Sales Assembly's #ScaleSmarter Virtual Roadshow - New York City 6.24.20

The CRO of Sales Assembly. I'm sitting here next to my co host Liam Patrick Green who's going to help me run the show today. We're really excited about about today and about this roadshow in general. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Sales assembly, so a little bit of context as we kick off. Sales assembly was launched here in Chicago about three years ago. What we are is were the country's first, first collaborative based learning platform and community specifically built for the country's most prominent B2B technology companies. And over the past three years we built up a really great community of around 130 B2B technology companies across the country. These include venture backed hyper growth tech companies like G2 and even large publicly traded companies like Upwork, Sprout, Social, so on and so forth. And what we provide to all these organizations is an opportunity to have access to a collaborative learning platform that we built to provide consistent continuing education, ongoing training and development for pretty much every professional and every leader within the revenue organization. And what we decided to do is we expand Sales assembly nationally as we decided to launch a virtual roadshow hitting on seven different cities to not only introduce Sales assembly to those specific cities, but more importantly do what we do best, which is bring together a really rock star lineup of panelists and thought leaders to provide some really tactical best practices that each of you on the zoom are going to be able to use. Be you a marketing leader, a CS leader or a sales leader or a practitioner in one of these departments that you're going to be able to use to help build what is presumably you're also fast growing revenue organization. Little bit of housekeeping for today. I mean, of course this session is going to be recorded. We are going to distribute a recording of this conversation afterwards and a little bit about the format. We're going to start with a really rock star panel discussion that I'm going to kick it over to our president Christina Brady to moderate in a moment. As you'll notice as all these panelists dig a little bit into their respective backgrounds, we've done a great job of bringing together representatives, revenue leaders of some of the most prominent, some of the most successful B2B technology companies in the New York City area. And what we're going to be talking about today are a lot of the fundamentals that come along with building a fast growing B2B revenue organization in general. But we're also going to make sure that we spend time throughout this discussion talking about the specifics of building a fast growing B2B revenue organization within New York City. Specifically, we understand that the nuts and bolts of how to build a really great revenue organization are going to be consistent across the country, but that each city, each ecosystem is going to have nuances or idiosyncrasies that are specific to just that market. And we want to make sure that we're being helpful in diving into those. And then after that panel discussion, we're going to have the one and only Sam McKenna joining us to do a really awesome keynote. For those of you who aren't familiar with Sam, I highly recommend that you follow her on LinkedIn because she's providing some really excellent tactical thought leadership on a daily basis. And last but not least, before we kick it off, I do want to thank our partners that made this show possible, our friends at showpad, gong and G2, and after this session, we're going to circulate some calls to action related to all of our partners there. That being said, I'd like to turn it over to our illustrious president, Christina Brady to introduce our panel and get the event kicked off. So Christina, over to you.

Amazing. Hello everyone. Like Matt said, I am Christina Brady. I am a newer addition to Sales Assembly. My past I've worked at the likes of MetLife, Groupon, Glassdoor and for Groupon and Glassdoor, worked to lead and build sales orgs there, help them scale. And when I was thinking about what was really a game changer for my team at Glassdoor, the Sales assembly partnership up leveled my reps. I led the SMB growth org there and when we partnered with them, the difference that it made in their skillsets, their attainment to quota and their overall confidence in the job made me a believer in Sales Assembly. And when Covid offered me the opportunity to make a job switch and decide where I wanted to go, it was a no that this was a machine that I wanted to help build and launch because I personally had been so positively impacted by it as a revenue leader myself for well over a decade. So happy to be here, happy to be talking to this fantastic panel. They will do much better at talking about themselves than I will. So I'm going to round robin in the order that I see you in terms of just introducing yourself, who you are, who you work for and what you do. So Rob, let's start with you.

Thanks so much, Christina. I am Rob Dandorf. I am the VP of Revenue Operations at Behavox. Behavox High Level is a data operating platform that allows companies to aggregate, analyze and act on their entire organization's internal data. It uses machine learning, AI and all the most cutting edge technology to really help an enterprise to understand its people and to really understand what's going on day to day within their organization, the relationships, the engagement. And then we kind of point that technology towards a few different use cases. The primary being compliance for large financial institutions to uncover any kind of wrongdoings or anything that might be bubbling underneath the surface. But there's also a huge conduct element as well. So making sure that people are treating each other well with respect, that they are taking care of each other and that they are happy, engaged and doing well as employees. So those are a couple of the use cases overall. As VP of Revenue operations, the remit is to cover a few different categories. So we think about it as five big buckets. The first is insights, so making sure that we have the information to govern the organization. The next is process, so making sure that we have the actual process to be able to gather that information and you know, create the next steps. The third are the systems, so being able to automate as much as possible and create efficiencies around that process. The fourth is enablement, so helping to teach people about those processes and the systems that are rolling out. And the fifth is procurement and legal. That was a little more unexpected just because I was unfortunate enough to be a lawyer in a past life, so that got thrown underneath as well. But realistically it's fantastic to be able to have that as part of the revenue organization so that we really have partners to be able to help through some of the more complicated enterprise deals since there long and complex for us.

Yeah, well, so you're not busy, anyone needs to reach out to you. You've got a lot of time on your hands, not much that you're covering. Wonderful, thank you so much. It's really wonderful to have you here spending some time dropping the knowledge. So Vikas, let's go down to you.

Good morning everyone and Christina and Matt, thanks for having me as part of the panel. So Vikas Bambri, head of sales and CX here at Customer, which basically includes everything from the account executives to the channel organization, the rest of the sales organization including Revops all the way through to the post sales, which for us includes professional services, customer success and support. Launched customer into market as the first head of sales almost three years ago. So it's been a wild ride, you know, exponential growth year over year. You know we raised $130 million last year, which knock on wood, was a Good move. In hindsight with everything that's going on in the world for us, we had dramatic growth, really spent the last three years having a little bit of fun, poking a couple of big bears. Some of you may have heard of companies like Zendesk and Salesforce. So it's not for the faint of heart over here at Customer, we are a CRM for customer service. And so my team and myself, we wake up every day trying to figure out how to stick it to the big boys and girls, which is a lot of fun and it's been a tremendous run. We just became the youngest company on the Gartner magic quadrant. And just from an organizational perspective, we've grown from 30 people to almost 200 since I joined New York City based headquarters with a satellite office in Raleigh Durham that we built out kind of back end of last year, sales office in San Francisco and newly acquired a company in Madrid where we now have an engineering hub. So that's just give you some perspective on the landscape here at Customer.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And little healthy competition keeps us fresh, right?

Oh absolutely.

Keeps raising the bar. And so you go after them, you take a bite, it forces them to respond and then everybody gets better. Although ideally you're focusing on being the best.

Well, you know, it's really funny coming from having worked at some of the larger companies, you know, previous stints at companies like Oracle, it is fun to see how big companies react to even a startup. You know, at our scale we've seen, you know, companies like Zendesk do everything from, you know, imitating product, imitating pricing to even literally I have copies of ads where they've taken an advertisement that we've run for an event and actually use the exact same images. So it's kind of fun to see how the bigger companies react. Having been on that side of the fence and dealt with kind of disruptive startups, it's fun to see the other side react for a change.

I love little one two punch, so why not? Thank you so much. I'm very excited to dig in a little bit further with you and hear some of your insight on New York and how people can grow and scale like you are. Last but certainly not least, Taryn, tell us about you.

Great, thanks.

I'm excited to be here. Appreciate you guys having me join today. So I lead learning and enablement for the go to market team as well as the I lead the sales operations and partner operations teams for a company called yotpo. Yotpo is an E marker, e commerce Marketing platform. And so we, our core products are ratings and reviews, loyalty and referrals. And we've just added SMS to our suite as well. So, you know, as part of focused on learning and enablement, our mission there is really to inspire and enable deliver the learning experiences and tools that inspire and enable our employees to do their best work, develop their skills, as well as drive business results. And then on the sales operations and partner operations side, it's obviously to increase efficiency and effectiveness of the sales and partner teams through a number of different channels. And so that's sort of what I'm focused on day to day and a bit about. Yeppo.

Efficiency and effectiveness. You hit two of like my favorite E words when it comes to thinking about companies and revenue operations. So well done and to kick things off to give everyone a little bit of a softball before we dig in. And Taryn, I'm going to stay with you. When you think about the concept of scaling smart, ultimately what we want to help companies do in a myriad of different ways is to scale smart and do it efficiently and effectively. To your point. So when you think about one to two things for companies to consider as they think about doing that or as they are doing that, what would they be from your perspective?

