STEP towards inside sales during a pandemic with BrowserStack Director of Global Sales Tariq Ahmad

muted while you aren't speaking, but to really be engaged with the conversation. There's a few ways to join the conversation throughout the session. Simply adding a comment into the chat box works great. Being able to raise the hand button within the Zoom settings at the bottom of your screen works as well. And last but surely not least, you're available to unmute yourself and speak to the group with your questions and thoughts. This session will be recorded and we thank you for joining us. I'll pass it over to you now, Tariq. Thanks for having us.

Thanks, thanks, Lindsay, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are in the world. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Tariq Ahmad. I'm the director for global sales at a company in, uh, who started in India. We are a 9-year-old organization. Interestingly, we are one of those startups which have been profitable since day one. So BrowserStack currently has approximately more than 500-odd employees across offices in San Francisco, New York, Dublin, and India. We are in the testing space where we actually help testers get better. So that's a little bit on the introduction. What we're going to talk about today is— I was actually a field sales guy. I worked at IBM for a very large amount of time in the last 10 years, as well as LinkedIn. So I've done a little bit of SaaS, and I've done a lot of services sales as well. I think at IBM, I was running a business unit which actually contributed a quarter of a billion dollars, and at LinkedIn, it was a multi-million dollar business as well. Currently, I'm building a global insight sales team at BrowserStack. We actually hired more than 100 people in the last 3 months itself during COVID and this is with virtual onboarding from premier B-schools. In India itself. So we've actually one of the few companies who've hired aggressively and we continue to do so and we are expanding globally as well. Now, one thing about being a field sales guy coming to inside sales, my biggest concern was, is it acceptable with one, our clients, and second is with the talent that we want to hire. I think clients were much more happier when we realized that it's inside sales and people don't need to meet face-to-face. A lot of our clients were actually much more happier saying that, Tariq, you know, we don't want to take a risk of getting your sales guys here because it's not essential. And given our business model, we were having these conversations remotely anyways. Now that's one part from the customer side. From the sales side, a lot of people actually realized that everybody is an inside seller. So today, even if you're a field sales guy, you're stuck at home, You're not meeting the clients as much as you would love to. So you're not getting that vibe and energy between you and the client face-to-face. So you're an inside sales guy and all of a sudden you're thinking, is this something that would work for me or not? And for me, looking at both sides of it, that's what I want to share today and have a conversation with most of y'all today. So I've bucketed into 4 things. So STEP is basically an acronym for skills. The 4 areas that you want to focus on is skills, One is tools and technology. Third is engagement. And fourth is partnership. We've seen this across the last 6 months during COVID how we've managed to leverage each of these buckets to start engaging higher with our clients. We've actually not degrown at all. We are actually growing as an organization and our sales are growing. Our ASPs are growing and our acquisition of customers are growing. So for us, a lot of these things we've done right is in these 4 buckets. While these are not exclusive, these are some of the highlights that I actually wanted to share today, and we'll have a discussion more on what else do you think we should look at. So first, let me touch on sales briefly. One thing we realized is great communication skills. Now for BrowserStack, you may think, okay, you're based out of India, so maybe English across the globe. To be honest, I think we hire from some of the best premier institutes in India, And English is the primary language of education in India as well. However, when you go to sell in an area like Turkey or parts of Europe, let's say the DACH region or the Nordics region, which speak local languages, it gets a little bit concerning. So whenever you're sending any kind of communication, you have to check for its validity. That's one thing which was very important is, is this person going to even respond if he saw my email? So that's one thing that we looked at. Second thing when it came to skills, are my guys focusing on repeatable tasks? So in inside sales versus field sales, you actually have a lot of velocity that is required as part of the inside sales function. So a lot of our sales reps need to do those things much more diligently, which a field sales guy could actually get away with. Third is, of course, every day, every day we are testing. We are testing our communication, we are doing A/B testing on our personas, we are doing A/B testing on our comms, on our medium. Is it better to do LinkedIn first? Is it better to do email first? Should I call people? To give you an example, in Europe currently everybody's on vacation. So if you call up any headquarter, you're not going to get anybody there. Very interesting point. Second thing is you call anybody in Europe currently, The only people who are picking up the phone are the people on the reception, on the borderline, and most of them