4 Ways Your Sales Team Can Maximize Revenue Yield with Conga VP of North American Sales Kerry Hudson

Time for Q and A. So please make sure to drop your questions throughout the session into the chat below and unmute yourself and turn on your video to ask Kerry Live during the Q and A portion. Kerry, take it away.

Well, thanks for having me today. I really appreciate it. Just a little background on myself. Kerry Hudson, I'm coming to you from Denver, Colorado. I spent the last 15 plus years in SaaS sales building high performing sales organizations and I've had the great opportunity to kind of see businesses in every stage of the ecosystem. I've worked in early stage series A, series B organization scaling them to 20 to 30 million and then PE backed organizations taking them from 70 to 300 million and everything in between. And what this has been able or afforded me the opportunity to do and experience is really to see what it takes to drive a high performing sales organization. And over a lot of successes but plenty of mistakes. I've really learned that there's four key themes to developing an organization that's going to help your business deliver on your revenue goals. And it really is four big buckets. It's the people, it's the culture, it's the process and really understanding the key KPIs to drive your organization and know when to put fuel or gasoline on the fire or when to really take a step back and analyze what's going right and where are the challenges so you can really effectively make the tweaks to your business. But for me where I'm always going to over index on is the people side and you can have great products, you can have amazing processes, but it's really the people that's going to make the difference for an organization. And when I think about people I really look at it in kind of two major buckets. Of course the hiring is a very important part, but that's a topic in itself. So today I'm really going to focus on two things that I think are really really important. It's the onboarding process and how do you develop and retain your talent. And onboarding in a number of organizations is a one week training program where you really focus on who you are as an organization, key Personas that you're going to attack and really core processes. But what I have found is that it leaves a major gap because you put your sellers in a position where where then they're hitting the phones without the core knowledge of what needs to be done and what that affects is your ramp periods and extends time. So over the last several years what we have developed is a really strong onboarding program that maps back into your sales process. So if you know that you have a 90 day sales days to close. What I've done is I've mapped my onboarding process into a a three month training process for the team which gives them really fundamental skills every week in order to support that. So as an example, in week one for my onboarding, for my growth team, we really focus on what are the Personas, what are the core use cases and what are the prospecting skills that they're going to need to be successful. And then what we have is we have exit criteria at each week in order to say have you mastered that skill set and are you ready to move on to the next week which you're going to build on those skill sets? And what this does is it really starts to create the tempo. And our actually sales philosophy is that you are a lifelong learner. We are going to continue to invest in you, but we also are going to ask you to ensure that you have the minimum skills to be successful in the organization. And what this has helped us do is it has helped us reduce our ramp time in my growth segment, for example, from 90 days into a 30 day ramp, which is helping us deliver against our revenue goals faster. The second, and I think the most important piece is once you have somebody onboarded and they're fully ramped, you have to continue to invest in that individual. And oftentimes I've seen even in my businesses is that you put together really tactical enablement programs to focus on skill sets that are the same across all sellers. What we've done is we've developed a program that really looks at what is the growth path for the seller. So underneath my team, I have three different segments that report into me. I've got my gross segment, my mid commercial segment and my small enterprise segment. And each one of those has different skill sets that are necessary for them to be successful. So what we've created is a journey map or a career progression map that really allows individuals in each one of the segments to support growth goals. So not just looking for how do I get to hit my quota enough to get to the next segment, but what are the skill sets that I need in order to support that? And what this does is it really creates an environment of investment. Both sellers investing in the business, but us investing back in the sellers. And it allows us to put them on an individual journey or an individual path to meet them where they are and develop their own skills to make them the best that they can be. And this has created not only success for the individuals from a retention standpoint, but then when we get them into the next segment, they're ramping faster in that segment. So we're just creating a culture of success and progression and career progression, which also keeps individuals within the organization and you can grow them faster. So it's been a really exciting opportunity for us. But I would say people matter. And over investing in this area for your business is really going to help you deliver against your revenue targets. The second one and how we've really focused on changing the game is creating the organizational culture of winning and accountability. And we can start and we always talk about, you know, how do you do that in the sales organization? And I actually am going to bubble it up and say it actually starts higher than that. Creating a culture of accountability across the organization is really what's going to drive success. And at Congo, we, you know, led by our CEO as well as our C level, really have focused on creating a culture of accountability through our cross functional teams. And this has built a successful organization where we can challenge each other, where we all own three things. And as a business, by owning everybody owns a customer, everybody owns pipeline, and everybody owns bookings, knowing that we all have separate roles to play in delivering against that, we all have a unified experience. And what that allows us to do is to win faster but also create a rhythm and a tempo for the sales organizations to help them be successful. So by creating this framework where we all own power, pipeline, customer and bookings, we're all working in unison. And what I talk to my team a lot about is rhythm and patterns so that you can execute quickly. And so what we've done is partnering with our marketing team, marketing with our product marketing team, and then partnering with sales. We create campaigns on a monthly basis, little C campaigns we call them, which are things that my team can quickly deploy against their pipeline in order to build their own pipeline for success. I also have to say that I am fortunate working for an organization that has a product that can spit out reports very quickly, so I can easily see and create accountability with my organization. So my team on a weekly basis gets a report that shows them what was their pipe create or how many meetings do they have, what is their creation and how are they tracking against their quota so that we can easily create that tempo and that pattern of success, you know, week over week and then month over month. But more importantly, it creates this culture of winning and winning together. And when we really figured out that we had success, I'm going to have to go back to Q4 last, I guess it's two years ago now when we were sitting on the floor in the office in Broomfield and we were waiting for, you know, we had just hit our number as a business, but we had one individual who was 24k away from club and instead of all of the reps who had already hit their number leaving and saying, hey, we're here, we're gone, we've hit our objectives. The entire team stayed. The marketing team came over, the support team came over and rallied behind this one individual who was trying to get to club and they stayed with him till 6 o' clock at night and said, we're here for you. We're going to wait for this deal to come in. And when it came in at 6 o' clock at night, you would have thought that we closed the biggest deal in company history. It was a small 24k deal, but it