The 4 V's of Sales: Volume, Value, and Velocity: Waze Head of SMB Sales & Head of Sales Enablement

I think it's important just to let everyone know that there's a huge disclaimer here. I think both Ken and myself, we were extremely data-driven, and we really trust and we like to see a lot of data before we make any decisions, before we have any conversations with the teams. So of course, most of my, uh, uh, favorite business quotes are related to data and numbers. Trust but verify. I think that's a Russian proverb. There's, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, which it's an extremely famous one. And then there's one from Eric, which I really like, which is we trust everyone, in God we trust, but all others should bring data. I think that's kind of a part of Google's DNA. We are a very data-centric company, and so is Ken and myself. So I think that's why we've been able to have so much fun over the past couple of years. And hopefully throughout the next couple of slides, when we're zooming into each of the Vs, you'll appreciate how data-driven we have been over the last couple of, of years at Waze. Sharing a little bit of context before we begin, and hopefully context will allow everyone to understand a little bit about what we do and a little bit about the experiences we wanna share with everyone. First of all, we are here to share experiences. We wanna share wins, but also we wanna share a couple of things we didn't do very well. And I think we learn a lot from some of these experiences. So we wanna be very honest and really just share with all of you today. There's something that is very interesting about how I joined Waze. So Waze is a Google company. I had been working for Google for 2 years and then I joined Google, I joined Waze Ads SMB in Brazil. So I'm Brazilian. I joined our Brazil team, I was employee number 1. It was so exciting to grow a team and start a team from scratch. I was the employee number 1. I had, and I still have, an amazing director who was extremely open to my suggestions in how we were supposed to build a team. So I truly had a blank piece of paper in terms of setting up a go-to-market strategy for Brazil. We grew the team pretty quickly, and after 2 years we opened a Mexico team. We opened a team that was based in multiple countries managing, uh, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. And at the end of the day, we are an SMB team selling Waze ads to our advertisers. We engage with both brands directly and also with agencies. So that's a little bit of context of what our sales machine looks like. And the way I define SMB is we have a small business go-to-market, which is very different to our mid-market go-to-market. I think a lot of what Ken and I have been doing over the last 2 years is understanding how should we— I identify these very different market opportunities? And how should we create teams to try to deliver as much value to our partners, but also to the company? So how can we grow as quickly as possible by creating very different teams with very different go-to-markets to address these opportunities? And before we start talking a little bit about the content and a little bit about the Vs, Kendra, do you wanna say hi and present yourself to everyone?

Yeah, hello everyone. I'm Kendra, like Farah mentioned. I have been at Waze Ads for about 2.5 years now. I was at Google prior to that with Google Cloud. But in my time at Waze Ads, I just want to reiterate what Fair had to say. We have grown significantly. I started as a seller and supported agency business at Waze Ads, and now I am actually in the sales enablement role. What that means is my day-to-day is supporting sellers and everything that they need to get deals across the line, whether that be, I don't know, pitching, value proposition, objection handling, etc., or even the, the nitty-gritty of analyzing the data and coming through with results that actually optimize our machine. Similar to what Farrah mentioned, just for some context, like the North America business has grown significantly. Over the past 2 years that I've been a part of it. I remember I was, you know, on a very, very small sales team, and now we are, what, almost double the size. So exciting stuff that we've been doing, and we hope that, yeah, what we're going to discuss today can be, you know, learnings. You know, we're going to share good and bad. We're going to share everything, hopefully, to just be honest and upfront about what has worked for our business. So, so yeah, let's dive into that. So essentially the number one question I think that we all, you know, ask ourselves in our day-to-day is what truly makes a sales organization grow? You know, in Waze Ads, we ask this, I think, every single day, especially being a part of the SMB business. You know, we're a little bit scrappier. We are trying to figure out how to grow deals the quickest, how to perfect our pitches, how to make sure that we're growing our organization. Uh, and so I wanted to take a step back here and just relay the agenda to you all. Um, so the, the primary goal after leaving this meeting, hopefully, uh, is that you just better understand how we think about, uh, growing our sales organization and, um, you know, the kind of pillars that we have bucketed, um, over here. So Our philosophy throughout the years has to kind of keep in mind 4 pillars when we think about growing our sales organization. So we will review the 4 pillars today, and we tried to make it easy and simple by remembering that they all start with V. So these are the 4 Vs that we have come up with that have helped our sales organization grow. As you can see, it is value and variety, which Farrah will be reviewing with us momentarily, And then thinking about volume and velocity, which I will be reviewing with you as well. But again, open discussion. We want to just share what's worked, what's not worked, and why focusing on these 4 Vs is actually helping our business grow, scale, and be better. So, Fair, I think that value means, you know, like worth. I think that's like the technical definition. But can you tell us more about why value is important?