Yeah, I think one of the first things is really having clear and consistent sort of mission, vision and goals for the teams that you're operating. If you make that plan and you're able to adjust that plan along the way, you'll have a lot more success in sort of achieving those milestones in terms of scaling. And then I think the second piece that's personally helped me on the enablement side is investing in a learning platform. And so that's become super critical, especially in our new sort of remote work environment where we're able to scale that learning experience and get the team sort of the information, the training, the materials that they need. And we've been doing that through our learning platform, which has been a huge success.

Love that. And then, Rob, what are your thoughts on how companies should scale smarter?

Yeah, so it's funny because we, we're doubling down right now on the, on the operations side of things and trying to think back through pretty much the entire, the entire customer journey and every single possible stage that goes through that. And so thinking about it as roughly an infinity loop of saying, okay, from initial awareness all the way through purchase, all the way through upsell, cross sell, you know, back into that initial sales cycle. And so we have revised all of our stages for every single say you know, opportunity type. And we're then running diagnostics based on what that is. So if it's just like one giant factory floor, I don't know if I read the goal, which is like that old business book that's just like there's a factory floor and the machines are broken down. How do you increase output and all that. So if each of the products or the outputs are the different opportunity types, then we're saying, okay, what are the stages that go into that? And then we're running diagnostics on each of those stages to say where are the gaps, how advanced are we going from? You know, is it just kind of tribal knowledge and people just kind of talk about what's going on, to having playbooks, to having true automation that is allowing us to not just gather insights now, but to predict what's going to happen in the future. And then what we're doubling down on is each of those stages, that's going to be the bottleneck and route to the final, the final output of making the sale of whatever opportunity type that is. So that's kind of how we're trying to run the diagnostics right now and how we think we're going to be able to plug the biggest holes and route to then being able to scale. So, you know, using, using kind of those common metrics of what's the conversion percentage like? Are things getting stuck here? Is the effort way, way higher? And that's why our CAC is actually going up so much and are things just dropping out? Is the quality going down here? So that's, that's really what we're trying to target so we can plug the holes now and then be able to scale more efficiently later.

Yeah, the classic leaky bucket, I think is something that a lot of companies struggle with, especially as they're scaling some companies, when they've even been around for a decade, and I know a lot of them lean into first the customer experience and how we can change that and impact that to make sure that our retention goes up, our growth unretained is going up, things like that. But one thing that I found even in orgs that I've been in is as you tweak the customer journey, the result of that is a trailing indicator. So if we change something today, right now for our customers, even if it's the best thing in the world, we may not know that or see the result for anywhere from 9 to 12 months. So as somebody in a revenue org right now, where you're trying to sort of reinvent and tweak. How do you look for what's successful right now and determine how to pivot when the fruits of the labor is months ahead of the work that you're doing?

Yeah, it's a great question. Especially tough for us because the average deal cycle can be six months, nine months for large banks. So it's 100% accurate that you can't look for just what that end result is. You have to build leading indicators in. And so much of what we're able to do is somewhat off the bat. It's a little bit of an unfair advantage that we get to use Behavox for Behavox as well, because there's a little bit of starting to grade relationships, grading that strength of relationships, how strong based on not just kind of emails going back and forth, but like the sentiment that's being expressed, like what's actually being said, the context around those conversations. So looking to make sure that we are defining what those leading indicators are, which are really the quality of the relationships and route and then the acceleration into each stage. And to your point, if that end to end process is taking so long, then all the better to then be able to break it down into those objectively defined stages with a pretty strict criteria for entry and exit so that then you can measure. Okay, if that's just a three week chunk on average, then let's start measuring all those three week chunks for every single customer and start to see the variance between just that portion and whether that is the, the next goal for automation or for change.

Yeah, some really good tactical, juicy bits there. So thank you. And Vikas, as you start to think about how do we scale smart, what does it mean to you?

I think there's a couple of things. First, I think when you think about scaling smart, I think especially for an early stage company, I think that means scaling in unison. And I think that's a real challenge for a lot of companies where you always feel that one side of the business is moving further ahead than the rest. And what I mean by that is, is your product organization or you know, is your product ready for you to kind of scale the next level? Is your marketing organization? Is your sales? I think a lot of people often look at it, unfortunately, and I'm saying this obviously selfishly as a sales leader is, hey, you know, we just need to invest in sales. Well, is your product ready? Has your marketing team started sewing? You know, if you're going into a new vertical or new subject matter. Right. Have they started seeding that interest Right. So I think that's the biggest thing for a lot of not just early stage companies. I mean, frankly, I found it, you know, even at big companies like Oracle and Live Person, it's, are you scaling in unison? So that would be number one. I think the other thing is this concept of experimentation, and this is the unfortunate thing that I see from a lot of my peers is the board or the CEO or somebody comes in and says, we have to go up market. You hear that buzzword all the time. Nobody really can define sometimes what that means, but we need to go up market because that's what we want. And what happens is people go out and they hire four or five account executives to go up market and then after six months they find out the product's not ready, the market's not ready, the competition's fierce in that space or whatever it is, and then they have to let go of five people. Right. And I find that very disappointing because, you know, I understand the impact that has on the account executives and the broader organization. So the second piece of it is experimentation is, you know, kind of the whole concept of, you know, as we as buyers do try buy, like when we're buying software, you know, why not experiment with, you know, one individual or even what I often say is you should be able to use your existing team and your own talents as a leader to stretch the organization a bit. Right? So for us, when we started, you know, we're looking at kind of mid market accounts. The first time we had an enterprise account. Okay, well, I need to roll up my sleeves and get involved. And if I find that's a repeatable motion now I can go invest in account executives to go focus on that segment of the market. What a lot of people do is like, oh, let's just go hire some people and they'll figure it out. And I think that becomes a real challenge for a business. And that's why you see all the times with a lot of sales organizations, you know, hiring people and then letting them go. Hiring people and letting them go. The downstream impact that that, that has not only to your culture, to your team, but frankly, it burns you in the market. Because at the end of the day, we are in, you know, if you're good at what you do, it's absolutely an employee market, especially here in New York. So you can burn yourself in the market where people are like, you know what, I'm not going to go work for that company because, you know, I talk to people, I have friends on LinkedIn, etcetera who've told me about their experiences there. So those would be my two recommendations.

Yeah, I love the concept of scaling in unison. I think probably everyone on the panel and everyone listening has either experienced it for themselves or seen companies who operate in silos. I don't think a virtual world helps with that at all. I think it sometimes pulls people further into their own corners because we interact with the people we're comfortable with and a lot of times they're the people in the same job. And so when you think about the typical teams that don't always move in unison, I'm thinking like a sales and a sales ops or a sales and product or a product and marketing, where there's a lot of finger pointing and people moving in different directions. Who do you think owns that and owns, not to drop a buzzword, but why not? You know, who owns the synergy of that? Who says, hey, we're all going to scale in unison and owns the ability for everyone to get out of the silo, talk to each other and work together. And I say that not because it's easy, it's a unicorn. Everybody wants that. And we're all laughing on the panel because we're like, it doesn't happen. But in your opinion, how would it happen? Say, I'm building a company today. How do I do it?

For me, I think, and I hate to put the burden on my boss, but I think, yeah, I think it starts at the CEO. If you're talking about an organization scaling in unison and all those moving parts, that symphony across the organizations, the burden starts and stops with the CEO. Now, I don't want to put it entirely on that individual because I also think we as leaders, whether you're the head of sales and CX or whether you're the head of marketing or head of ops, head of finance, etc. You have a responsibility as well that you're only going to be as good as the rest of the team. Like, if you think you as a sales leader, I can be as great as I want to be. I can build the most amazing team. We can be fantastic. But if we're not in lockstep with marketing, if we're not in lockstep with product, it's not going to matter. At some point it's going to come to a grinding halt. Right. And maybe not out of the gate, but six months a year, 18 months down the road, it absolutely will. So I think, yes, it starts with the CEO, but I think it stops with the leadership across the organization.

