Proven Leadership Frameworks for a High-Performing Sales Team with Databricks' VP of Sales

All right, thank you very much for that introduction. Uh, Heather Akuiabo, I run mid-market and commercial sales at Databricks in the Americas, and I'm excited to talk to you today, uh, about how, uh, over the last 4 and a half years I've been working on growing, uh, our team by 100% year over year. Really, this is an effort that requires a tremendous amount of execution, and it's one of those things where I'm happy to share with you what it is we're working on inside of Databricks. And if I could get to the next slide, please. Yeah, so my belief is that in order to continuously successfully execute, you're going to need some strong frameworks that you're going to lean on and iterate against year over year. So I'm hoping to share with you a couple of these frameworks that I've leaned on to help scale the business. I think these can be scaled down to no matter what size your sales team is. And looking forward to sharing it with you. So the first thing that I often lean on is the Databricks company values. So these are, these are very customized to Databricks. They are absolutely ones that we eat, sleep, and breathe, and in alignment with our mission, which is around data and AI and a uniform platform for practitioners, and our goals, which are changing every single year. But we lean on these company values Teamwork makes the dream work. Customer and partner obsession. Own it and let the data decide. And it kind of dictates almost everything that we do. And these frameworks that I'm going to talk about are deeply rooted in these company values. And I think, you know, these values are whatever they may be at your company. They really live when, as a sales leader and as a leadership team, we bring them to life. So, With that in mind, I'll move on to the first framework here. And culture is one of those things that it evolves, you know, it's really tough to pin down, but it's actually a really critical part of how you're going to scale your organization. What I have right here is a word cloud that was recently created from about 20 cross-functional business partners from within the Databricks team. And as you can see, teamwork is in there, dedicated, that's, close to ownership, leadership, leaders, scrappy, driven. These are beliefs that we have within the mid-market and commercial sales team. So this example here is one very recently where I went out to cross-functional business partners and said, okay, can you tell me, give me 3 words that you use to describe my team? You work with my team all the time. So help me understand, what is my, culture from an outside perspective. I've also done this exercise with just leaders, you know, writing words on a Post-it and saying, how do we want to be defined? If we were going to curate our own culture within our team, what would be the hallmarks of that? And I'm looking for alignment between how we're perceived outside and how we're wanting ourselves to perceive. Be perceived. And then lastly, to really give ownership to the, the account executives as well. You know, I often do the similar exercise with them. You know, we might have them go to a whiteboard and write down, what is it that you want the culture to be known for? How is it that you really want others to think about you? And what do you want to look back on your time on this team and at this company? What do you want to uses the reflection. And so I think culture is something that, you know, is incredibly important to be constantly aware of and be curating. And there's these really simple ways to do it and really kind of get the visual and have the impact and really own the culture as opposed to just letting it organically happen. The second framework that I wanted to share with you today is probably what I would consider the most important as you think about building a sales team and then scaling it over time. I don't think a scorecard is incredibly unique. It's not something that I'm doing that's, you know, special. What, what is, I think, special is that we're very data-driven around it. And we own what it is that we're putting into the scorecard. So what you can see here are the characteristics that we are looking for when we're doing our phone conversations or when we're doing in-person interviews. And we have a weighting for each one of these. And as an interview is occurring, different people on the panel are given very specific characteristics to dive into and to really understand at a deeper and deeper level. And then they give a rating, 1 to 5. We multiply that by the weighting, and you get an output of a score. And that is— that's interesting in and of itself. But then what we're also doing is we're taking that score, and we're comparing it to our top performers, where we've also, you know, we've obviously interviewed them and hired them as well. And so we're constantly looking to see, how are we doing in raising the bar around the AEs that we're bringing on? And then regularly we come back as a leadership team and as an interview team, and we say, do we have this right? I'll give an example of something that has modified over the last couple of years, and that is really around big data selling experience. You know, a couple years ago you had to already know the ecosystem in order to be good at it, but as we've grown as a company, it's not actually as huge of a percentage as it was a couple years ago. And so we can shift our our percentage weighting to other areas that might matter a little bit more. And then we do that check to see, well, how, how are the current interviewees doing against the top performers when they were interviewing? And we're constantly iterating, owning this, being as data-driven as we can in a process that can be very subjective sometimes. And we use this as a way to keep ourselves accountable. And make sure that we're constantly doing the best that we can. The reason why I think this is the most important is because this is where I probably spend most of my time outside of time talking with customers and partners. And in our