Of course. But before I do that, Ken, I think I have a fun idea. Should we run a poll and try to ask everyone what, which of these Vs they think is, is, is more important for their business? So all of these are extremely important, but if everyone could just kind of use the poll feature and just choose one of these Vs to show us, uh, which is the most important one in your opinion. And then after we zoom into all of the V's, we're gonna ask the same question again and we'll see if anyone changed their minds. So I can see in real time, we have over 50% saying that value is the most important one and also velocity. That's surprising for me. Value and volume are the two that normally are the most, are considered the most important ones. So that's interesting. Let's just wait for a couple more seconds. Great. So I think that's it. So, so I just need to write this down to actually remember in a couple of minutes' time because we're going to ask the same question again. So 50% value and 29% velocity, and then 13%. Sorry, so it's 50% Value, 32% velocity, and then we have, uh, third and fourth place, both, um, both the volume and variety. So we'll compare with a couple of minutes' time when we finish explaining a couple of the wins and the, and the challenges we had with these, and we'll see if there are any changes. So going back to value, I think when we define value, it's, it's a relatively easier definition I think at Waze and most companies will define value as the deal size or the deal amount of whatever contract they're closing. We're selling ads, so value can also be defined as a 30-day value. Some campaigns might be a 30-day flight of campaign, so value can have a 30-day amount. Hopefully if we do a good job, that flight will become recurring revenue. So we also started to assess what is the 6-month value or the 1-year value of our, of our accounts and our clients. So value, it's not too hard to define, but I think depending on your industry, you'll want to kind of use a different timestamp to talk about value. So how did we try to maximize for value? And at the end of the day, we're going to share 12 questions. So each of the Vs we're gonna share 3 questions that will hopefully guide all of you to kind of just help you ask, uh, some of these questions thinking about your own businesses. So it doesn't really matter if you're selling B2B software, if you're selling media, it doesn't really matter. I think we try to identify and list questions that are sales-centric and not necessarily related to our business. So the first question I have is Are you considering both your wins and also your lost deals? And this is interesting 'cause when I launched the Brazilian operation, I was extremely concerned and I was really wanting to have a lot of information about all of the accounts we were winning. And I wanted to know what verticals they were in and truly what was the size of the value of the deal. That we were able to win. And then I was comparing between different regions of the country and I was kind of slicing and dicing the data, but I was only looking at the accounts we actually won to try to understand how can we scale value even further. And then a couple of months after just looking at the accounts we were winning, that wasn't really helping me to maximize for value. What really helped me maximize for value was when I started looking at why weren't we winning more accounts and really zooming into the reasons why we were losing accounts. And if you just can show the diagram, Ken, I'm sure most of you have actually seen this in other presentations and it's now very famous, but this is back in the Second World War when there was, if you look at the plane to the left, people were trying to look at the planes that were actually coming back from a day at war, and the planes that were coming back, they were considered as the planes that succeeded, right? They weren't shot down. So all the red little dots mark the bullet holes. So they were actually looking at the wins, right, the closed deals, and they were trying to kind of zoom in and trying to make sure that the plane was optimized, and they were trying to reinforce all of the areas of the plane that had the bullet holes. And that seemed very smart at the time, but very quickly they realized that they should actually start thinking about what about the planes that aren't coming back? And actually all of the different parts of the plane that don't have the bullet holes, those are the parts of the plane, if you look at the airplane to the right in purple, those are the parts of the plane that are extremely vulnerable and fragile. So it's the motor, and it's, I think, close to the part of the plane that has all the gas inside. And then they started optimizing and they started making sure that they were protecting more where the plane didn't have bullet holes. And that's what we started doing with our operation. Like, why are we losing these deals? How can we make sure that we're winning deals and those deals are helping us increase our average value? So that was my first big insight I had. Like, spend a lot of time understanding with your clients and with your teams why you aren't winning. Your deals. We normally spend a lot of time and we value the sellers that are selling, but it's also equally important. In my case in Brazil, it was even more important for me to understand why we weren't winning. And I started to understand there was a pricing issue. We had issues in terms of the profiles of the sellers we had brought to the team. So a lot of, a lot of great insights there. Second question I wanna share with all of you regarding value is what is your average deal size? Pitched versus closed. A huge mistake, and this is almost therapy session for me, Ken, I'm talking about all my mistakes, but I was very focused in looking at the average value of closed deals, but I wasn't necessarily looking at the average pitched amount. So if our teams were closing an average of $10,000 a month, that was the number I was looking at and I wanted to optimize for that number. So we were training the teams, we wanted them to pitch bigger, but we weren't doing a good job of actually tracking their pitched amount. So we wanted them to close bigger deals, but they weren't pitching bigger amounts. As soon as we started looking at the size of the pitched amounts, we could go and actually train different teams, talk to the different sellers, and make sure they were pitching bigger. And then if they were pitching bigger, if we were doing a good job of showing the value of our product, then the closed amount was also increasing. And then the third question I, I suggest everyone to just kind of constantly ask themselves is, are you, are you making it interesting for your client? Are you helping them want to invest more with your companies? And at Waze, we have a lot of different services and different insights we can provide to our clients. So I think we spent a lot of time thinking about our SLAs. Our service level agreements. And then depending on the, the, the level of investment, the commitment of our clients to our platform, we are willing to commit our time and our limited resources back to our partnership with them. And that was really effective in us driving the value of these accounts. So take a look at your lost deals, take a look at the amount of, of, of, of, or the average pitched amount of your teams. And last but not least, really have a very clear SLA you're offering to your clients and they're understanding if they are investing more with you, is that a benefit for them? Are there benefits involved? So that's the first V. The second V, and we need to start moving a little faster, is Variety. That's a harder definition. Ken, do you think you know what that means? Or at least for Waze, what would that mean in your opinion?

