Build a High-Performing, Data-Driven Inside Sales team at Scale | WalkMe VP, Sales Alisa Rosenthal

So I've been at walk me almost four years and when I joined about four years ago, WalkMe was a very heavily enterprise focused organization, really focused on field sales, big deals, big lands, Fortune 500 companies. And the idea was, could we take this complex, highly customized tool and and sell it with an inside sales team? Now what is an inside sales team? This means people sitting at home in the comfort at home now back in the day at their desks, selling via zoom. Right. So less field sells, less hitting the ground running, less wining and dining and more of a repeatable process efficiency, fast sales cycle, ideally one that is lower resource and could efficiently and effectively sell. Walk me. So that was the challenge I walked into several years ago. Over my four years, we've seen dramatic improvements across the board. And I'll walk through some of these metrics and how we did it today. So increased conversion rates by 150%, grew ASP by 4x average sales price, increased our renewal rates by 10% and hit that holy grail of attainment of 80% of the team, hitting 80% of their number. When I came in, I had 16 headcount and now I've got close to 50. And this past June, WalkMe IPO'd was very proud to get to go on stage on the NASDAQ and ring the bell. We got lucky. We threaded the needle and got to go to New York. In those few weeks in June when everyone thought Covid was over, was a really wonderful and euphoric celebration that I'm very fortunate I got to be a part of. So I'm going to walk you today on how I did it. How I took this team from just a few inside sales reps to a big high performing team that was able to ipo. So let's start off with why did WACME want to invest in inside sales if we're doing field sales? Well, if we're having a great time with field sales, Big deals, big whales. Why even invest in inside sales? Well, a few reasons. One, it's high velocity, it lends to predictable revenue. So you have these big deals you're trying to close throughout the year. Inside sales provides a monthly recurring revenue stream that you can rely on. It's fast cycles, which means that you can iterate, you can experiment, you can try things. Things. It's really hard to experiment with a million dollar deal. You want to do everything by the book. But when you've got fast cycles, you can take some liberties, you can try new things, you can test hypotheses. And figure out what's working and what's not working. We kind of call ourselves at WalkMe the Innovation Hub. This is where we test things out. It's our breeding ground for new ideas. I'm proud to say that the pricing model at WalkMe was created within my team and the commercial team. We kept trying new ideas. We came up with a pricing model I called 1, 2, 3 that it worked really well. We sold it like hotcakes. The rest of the organization adopted also means you can build a team with fewer resources. It's not as investment heavy to build this sort of organization. You have a lower sales engineering, CSM and BDR ratio which means it's lower cost to build it. So for organizations thinking about trying to get in the lower end of the market, not the Fortune 500, we sell to companies anywhere from startups, just a few employees, up to about 4,000, 5,000 employees. Think the Dropboxes, the Twilios of the world. Thinking about focusing on that market. Inside sales might be a great place for you to start. The final thing to mention is a talent pipeline. So you heard me mention BDRS before. @ Wakami we've got this really great talent funnel. You start as an SDR sales development representative where you're qualifying inbound leads. You move to a business development representative where you're doing outbound cold calling and then you move on to my team and inside sales where you can learn how to sell before you move up market into field sales. I'm excited to say that yesterday Anthony, I don't know if you're listening in but one of a bdr we moved to my team and October closed his first deal yesterday. It's always a great moment when we see these BDRs move on to the sales team and he had a 10 week ramp there, was able to close a deal. I'll talk a little bit more about time to ramp today and why that's an important metric as well. So let's dig in. All right, so you're going to build an inside sales team. Where do you start? Step one, collect data. I'm a really big advocate of starting out with a good CRM tool. Funny story for my startup credentials here I was the first employee, first sales employee at Mixpanel back in, back in the day, what was it? 2012 employee number eight. And when I joined they had no CRM. It was a Google document. And I said guys, I need a CRM tool. I cannot effectively sell, I can't collect data, I can't make good decisions without a CRM tool. So I actually went and put Salesforce on my own credit card, did the implementation myself. I am now a systems integrator with Salesforce. Mixpanel is probably still paying the price of having me do that original implementation. I don't recommend putting it on your sales rep, but it was so critical to me even back then as the only AE that I was willing to just do the upfront work to get it done. Don't make your AES do that. Get them a good CRM tool. Salesforce is the best on the market. There's an upfront cost implementing it, but it will pay dividends. I also highly recommend a forecasting tool. I use Clari. I love Clari. It shows you how your forecasting is changing over time. It gives you predictive analytics and how you're trending compared to previous quarters. It doesn't let the AES hide anything from you can see exactly how their forecast is changing week to week. And then finally, my favorite tool is gong. This is a call recording tool. There's