Top 10 Mistakes in Building Out Your Revenue Organization with Insider CEO Hande Çilingir | SaaStr

It's not a product game, it's a data game. In technology, everything changes very fast. Understanding the past is cool, but predicting the future is magic. We are the most progressive marketing software company in the world. The concept now is creating a website per person, creating a mobile app per person. Currently, we are reaching 25% of the world's population. World's internet users. We wanted to create something which has a high impact. We wanted to show the whole world that breakthrough product companies can be also created outside of Silicon Valley. We are hungry for success. Once you build the right culture with the right people, I think you are unstoppable. You need to work harder. You need to push harder. You need to read more. You need to sleep 1 hour less. Doing something much more meaningful than myself, this is my self-actualization. Let me introduce myself before starting. This is Hande, one of the co-founders and CEO of Insider. Insider is offering— Insider is providing a platform for individualized cross-channel customer experiences. We have clients from 26 different countries. 80% of those clients are enterprise, and we have 800 people from 41 different nationalities. So it's pretty much a, a global product company. And today I'm going to talk about the mistakes we have also made, not only one time, couple of times, during our revenue growth story. So starting with the first one, uh, and the first— before talking about the first mistake, which is going to be an interesting one, I think it will be important to remember the flow. So what is the flow for the revenue growth? We hire our salespeople and then we try to enable them, and after enabling, selling starts. And this is actually how growth occurs. This is the generic and at the same time basic flow of the revenue organization. But during the journey of the growth, we do a lot of mistakes. And very interestingly, the first mistake is not accepting that we are mistaken. As founders, we are pretty much strong, opinionated people, and it's sometimes hard to accept our mistakes. But Listening people around, talking about the metrics, and reviewing them time to time, and usually, and hearing people around from the organization, from actually external parties, will be important to understand and figure out our mistakes. So we should be accepting that we might make mistakes time to time. And I think second mistake will be about hiding with urgency. I think this is an important point to remember because most of the time we know that the investors are expecting for growth and all those stakeholders and organization itself is pretty much like impressed or driven by growth. And markets are still buying for the growth even in this macroeconomic fluctuated environment. And this is why sometimes while we are hiring our sales team, we are in urgency. And this urgency might cause a couple of mistakes because we have a tendency to sometimes hire people who may not be good at selling our products. So being able to sell this product of Adobe or Salesforce type companies doesn't mean that they can be also successful salespeople in your own organization because every single product is different. And at the same time, selling a product in a well-known company is pretty much different than selling in a startup or scale-up company who is trying to be a global one. So when you are hiring a salesperson, when you are hiring a quota carrier, please do the reference check by yourself. It is also so important. Don't leave it to your HR department. Don't leave it to anyone else. Just pick up the call and call this person. Even you can run a roleplay when you are hiring these salespeople, because don't forget that if they cannot sell you, they cannot sell also to your customers. So this roleplay and having the reference check of those salespeople is very important. Please call the, you know, previous company and the manager of the salespeople in this previous company, and please ask him or her that whether this person was hitting their quotas in the— in this company, in his old company. It's very important to check. And, um, the another mistake, which can be called as the third one, is basically about hiding non-competitive Sales representatives. What does it mean? Selling is not easy. It looks like easy time to time. Maybe it's easier for a well-known product, but it's not that easy if you're in a very competitive environment. And at the end of the day, SaaS itself is already very competitive. Yes, it's a growing industry for sure. At the same time, it has a huge potential, but it is so competitive. So, and we all know that no product is perfect in SaaS. Most of the SaaS companies are new, just evolving themselves. So in that case, when you hire a sales representative or salespeople, if they are coming from a non-competitive background, trust me, it's not going to work. Of course, I don't want to say anything negative about big, for example, marketing clouds, but I have seen and I have hired many salespeople from very big organizations who don't show the same, who cannot show the passion and who cannot show this struggle when they are selling, doing sales in your own organization. Because again, selling a well-known product, relatively easy. Selling in a scale-up or startup is a different story, different game. They need to be go-getters. They need to get used to this struggle. And it's a different game, different play. So the other mistake is, and again, as insiders, we did all of them. I as a CEO did many of those mistakes, same for my CRO. And the mistake 4 can be counted as lack of enablement. If any of you guys has a SaaS company which already exceeded let's say $5 to $10 million of ARR. And if you don't have the sales enablement team yet, then you are missing a lot. What does it mean? In the very first days of your sales organization or your, of your company, you probably teach the salespeople from your own experience, which might be enough that time, but that's not enough after $5 million of ARR. That's not enough after $10 million