I would think either different types of like pitches or different types of clients.

Correct. So we've been working together for quite some time, so you're absolutely correct. So for Waze, uh, variety means what different team is selling more or less. And we have teams that are focused in selling into agencies, teams that are focused in what we call directly towards brands. But at the end of the day, the number one question I've been asking myself very intensely and very frequently over the last couple of months is, do we have sellers that really understand their different industries? And it's— I am a huge sponsor of having industry experts in a sales team. Google does that very well. At Waze, We've been starting to do that and we're doing it even more. And there's a lot of benefits of having a seller that knows the industry, knows what vocab he should be using with the client. He knows what the pain points are. I'm seeing a lot of value there. And a question for all of you is, are you comfortable that your sellers are actually industry experts? Are they aware of the trends? Would you be comfortable for them to actually be thrown into a conversation with a CMO or whoever your important stakeholder is and talk about industry trends? And that's something that Ken has been spending a lot of time training the team and sending a lot of content. So our sellers are truly experts in their industries. Second question is, do you have a go-to-market for the different market opportunities? So in the beginning we had this huge team and the team was trying to sell to very small accounts, to large accounts. And the average was always like mediocre, mediocre in the sense that it was average, right? So most of our KPIs, they were average. And that wasn't very helpful. So we started to just better understand the different opportunities in the market, the different verticals, different company sizes. And then we really just tried testing with different go-to-markets. So we have different sales orgs, different roles, different responsibilities. We have different levels of seniority depending on the different market opportunity that we're trying to monetize on. And now we have very clear KPIs that are showing us We're doing a much better job to create a specific go-to-market for each of these market opportunities. And then the last one, which hopefully will be helpful for all of you is, what about your compensation strategy and your compensation tactics that you have in place at the moment? Are they motivating your team to actually think about a variety of types of deals? Are they being compensated to sell into the right verticals? Are they being compensated to sell deals that will last longer? So we've been learning a lot about compensation. It's one of those things where you try and invest a lot of time there and suddenly you have like a 20-page contract, which is your compensation strategy. And then you've, you probably did something wrong there, because nobody really understands what the compensation looks like. So you have to simplify a little bit. But we learned a lot there. But at the end of the day, do you feel comfortable that your sales team is being compensated to act and to behave exactly the way you would like them to? And we had huge learnings there. Two Vs to go. We're moving very fast, I know. Ken, do you wanna talk about our third V? This is an easy one to define, right? How would you define volume?

I was going to say, how would you define it?

That's so easy. I mean, for, for us, it's the amount of deals. So that's pretty easy. Thank you for asking me a very, a very easy question.