I love that digging a little bit further into New York specifically, we know that NYC is a fast paced environment. I spent a lot of time growing up on Long island and even there you caught a little bit of the wind of like, like the Manhattan Speed employees are hungry for advancement. I'm sure each of you have met with an employee on their first day and said, okay, what do you want to talk about? And they're like, how do I get promoted? So how do you balance that eagerness for promotion with making sure that you're promoting people when the business is ready and most importantly, when they're ready? Taryn, coming to you, how do you balance those two things?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And we've actually seen. So we have a fairly large SDR team and they're usually on the younger side in terms of, of we hire them into a more junior position. And so they're really hungry for development and they've been very vocal about that. So we've actually as of super recently developed a program which we're calling sort of the Growth Series for our SDR team. For those who want to follow the path into sales. And not all of them do, but for those that do, we've put together a quarterly training and certification program. And so we want to develop the talent from within. We want to retain these employees that we've hired. And we find that actually specifically on the SMB team, they're more successful if we hire from our SDR group than if we hire externally. And so in order to do that and sort of satisfy their needs for development and growth, we've built this very robust program that over the course of a quarter, it's an intensive sort of blended learning approach where they are watching courses in our learning platform and then we're having them attend training sessions with our SMB leadership team. And then they are assigned an AE mentor on the SMB team as well who sort of guides them and coaches them through the process. And so they do a lot of practicing both with those people and then submitting through our platform as well. And then it all culminates in a certification program. And so whether or not there are sales roles open for them to step into right away, they're able to sort of develop their skills, get a taste for what that's going to be like. And we're ultimately grooming them to hopefully move into that role when they open up.

Yeah, it sounds like repurposing the hunger from I want to go to the next step to repurposing the hunger for learning. And I can imagine that something like that also then bleeds into your culture. If your culture is focused on personal growth and personal development and that leading to the right step, then that has to hit multiple areas of your organization in a good way.

Yeah, it definitely does. And I think it's only made our culture stronger. And so we find that especially in our sales team. Our sellers have been here for years and there's a reason that they stay. And I think it largely is tied to our investment in their development and their success, which only ultimately brings success to yotpo. And so, you know, we've been very focused on trying to get creative in a number of ways, not just for the SDR team, but for the other teams within the Go to market. Org as well. Our CSM group is equally hungry and sort of eager for that type of development. And so we've created a growth series for that team as well. It just looks a bit different but definitely worthwhile for us.

Yeah.

And then Rob, same question to you. When you're thinking about how do we promote people at the right time when they're so eager and they just want that next step so badly?

Yeah, it's always a fun one to think about. And we try to lay it out as clearly as possible, always from the get go, to align expectations when people are having their very first interview with Behavox all the way through so that everyone, every single conversation they have is completely aligned on. Here are the expectations, here's how the entire company is kind of structured and organized, and here's what's going to be expected of you. And so we undertook a project maybe six months ago or so which was assigning contributor levels and defining and then assigning contributor levels and leader levels to every single person throughout the organization with a huge rubric of different qualifications and responsibilities so that there's some big signpost for every single person of here's more or less what's expected of you. This is going to be a meritocracy. Right. This is an organization where we're going to respect and reward good work, but we want to post it up on the walls and everywhere that you can see it so you know exactly what needs to be done. And then within all of that, of course there are a few different ways to evaluate. So there's okrs, which I was thinking about when you were throwing out Synergy. I was like, I can, I can throw some great buzzwords. Just like, let's use okrs, let's use that. Let's use all that stuff, but it's amazing for alignment. It's an amazing way to be able to truly hold people to their own unique goals, but that are also having cascaded down from larger goals to show how those are aligned with the entire organization where your exact place is across the entire organization. So we evaluate people based on the OKRs, based on their alignment with our values and based on peer reviews and management reviews. And those are all going into that rubric and so they can move up the levels. And I think to Darren's point, it's also just about gating. It's about having those individual steps in the process where maybe you're not even getting a new title, right? But now that you are three months in, six months in, we want you to be able to help with recruiting and hiring. Now we're going to put you on the interview panels. And when you start to have some kind of a real semblance of like, importance around what others might, might find trivial, it's, this is a reward, this is, this is a real, like, we want you to now help us to recruit the next people. We want your opinion. We want you to feel like you're almost a mentor for some of these, these incoming individuals. And so something as simple as that can be a huge mark of, wow, I really made it. And it's, it's funny, my last company too, there was this thing where you got a second little computer screen at like a year and, and you had, you had like your normal monitor and then you had this, this weird rectangular one. And so immediately you could see when you were walking on the floor, who's been here for a year and like, wow, they made it. They're going to get that next step up. And so just small indications like that we appreciate you, we see what you're doing, we want to involve you more, we want to help you to grow. Exactly what Tara was saying. Those are huge boosts to kind of supplant or bridge in between maybe some of the larger, you know, just pure titles.

Yeah. What I love that both of you touched on is the enablement piece of it and the training piece of it and how we get people ready and then how do we build programs to ensure that we are doing that the right way. And one thing that I have always been very, very interested in and studied is the psychology of how people learn and how they develop. What's interesting about that BDR space is you have an adolescent learner who learns by having things be presented to them. And a Lot of times your brain remains in that place until you hit right around the end of college and you start to transition into that adult learning phase where instead of presenting to me, it's involve me in it and let me have active hands on learning. And your brain develops and makes that switch between around age 20 all the way to about age 30, when you're fully in psychologically an adult learning place where you want to have your hands on the material you don't necessarily want to always be presented to. So Vic is coming down to you as you think about how to train people when they're coming out of college and their brain is actually developing and they need to be learning a different way. How do you train people and get them into that adult state of learning while they're learning a new job when they're fresh out of college?

You know, it's an interesting one. I think for a lot of folks it is, you know, we take this raw talent and we, I think we make the mistaken assumption that sales is often just about elbow grease, right? You know, you heard the old adage, you know, the more dials, the more meetings, right? Or the more. And I think where we need to invest and where like we've invested is definitely on the early on. You know, I think making sure that people understand the role, the process, the steps, the cadences, having those best practices, right? Doing the, you know, as you said, not just giving them the guidebook, but the role play, right? You know, you know, using. I mean, what's been a godsend for us is a tool like gong, right? So where we can listen to the calls with individuals, with the teams, right? Give constructive feedback. So I think a lot of that, you know, repetition, you know, in training and I think like Tarin was saying, is putting those programs together because at the end of the day, we want the sellers of the future, right? And I think that's frankly a big challenge for us in the industry is every day there's a new company that's being spun up and they're adding 5, 10 new sellers. Well, at some point you can reach it, reaching a critical mass with how much talent is available in the industry. And so I think it's, you know, responsibility to us to continue to nurture that. And where I see a lot of value, particularly when we talk about those, you know, business development, SDRs, BDRS, is that relationship and mentorship with their account executives. And that's something I'm really proud of, is how my account executives have really taken, you know, obviously there's a selfish reason there. They're hoping that they invest in these people and they'll generate more people pipeline for them. But at the same time, I'm really proud of how my account executives have taken some of the BDRs under their wing. Especially as you're a fast growing startup, you don't always have the right ratios of managers to BDRs. Right. And so, you know, the AE frankly has to supplement some of that. And I think that's the nuance. Especially in an early stage company, everybody's moving so fast that where people sink or swim is if they're waiting around for somebody to train them or educate them, they're going to fail. I can almost guarantee you where I've seen our best BDR shine, the ones who've gotten promoted and moved up the ranks is those that took it upon themselves. So when you talk about adult learning, I think one of the big pieces is, yes, the company is going to give me this, but there are amazing tools out there, right? Whether it be LinkedIn, whether it be some of the thought leaders out there. You know, you've got people who are constantly posting tips and tricks, right. You know, whether it be Vorsite and you know, just all these other people that are out there. So to me it's who's out there seeking knowledge and then putting it in action.

I love that.

And speaking about the talent, if we look at the New York City market specifically Taryn, this is coming to you. It's a younger market. A lot of the top echelon tech talent is starting to bleed into New York a little bit. But those large enterprise sellers, a lot of them are still segmented out west working for larger companies in the Bay Area or la. And so how do you find the perfect hire? How do you sift through all of the resumes and find sort of the diamond in the rough that's the right person to join the team?

I think that's a great question. It's certainly always a challenge, right? But I can't remember if it was Robert or it was Rob who was talking about sort of having clear core competencies outlined for the various roles. And what we really push for is not to hire for someone who matches the job description exactly across our open positions, but someone who sort of has the potential and is aligned with the core competencies. Meaning what are the. What does success look like in this role? These are the behaviors that we're looking for someone to emulate in this position and if they're able to do that In a number of ways, regardless of whether or not they've done this exact job before, they'll be successful and we'll, you know, support them in getting them to that success. But I think, you know, it's really important to outline the core competencies for the role and then build behavioral questions in our interview process that sort of test for those core competencies as well as behavioral questions that test for sort of our values and whether or not each candidate is aligned with those values. So for us, it's really about less about, you know, do they match this job description exactly. But more we actually want sort of fresh ideas, fresh perspective and people that maybe come from a slightly different background but have the capabilities to succeed in that role. And so that's what we've been focused on. And slowly, at least for the Go to Market team, outlining the core competencies for each role at each level in order to hire more successfully.