of ARR. You need to support them. You need to have like special presentations. You need to have, you know, training, special trainings for those salespeople. They need to know how to act when they are handling your objections. They need to know how to adapt themselves to enterprise sales or mid-enterprise sales. And it's a never-ending story. You don't train them once, you, you do it like on a frequent basis. For example, At Insider, we have our Sales University run by our sales team, run by our sales enablement team every week. And every week they actually go through the documentations, they actually go through the, for example, presentation very specific to vertical businesses. And again, it should be done continuously and it's not like only one-shot game. And Once you do that, once you have a strong enablement team, then ramp-up times will be shorter. In SaaS, if it's like enterprise product, generally we are talking about 6 to 9 months. And you can observe that it's going to become like maybe 3 months, which is going to be a big positive change for your sales cycle. And the establishment of the sales enablement team will be a key function for your salespeople. So they are going to know the answers. They are going to know more answers about the product, how to sell a specific vertical. And this team shouldn't be like a couple of people. They should be supporting our salespeople on the way. So the fifth mistake. The fifth mistake is, I think, about being an Iron Man. Or not being an Iron Man, or assuming that your representatives, sales representatives, are Iron Man. They are not. And there is a very changing or rapidly changing environment outside. The competition flows, the new products like AI. And in that case, there are too many struggles in salespeople's lives. So you need to support them. There are RFPs joined by different competitors, and there are new maybe contract processes, packaging, pricing, and your sales representatives should be focusing on what they do, and they should be focusing on the tags, they should be focusing on the packaging, they should be focusing on the how to do objection handling, they should be focusing on how to compete with a new competitor. So there are already too many fights in their lives. And don't imagine that, don't assume that they are Iron Man who can do, who can do it all at the same time. So this is why with the sales operations, who can support the salespeople about the contracts, about the, you know, whole sales cycle and purchase process, with the deal desk or marketing type functions, you need to be able to support your sales representatives because They are not Ironmans at the end of the day. And this is going to— this is going to provide enablement, stronger enablement for your salespeople. Sometimes we expect really much from our sales representatives. They have sometimes many product features they have to learn. They need to understand the dynamics of different verticals if you are not, by the way, having different sales representatives for different verticals. So in that case, we should be helping them more to enable themselves also with the support of the different functionalities. So after talking about Iron Man, let's talk about mistake 6, which is about losing control over the sales pipeline. I think, I feel like we can talk about this sales pipeline and metrics like until the morning. Why? It's all about having control over your sales pipeline. And most of the time people are pretty much obsessed about the outputs. If you ask a SaaS founder, what is the most important metric for you for your sales pipeline or sales cycle? If they are going to answer like, of course, MRR, et cetera, it's not right. What is, what are the things that causes MRR? How many leads they have generated in a month or even in a week? Or what about the forecast accuracy? What is the forecasted revenue in a month and what is the realization? And then we can talk about MRR. So losing the control over sales pipeline, meaning that they don't know how many leads they have generated and how much, how many leads they should generate to reach their targets. If they don't have control on the forecast accuracy, then they don't know how much revenue they are going to bring by the end of the month. And we should be all acknowledged about this. Every single salespeople has a control over their pipeline, and they should be on top of their pipeline. And everyone in the sales organization should be pretty much knowledgeable about this. And number by number, by the way, I'm not talking about just general sense. I'm talking about really being into the numbers, and they should know where they stand in terms of the competitors every deal. If you can't get an answer from a sales representative for a question like this, how many deals you lost over the 6 months, you know, against a competitor? If they don't have the answer, then there's a mistake. So they should have a control over the pipelines. By the way, most of the time people claim that if you are hiring a sales manager or sales director, you shouldn't only hire a dashboard guy. That's right, by the way. Your sales directors or managers who are going to manage your sales team shouldn't be only a dashboard guy because they should have a positive contribution on the sales processes. If there's like enterprise relationship that they need to manage, then they should do that. They should have different value adds for the sales journey. However, every sales director, every sales manager should be pretty much knowledgeable about all the metrics in the sales pipeline. And you should be going through this every week, I think. Even as a CEO, even though I have a CRO who is responsible for the growth, I'm running growth meetings biweekly and going through all sales pipeline metrics to be able to understand what is wrong, what is going, what's going right, what's not going right. So we can figure out, we can predict this risk and then we can correct it accordingly. So that was mistake 5. Let's talk about the mistake, sorry, that was mistake 6. Let's talk about mistake 7. So mistake 7 is, about lack of focus and expansion