also a tool out there called Chorus. What this lets you do is not only see what's going on with your with your sales team and understand exactly what's happening in the calls, but give you analytics around those calls. So things like how many questions are they asking? What is interactivity? What sort of topics are coming up? What indicators do we see, indicate or lead to a closed deal? All right, so you've got your stack in place, you're ready to go. The next step is analyzing your sales funnel. So here's a sample funnel. This is what it looked like at WalkMe at one point in time. So basically, deal comes in, you qualified it as a sales qualified lead. The next step, you move it to some sort of PoC or solution design. This might be a trial, this might be a custom demo. I put in sample benchmark conversion rates here. You'll see a pretty high conversion rate between qualified sales qualified lead and some sort of proof of concept. Most people who come in and and have that initial column like your product will want to move to some sort of testing period. You'll also see a fairly high conversion rate. Again, depends so much on the software. But typically you'll see a fairly high conversion rate from the solution design to asking about price. Where you see a big drop off typically is asking about price actually getting through and negotiating and contracting. So this is a fairly typical funnel. 30% is sort of industry benchmark from sales qualified lead to closed one opportunity. So you can take a look at your funnel and say, do I see any red flags? Are there any steps here where I see a big drop off that I'm not expecting? This is the first thing I did at Walk me and I found something interesting. I found that between stage one and stage three and yeah, I get we're missing a stage two here. Long story on that one. But between stage one and stage three, I noticed we had more like a 50% drop off, which ultimately meant we had something more like a 20% conversion rate. And I thought, that's weird. Why are we losing so many people? After the intro call, you should see a pretty high conversion rate there. And I'll dig into more of that in a second. But this should be your first area where you focus and you understand, what does my sales process look like? Step to step, are there any red flags? All right. After you've done that, the third part is experiment. And this is my favorite part of my job. Test hypotheses. What if we try this? What if we did this? Can we do this? Should we run a trial differently? Should we not do a trial? Should we do a paid trial? Should we do only custom demos? Should we try a new pricing model? Should we price differently? Should we present the pricing at a different point in the cycle? Right. These are all the things you can experiment with and start to see how they impact your cycle. And again, the luxury and the beauty of an inside sales team is you have enough cycles where you can run this experimentation. So I want to go back to that intro call, drop off and walk a little bit more about how I navigated that and the impact that I had in the organization. I'm really proud of this story. So when I first joined, as I mentioned, I saw about a 50% drop off rate after that intro call. And I thought, what on earth is happening here? So first up, Gong, looking at these intro calls, the first thing that jumped out at me is we were doing hour long intro calls. I thought, why on earth do we need an hour to do that discovery call? You know, intro call, you're typically just tell me about your organization, tell me about your pain points. Your typical discovery call, right? That rarely takes an hour. I mean, maybe a really good sales rep can extend that to an hour. But usually you see that more about a 30 minute session. So I thought, what on earth are we doing in this intro call? So I started listening to them. Guess what? We were demoing the product in that intro call. To me, this is a big no, no. I always tell My team as a sales rep, you've got two really big pieces of power. You've got two things that a buyer really wants from you. You have the demo and you have pricing. And once you give those up, you really lose your power. You lose control of the cycle. They don't need you anymore. So you should hold on to those two things as long as you can and get as much as you need from your buyer before you give up either the demo or your pricing. We were demoing right out the gates, which means we were probably showing a pretty shoddy demo. It wasn't well put together, it wasn't customized, it wasn't tailored, it wasn't thought through. We weren't getting access to power because we weren't asking them to bring their executives to the call in return, little give get in return for that demo. We were just giving it to them right out the gate. And then, horror of horrors, sometimes we were even giving them pricing in this original call, which blew my mind. So what did I do? I did a pretty draconian measure and I said, guys, we are no longer allowed to have one hour long intro calls. We are doing a 30 minute call and we're calling it a discovery call. So I went to the SDR team and I had to say, change their behavior. Instead of cold calling and trying to get a one hour long intro call book, they had to get a 30 minute discovery call book. I had to change our preconditioning emails. This is what to expect in this email, in this call. It's not a demo, it is not a demo. It is not a demo, it is not a demo, it is a discovery call. We're going to learn about your organization, how we could potentially work together. I got so much pushback from the entire organization on this. I put this quote in red down at the bottom because this is what I kept hearing. If I don't demo in the intro call, they won't get the value. I couldn't disagree more with