was because we won together and we knew how important it was to that individual. And it really talks about creating a culture, not just in sales but across the organization that if you own these numbers together and if you win together, you're going to create something really special and everybody's going to drive in the same direction. And it's really important for hitting your revenue targets to have all teams rallying behind the same goals. Process is my favorite thing and I could talk to you guys at nauseam about creating good processes. And I think, you know, from my perspective, you know, working in large organizations and then working in earlier stage organizations is the processes that you're going to create are going to be different depending on the size of your organization. But if you follow the three C's in a sales organization to really drive, drive to this, you're going to find success. And the three Cs are customer first, company and compensation. And why I put them in that order is it really allows you to as you're thinking through and defining your processes, if you always have a customer centric approach, you're going to be creating processes that's going to make you easy to do business with. And you know, as any sales leader knows that people don't buy product, they buy people. And so by creating processes and making yourself as a business easy to do business with, you're going to win more deals, deliver better numbers and frankly then have an opportunity to upsell, cross sell your existing customer base. So it's a framework that we use and we really find to be really effective and successful within the organization. The next is really focusing on creating touch points within your funnel to support not only your existing business, but also your new business and giving the sellers a framework to, to work against. And by doing this and focusing on the customer, the company and the and your commissions, you're going to create an environment where sales can be successful, the business is going to be successful and the customer is going to be successful. And I think a strong kind of story or narrative around this was last year. I'm sure like our business and like many businesses there were challenges with COVID and you know, we have our processes and we have our bookings policies that really focus on this is what we need to do to drive revenue and success for us as we prepare to go public. And sometimes those bookings policies didn't align with what our customers need. And we had a customer as an example who was struggling. They were in the restaurant business and really had to make some changes to their business when their contract renewed. Instead of taking hard party lines, you here is our conga processes. This is what we're going to do. We bent those processes and we looked at the customers and said this is what you need, this is what's going to be good for your business in this really challenging time for you. And we amended their contract and supported them during COVID and we created a customer that was a customer for life. Fast forward a year, that same customer is growing in business is back, restaurants are open and we started to deploy different services around it. But that's not the story. Not just because we could sell more product to them, but because we had created that tight relationship and that process, those processes and that partnership is that at the end of Q1 we needed a deal. We were, we were behind in our bookings and we needed one more deal in order to hit our quarterly goals. And we knew that this customer is growing but wouldn't need additional licenses and additional product until Q2 of this year. So we were able to reach out to this customer and say we know you're tracking to this, we have this forecasted for next quarter. Is there anything you can do to help support our business because of how we helped you last year and it was a no brainer. So the reason I tell these stories is yes, it's really important to create great processes so you have the fundamentals to run a great business. But by putting your customers first and always keeping that within your framework, you're going to create customers for life. And we all know that if you have customers for life, not only are you going to have a great foundational business but you're going to be able to grow and scale quickly. And you know, as an example, in our existing customer base our conversion rates are 60%. So we know that we can win fast and we can continue to cross sell upsell because we create a really wow customer experience for our base. And how do you win faster? And this is probably the fundamentals and I would say that the people side and the fundamentals, the reporting side are really where businesses have to over index on. Because if you have those two cornerstones or those two bookends, you're really going to be able to own and understand your business. So as we look at our sales organizations, we really focus on a couple of really important key KPIs. We look at, you know, how many SQLs are there, how many are converting to SAOs, SAO and then we look at the conversion rates within the funnel at each one of the stages to understand where we're winning and losing. And then you have your win rates, your ads and then you have your days to close. And by understanding those KPIs and making sure across the business with my marketing partners, with my sales, my sales organization, but also with my CS organization, understanding those metrics and having a firm understanding is really going to help us understand where we need to add fuel and where we need to kind of pull back and really overanalyze that. And right now as I mentioned, you know, how is that manifesting itself in my business today because we have, you know, dialed in metrics and we're aligned to these goals. What we were able to do just in my QBRs this week was we were able to look and say, look at this one segment. Ads is high, conversions are world class. We've got great pipeline and we have capacity within the sales organization. Let's go add more pipeline, let's go build programs, build campaigns so we can add more to this organization because it's ready to scale. Now on the flip side, I have another team that although they're doing well, they're in funnel conversion rates aren't as high as we'd like to see them. And really what we're seeing is in stage one to stage three, we're losing too much pipeline, which really leads to a qualification criteria question. So because we have the mechanics in place to say red, yellow, green, where should we start, where should we start, where should we stop, where should we continue? We're able to look at that one segment and say this is where we need to, we need to dip in or dive in rather. And how do you do that as a sales organization? It's not just sales, as I told you before, because we've locked hands and said we all own this experience. We've got marketing, we've got product, and we've got sales coming together cross functionally to say what are these challenges? Why are we seeing this dip? Is this a product issue? Is it a sales motion issue? Is it a use case issue? And we are as a team coming together to solve it. And because we have the metrics and the KPIs in order to really understand those challenges, we're able to dive in quickly, understand and execute and really be agile in our business. And that's really going to help us drive revenue, also stop things that are not working, not working successfully. And so if I had to say anything regarding analyzing your business is spend the time to put the infrastructure in place in order to support that, in order to support this. And you know, when you kind of tie it all together, these four things really change the way that you're going to look at your business. I'm not going to say that they're easy, these are things that take time and you can always push them to the side. But I would say in my experience when I push these to the side, we are not able to run as fast and really to scale the business and see the revenue numbers that we need to see because you're missing either on the people in the enablement side getting them up ramped and then be able to scale them quickly or you haven't created a culture where you've got this growth mindset and wanting to win quickly, win together and execute in a fun way. So what I would say in my organizations is that when I come into an organization, I evaluate these four priorities. I stack, rank them, where do we stand, what do we have and how do we create a framework to put this together in rapid succession in order to support our growth. With that I will, I'll turn it over to some questions.