Yeah, yeah, I guess.

Christina, just, just a point on that. I think, I think one of the things about the New York market is actually you do have what I would say, enterprise sellers, right? Because if you think about it, even the Bay Area companies, you know, whether it be Oracle, SAP, et cetera, have always had enterprise sellers in New York just because of the market. Right. A lot of the customers are here, right. Big financial services companies, telcos, et cetera, media companies. So enterprise sellers have always been in New York. It's that next level down where I think we struggle in New York and we have to cultivate our own talent. Because historically the inside sales, the SMB, the mid market teams were built either in the Bay Area or a hub like Austin or Salt Lake City or Raleigh, Durham, etc. Et cetera. That's the gap I think we have in our market is we don't have enough of that. The down market sellers and motions where actually the enterprise seller I think you actually have in spades. It's the other where a lot of our businesses are right. And that's where we almost have to build from scratch.

That's a really, really wonderful distinction. I have one more kind of lightning round question for everybody before we hop into our Q and A. And for everybody listening in, feel free to go ahead and use that chat functionality to submit a question that we can ask to the panel before we get to our keynote speaker. So go ahead and start typing in there if there's anything you want to know that I haven't been able to cover yet. And the last question I'm going to start with, you Rob, as you think about the next couple of months and transitioning back into the office, or maybe not transitioning back into the office, what do the next couple of months look like for you and your company?

Yeah, it's. It's an interesting one because we were such an office company. We love, we had or we still have, they exist despite the chaos. We have beautiful, beautiful offices in New York and London and Montreal and Singapore. And it's, it's the kind of culture where you're excited, cited by the. By the passion and the grit and the hard work and just like having those people around you. Right. So it just, it spurred everyone on to even greater heights when you're in that culture. And so much has been trying to, you know, recreate, set up the. Set up the guardrails, set up everything so that you can still be able to duplicate that. Are we going to rush back to the office, though? Absolutely not. Because it just, it just doesn't make sense. As much as I want to get back tomorrow, it just doesn't make sense at this point. So it's. The next two months are kind of just about keeping status quo. Right. We've built these new processes in place, we've built these new systems, we've put things together, and we don't want to necessarily give people something else in the back of their mind that they need to be thinking about every day. So I do want to get a haircut very badly in New York now that we're in phase two. That would be just fantastic. Was hoping for before this fantastic panel. But as much as I want that, you know, we don't want to put any pressure on other people to say, like, well, you know, the office is going to be open maybe come tomorrow, you know, and so it's just. Don't worry about that right now. Do what you're doing. You're doing a fantastic job. Keep going. I said the word fantastic 30 times, but it's just like, keep the passion alive, keep the drive and the momentum going. Don't introduce like, doubt, worry, fear. But for those that are excited to get back and all that, like, we'll be there, we'll figure it out, because we want to give you the environment that you're going to be able to do the best in.

I love that, you know, statistically you have to hear something three times before it sticks. And so even though you said fantastic multiple times, most of us only heard it once, so you're fine. Vikas, what does the next couple months look like for you in the office, work from home. What are you thinking?

No, we have committed to our team that we are going to be work from home at least through Labor Day. And then we will, obviously, as we get through the middle of the summer, we'll reassess that. The reality is, the challenge we have in New York is many of our team members use public transportation, as most New Yorkers do. And, you know, that's a pretty scary proposition, right? It's not like, you know, living in some cities where you hop in your car and you're completely isolated till you get to the office. So that's the challenge we have. And so we've now, I think we've adapted to the new. I like to call it temporary normal, because I don't envision a world where we're never going back to offices, et cetera. But it's shown us, because we were a very heavily concentrated office culture, that we can be successful, remote. And that starts opening up your eyes and just thinking about, you know, other opportunities for the business and for individuals. Right. You know, from an individual level, people are reassessing, you know, how they. How they work and can they. Can they do their roles and what do they miss? I hear it all the time is people saying, look, I like, you know, the fact that I can, you know, work from home and have that kind of clarity and just lock down. But then when I'm doing things like exact, for example, for, you know, our account executives when they're working on a bigger deal, I want to get in a room with my sales engineer and my professional services partner and brainstorm and whiteboard and do all of that. Right? So you do miss those opportunities, which we have to account for. I think from a management perspective, you think about how does this create potentially a bigger talent pool? Because if you're not limiting yourself to just New York and now you can start to say, okay, we can open it up a bit. How does that impact your hiring practices and your thought process going forward? So, you know, we're taking it, you know, and I think like a lot of companies here in New York, we're taking it day by day and we're, you know, making, you know, kind of assessments and moving the, you know, the dial back and forth. But I think the key thing is, you know, that culture and, you know, keeping people engaged. And, you know, there's a lot going on in the world right now, so really making sure that when things do come up, that we are part of the conversation and we're not leaving it to people Sitting in their homes, kind of assuming the worst, as Rob was alluding to really being proactive as leaders and bringing data to them about how the business is doing. We're very transparent as a business. Our CEO basically shares a lot of data with the team, which is unique. I think that's a cultural value add that we have. We share the nth level of detail with the entire company, so people know exactly where we stand as a business and then they can obviously understand why we're making decisions, et cetera. So I think those are some of the key things as you move forward.

I love it.

Taryn, bring us home.

Yeah. Similar to Rob and Vikas, we were previously a very office heavy culture and our policy was actually designed that way. But given the current environment, we realized in order to remain competitive going forward, we're going to need to sort of have a more flexible policy in place. And so a lot of discussions going on internally about what that looks like. Some of the challenges, though, that will present themselves is once, you know, the majority, once offices open up and we are able to return, it's working really well right now because we're all remote. But when some of us are in the office and some of us are remote, that will change a little bit. And so we're just trying to work through, through what that looks like. Do we bring the sales team in for the last week of every month or they have to be there the last week of every quarter. So playing with a lot of different ideas, I think a lot of different challenges. But the overall sentiment is that going forward, I think all companies will have to have some kind of flexible policy in order to attract talent and retain talent. But to Vikas point as well, it does open up the talent pool too. Now there's an opportunity potentially where we could hire people who work remotely full time, whereas we were less inclined to do so before. So no set date for us returning to the office in 2020. Right now, keeping that open as well, but having lots of discussions about what it looks like in the future sounds good.

It's the right thing to be doing. So thank you, everyone. I want to go ahead and invite Matt back in for a couple of questions. This has been wonderful, and let's open it up to the audience.

Yeah, thank you. Great discussion. You know, I wish that we had time to get through all these questions submitted, but unfortunately we only have time for a couple, so I'm just going to go ahead and dive right in. Vikas, one question for you. You spoke a lot about scaling in Unison. This concept of scaling in unison, which to your point, is hard for early stage companies. The role of a CRO is becoming more prevalent, probably in large part because, you know, the role of the CRO is to basically force this unison. At what point do you think it makes sense for a company to explore hiring a chief revenue officer?

Yeah, a lot of debate about this particular one. There's people who like to do it right out of the gate. You know, for me, you know, the good CROs are truly unicorns, right. And I don't think there's only so many of them that can really span the entire remit. And so for me, I think it's probably when you get to that 20 million mark is when you can really start exploring it. I think till then, I think you really want to look at specialists that can go in and really. Because you're building, right? And I think if you go too high, too fast, you don't bring in the builders. And I think that's, you know, that's something that you need to think about. So, I mean, you know, that's just one person's assumption. But. But that's kind of my guiding principle when I'm speaking to folks and advising them is probably at the 20 million mark. You're at the maturity where some of these functions are now beyond foundational, where you can bring in somebody who can orchestrate across those functions.

Great. No, that's useful. Taryn, you know, last question is going to be for you.

Question.

Is your certification program that you mentioned throughout the discussion does sound really interesting. Are there specific metrics that these SDRs need to hit throughout the program in order for them to graduate or get certified or. I mean, is this really more of an excuse to, at least from a PR perspective, provide like, hey, here's structured training and let's get motivated to get really involved. Tell us more about that, if you don't mind.