hiring process, you have a couple in-person 30 to 45-minute phone conversations, and then our final stage is a presentation and a mock call. And this presentation and mock call is a tremendous investment of time from my leadership team. It's almost a half a day of collective time. And to me, that's a very expensive meeting. And I can't have expensive meetings with my team if we're not aligned on what good looks like and we're not really truly testing to make sure we're bringing the best people onto the team. So I, I think this piece in particular has like a 10x return on getting your team aligned on what good looks like, making sure that you're constantly evaluating and iterating and adapting for what your business needs at any given point in time. Okay, so we've got these rockstar AEs on the team, and you know, one of the first questions that they ask is, tell me, what are the best AEs doing? And so in order to really understand and again, be data-driven, I worked with my sales performance team to identify what we call the ideal AE profile. And if you can move to the next slide, please. This is essentially looking back and reverse engineering what the best people on the team are doing on a 6-month basis in order to overachieve on their targets. So you could see a consistent record of perform— record Consistent overachievement is one of the key things we're looking for. But then as soon as somebody comes into Databricks, we're wanting to give them the keys to the castle and say, okay, if you want to be an overachiever here, here's the way that you manage yourself. And again, this is giving that ownership to the account executives specifically to say, these are the kinds of activities that you're going to be wanting to hold yourself accountable to. There are conversion rates, their activities, and you can see we've broken it down to different stages of the customer lifecycle. The first time we did this project, we actually only had 4 account executives. We really just took the cream of the crop. The second iteration of this, as you can see, we had 13 AEs on the team that we were building this model around, and we get very— we can get even more specific. And the way that we're doing this is we're incorporating a variety of different data sources. We're looking at Salesforce data. We use Outreach and Gong in our tech stack. And then we're also scraping calendar data to make sure that we're really as accountable as we can be to how account executives are spending their time. And like I said, we're reverse engineering, and then we're building this all into a dashboard so that we can then inspect and see how people are doing on a weekly and monthly basis against these ideal targets. And really, like I said, we're giving them the, the keys to say, on a quantitative basis, this is what you should be expecting yourself to do in order to overachieve on your number. And our goal is to have, you know, 100% at or above their quota. Obviously, it doesn't necessarily address what's going on in the qualitative side of their business. So if we could actually go one more slide, I wanted to take this one level deeper. So we come, because we're doing calendar scraping, we're also able to give them really specific guidance on exactly how much time they should be spending with the meetings that they're having. Again, you know, when you've got, at this point, there's a team of nearly 70 account executives, you're constantly trying to figure out how do we optimize for time and performance. And so with this, we're saying this is what the best people are doing. And as you can see, it's very disproportionately time spent on new prospects. And that is completely okay with me, because for us to grow 100% year over year, we're constantly adding new customers to our account base. 30% with customers, right? We've got our customer obsession, and 15% of the time with partners. And so really being specific and then doing the look back regularly and having this be a conversation piece in one-on-ones is super valuable to help AEs, managers, and myself at a more macro level know where we can go in and make adjustments to help on the qualitative side. And like I said, we refresh this and we, you know, if we get new data or we think there's something that's relevant to pull in and look at, we're going to work together with that sales performance team and figure out how do we tweak this. And we can— I plan to continue tweaking this every 6 months in order to really have my finger on the pulse. Okay, so we've got all this qualitative data on what you should be doing, but how do you get in— sorry, you've got quantitative data. How do you get into the qualitative data? And there's a Brené Brown quote that I really love. And it is— the quote goes like this: to be clear is to be kind, to be unclear is to be unkind. And, you know, a high-performing sales organization can be very kind. Obviously, we're setting expectations on what we want from activities, but then we're constantly building structure into our quarterly cadence on what we're going to be inspecting and where we're going to get the, the foundation of our collective execution success. So every quarter, I'm getting the leadership team together. And we're talking through how did we do last quarter? What are we planning to do next quarter? And we're doing a little bit of enablement for ourselves. We're then going to take that to the account executive team. And we're going to say, okay, we're usually it's a day and a half or 2 days, ideally, ideally in person, but we've done them virtually as well. And you— we're going to focus heavily on enablement. Because in the leadership conversation, we've figured out where the gaps are. Where are our gaps on our ability to execute better and better? And so then we're going to turn that to the account executives, and we're going to do enablement and training around that. Interspersed, we're also doing a lot of enablement around all hands. You know, it's a very dynamic industry. Databricks is a very dynamic company. There's a lot of different things that the team could focus on. But bringing it back