Great Kerry. I think we have a couple questions keyed up now within the chat. First one from Ben. Great insight, Kerry. How do you prioritize accounts to get quick wins?

Yeah, great question. So what we do is we look at kind of three criteria and I would say that this is as I mentioned, we have three different segments. So you have to really prioritize against your segments, understand what cohort they're in. So first I would understand if the account is a new business account or it's an existing business account. If it's a new Business account, What is the vertical they're in, what is their revenue? Are the two criteria, the steel threads that we look at in new business, in existing business, we look at those two criteria. But then what we add in is we add in what is their current spend with us and what are the current products that they have. Because what we do, especially within our existing base, is that we take them on a journey. If they start with our Composer suite of products, we know that the next adjunct is into our sign product and after that they're going to go into our CLM product, depending on the journey that they're in. But we know based off of the vertical, based off of their spend, where they're going to go in that journey map and where we're going to have the highest conversion rates. And that's how we've been able to get and maintain that 60% conversion rate within our existing base.

That's fantastic. I have another one here from Julia. Love the focus on processes. Quick question. How can I accelerate deal cycles for my sales team when they hit bottlenecks from legal, et cetera, et cetera?

That's a great question, Julia. When I look at that, that really comes down to processes and locking hands. So I think I'm going to read the question as is it's internal bottlenecks. And so when I look at the internal bottlenecks, that's where as sales leaders and business partners, you need to look at your processes and understand are these things that are necessary for compliance or for business reasons or are these just, are these just old antiquated processes that we need to work through? And so what we do is we really evaluate processes but we also have great tools like so if you look at bottlenecks with legal, look at Conga clm because that really does speed up your sales cycle and your legal.

Excellent. And I think we have time for one more from Susie Trends on top areas for revenue expansion for major accounts, that is existing enterprise accounts.

Yeah. So where we're seeing our greatest expansion opportunity and you know, it's going to be specific to your verticals. I think in our industry right now it is vertical specific. So we're seeing high tech fins and hls really, really moving fast and quickly within, within their span. There's a lot of digital transformation that's going on within these segments right now. So I would look at those, those opportunities. I would also look at where you sit within your organization and what is their prioritization. So you know, here at Conga we've created a maturity model that we're able to map back into. So we take that to the highest converting verticals, and we really focus our teams there. So we really. What I do with my organizations is really say, what is the mainstream, what is the line? And really try to block out the outliers, meaning if there are verticals that are not right in our mainstream, using those and only taking those opportunities opportunistically opposed to focusing my team on them. So we really try to keep everybody laser focused on what they're trying to achieve.

Awesome. Carrie, what an insightful session. Thank you so much for that. We have a lot more great content coming today, so see you all in the next session.