I'm giving you all the easy ones. Yes. So the actual official Webster definition of volume is the quantity or amount of space occupied. But I think when we do think about sales and volume, I think traditionally we do think, you know, more around number, right? Number of leads, number of pitches, number of closed ones, number of customers, and things of that nature. But something that we've learned over time is, is to think a little bit differently about volume. And here is a couple of insights that we, that we think might work. So when thinking about volume, we actually like to focus on two things. The first is the how. And the second is the who. So when I think, think about the how, you know, how are we getting volume, right? How are we getting clients? Where are our leads coming from? You know, which sources are the most profitable for our business? I think, you know, historically, you know, on sales teams that I've worked with, it's very easy for us to think, okay, we need to build an SDR team, a sales development team. You know, people who are cold calling, they're hitting the phones, they're trying to get as many outbound opportunities as possible to really drive the volume and make sure that we have, you know, the revenue at the end of the day. I think that an important learning for us has been, you know, yes, we should focus on our leads and where we're getting them, but are there other areas within those lead sources that we can actually, you know, drive more efficiently. So for instance, you know, do we have an SDR team who is outbounding? But do we also, are we also supporting our inbound, you know, lead channels? You know, do we have a marketing team who is super focused on brand awareness, product awareness, who, you know, runs a web form where people who are interested in our business can actually come to the forum and talk to us? Um, so I think thinking through, you know, hey, our SDR team is going to, you know, their, their goal is 5 opportunities a week with a 30% win rate, you know, hypothetically, but other lead sources could actually have a better win rate. Um, so something that we challenge ourselves day to day, uh, actually month to month is just looking at where we're getting, um, and how we're getting leads, uh, to truly impact, you know, the volume. I think the second area would be who. So once you think about how we're getting volume, thinking about who makes up our volume, right? And Farrah hinted at this from a compensation point of view, but when I think you think about volume, really thinking about, you know, your revenue, right? Who makes up our revenue? Is it a bunch of existing clients? Is it people who have been spending with us 3 years at a time? Or is our team just really good at getting people to spend in the first month and then they leave for whatever reason. And I think something really interesting when you think about who makes up your revenue is if hypothetically you're focusing on both your acquisition accounts, so people that you actually acquire this month, having a goal for that, but also focusing on people who were onboarded last month. Making sure they're spending this month and the next month and the following month really does help maximize your volume and really kind of drive up your numbers when you think about both leads and revenue. All right. So the last and final is velocity. Farah, what do you think velocity means?

How quickly can you close a deal? And I was actually surprised, it was actually chosen as the second most important V with 29% of the respondents. So people think this is important.

Yeah, I personally love this one. I think that, you know, I think we both do. As an SMB business, we're always looking to go quick, right? You know, we focus really hard on acquiring and keeping our clients, but we are teams spread across so many clients and so many verticals that, you know, thinking about how we can speed up is something that is super important to us. So I love that people are excited about this one. So the definition of velocity obviously is speed, but I think when we think about velocity, you know, we like to think about two things. So in order to, you know, improve or quicken your sales, you know, both the seller and the process, you kind of need to drill into them. So thinking about the seller point of view from Velocity, I think is really important. You know, do your sellers, you know, are they working efficiently and are they pitching well, right? So do they have their pitches perfected? Do they not know their top potential objections? Do they know how to handle those objections on a phone, you know, right? A seller hears an objection right on the line, they're gonna, they're gonna handle it immediately, as opposed to going back, um, you know, and answering that objection a day or two later. Um, you know, how quickly are they closing deals, and can we actually optimize, you know, the sales process and the salesmanship of our team, um, to make sure that we're speeding up their their projections. And then I think the second is you think about the process. So I remember the seller, you know, I always had to think about my sales skills and what works at closing deals, but I also had all these backend processes, right? And so kind of thinking about those two hand in hand really has helped us improve our velocity. And just kind of thinking through, you know, you have a potential buyer, for instance, right? That potential buyer from a sales perspective is going to be pitched probably multiple times, right? You have a couple calls, you have to, you know, discover, you know, what their needs are. Then you have to actually pitch them the product. Then you have to talk to them about, you know, the pricing and things of that nature. So that potential buyer goes through a couple different pitches and they probably have a couple different objections, right? At the same time as a seller, you know, once you get off your first call, You have to go do some sort of process on the backend, right? There's, there's all of these kinds of processes that go into essentially driving the revenue. So something that we have challenged ourselves, and me specifically in my role, the sales enablement, is how can we work towards both of these and kind of get rid of, of, you know, a process or an objection or a part of the pitch that maybe they could have handled on the beginning. Of that sales cycle to really drive revenue quicker and decrease the amount of effort that our sellers put in. So at the end of the day, some of the best sales teams that I've seen personally, especially coming from the sales side, is like, you know, in a weekly meeting, you know, is the manager asking the sellers what their top objections were for the week, right? And the sales team is working through those objections in real time. Because objections change, and they're probably the hardest thing that you'll have to go through as a seller. So, you know, kind of thinking through objections and how sellers can just immediately respond and get it out of the way can actually increase your velocity. So that is basically all 4 of the Vs summed up. Fair, if you want to touch on the takeaways, I think we can then open to questions.