to time, we're trying to get them focused on the most important things. We've got forecast meetings that are happening on a weekly cadence. And everybody knows those forecast meetings are really critical for them to communicate their building blocks to the business. But where we really get into quality at an account executive level is doing their territory reviews, and a gap-to-goal analysis. So in the beginning of the quarter, we're going to do a territory review. Midway through, if, uh, if there is a gap, we're going to do a gap-to-goal analysis, and we're going to develop the plan on how to fill the gap so everybody is very clear on exactly what's needed to execute well. If somebody is over their expected target, then they get a stretch goal, and that's really building a plan for being one of those ideal AEs. And then continuously going on throughout all of this, I was even on one this morning, is a deal review. And we will definitely do a deal review for every deal that has been committed by the account executive. That's them saying this deal is going to come in. So we'll inspect that and make sure that they have the full team behind them. Leaning on the teamwork makes the dream work. And then we'll also do later-stage deal reviews. If somebody's new to the team, we might give them a little extra deal review. We'll look at everything. So it's really customized to success of the individual, and really focused on quality and enablement and helping them execute the best that they can. So, you know, and we have thresholds on where we expect deal reviews to happen, no matter what. And AEs know that this is to be expected, that all commit deals and a deal over a certain dollar amount is going to get a deal review. There's a template, there's a template for the territory review, there's a template for QBRs. And so this is, this is all something where I think, again, back to the Brené Brown quote, to be clear is to be kind. It's all about setting expectations and then wash, rinse, repeat 4 times a year so that they know exactly how to build for success. And they can really own that themselves as much as anything. And then lastly, you got to celebrate, right? If your team's doing incredibly well, it's super important to have celebrations. So we have email win wires that actually go out to the whole company. That's awesome. But we like to get a little funky on mid-market commercial. And we actually have a Slack channel just called mid-market commercial wins. And that's where we bring in a lot of the team members that are also contributing to the deals. This could be on the legal side, this could be on sales operations, this could be in our solutions architect team. So this is not just a place where, you know, the AE is celebrated. We're celebrating the whole team and everybody who has contributed to the deal happening overall. That's what you can see on the bottom part there. And I've had people tell me this is their favorite Slack channel because it's literally only goodness. And high fives and celebrations across the board. I'm also using it as a little bit of a, a change agent, if you could say. So we're doing a change in our business, moving from focusing on signed contracts to what is going on on the customer's usage of the platform or their consumption. And again, being customer obsessed, They want to use the platform. So how are we helping them do that? And so we've started introducing automated alerts. Sorry, if you could go back one more time. Okay. So automated alerts that bring broad exposure to everybody that a milestone has been reached within a customer account. And then we're beginning to start to celebrate those wins as well. That's been a recent innovation that's really brought a lot more interest into what is going on inside the customer base and not just around signed contracts. Okay, and so one of the things, you know, the 3 takeaways that I would say for my presentation today is, you know, high growth, high performing sales team, you got to have some frameworks. Our values at Databricks are the guiding star. They're the underpinnings of these frameworks. And, you know, these frameworks can be adapted to the values that you have at your company as well. You know, the team develops and iterates. So I work with the sales performance team, I work with my management team extensively on making sure that we are all very happy with how these frameworks are being executed. And we're open to adjusting and adapting as the conditions change, as we grow, and maybe something just doesn't work anymore. And so we're gonna, we're gonna swap it out and find something to achieve the same goal. And then I really believe repeatable account executive success comes from Good clarity, both data-driven and qualitative, and then structure and giving them a real clear understanding of what's going to be expected from them and how they can be successful within that framework. Thank you very, very much. Those are my prepared remarks. If you have any questions, happy to take some. Okay, this is a quiet group. Okay, here we go. Now I'm getting it. Okay. So the first question is, how does Databricks internally share and communicate your values so they're top of mind for teams? Oh, great question. You know, we definitely tie it to celebrations. So we have a quarterly values in action award, and that's at the company level. Ali Ghodsi, our CEO, and Amy Reichenater, our chief CRO— sorry, chief HR officer— they collect submissions from every business unit in the company, and we regularly celebrate those. We talk about our values quite regularly as well. So teamwork makes the dream work is one of the absolute favorite ones on the sales team, you know, so that's why we celebrate it in so many different ways. And we give tons of shoutouts in a wide variety of different manners to people who are really demonstrating teamwork makes the dream work. What— so next question is, what's the most important KPI to track for a high-performing sales team? You know, I— there's a whole lot of important KPIs. But I think understanding your pipeline coverage ratio, what you need in order