Yeah, no, it's a great question and I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone has about building that type of program. One of the first things we did when we mapped this out was really get clear on what the learning objectives are. So as a result of this training experience, SDRs will be able to do what? Right? And we then design the program to support and deliver on those objectives in terms of how we measure they are held to a high standard. It is a program that is actually meant to prepare them for the AAE role that hopefully will open up in the near future. And so, you know, in terms of the certification we put together detailed rubrics that clearly outline what we're looking for in your certification pitch and demo. This is the criteria that you'll be evaluated on, and oftentimes they don't actually pass on the first try. Sometimes we have to ask them to do it again and then again. But we've put some structure in place to help them where they're practicing a ton. And we actually use Showpad as a learning platform which has the unique offering of Pitch iq. And so you're able to sort of submit your pitches and practice those as many times as you'd like. And then the AA mentor or the SMB manager can easily go in and provide feedback along the way on those practice pitches so that ideally, when they get to the certification stage, they're really ready to go. But the measurement criteria is clearly outlined for them. We're transparent about how they're evaluated and what the expectations are, and the program's designed to deliver on those learning objectives.

Awesome. No, that sounds. That sounds great. And I think that that's probably a great place to end the panel discussion. I want to thank again, Taryn, Rob, and Vikas for being a part of this, for being a part of this program, and for being some really fantastic leaders helping to build the New York tech ecosystem. So thank you, all of you, for participating in the panel today.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much.

Awesome. And we're going to go ahead and pivot over to today's keynote, which is going to be led by Samantha McKenna. As I mentioned, at the top of the program, I'm sure many of you probably already follow Samantha on LinkedIn, and if you don't, I bet that by the time she's done today, you're probably going to be motivated to, because that's how awesome she is. So, Samantha McKenna, we're excited to welcome you to our New York stop of our roadshow. How are you this morning, by the way?

I'm good, guys. How are you doing, Matt?

I'm good. Good, yeah. We're excited for this discussion. So in the interest of not wasting any time and giving the people what they want, I'll turn it over to you.

Quite the panel, you guys. You really did an amazing job. So thanks for. Thanks for setting a really high bar for me this morning. I'm going to grab my screen really quick and share my deck with you guys. And let's start here. So here's my thought for today. I think the guys had the panel so far this morning, had so many incredible thoughts and I think one of the things that I want to focus on is a lot of what they talked about too. I think that they led into so many great things that we can talk about about how you scale and how you do this effectively. So one of the things that I hope to do today is to leave you with a really big idea of one of the tangible things you can do to scale more effectively. This really impacts you whether you are a one person shop that has a one sales rep or whether you are a Microsoft, a LinkedIn, a Salesforce of the world and you're thinking how could we be better about some of our processes? Hopefully that helps you and hopefully you've got some great takeaways from today. So who I am, just in a nutshell, as Matt said, if you haven't heard of me, I'm Sam McKenna. As my name suggests, there a couple of different things here about me. These are all just things to give you a little bit of credibility for me and what I'm going to talk about today, if you haven't heard of me. So I'm the founder of SAM Sales Consulting, but I've spent about 13, 14 years of my career now, all in enterprise sales, both as an individual contributor and then as an executive leader at companies like LinkedIn and on 24 for. And while there are again a bunch of accolades here, this is all just to say that, you know, some of the success that I've had in sales is of course due to how I operate with clients and how I sell and the pitches that I give. But at the end of the day, the thing that I need the most is people to sell to. I need leads, right? I can be the most amazing salesperson on the planet, but if I don't have leads coming in or an automated process of how I can get more of those, then I'm going to be in trouble. And I think that in my role with Sam Sales Consulting, one of the things that I look at for organizations is to see what that funnel looks like, right? And where are the leads coming from? How do we get MQLs, what do we do inbound wise? And it's pretty wild wild west might even be wild wild west within the organization with a lot of disparities in practices. But I'm hoping again that all this lends to give you an idea of how unbuild process in my own career, both as an individual contributor again and as an executive leader. One thing to note too is having previously worked for LinkedIn, I now support them in a Bunch of different avenues. But while some of this is going to focus heavily on LinkedIn and give you a really good idea of how to use, especially Navigator, I assure you I'm not compensated in any way. I'm just a true enthusiast of the platform and what it can do for you from a technology perspective. So hopefully a little less bias in my presentation there. Okay, so scale smarter. And I was thinking about this even just listening to our panel this morning, and I think one of the things, a few of the things that Vikas had mentioned really resonated with me, right? Where he says, you owe too high too soon, or the fact that you need to be in unison when you're scaling. I wrote down these notes that were so great, but I think about scaling and I think about one of the things that I see with a lot of organizations is that they think, okay, I need the, the latest hack and the best practice and, you know, the, the latest trend that I can do. And, you know, we're gonna put together all of this great sales tech stack, but they're really not focusing on the foundations, right first. So the foundations are the most important thing. I look at focusing on the hacks and all the things that you can do and less on the foundations as the equivalent of remodeling, let's say, a bathroom on the second floor of your home while your floor, your house is sinking and your foundation's cracked. Makes no sense to do that when the floor is literally falling out below you. So one of the things that I would really think about as you're thinking of scaling smarter is have we mastered the foundations? Do we really know how to do that? And this really all comes back to process. We talk about this all the time. To use our trendy buzzwords. We do scalable request, repeatable process, right? And while it's like, oh, my gosh, I've heard that so many times, it's also so important, right? Do we have a scalable, repeatable process? My favorite thing is to say if this, then that. If we do this, then we do that. If we have a demo with somebody, we connect with them on LinkedIn. If we close the deal, we send a handwritten thank you note. I can go on for hours about that, but start to think about your process internally. So one of the things that I really want to impart with you on is the idea of job hoppers. So this is kind of my own little name for it, but this is a process that not only have I installed in a bunch of different clients that I work with now, but for previous organizations that I worked with and worked as a VP of sales and so on and so forth. And I think this is really interesting. So we think about the idea of job hopping and we think about, okay, we know that the average, let's say VP of sales stays in role for 17 months. We know that people change jobs. We have all changed jobs. We most likely will not retire where we are right now. We will change jobs again. I know, shocking. But when we change jobs, we also change. We also bring a lot with us, right? We bring relationships from the past, we bring technologies that we've used. If you even think about your own experience, how many times have you changed jobs and said, I'm going to accept this job, but I want to be able to buy this, I want to be able to hire the staff, I want to be able to buy this technology, I want to be able to use the relationships that I have from the past. And your buyers and your customers are no different. However, our process for tracking this and how we capitalize on job changes I think is a little bit broken. So let's look at something. What does our current landscape look like? What do we do in terms of bringing on a new client and then what happens from there? So, and by the way, all the clients I'm sharing with you have given approval to being featured today. So no, no risk in violating my terms there, but existing landscape. So we've got a client, right? Our client might be Ballard Spar. If you're not familiar with Ballard Spire, they are a 650 or so, 700 person attorney firm, large law firm, 15 offices or so. They've been a client of mine for a long time. And so the client is Ballard Spahr. The buyer might be someone like Robin Addis. Robin was formerly the head of procurement for Ballard Spar. And then the sales rep is yours truly, Sam. So here's how we do this, right? We have a client, we know what the buyer is. I'm probably connected with the buyer on LinkedIn. We probably have some kind of personal relationship and I'm the sales rep. Now, as we know, Robin will eventually change jobs and lo and behold, she did. So we get a notification, right? I actually don't have her notification from nine months ago, so pretend with me. But we get a notification that she's changed jobs and what's the job that she does now? So she's left as director of procurement and now she's the chief operating officer at Leasei Legal Internet Solutions, which is a Marketing and website design shop. But so she's our COO now. So for me as the rep, right, what happens? I think Robin left. Okay, great. Now I can sell it to her somewhere else. But what are the odds that where she's gone is in my territory? Probably some to none.

Right.