Sure. So talking about velocity, I'll go very quick. If we can also open the poll again. So we're going to answer the same question again and we'll see if there was any any difference between what you consider to be the most important V. The takeaways are: measure your Vs, uh, optimize each V individually and in parallel. One of the mistakes I made was every quarter I was focusing in one of the Vs only, and it's truly a trade-off. And maybe you're prioritizing one of the Vs because you think that's the right time for you to do that. So in Q1, you're gonna go all in to volume, and that's fine, but as long as it's intentional and you're doing that on purpose. So what is your strategy for all the Vs? And maybe you have different timings for when you want to prioritize them, but my recommendation is you should really have a strategy for, for how to optimize them individually and in parallel. And last but not least, but I think if you're able to optimize your Vs, you'll, you'll be, you'll be very proud about the sales machine, the well-oiled sales machine you're building, and you'll be creating a team that is future-proof, it's sustainable. And a phrase I love is you'll actually have predictable revenue by optimizing the 4 Vs. So value is still considered number 1, 57%. Number 2, velocity, which was also the second one in the beginning, but actually volume is now more important. Than it was a couple of minutes ago. So that's interesting. So, Ken, you did a good job of pitching the importance of volume. That was the—

I mean, I think it's the lead sources. I think that was what it was, because that was something we were not thinking about, but it's super, super important.

Absolutely. And these are our contacts. I think the easiest way to reach us is LinkedIn. Just look for us and kind of send us a message. We'd love to have the conversation, keep the conversation going over the next couple of weeks, months, and even years. And hopefully we have a couple of minutes for questions. Would love to answer any potential questions any of you might have.

We do have some questions that came through, so feel free to run through them.

So let me start. Wow. How would you prioritize the Vs? Ken, do you want to start answering this one?

Yes. I I, I think that Ferry had a good point in the, the end, um, around trying to prioritize potentially where your business, I think, is struggling the most, but keeping in mind that they all flow together, right? Um, if you don't have the volume, you don't have the variety, right? And so I think thinking about, um, where the business is struggling first and foremost and prioritizing that way but also kind of mapping specific for your organization, how they all play with each other and which ones, you know, need to influence the other in order to truly drive the impact there.

Perfect. Nothing to add there. Let me try to answer one question here. What V do you find the hardest to crack? I think velocity for me is, is a tricky one. At the end of the day, we are an SMB team, so we are expected to, to scale quicker than our enterprise team. So we're expected to sell faster, but at the end of the day, I mean, the client has less budget, but most of the questions being asked are kind of the same. Uh, maybe the enterprise, uh, prospect has a, a longer buying time, they have different teams that need to approve, etc. But I would love for us to have a 4 times quicker closing time period than our enterprise team, and we're not there yet. So that's been a very tricky one for us to be able to optimize. Let me, let me choose one more. Platforms used to track and measure all of this data. Ken, do you want to talk about a couple of different platforms that we use, uh, uh, to track all of this?

Yeah, I, uh, the biggest question, and I think it's, uh, data is great, right? Um, but we have a lot of it, and there's, uh, a lot of times really, yeah, um, it can be anywhere or anything. I think number one resource, your CRM. Um, I think that it really relies on the sellers to, you know, accurately update their CRM, but there are insights that you can drill in really quickly, right? So your CRM, you know, how quick did a stage move or, you know, how quick was that sales cycle, you know, start to end date, what products were pitched, what deal value was pitched. I think majority of what we were discussing was through our CRM, But there's other things, right? It's like in the pitching that they're doing, maybe on an objection handling doc that you have, you know, how can we quantify that, I think is up in the air. We've, you know, we're a Google company, we love our Google Sheets. We love our Google products. So I would say number one should be your CRM first and foremost, and then getting tricky with the others.