are not as well paid, so they only speak in the local native language. So that again becomes a concern. So these are things we have learned during this point in time, that it's not going to be easy reaching out to people. Second is tools and technology. Now, of course, we are on Zoom today, that's given. I think a video conferencing technology, whichever one you're using, whether it's Zoom, whether it's Teams, Teams is a definitive, but I think Slack has worked for us very well when it comes to comms internally. What we've also started doing is adding a lot of our partners on Slack as well by extending it outside our own organization. So we work with a third-party sales training organization in the US. So we've added them onto Slack as well. Second is data. Where are you going to get data for clients? So we use ZoomInfo. There are things like Lusha. We've tested Seamless.ai, great products available in the market. And of course, LinkedIn Sales Nav to reach out to people. The second one, to be honest, we've not started using at BrowserStack, but there's so much heard about it, is Gong, right? Around conversational AI. I think Salesforce does it now, Chorus does it now as well. So when your managers are not on the floor with your team, so just a little background, in India we are still on lockdown. We are not allowed to go to the office. Office currently. So most of our guys are working remotely from their homes and we have a lot of youngsters, so they've actually gone to their hometowns as well. So everybody is remotely working. So for us, managing and coaching is getting a little bit much more decentralized. So a product like Gong, which actually looks at conversational AI, will help us improve that as well. And finally, the sales engagement platform. Now I'm not sure whether any of you guys have used Outreach before, or any other sales engagement platform, it actually allows us to improve productivity with people at home. When you're at home, you get stuck by, let's say, your kids, or if you have homework that has to be done, or you've got repairs to be done, but you don't follow up on that email that needs to be followed up. I think that's what a sales engagement platform brings to the table. I think this will work well both for field as well as inside sales going ahead. With field sales because the engagements are lesser. So the amount of engagement platform requirement is lesser compared to inside sales. Third thing, very important, is building multiple sequences. For people who have not worked on an engagement platform before, I think looking at sequencing is, should I go with in-mails, emails, telephone calls, second follow-up emails? These are things we've been testing over the last 6 to 8 months on seeing how to get it right with COVID So that's something that you would want to do. Second thing, as sales managers and sales management, focus on lead metrics. I think a lot of us are worried about closures. I think the important thing is to look at lead metrics. I'll give you an example. We are currently looking at our email open rates in sales, and we are trying to see what the benchmark is in the industry, and we are trying to hit that benchmark by doing A/B testing around messaging and multiple other things. So that's another important thing is look at lead metrics like how many meetings are happening, how many demos are happening versus actually lag metrics like how much pipeline is getting created versus how many closures are happening. So just focus on the meetings and the demos part. Second is, of course, this is one thing we miss out, is the group bonding. I think the energy on a sales floor is something we miss totally in this lockdown. So how do you create that engagement is one thing I think we've not solved for today. So if anybody has a better way of actually doing it, We'd love to hear this today. I think this last point is understated— partnerships within the organization. With field sales, sometimes you can actually get away by being a lone warrior. I think with inside sales, because you are so dependent on certain functions providing you the ammunition to actually go behind the customer— so marketing with their warm leads that they can get you through actually marketing qualified leads or contact sales forms, product, helping you with competitive scenarios, or systems engineering. We are a technology selling team, so we need— we do have a lot of complex integrations and demos. So for us, a systems engineering team has actually been a very useful partner when we are speaking to our customers. Given that they are not going to give us too much time, we need to get it right at the first moment itself. So for us, that becomes a very important part of actually going and having a conversation the first time. I think from a So from a content standpoint, that's what I wanted to cover, just to give a little context at what we have done currently. I would love to hear from people on the call. I know it's across industries that we have on the call. So what are some of the things you are doing when it comes to skills, tools, and technology, engagement and partnerships, and what is working? So it's a learning session for everybody, so would love to hear people's views. So if you could, you can unmute yourself or put your hand up, or if you have a question, that would be great. Yep. Okay, I think everybody's shy, so I'm going to typically ask questions. Anybody here who's running a SaaS business, put your hands up. I can— okay, anybody in bank? Oh, everybody's here. So Erin has put her hand up as well. Erin, do y'all run an inside or a field sales team currently?