this. If you demo in the intro call, they will not get the value. The intro call should be a discovery call where we understand what they need to see what value looks like to the buyer and then we build a tailored demo that caters to that. It also means we bring the right people to the table. We have the sales engineer, whoever we need on our site on that call and we run a well thought through, well structured demo. So this is what we did and guess what happened? This is probably the most impactful thing I've done at WalkMe. I don't know, people might disagree with me, but this had such a huge impact on our conversion rates. Right away we shot up from 20% to that holy grail of 30%. And it was funny, I was sort of on a roadshow shopping this around the organization saying this is how we should be running things across the board, not just in inside sales. We should be doing this in field sales, we should do this upmarket. And I got a lot of pushback initially. No, no, no, no. People need to see a demo. They won't get the value. As soon as I showed the results, here's what happened. Here's our conversion rate. You can bet the entire organization is now doing 30 minute discovery calls. So anyway, that's a story I'm really proud of. Again, it started with the data. It started with me looking at our sales funnel and noticing a big drop off using GONG to figure out what on earth was going on. Making a change, it was not easy and seeing a really fantastic result. So you've heard me drop a lot of metrics so far today. I just want to stop and pause and tell you a little bit about some of the metrics. I focus on the metrics that matter. So asp, you've heard me talk about average sales price. This is a really important one. Your bookings, your annualized revenue per deal. You'll hear me talk about conversion rates. So when I talk about conversion rates, I'm usually talking about a sales qualified lead, an opportunity created through a closed one. Deal age is really important. Average sales cycle on my team, it's about 90 days. This impacts a lot of things from forecasting to pipeline. So it's really important to understand what your average deal age looks like. Time to ramp. So you heard me earlier talk about Anthony and how excited I was to see him close a deal and hit his quota in 10 weeks. That's a 10 weeks ramp. That is, that is a really critical piece of information to building out your expectations, your forecasting, your hiring plan. The shorter your ramp, the better you'll be. So focusing on onboarding, focusing on making rep successful out the gates is really critical to your organization. And have a little bit more on that later on. And then finally breadth of performance. So that 80% by 80%, it's cheaper, it's better for organization, it's better for the AES, it's better for morale. If you have not just the feed the eagle, starve the vultures plan where you're rewarding really high performers and starving low performers in an ideal World, you want everybody to be making roughly their ote, right? So that's why breadth of performance is important to focus on. It's fiscally better for the organization and it's also long term better for the AES and for retention rates. All right, moving on to another example, asp, which I just talked about average sales price. So when I joined WalkMe and the inside sales team and the commercial organization, our arasp is about $18,000. And I noticed when I joined we're closing a lot about 18k deals. 18k seemed to be what the reps started with right out the gate. How much is your tool cost? 18k. But I did notice there were a couple of outliers. There were a couple of reps who had more like 50k as their ASP. And I thought, what on earth are those reps doing differently? So I analyzed their calls again, going back to Gong and listening to their calls, looking at their indicators. Where were they giving pricing? How were they talking about pricing? What were they doing differently? Well, for one thing, they were doing it much in the cycle. They were holding out pricing until really all the value had been proven. Until after the proof of concept, after the demo, really, after they had executive buy in, after everything was done. Only then were they disclosing pricing. The other thing they were doing, I call this anchoring high. They were giving pricing much, much higher. They were never just coming in at 18k. They were quoting more like 50k on that or 60k on the pricing. And this had this. Anchoring high is a pretty well known negotiation and sales tactic. The higher you anchor, the higher the deal will likely end up. There's very little downside to it, unless you're maybe in an RFP or everything's done blindly over email. I usually always recommend anchoring as high as you can. So what did we do? We introduced price floors. You don't get credit for a deal below a certain threshold. And of course the reps immediately moved up to that price floor and began selling higher and higher and higher. The team ASP today, I'm proud to say, is much closer to $60,000, which is almost a 4x increase of where it was when I joined the a very highly respectable sales price for an inside sales team with a 90 day sales cycle. Another example, renewal rates. So at some point in my walk me career I was told, congratulations, you're now running renewals as well. So the first thing I did, I went and hired a couple renewal managers. And then I thought, okay, how am I going to build the comp plans. Comp plans to me are one of the most powerful tools you have as a sales leader. They impact so much of behavior, they impact so much of results. Really the most important tool in your belt. And I tell people this a lot. When founders or CEOs come to me and say, I'm building a sales team, what do I need to know? I say, obsess over the comp plan, become