So what happens instead? We know that Robin is the buyer now. We know that she is at least. And we know that the rep is probably not me. And it's this guy who none of us really like. For any of you Harry Potter fans out there, there you go. You're welcome. I think what's really interesting here, though, is that you've got three scenarios that happen, right? So, number one, we know that the territory is probably going to be different and we know that that person's probably going to move to an account that I'm not tracking. So number one, what if I. What if I am just kind of a rotten rep and I don't like the sales rep here and I say, you know what? I'm not going to help this person. I don't want to see this person succeed, so I'm just going to be quiet and not say anything. I know. Shocking that sales reps are competitive and it might happen from time to time, but you run the risk there, right? All said, it's out of your control as a sales leader and it's out of your control, certainly in a marketing leadership perspective as well. The second risk that you run is I just don't use LinkedIn. So I say I'm, I'm a great sales rep, but maybe I don't use LinkedIn effectively. Maybe I don't even know how to digitally sell. I think that's one of the interesting things that's really come out even in this pandemic, is how many people say, I have zero idea how to digitally sell. I Never go on LinkedIn. I have a terrible profile. I don't know how to replace a handshake with a zoom. You know, what do I do there? But using LinkedIn and knowing how to digitally sell still seems to be a foreign concept for many. So maybe I'm not a LinkedIn user. Maybe I just don't notice, right? I signed Robin at Ballarat Spa two years ago. Now I've moved on and I'm just not paying attention to when she changes jobs. Maybe it's nine months later today that I noticed she changed jobs. So I'm missing that opportunity there. And again, out of the control leadership, both on sales and marketing. And then the other thing, maybe I'm an angelic, perfect, digitally selling phenom of a rep and that's all great. And so I would pass the lead along except. Except I left my company about a month ago and so now it's not really in my best interest or in my top priority to think about, oh my gosh, Robin left and I should probably go to my old company and let them know that that lead went. So what do we do there? How do we bring control back into the situation? Right, here's an idea. So this is a tactic that I used again, I have built this across an inordinate amount of different companies and I think just such an interesting thing to do. So if you are a Sales Navigator customer, which you can be for a, even if you have one license, you can few hundred dollars for the year and you're good to go, you can come in and you can say, hi, I'm head of demand generation, I'm head of marketing, I am head of sales, whatever it may be. You can have a marketing coordinator, a demand gen coordinator, the coordinator that can do this and lead this project. But you can come into Navigator and you can find Robin and you can say great. And what we're going to do is we're going to use this magical little button and we're going to hit save on her profile. Now you probably know how to do this. You guys are probably super savvy and you think, okay, Great saving in LinkedIn Navigator. Riveting. What's the big deal? Here's what the big deal is. When you do this, especially from a marketing perspective or from an executive leader perspective, you are taking the control, right? The notices, the control out of the individual sales reps hands and you're putting them into the hands of somebody who can actually manage an SLA around this, who can manage and turn this into a lead when there's a job change, who can build an MQL out of it and who can start to track revenue. So instead of relying on all the individual reps to say, hey, somebody moved, we should go after them instead, that becomes a function of either executive leadership or marketing, most typically marketing leadership. And you think about how powerful this can be. So now at a high level, we're starting to track and see where all of our clients are going. Again, this isn't siloed by rep, right? And we lose the idea of saying, oh, it'd be so wonderful if we knew that this person changed jobs or hey, somebody just randomly let us know that this person left and went to another Company that melts away because you start to see it in an automated way. So then you'll get notifications. Look at, this is something that I pulled just from Navigator this morning. A few people that I know that recently changed jobs. I left Dave out there because I said I'm an advisor for his company, Replay. So I'm giving him a little shout out there. But this is what you'll get on a daily basis. You can see who do we care about and where have they gone? Which is really important. So what does the new landscape look like? Here's my process to you and what I would advise. So, number one, review the last three months of deals. If you think, okay, this is great, we want to start to track this. How do we even do this? Where do we begin? Here's my advice to you. One, review the last three months of deals. Go back to your sales team. Perhaps, perhaps it's just one sales team. Perhaps you're an enterprise leader and a frontline leader and you say, I'm going to just do this with the six reps on my team. Perhaps you're a second line leader and you say, I'm going to do this with the 50 reps and the 6 managers on my team. Or perhaps you're even in marketing and you say, we totally can rock this. Go back to your teams, look at your deals for the last three months and say, guys, I want you to give back to us the five, 10, whoever you're comfortable with. Five people, let's say at a minimum, who were involved in our deals, who were the influencers, who were the decision makers, who was in procurement, who was the robin of your world, who was in legal, right? Especially when we have to go bat to bat, you know, and head to head with legal and we have to go through terms and conditions and tons of red lines and things like that. We do build relationships with them and when they move, we have an in with legal who probably talks to procurement all day long. I want to know who that person is. So find out who those individuals are. Ask your team and say, give us that, give us that landscape of who those people are. Next, talk to your cs, your relationship managers and your account managers. Who are you guys working with? Has anybody new come into the picture? Have they introduced new players? Have we issued new licenses? Are there new decision makers, new leaders that are coming in and want to be part of this? Who's new that we should know about? Find out who those people are. Right? What you do with that full list is then you build A master account and navigator and you. And so we've got one individual who will be responsible for that. And you just run through and hit save, save, save. Here's what's great again, not only are you getting notifications now about that person, but you're also getting notifications about their company, what's happening in and out of the press. And while that might not be overly useful to you from a marketing perspective, it definitely is from a sales perspective. So even if you do that as a sales leader, how great. But at the most basic level, if you do absolutely nothing else with this, you are going to get job change alerts every single time somebody leaves that you've saved and goes to a new job. Now don't worry, I'm actually going to give you a case study of what's happened and hopefully even ignite your excitement about this a little bit more. The next step, deals moving forward. So that's pulling the last three months of deals and gosh, if you want to even go back farther, further than that, six months, 12 months, have at it. This is just a basic starter so not as to totally overwhelm you, but deals moving forward. How do we build a process in next steps? So ask your reps to again submit their top five players as part of a closed one opportunity. Now I will say a couple things here. So in talking to some sales leaders, when we, when we say like before they market close one, let's say that they have to submit their five names of who was involved and sales leaders and sales operations are like, oh my gosh, it'll never happen. Maybe it'll never happen. Maybe Quinnels has started to set a new bar of requirements to say if you do this, it means everybody else is also doing this and you will probably get leads from it in the end right when these people change jobs. So it's in your best interest to contribute to the greater good or we can just require this. But I think what's really interesting is that even given that feedback and thinking, maybe our sales reps aren't going to be able to do it or aren't going to be excited to do it, it happens more often than not and people are excited to be able to get these net new quality leads. Build your process, build with your CS team, with your RMs, your AMS signal and say hey demand gen, hey marketing, hey sales leadership. FYI, we have a new player involved in this deal. Perhaps you're working with an oracle with Salesforce with General Electric and you start to get new People that are growing, growing, growing in your deal. We want to know who all of those people are. There's such tremendous value there. And then add a CRM source. So in your CRM, whether you use HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever it may be in there, add something that says navigator demand gen project or you can call it whatever you want to call it, totally fine. But I think what's interesting is that then you can start to track like are we actually getting anything out of this? What does the conversion look like? Are we getting meetings, are we getting pipeline? And more importantly, are we actually getting any revenue out of this? Think about this also for any of our marketers or demand gen individuals on the line, think about this from your end of you are responsible for driving MQLs, right? We've got a quota of MQLs, we've got a quota of SQLs. We likely have a quota of pipeline and then of closed revenue that we're chasing. This can open up an entire new opportunity again for less than 1000 bucks a year.

Cool.

So let's take a look at what our actual case study is. So my slide will advance. I will show you guys.

Here we go.