So actually, I'm in charge of, let's say, sales enablement and alliances at an HR tech SaaS company. But at the moment, let's say we don't have an inside sales team. We have a field sales team that's doing a sort of mix of field and inside depending on our customers' and prospects' comfort level with having people people on site or not. We're not in a lockdown anymore.

Okay, so how do you feel— oh, so they're still going on field, right? So in, in midst of, uh, did you all have a period of time where you all actually had a lockdown in between, Erin, where people weren't visiting clients?

We had 2 months of lockdown, uh, but to be honest, let's say, uh, at that particular point, our customers were focused on other priorities than necessarily our products. So basically our sales team sort of went dormant and actually were on furlough for those couple of months.

Okay. So anything you all have done when it comes to now coming back to the number of engagements that are happening? I'm assuming it's not as much as it was pre-COVID because of customers also being very careful about their time and their budgets, right? Is there something from an enablement side that you've seen people coming and asking you, "Can I do this a little bit better or that a little bit better?" Well, weirdly, things haven't changed so much, at least from our perspective.

So switching from, say, field to inside, inside sales, or doing things via video versus doing things on-site doesn't seem to have changed that much. Uh, there's almost this expectation that we are going to go back to having more on-site things, say, in the next couple of months, on-site events or on-site meetings. Um, and I guess what I have felt is I'm a bit skeptical. I'm based in France. So our company is headquartered actually in France, Spain, Italy. So Southern Europe mainly. And let's say that our customers and our prospects, they're very people, like, well, how to explain it, people-oriented. They like to actually—

Face to face.

Face to face. And actually, we're finding that we can close deals via video because at some point during the sales process, we did meet them face to face. So I guess there's a question mark for me and for the team as well. If we had to continue doing things inside sales only, particularly as we deal with deal sizes that are, you know, $30K to $100K, can we continue to do deals of those sizes if we had to switch to inside sales only, having never actually met the people face to face, at least in Southern Europe?

Yeah.

So interesting feedback for you from our side. We have an average deal size of around 15 to 20K to start off with. I think over the last few months, we've managed to close deals which are almost 3 times of that as well using inside sales. I think the acceptance, like I said, has really improved from a customer standpoint. I think when you look at expansion, maybe, Erin, inside sales could be great when you're looking beyond the geography and it's much more cost-effective to look at inside sales and especially from an enablement standpoint. It helps you a lot because it's a centralized sales workforce and allows you to actually work closer with the metrics to actually improve the sales cycle as well. But thank you for sharing, Erin. Anybody else would— I know Chris had a friend join us as well in the middle to talk about something. So Chris, anything that you felt during the COVID part that you could actually change around sales or anything around that?

Yeah, that was just my dog giving me some thoughts about inside sales. So actually, so I'm the kind of the US arm of a New Zealand business. And for them, so that, you know, our male kind of main sales force is in New Zealand trying to sell overseas. So for them, you know, there's a bit of, this has always been the way that they've the way that we've done business. I think the kind of biggest challenge is around the kind of— this kind of slower customer metabolism, you might say, you know. So just how can you, you know, even if you can get customers comfortable with that, um, you know, like an inside sales approach, how can you— how can you move the pace forward? How can you accelerate the kind of the kind of sales cycle creatively through nurturing a relationship, just kind of prompting them, feeding them information, and feeding them more kind of features and benefits information that can just kind of move them along that journey. But to be honest with you, I kind of find it— because I've got as many questions, I find as many challenges as I do solutions in the current market.

Yeah, I think it's very interesting. We faced a similar problem. In Erin's market, right, a lot of people in Europe are currently on leave and will be returning this week. So our pipe actually went flat for 2 weeks because nobody was picking up their phones. And I think with GDPR in Europe especially, getting hand phone numbers is very difficult. So you can't pick up a call and expect somebody to actually speak on a mobile phone, right? I'm not sure if, Chris, you faced a similar problem if you all actually target Europe as well.

So for me, a lot of the focus is here in the US, but for New Zealand, it's the same. But of course, with lots of people now working from home, even if you did have an office number for them in the past, lots of people are either not taking that number home or they're not redirecting it to their mobile, so you rely on them having their mobile. I think if you've got their connection, if you have an email connection or a LinkedIn connection, my experience is that people actually are quite, probably a bit more open to having that Zoom call than they may have been previously, and that can be a really good opportunity if you're good at it, you've got the time to invest in it, just to kind of nurture that relationship.

Sure, thanks, thanks, Chris, for sharing. I know Bruce is here and Mo is here. Anything you guys think has changed for your sales teams given the COVID scenario?

Actually, I'm a bit of an anomaly here.