a student of the comp plan. I have one more slide on that, one that I'll get to in a minute. But what I thought about when I was designing this comp plan was let me first look at the data and see if I can find any indicators of which organizations are more likely to renew. So ran and crunched all the numbers and found a couple things that jumped out, one more intuitive than the other. The first was that it turns out the more people paid for our product, the more likely they were to renew. I don't know if that's intuitive or not. Part of that actually surprised me and there are a lot of reasons. I think you could wonder why this is the case. Maybe people are just more invested in something they're paying more for. Maybe they value it more, maybe they prioritize it more internally. But it turned out that a higher ARR had a very strong correlation to renewal. So of course, what do we want to incentivize towards bigger deals? The second thing, and this one is less surprising, that three year deals had a much, much, much higher renewal rate. So it seems if you invested in the product up front, if you committed for three years, by gosh, you were going to make it work. And so we leaned really heavily into both rewarding higher ARR and three year deals, both at the logo acquisition. So this impacted not just my renewal team, but also my new business closers, rewarding them really heavily for three year deals and incentivizing my renewal managers almost exclusively. Their job was to go and convert everybody to three year deals and then if they couldn't get the three year deals, then the goal was to increase the ARR. And that was what we incentivized around. So purely using sales process here without even getting into the CSM world and customer happiness, purely with sales process and data, we were able to increase our renewal rates by 10%. So another way that data can be really impactful. So you heard me talk about comp plans just now. Sometimes they're called ICPs, individual comp plans. They are your most critical tool in your belt to drive behavior with your sales organization. You know, in a nutshell, I would say keep it simple, don't have too many things you're driving towards. But at the beginning of the year it's worth sitting down and thinking, what do we care about as an organization? What are we driving towards? Is it long term deals, is it bigger deals, is it more deals? It's the faster sales cycle, is it more lands? Are we finding that our reps are expanding and focusing all their time and growing existing customers, but we're not getting new logos in the door. Our renewals, what matter most to you right now, this will vary over time, year over year, this will change. And it's okay to change your comp plans year over year to keep up with your changing priorities. But as an example, if you decide, you know what, what we care about right now is that we've got this great product, this is our moment, we just need to land grab, we just need to get as many new customers and new logos as we possibly can. Then it's really great to design a comp plan that over rewards or overpay for new logos. So you could get say a 1.5x commission rate or kicker on any new logo versus expansion deals closed. Another thing I just talked about, the three year deal. So if you look at a carrot and stick behavior with three year deals, you could pay a higher commission rate for a three year deal and actually a lower commission rate, not full commission for a one year deal. And then you'll see a really heavy drive towards three year deals. So, so when you think about your comp plans at the beginning of the year, analyze your funnel, analyze what matters, analyze what you need, and then build your comp plans to incentivize the behavior that'll bring you the highest quality, highest retaining customers. All right, so I've just done a lot of talking in a nutshell. Hack your cycle, bring your growth mindset to your sales cycle, bring the concept of growth hacking, where do I see drop off, analyze the data and figure out where can I make small changes that have major impact on revenue. So changing an intro call from one hour to 30 minutes, that doesn't seem like a huge change. That doesn't seem like something that will drive millions of dollars of revenue. But guess what, it did. And you can find those sorts of processes, changes within your sales cycle as well. So now that you've found these great things like a 30 minute intro call and you've increased your ASP, you've increased your renewal rates, how do you scale? This is a lot harder than it sounds. But one way that I found to be very effective is the qbr. So a quarterly business review is a pretty standard practice in sales organizations. Many sales teams run these like an opportunity to beat up the sales reps over the deals they lost. We take a very different approach on my team. We have a very different culture around QBRs. It is our opportunity to showcase all the amazing experiments we've run and what the outcomes are. Where did we fail, where did we succeed, what worked, what didn't work. And when we find those moments, those aha moments. Wow, this works. Tried a whole new type of proof concept and oh my goodness, look at their conversion rates. Look how they did this quarter. Let's try it. Everyone try this. This is our new plan. That takes a culture of openness. It takes a culture of change management. It takes a culture of vulnerability to be open admitting that you tried something and it failed or to be open to try someone else's idea admitting they're doing something better than I am. As a personal example here, I have always been very anti trials. I hate trials. You lose control of the deal, so much can go wrong. I've hated trials my whole career. I came into Walkme saying, nope, I'm not doing trials, we're never