All right, so results. This is a great case study with a client. Again, I'm happy to, I can even share the name with you guys afterwards. They're more than excited to talk about this but we applied this process to one of our clients in February of this year. So February 54 person sales team marketing, SaaS platform. There's like 5,000 out there, so throw a dart. But this is what we started. So we worked with the demand gen coordinators. So we took one of their entry level roles and we said you're to going, going to lead this project. And this person handled all the logistics. So number one, setting up the source in their Salesforce instance. Number two, making sure that there was a built in process for ending closed one deals. And then number three, being able to document all of that moving forward. Here are results. So as of June 10th when I built these slides out, it was 112 days since our launch. I think some pretty meaningful data here and I want you to just think about, about when we look through these results, I want you to start to think about this, how this would apply to your own sales game, to your own current MQLs, right? To even your own closed one. Now if looking at the bottom in terms of our closed one and you might think, well I work for Salesforce and like woo, $200,000 I can come up with that today, sure. But let's think about your ACV and what this could actually mean to you. So let's dig into what this was. 167 job changes. So in 112 days we had 167 job changes. 134 of those for lateral moves, but to either larger organizations or for more responsibility. And I think that's incredible. Right. So even just again, back to our example with Robin. She was Director of Procurement and now she's Chief Operating Officer. Right. So perhaps moving to a smaller company but a bigger title or moving to the same title but with a bigger company. Right. That's what we're tracking. It doesn't necessarily mean one thing or, or the other. Maybe, perhaps it's just a lateral move to the same size company. It still matters. But we were specifically targeting is it a larger opportunity for that person and a larger company even for us. So 134, 98 of those were moving from an existing client to an existing target. So within that mix, people move from an existing client to an existing client. Which honestly just gets us to say thanks, welcome to this new company. And you're probably overseeing a line of business that we don't work with yet. And we'd love you to work with us here too. But thinking about this, you've got your, your current customers, your current clients, your current influencers, decision makers, legal, procurement, all those people who are up and leaving, someone who's used you and hopefully had a good experience with you and going somewhere where you've never cracked open, you've never gotten revenue, perhaps you have, you've churned, but you've got an opportunity to open something there. Right? And how amazing is that? I would kill to know every single day when is this happens. And thankfully I can. 98 of these moves, again, the existing client to existing target. 77 of these resulted in meetings being scheduled within the eight weeks of outreach. So this is one thing that I would note you guys too, thinking about it from your own perspective when you change jobs, right? So when you're an executive at one company and you go to be an executive at another company, the last thing you're thinking about is let me take a meeting with a sales rep to pitch me on something. Right? We're drinking for the buyer host. Really, really busy. But here's what's great. So even in training your reps for great sales process, have them reach out and say, I know you're incredibly busy, congratulations on your job change. I would love when things have settled down to find some time to connect with you. Number one, research shows that the first person in that particular vertical to reach out on a job change has almost four times the likelihood of being the person to win the deal. So we want to capture that and fast. Right? Four times. That means let's say I'm a sales rep at Outreach versus a sales rep at Salesloft. If I reach out first, I have four times the opportunity to beat the Salesloft rep. Plus if I'm tracking this, I know that they've already used me before, so what a great advantage. Second, just the opportunity to be a little bit self aware and say, I know you're busy, I know you're slammed, but could we meet in six weeks? Could we schedule some time in seven weeks? Right, let's find some time to connect, if not now, because you're busy. The other thing that you might have is that person says thanks for the self awareness, but I actually want to be right now, this is one of my biggest initiatives. As soon as I'm coming in, this is what I want to revamp and I want to bring you guys in. So thanks for reaching out. Right. That can happen too. Thinking about this company, I have an average contract value of $48,000 in 112 days. 112 days, they were able to build almost a million dollars of pipeline and then convert almost $200,000 and close one opportunity. I think this is so incredible, right? And you think about this again, it could maybe one of those deals was somebody who said, I know I'm already going to use you coming in, but maybe none of them were right. And think about this. If you're a small organization where your average contract value, you'll see you have 54 individuals, you're about $35 million in revenue. This could ideally, at the most basic level, if we've got a trend here, represent almost a million dollars of net new revenue for you, net new in a given year. Massively impactful. So again, think about this from your perspective. What can you do at a grander scale? How can you incorporate this? I think amazing, amazing results. I'm going to talk about one other thing with a little bit of time left. So one of the things that I think is also really valuable about this incredible navigator technology is just the opportunity to leverage our network and leverage everybody's network. Now if you are a navigator customer already and you know this and you were like, okay, great, I have access to this thing called Team Link Extend, which lets me to see everybody in my Network and who everybody knows. And I hope to God she's not going to pitch about this or talk about this because I already know how to do this. I'm going to teach you some of the hacks that I use that not a lot of people know about and hopefully will again make impact to you. So just a little cheeky comment. This is what we do when new people join our organization, right? Like, hi, we've never met. I'm Sam. Welcome to I don't know xyz. I'd love to find your, look at your network. I'd love an introduction to the people that you know and you have absolutely

no idea who I am or if

I'm trustworthy, but totally introduce me, right? That happens all the time. But again, how do we scale this, how do we make this more repeatable and how do we build a little bit more value here? So welcome to our company. Tell us who you know. Couple of things to think about when one of the searches that I've actually created and in fact I just posted about on where else LinkedIn this week was talking about how, especially when I was at LinkedIn, I built a search and I said, hey navigator, tell me every single time I have a new executive that joins either LinkedIn or Microsoft that's, you know, that owns LinkedIn and what's great about that is LinkedIn's a pretty big organization, so it's Microsoft, right? There's tons of people that are joining every single day that I don't know about. And no matter the size of your organization, you know, granted, if again you're a three person shop, you probably know everybody who's joining. But as you start to scale, think that you might not know everybody who joins, right? Maybe there's somebody new in finance, maybe there's a director of product or engineering that you have yet to encounter. So you can build a search that allows you to say, hey, there's somebody new that works for your company that's senior, that's in an executive role and probably has a great network to boot. So when new executives join, one of the things that's a hallmark about them is that they're eager to contribute, right? They want to make an impact as fast as they possibly can. But they're also overwhelmed and busy. They're learning all their processes. They're trying to figure out where the bathroom is, although we're at home right now, so they probably know where that is. But, but they're really busy, they're overwhelmed. Again, lots of processes for them to Take on. So I think what's interesting here is that you're gonna give them an opportunity to make impact right away while not having to ask for a lot of their time. So quick Navigator poll, I look to see who joins our company. I connect with them right away and say, welcome, welcome. And then I pop into Navigator and I look to see who do you know that I would care about? And here's the really cool part. Here's what a report looks like. You can pull this really easily. I save it. I never have to search it again. Navigator will just tell me when new executives join. And here's what's really great. The most important thing is I'm going to connect with an executive that has, I don't know, 3,000 employees or 10,000 connections. I, I don't know how many connections they have, but I don't really care about their 10,000 connections. Super selfishly. What I do care about is who they know that I care about. So there's this really handy thing where you can say, search within saved accounts. So instead of looking at your 10,000 connections that you might have, I can say all of my accounts and all of my contacts and all the people that I care the most about are saved. And I can just hit search within saved accounts and then really easily see exactly who you know that I want to know, which is killer. Other thing that I would suggest here. So pop here. How do we use this to scale one again? Immediate new alert of executives that join. You can capitalize on their networks and you can approach them and say, I happen to see that, you know, Vikas a customer and I would love to get in front of him. And I've never been able to do so despite my incredible messaging. But you guys know each other. It looks like you worked together previously. Can you introduce us? Right. What an awesome opportunity for that person to say, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Vikas and I go way back. Happy to introduce you. And while Vikas might be like, he's going to take our meeting, most likely. Right. Because you're leveraging the network of an executive and executives want to help each other because at some point that executive is going to need something back from your executive. So great opportunity to say help us out. Great opportunity for that executive to make immediate impact. I also like to use this as notifications of moves in and out, especially of tier one accounts. Right. So you can build a search to say, our top accounts are Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, whatever they may be.

Right.