I'm a VC, so I'm just kind of listening in to see how the sales world has changed, given COVID. So I'm just, I'm not a real person, basically. I'm just not here. No, I think, I think a lot of thinking of any VC is we're not real. No, I think, I think for VCs as well, we work with Accel. They are one of our partners as well. And across, we keep taking feedback from them because as we see, as you all see across industries what the viewpoints are. So Accel did tell us that we are actually in the top 5% among our peers. So certain needs and wants, like Erin said, right, we are in HR tech. So maybe people want to push the decision by a couple of months. For us, it's been interesting because we actually, as a SaaS provider, give customers devices to work on the cloud. So we are basically, we allow cross-device testing. So for that, customers actually who had devices on-prem now actually want to go to cloud. So for us, we've seen an uptick as well. So I think more for you, it will be most probably among your portfolio companies which actually accelerated versus actually stunted growth because of COVID Bruce, anything about, anything that you wanted to add?

You know, we're in the process now of transitioning to an inside sales team. So I don't have anything to add at the moment, but we're trying to be as creative as possible during this process.

Yeah, I think Bruce, any reason why you all decided to transition to the inside sale? Was COVID a catalyst, or is it something that has been on your mind for some time?

No, it's been on my mind. I think with, you know, with COVID it was sort of, all right, it makes sense, let's do it now.

Yeah, I think we added 100 new hunters in our team for hunting of new logos. I think what we did was one of the biggest lessons for us is starting on the level where we looked at what our email response rates were as well. So we actually started looking at our pipe, we started looking at closures, then started looking at a pipe, started looking at activities, and within the activities we realized that phone calls were actually on the way down, like where we only had emails and inMails that we could use effectively. And when it came to inMails and emails, we started tracking response rates, open rates across both of them. And we started benchmarking against industry best standards. And we started double-clicking on almost every metric where today I can say that if my sales rep sends approximately 50 emails a day, which are personalized, 4 inMails a day, which are personalized, to a set of customers in my prospect list, I will be able to hit 10 opportunities in my pipe, which may lead to X amount of closure within the quarter itself. So I think we started looking at the data very well, and maybe Bruce, that would help you as you go ahead while you're building is look at the lead metrics on how the email response rates are, open rates are, and you'll actually find a lot of gold in there.

Are you doing anything with outbound phone calls?

Yes, so for us, outbound phone calls are great. I think the, the problem currently is because people— we aren't able to get too many phone numbers, which are the data quality issues that are there. And this is across ZoomInfo, Lusha, Seamless, right? So the biggest problem is you'll get a lot of headquarter numbers, so you'll reach the desk line of a receptionist and nobody's in office, so they won't give out anybody's handphone numbers. In Europe, it's even more difficult because they have GDPR, so they don't allow handphone numbers to be available as easy as maybe, let's say, some Asian countries and some places in America as well, except for California. So I think from that standpoint, we use phones as a secondary line of actually going after people. I think what we have done is used emails and inmails the most and then follow up with phone calls as well. So that's something that we've tried. So your primary thing will come under your inmail responses and your email responses.

Okay.

Yeah. So that's something. Yes, please.

Just one more question. Have you experienced, um, experimented at all with, um, um, videos and like personalized videos and emails?

Yes. So I think that's one of the things on my agenda is we've seen video sales pitches have a larger, uh, open rate than most text ones. What we've realized also is that, uh, if the content is mediocre on video, while you'll have a great open rate, you may not have a great response rate. So what we've suggested to most of our sales reps is spend more time actually researching about the prospect, and we've given them a list of places where they can research them better, come up with a value proposition, and go after those guys with whichever one they are comfortable, because not everybody is comfortable with video. Uh, there are a lot of sites that allow you and allow you to embed it as well, but I think a lot of people are not very comfortable as well. So it's a call 50/50, I would say, whether it works or not. Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, Phil, we lost you for some time. Uh, I would love to hear, uh, whether your organization is actually looking at inside sales or is there something that y'all are currently doing? Yeah, we are, um, we're still like a brand new team, so like I'm basically on the marketing side and then I have a colleague who's on the sales side, and we're all remote at this point, so it's all inside sales. Everybody we're meeting, despite COVID or anything, is like people in our network, and it's, it's all inside sales. So, um, yeah, I'm just— we're, we're kind of both just trying to build best practices and get a good system in place and think a little bit about, you know, the right ways to do things. And that's, that's kind of where we're at. Yeah, I think, uh, I called out partnerships with marketing, right? So for us, it's been very, very important especially the number of customer sales forms that are filled on our website. We actually treat them like gold, right? So we've actually doubled down on those. Any kind of marketing qualified leads during COVID are like gold. So these are two of the things we've taken very seriously. I'll give you an example. Most of our customer sales forms that are filled with intent to buy go to our most experienced reps. Doesn't matter whether it's their territory or not. We do a round robin. We've identified some of our top reps. and those are the reps who will get to call on first. Very clear because those are the ones you're not going to get too much. We want to maintain the revenue during the COVID part as well, so you can't let those go. So you want to make it as big as possible. So we've actually flatly kept a rule saying that with sales ops saying that for the next 3 months, any customer sales forms that come in go to our most experienced reps. Yeah. I think, Brett, you've been taking notes and been listening, and very kind of you about that. But anything you would like to add on this?