to hit your targets, and what your close rates are against that pipeline amount is actually, you know, pretty fundamental. So we, we actually inspect our pipeline coverage ratios every week. And we are working to improve. If we're hitting the target, that's great. If we're above the target, that's a strong indicator that there's going to be over-success. And if there's a gap, we often will do a spiff or something to motivate the SDR and the account executive team to do extra effort around pipeline building. Great question. Okay. What metric— metrics or data is shared across your quarterly leadership QBR versus your account executive QBR versus all hands. Databricks is a company that's pretty big on transparency. So we are fairly consistent in what we're sharing across the board. There's not a lot of difference. Because it is important that, you know, tying back to the vision, mission, values, and goals, everybody needs to know what the high-level goals are. And they need to know how we're tracking against them. They need to own their piece in helping them be achieved. And so we're, we're pretty consistent across the board. The biggest thing is that, you know, we, we will probably get a little bit more customized to the team that we're presenting to. But whether it's in a company all-hands, a sales all-hands, a QBR, or a territory plan, you know, we're, we're talking about all the high-level metrics across the board. So we don't really filter it down. Next question is, do you involve other teams, leaders, or anyone who wants to join in your QBR or pipeline review meetings? Great question. Yes, my key business partners are the two other customer-facing business units, our field engineering team and our customer success team. And we invite everyone from field engineering and everyone from the customer success team to join our quarterly business reviews. We need to have tremendous alignment and teamwork across those three groups. And then we also have other teams that will attend as well. Other overlay sales teams, marketing, demand generation, sometimes product. Oftentimes we have product actually presenting to us. But we have just a lot of different teams that are interested in hearing what we're talking about in the QBR, or they're actually presenting to the team so that we can have a lot of cross-directional conversations in those QBRs. And just another point in the QBR, you know, it's heavily enablement and training focused, but it's a conversation. And sometimes it's a conversation with 60 people, but that's okay. And it gets a little messy. It's not always pretty. We are looking for the challenges so that we can solve the challenges as a team. We're looking for like the absolute rockstar breakout performances so that we can celebrate and learn from those. And we talk about things that didn't work as well. And so it's all just to, you know, really get us all working together as a team and learning from each other as much as possible. Okay, next question. How do you measure and then handle when an AE is not quite a good fit? Yes, this is why we spend so much time making sure that we've got a good fit to begin with and why that scorecard is hugely important. The— I mean, it's the worst part of the job in my mind is when it's not a good fit. Ideally, you can come to a mutual agreement and, you know, it's a really positive experience on both sides. But what we're doing along the way is we're, we're being as clear as we can be with what's expected. And if somebody is not meeting expectations, we're going to work to get them the help that they need in order to meet expectations. And then if that's still not a fit, then, you know, we do find ways to part ways. Again, I'm sure there are statistics on how expensive it is to make a mis-hire. That's why we focus so heavily on that AE scorecard and really making sure that the hiring panel, which on my team is about 4 to 5 people, that hiring panel really has a good idea of what good looks like. Okay. So, next question is, do you have a framework you utilize to manage internal change as you continue to improve and refine your processes? Oh, that's a good one. Not one that's in my tool bag quite yet. You know, a lot of that is handled through manager meetings And, you know, really focusing in on how are we going to communicate change, what's the rationale behind the change. Like, there's always the what, but if you're not effectively communicating the why a change is happening, then, you know, the team's not going to get behind you. But if they understand the why, and they understand how it ties back to the values, the mission and goals of the company, then it's actually not as hard as as you think it's going to be often. And again, that, that transparency, regular communication, being comfortable handling challenging conversations, that makes a lot of change management a lot easier. And then here we go. What's the difference between a QBR and an all-hands? Great question. So an all-hands is going to be, you know, more of like an hour-long meeting. And we're doing them every other week. Sometimes people do them every month. And it's really just the opportunity to get together and update, do a spot update. In a QBR, we are much more deeply focused on a broad amount of enablement. We're going to do some breakout sessions. We're going to do team building. We're going to go out and we're going to have fun and get to know each other on a personal level. And so that's why we're flying people into, you know, a city and really having that person-to-person connection. You know, the, the value of really trusting and knowing the people that you're working with, it, it just helps things move much more smoothly. And that trust building doesn't come when you're only focused on the business itself. I'm a big believer, and you got to have fun. We give out awards in these QBRs as well, and they're, they're pretty big productions. So there's what the all hands is more like continuous regular communication and maybe a little bit of light, light enablement, but the QBR is a quarterly deep dive. Hopefully that answers your question.