function. I was listening one of the Saastr podcasts when I was just cycling, because that's the only time I can listen podcasts. Otherwise, we are all working in front of our computers. And while doing so, I heard something very, I think, strong. Especially in that type of economic times or macroeconomic environment. Expansion or retention is the new acquisition. That's 100% correct, because always acquiring a new customer is more costly than selling to an existing one. So that's why expansion function is very important to take care of, and you might have different strategies around this. For example, we have separate expansion managers. We also include customer success managers for this expansion, you know, pipeline or generating pipeline. However, at the end of today, we all know that it's a never-ending question and never-ending story between customer success and salespeople whether expansion function should belong to customer success or sales. By the way, I'm really curious about the also practices for us By the way, our sales function is responsible for the expansion revenue. And by the way, according to numbers, ideally your expansion revenues should consist at least like 30% of your new acquisition revenue. But before talking about the mistake of lack of focus on expansion function, I would like to run a quick survey if you would allow me. How many of you people actually gave the responsibility for expansion information to their customer success team? Wow, more than I expect. How many of you guys actually give this responsibility to sales team? Wow, customer success is actually higher than the sales. So very important, I think, observation. I think it's now shifting a little bit more on the customer success part because they are engaged with the customer more and they can maybe sell to customer more. For us, still on the safe side, but wherever it is, the biggest mistake would be lack of focus on this function, expansion function. Again, retention and expansion is the new acquisi— new acquisition. So this is why actually, uh, we should be focusing pretty much on that. And who should own it? You should decide it according to dynamics of your business, but it is going to highly affect the MRR because most of the time the length of the sales cycles are long, especially if you are doing enterprise sales. And you should be able to decide on that whether the expansion cycle should be less than— and it should be less than the normal sales cycle. And you should be pretty much knowledgeable about which products to sell. And you should be again pretty much knowledgeable and decisive about this, whether you have strong expansion products that you can upsell. Insider is a Sequoia-backed company, and when we are doing— when we are— and we have also completed our Series D round very recently. Most of the investors also for a SaaS business check the same answers. By asking the same question: how many products you have for your upsell? And most of the companies which failed in SaaS, as far as I observe, they are actually lack of expansion products. So apart from your main product, you should have, have this other expansion products that you can upsell, you can sell to more, sell more to your existing customers. And you don't have to just give this responsibility to one department, I believe. They can be both involved in the process by also encouraging them with bonuses. Mistake 8, weak packaging of the products. Most of the time people think that product is the key differentiation. People, of course, that's the differentiation itself, but packaging can be an interesting type of differentiation because you need to first understand the need of your customers and you can create the right packaging for them. And most of the time you don't have to land with your whole product stack. Don't forget that landing with a specific product and expanding in time, especially if there is a competition, is going to be a pretty much right strategy, which is also Insider's strategy at the moment. We learn— we don't have the fantasy of selling our products at the same time just in one time. We land with a specific product and we expand in time. It doesn't have to be a specific product, by the way. It can be a, it can be a, you know, packaging that combines a couple of other products depending on the needs of the customers. So how you package your products, how you sell them, are the most important indicator of also both new acquisition and also expansion opportunities. And the rule can be counted as land and expand. A strategy works for Insari for the last couple of years, and if you don't think about it, then you might be mistaken. Mistake 9: avoiding POCs. I remember one of the very early sayings of Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook. He said that titles are free, just give them. I'm not going to say the same thing for POCs. They are not free for sure. There we have a lot of costs during the POC processes, but please let your customers taste your products. Don't avoid to give POCs because they initiate the, you know, selling. They initiate for them to understand what is the real value that you can really create with your product. So let them understand the value. Of course, please put a limitation to your POC. It doesn't have to last for months and months. For example, at Insider, we are doing 3 months of POC. And it's a paid POC, by the way. We don't give it for free. Because if it's going to be free, it's like a free gym membership. If it's going to be free, you will never go there, right? So 3 months paid POC. If they are going to see the value, and of course you have a trust in your product because if you have it, then they will see the value. And then we have almost like 80% of the conversion rate for our POCs. 20% generally fails because of other technical reasons and pretty much external reasons. And after talking about the POCs and after letting them taste your product and really understand the value, Let's talk about mistake 10. You might assume that it's the last mistake. Actually, there's a long list of mine, but I just try to put like 10 of them together today, and I'm