Yeah, this is great. This is right up my alley. I'm that hunter sales executive going out trying to generate business, and traditionally, you know, set meetings and travel to clients, and, you know, trade shows are huge as far as generating leads, new relationships. So the whole inside sales COVID phenomenon, it really makes you buckle down and, and you have to wear a lot of hats and try different things and be creative. So I'm leveraging LinkedIn very heavily, just like you. The, the 4 in-mails and the 50 emails are critical. Not a lot of folks picking up the phone. These calls are going to offices that haven't been transferred to a home office. You know, the phone's really just kind of a dead end. Um, so really everything's been channeled through LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, InMail, email. And even emails are challenging because you really have to craft something creative content, something different, because if you come at them with a book that's salesy, you're not going to get anywhere. So yeah, this is a fascinating conversation for me. And I put a lot of time into my home office here and really buckled down and ready to get after the inside sales approach because that's the world we're living in.

Yeah, I think one thing, Brett, and I want to get to Paul as well, and Phil had asked a question and we have 5 minutes remaining. So Brett, one thing we realized is if you look at it as sales executive yourself and somebody pitching to you, So when I took up the role and I hired 100 people, everybody's sales nav started, their alarm bells ringing, right? So this is a growth company, they're hiring people. So everybody thought they could sell something. One thing we realized is everybody in their emails, the first email itself started looking for 15 minutes on a calendar. Almost 90% of email pitches that I received said, would you have 15 minutes on your calendar? Or does Wednesday, 'XYZ at 11 PM work— 11 AM work for you?' Everybody did the same email. Everybody asked 15. So I asked everybody, nobody's going to ask for any time from our customers. What you're going to do is you're going to experiment sending the first email. You're going to put a foot in the door. So you're going to send something of value to the customer. Second, you're going to go and send him another thing of value and connect that with a case study. Now you've sent him two proofs of concept. Now you're going to go and ask him whether he's got those 15 minutes. So we stopped sending the first email because we realized our open rates were great on our first emails, but our response rates were very bad. And whereas our response rates were better when we had a little bit of more engagement. So we started looking at foot in the door. So our first email that went out was some research that we did around the company and what we saw as an outsider. And we had some data points and tools that we could do that. and we sent that first. Second, we connected that problem with a case study and send them the case study. And third, we send them an email saying that, you know, let me connect these two for you and your organization. That's something we did. And I think that's something you'll have to A/B test for most of your time. I think Phil asked a question around number of sequences. I think initially you'll have to test out quite a few. What we've done currently is we've prioritized versus personas. That we have currently and what kind of relationship they currently have with our organization and build sequences around that. What you want to do is have a level of standardization initially so that you know whether it works or not. When I initially started with our sequences, everybody was sending a sequence that they made themselves, right? So standardize it. Marketing is a great partner that could help you with the communication. Standardize it, test it out, see whether it gets you responses, and then iterate on top of it. But control the sequences. People go mad on it, right? You'll have 100 sequences in no time and you'll never be able to control it. And everybody's running their own communications, right? So it affects brand, and especially with unsubscribe and bounce— bounce is still fine. I think unsubscribe rates will affect your credibility when it comes to email, and that's just one of the things that you can run. I think last thing from Paul. I know you're the last person on camera. I'm sorry that the people are still a little bit shy, but what do you think you would love to?

I'll be fast. I mean, this was a great opportunity for us to remake our sales motion, and we were primarily outside sellers leveraging referrals, networks, conferences, verticals. And it gave me an opportunity to really take a deep look and pause and strategize on who we wanted to be moving forward. And this slide really resonates. I mean, we implemented new technologies, we really worked on honing in on our communication style. You have to be a more concise communicator over Zoom than you can when you're sitting across from somebody in a conference room. And then the partnerships— marketing is my new best friend. And I can't believe I've gone so many years not partnering as closely as I have with marketing over the last 2 months. Because our appointments, our MQLs, our SQLs are through the roof. And that's all driven, I think, on just getting concise and focusing on the same message and the same goals, because we had to. 'cause we couldn't go and have lunch with somebody.

Yeah, I think makes sense, Paul.