You can list a hundred of them and you can say navigator. Every single time someone moves in with these specific titles to our account or out and changes jobs. Maybe somebody that we've never seen before, maybe somebody we've never encountered before, we don't even know they exist. They're a third connection to us. We want to know about it. Right? Here's what I think is interesting. So perhaps if you hadn't installed the process that we talked about before, you have a VP of sales that moves into a key prospect. So let's say they leave IBM, which you guys work with and they move to Oracle, which we don't work with. And what's great is that that person probably has a connection to someone. Maybe your 2017 rep of the air, just pulling out of thin air there. But again, that person left three months ago or a year ago and you can't ask that person or you didn't even, you don't even know because that person owns the relationship. So again, really awesome to have this specifically where it'll notify you people moving in and out, it'll notify you of job changes and you can capitalize on those. I also think about how to mitigate churn. So how to scale effectively, how to scale smarter. We know how to scale smarter. We need to bring in that new leads. We need to grow our existing customers. Man, do we really need to make sure that those customers don't churn, right? Because if they do turn, we have nothing but at least leaky bucket. So if we see perhaps a new VP of sales moves into one of our top revenue producing accounts. Right? And maybe she's not a big fan of us. This just happened to me yesterday. One of my largest clients has a chief operating officer that moved in and she has her whole team of people that she uses that aren't my client. And so they have an existing contract there. It's a massive deal, but it can also be canceled kind of at convenience, which I know seems nuts, but this is the thing, right? We're notified of this now we don't know this person, but because we have these reports built, we saw and we're like, okay, what do we do? How do we do this? I'll also mention if you think, well anybody would notice a new COO coming on board. This is a massive company that has COOs per lines of business. So it's really impossible with the hectic ness of our day to day to track all that. So again, just an awesome opportunity for you to say, you know what, there's someone new in or out this Might present an opportunity of churn and let me work with CS and with our relationship management team to make sure that everything's in good shape. I was going to say this too, just Vikas made a great point earlier. Right. Make sure you guys are in lockstep. And this is one of my final thoughts for you as well. Product, sales, marketing, cs. Everyone needs to be in lockstep to make sure that you scale smarter. Because if you are siloed and no one's talking to each other, we know we'll fail. So just a good opportunity here especially to work with CS and go from there. One other thing I was going to mention, so bonus for any of you in sales and marketing, just going back to the previous slide. One of the biggest frustrations that I hear from people is to say, oh my gosh, we have so many followers on LinkedIn, we have no idea who we can see. We can't see who they are. We don't have access to that data. Actually, look at my screenshot. If you had scrolled over to the right a little bit, it'll show you in search results who those individuals are that follow you on LinkedIn, which is pretty cool. So you can start to see like our key prospects following our company page on LinkedIn. Are they, are they doing anything on there? Have they followed us for a long time? You can pull this really specifically or even a more broad search. So good little bonus hack for you there. Final thoughts. Again, you really want to nail the foundation. Scaling smarter. Nailing the foundations means nailing your process. Build your processes that can send scale quickly. Build your processes that can automate leads. Build your processes that can tell you, hey, somebody's changed job, somebody is new has come in. There might be a risk of churn. You want technology that does this for you, but in a meaningful way. It's not just about scale, scale, scale and tons of leads and unqualified this and that. It's about finding how do you get the most meaningful leads and notifications into your team's hands so then you can capitalize on them. All right, get your organizational house in order. At the start, I talked to a lot of sales leaders who are just joining startups, just joining new organizations and again, thinking about hacks and this, and we want to do all these things, but put your process in place. Make sure you even have a sales process. Are you guys going to be a challenger seller? Are you going to be spin seller? Are you going to be Sam sales seller? No. Make sure that your organizational house is in place when you get there and when you start. And if it's not, this is a great opportunity to take a pause and say we need to adjust. If you're like some organization that are wrapping your year right now in a couple of days, maybe not the best time, close the year out strong, let's get into July. But even think about how you can pause for a week or two and say these are some things that we need to build, maybe even building the job hopper process that I talked about. And again, capitalizing on Vicus point, which I think he was probably reading my slides during his panel speech. But ensure your sales and marketing teams are locked up right. Goals, process. You have to make sure that there's communication. And I think that that might be one of the biggest myths ever. Like sales and marketing never gets along. Everyone's always pointing the finger. You're not doing enough of your job. We're giving you leads and you're not closing them. We're not getting enough leads. We need more. But I think with a great amount of communication, we're going after the same goals. Right? We have the exact same goals. We just have to agree on the process to get there and then just know to be collaborative to make sure that we're again in lockstep to hit our goals with that. That was my presentation for today. And thanks you guys for, for listening to me passionately talk about how to hopefully scale a little bit smarter on your side. And I will pass it back to our lovely Matt.

Yeah, thank you, Sam. That was great. I mean, the extremely tactical and step by step nature of what you laid out, I mean, it is exactly the type of content that our audience looks for. So we appreciate it. Do have a couple questions. We have time maybe for one or two of these that we're submitted. But before we get into those, I do have a bone to pick with you. I did not give you authorization to use a photo of me as your representation of the sales rep earlier on slide. But that being said, you'll hear from my attorney shortly.

But, you know, very handsome without your nose there.

Thank you. Ignoring that for the time now, one great question that came through. Seems to be from a leader on the call. Seems like, you know, he or she is probably having a little bit of struggles getting their reps comfortable with just the general idea of social selling. So how would you recommend someone who's obviously an expert in the space. How would you recommend getting your team comfortable with this if they haven't been up until this point?

Yeah, so I Wonder if getting comfortable is about social selling or using utilizing kind of a process like this. What's your gut tell you, Matt?

That is a great. Yeah, I'd say probably more of. If I had to guess, I'd say probably more the latter.

Okay. So I think that this process, you know, for sales, for a sales team, one of the things that I might see as a point of frustration, maybe for a sales rep, is to say, well, these are my people. Like, I don't want to give you, I don't want to give you access to connect with them or follow them on LinkedIn. And these are my lead and I'm really incredibly protective of them, especially from an RM's perspective. Right. A relationship manager is going to say, it's my job to grow this. I don't want to give these over. I think one of the things that I would say is one, at the end of the day, the leads and the accounts and everything are not the ownership of the rep, right? They're the ownership of the company. The rep is working for the company. And at the end of the day, those are the goals is to further the company's revenue. The other thing that I would say is if they are concerned about private privacy or concerned about giving access to that. Keep in mind that one of the beautiful parts about being a member of LinkedIn Navigator is that you can save and follow all these people completely privately. Nobody has any idea it's very Big Brother in the most wonderful way, but nobody has any idea that you're following them, that you've saved them, that you're tracking any of their things. And furthermore, any of you can set your privacy settings on LinkedIn.com to be private and then set your still see everybody who looks at your profile while being completely private. Really nice bonus of Navigator, but I think in terms of getting comfortable with this process, it's also the outcome for you. So because kind of to the earlier point, you are contributing to a process that others are contributing to and will benefit you. Right. How much would you love to know if an existing client moves into one of your top prospects? And this is just a great opportunity to serve the company as a whole. The other thing that I would say is think about if you can build in a spiff with this, right? And I know it's like, oh my gosh, what do we have to do? Build contests to get sales reps to act sometimes. So think about if you can build in a spiff and say, you know, top points for getting this in by today, tomorrow Whatever. Also, when there are job changes, you'll be involved and, you know, we'll give you a 10% quota credit of the deal. Tons of different things that you can do to really motivate people because at the end of the day, all they care about is hitting their quota and making as much money as possible.

Awesome.

No, I love it. Time for, I think, one last quick question. We've got a couple different versions of this. I'm going to try to consolidate them into one. You essentially, you spoke about speed. Delete. Essentially, you see somebody change jobs, the first person to reach out usually wins. We had a couple questions as far as when you do actually engage in that dialogue with that person, be it immediately or six weeks down the road, depending on his or her schedule, what does that language look like during that dialogue? I mean, do you essentially just go straight into the cell, for the lack of a better term, or, you know, is there a more delicate way that you balance that?

Great, great question. So one, one of my first steps as a, as a rep would be I want to work with CS and the RM and say, what does this, what does this relationship look like? So the person that just moved from, let's say again, IBM to Oracle, how are we doing with IBM? Do we know this person well? What was their experience with us? Are they a huge champion of us? Give me a lay of the land. I'm going to do discovery in two ways. I'm going to do discovery with my own internal team, and then I'll never cut straight to the cell. I'm going to do discovery with that person. So even though they know our company and what our technology can do, I'm going to say, tell me everything's going on with you. Congrats on the job change. This is amazing. I know you're probably again, drinking from the virus. Hate that term. I don't know why I keep using it, but I'd love to hear about your priorities. So tell me what you're hoping to accomplish. Tell me why you'd even consider using us and what we could do for you. Tell me the landscape and then let's go from there. And as a quick side note, that's the way I always start a discovery call. So I think a lot of people stumble through discovery and they're like, hello, Matt, tell me what interests you in this call today? And you're like, I don't know, you're not. BDR got me on the phone and here I am. And then you're like, well, that's really awkward. So what I like to say is whenever you start a discovery call and should always do discovery, it's just to say I'd love to tell you a million things about us, but first I would love to hear from you what's the team look like, your challenges, your goals and love to hear about your landscape, if that's okay. And nine times out of ten someone's going to say sure, which is going to give you a running list of everything that you can ask for and how to close them.

Perfect. I think that's, that's a fantastic place to end. Thank you Sam for your contributions, for your leadership, for bringing some really great and tactical knowledge to the community today. And that is a, that's a great place to end this, this roadshow here in New York. So thank you everyone for joining again. Quick follow up. You are going to receive an email from me later on this afternoon that has recording of this session because I know that I had a couple questions come in through the chat as far as people that maybe miss the first portion or so within there of course there is going to be some information about Sam, about all of our panelists. We do encourage you to connect with and follow them on LinkedIn. And also included in that email is going to be an invitation to join an event that Sales assembly is putting on in a couple weeks led by gentleman by the name of Andrew Sykes. For those of you who aren't familiar, if you do attend the event as our guest, which we'd really love for you to do, you're going to see pretty quickly why companies like Google, IBM and CDW work with Andrew to train their global sales organizations. So thank you again everyone for joining us on Sales Assembly's virtual roadshow here in New York. Thank you to Sam and to all of our panelists and we hope everyone has a great day and a great rest of the week and end of the month and end of the quarter depending on what your fiscal looks like. So thank you again everyone and have a good rest of your day. Thank you Sam.

Thanks Matt.

Bye.