going to have one bonus one. Before talking about this bonus one, let's talk about mistake 10. Not having pricing for organic growth. What does it mean? It's a very cliché saying, but at the same time, I think it's a very Still very impactful saying, "I want us to grow all together." So same logic works for your customers. You want to make them feel like you grow together. So that's why trying to find a parameter which is going to be mutual to your product and your clients' use of your product. Once you do that, you will see that and they will feel that it's going to be mutually beneficial And it should be visible to all parties at the same time. It means that when they are going to make more value through your product, by the use of your product, then they are going to have better metrics. Then you will help them to— you will help them for their growth, to reach their growth targets. And you will have the same. So having this sense of growth together, then they are going to be, I think, much more satisfied by what they do together and then they are going to start to see you as your strategic partners, not only something they purchased. So bonus mistake. How many of you guys has read the book Amazon Working Backwards? Really? Okay. So there are two ways for founders to learn, to understanding things, to discover. And the first one is learning through from others. We talk to each other, we talk to other CEOs, and we learn from their mistakes, their journeys. And this sharing actually helps us to understand what was the journey looks like for them and what they have faced. The second type of learning is, of course, reading. Once you have time, we should try to read a lot of books because they have also some real-time stories or real stories that you can learn from. By the way, one of the other mistakes that you can do when you are reading, never ever read a book from someone who hasn't been— or written by someone who hasn't been an entrepreneur before. Because an entrepreneur can be actually precisely understood by another entrepreneur. So management books, I don't like them. If there's like a real story there, I read them. And one of them is Amazon Working Backwards. And in this book, I definitely, by the way, suggest you to read it. You can see it, you can see a concept called input and output metrics. And most of the time, just like the forecast accuracy and MRR, or number of leads and MRR, people are pretty much concentrate on the output metrics. But what causes the output metrics? Input metrics at the end of the day. So the number of certain activities are not directly correlated to results that you will get. So instead of just focusing on results, you should be also pretty much focused on the input. You should be able to try to find the activities which are going to bring you to, or which are going to help you to reach output output or results themselves, so you should be more concentrated on that. In order to do so, and I would like to read that as it is: before you can improve any system, you must understand how the inputs affects the outputs of the system. You must be able to change the inputs and possible system if needed in order to achieve the desired results. This will require a sustained effort, constant constancy of purpose, and an environment where continual improvement is the operating philosophy. And it's pretty much similar for the whole sales funnel, right? In the sales funnel, if you are just focused on the output metric, then it works— it doesn't work. You need to go to every single item, every single path into the sales funnel, try to optimize them, then MRI will improve automatically. So that was also the last and the bonus mistake. But before ending up the whole, you know, presentation and the mistake themselves, I would like to give you a quick summary. Let's remember them all together. Well, mistake 1: not accepting that you are mistaken. Be careful about it. Mistake 2: hiding with urgency. Please do all references checks of your sales representatives by yourself. If they can't sell to you, they can't sell also your product. Mistake 3: Hiring non-competitive sales representative. Selling in a well-established company or structure is relatively easier than selling in a scale-up or startup company. Don't hire those guys. They can't sell your products. Lack of enablement. If you leave them alone without an enablement function, then it doesn't work. And don't forget that your representatives, reps, are not Iron Man, so you should be pretty much knowledgeable about how to support them. Never ever lose control on your sales pipeline, and lack of focus on expansion function might kill your company. By taking into account that selling to an existing customer is always like less costly, even especially very important those times. And weak packaging of your product without understanding need of your customers, as well as avoiding POCs which might prevent for your clients to understand the real value of your products, and organic pricing for organic growth, letting them to feel like you, you actually win together, might cause those mistakes which may not help you to build a very strong sales organization. At the end of the day, yes, it's a sales game. Yes, it's a focus game, but at the end of the day, it's a metric game. Sales is sometimes more metrics than only stories. As a bonus mistake, don't also forget that you should be taking into account the input metrics, not only the output metrics. Even in these fluctuating times, Please don't forget that sales fixes everything. Anything and everything. If you are good at sales, if you are selling, if the investors, if your board will see that you are growing, you are selling, and of course if you are retaining your customers, it fixes everything. But if you can't sell, then you have a problem. And wherever we go, whatever we do, whether which presentation we make, it doesn't matter. At the end of today, even in this, again, macroeconomic environment, there are people are starting to look for also profitability or capital efficiency. Still, ladies and gentlemen, growth is the king. Thank you very much for listening me.