does theirs, G&A helps us scale, sales can do their part. And not only is this good for your teams, but this is good for the company because it drives sustainable growth. And revenue leaders, this is on us. When things are going well, you're crushing quota quarter after quarter, your numbers, you're just destroying them. Amazing. Be grateful. Say thanks to your product leader for delivering an amazing product. Say thank you to your marketing person. Be grateful. When things aren't going well, don't point fingers. Be graceful. This is your This is your opportunity to build the bridge. We're not competing with each other. It's not one team against another. We're in the company together. We're on the same team. Build a culture of winning together. Since I'm a salesperson at heart, I have to recap. Gotta do key takeaways. It's just wired in me. And so here are my top, top takeaways here. Yes, strategy, product, operational excellence, everything's important. But if you don't have the right people, none of it matters. You've got to start there. I think this is working. Invest in your existing team's growth before focusing on bringing in new members. Don't stop at onboarding. Don't assume just because they have goals and they're making money, isn't that enough? No. Connect their growth to the company's growth. Accountability and trust go hand in hand. It's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. What are you tolerating? And my favorite formula for growth: people over pipeline. It drives revenue. I know it. I've seen it. I've seen the results from it up close and personal. I've been part of these orgs. They're fun to be part of. I deeply believe people-first sales leadership is the future. And so I hope as I wrap this presentation, you all take something from this and apply it to your companies, bring it to your environments, make it work for you. Let's change sales orgs from this culture of scarcity and fear to let's bring in a culture of abundance. Where people are cheering each other on, working together, winning together. Because as Lizzo said, it's about damn time. Thanks, y'all. It's been so fun. Come find me. I'm Dini Mehta. Find me on LinkedIn. Find me on Twitter. Thank you.