doing trials. And one of my reps said, I'm running trials and they're working. Can I show you what I'm doing? And I said, yes, show me what you're doing. And he had a really good process and it was working for him. And I said, you know what, you're right, I'm wrong. We're going to adopt this process and roll it out to the team. So it takes a culture of open mindedness and vulnerability to be open to these ideas and to share them. The last thing I'll say on onboarding, you know, it's so critical that you make sure you're not, you're taking that 30 minute intro call and you're making that part of your onboard. You're not letting old bad habits sink into your onboarding. You've got to stay really upfront, you've got to keep iterating on it and you've got to make sure as you onboard and bring in new reps, they're learning all these great tactics as well. And then the last thing is now that you've got these great reps who are experimenting and growing and scaling and being vulnerable, you've got to promote them from within and give them an opportunity to be a leader and then you'll see These results tenfold. So in summary, get the right stack, get the right CRM tool, the call analysis tool, analyze the data, innovate and experiment to see what's working and what's not. And then monitor those critical metrics we talked about. Asp, sales cycle, conversion rate, spread the performance, make sure these are all headed in the right direction. And when you find something that's working, scale in it, invest in it, invest in your AES, make sure you're onboarding them well and give them opportunities to leave. So that's all I've got and I'm happy to take questions. Okay. As a VP of Sales, how much of your time is spent on evaluating the data? That's a great session, That's a great question. And what I've actually found is that I need to block it on my calendar. So I have a one hour block once a week with my sales ops team to go through data and look for insights. And I try to encourage them to come with me, to me with insights as well. Which is something I've had to create as a culture is instead of coming to me with a task list, come to me or a dashboard that you've created, come to me with insights you're finding from the dashboard, with insights you're finding from the data versus just showing me charts that you've built. How are you dealing with the great resignation? What is your target retention percentage for AES? This is a really good question, I have to say. I had a baby in November of last year and I went on maternity leave and I came back in February and I was just so caught off guard by this sort of this great resignation. In Q2 of last year, I was so proud. My first three years at WalkMe I did not lose a single AE, not a single one. I was so proud of that stat. And then I came back from maternity leave and for the first time I faced a lot of AES quitting and it was really shocking for me. But you know, I understand it's the current environment that we're in and so I, you know, we had to change a lot of my tactics. We had to do a lot of investing in our AES and making sure that they are happy here, that we had the right leadership in place, that they were getting the training and the tools that they need, that we had adequately adjusted to the new world of working remotely. I will say it's been one of the biggest challenges for me this year. I think we finally got the ship is righted. I haven't had AES leaving anymore. I'm sure it will continue to happen because it is the new reality that we're in. But that has been a challenge. I don't know if I've got a target retention percentage. In the past, I always said 100 because I never lost anybody. I think probably 80 is a more realistic goal. What was the time period over which you grew the team from 16 to 50? That was about a three year period. Do you ever provide pricing intro call? No, never. Never ever, ever, ever do that. I do not allow my team to do that. I get really upset when they do it. It's one of my big things I'm a stickler about. I'm like, you know what if someone's mad at you that you're not giving pricing intro call, send them to me. Send them to your boss. I will tell them why I feel really strongly about that policy. And I've had a few people actually come to me and ask me, tell me why you feel that way. And they said, you know what, that's great. I'm on board with you. I'm not gonna have my sales team do that tactic. Can you share more about the internal infrastructure, how many AES to one manager and any data insights to share as to why? So the holy grail. You typically see a 7 AES to 1 manager. You can, you can do a little bit more than that in inside sales. You can go up to 8. I don't recommend going beyond 8 because what happens is your manager becomes so reactive and so overloaded with jumping on deals, they don't have the ability to coach. And it's really important that they have time in their day and their schedule to coach the AES and make them better instead of just jumping from fire to fire. In terms of SES to AES, we've got 4 to 1 ratio that's gone up and down over the years. At one point, I think we're 8 to 1 where we had to get really efficient and thoughtful about how and when to use ses. We're a little bit better now. Following your change to discovery only calls with your AES, how did you manage these prospects beyond a non successful discovery call that is nurturing, revisiting, et cetera? Yeah, great question. You know, for people who we basically called out or didn't move forward after the disco call, we do call blitzes often. I'm a big fan of call blitzes. So putting, you know, an hour on the calendar, we all get on zoom. We're all kind of looking at each other making phone calls, calls. Back in the day, we were sitting at desk doing this and calling all those disco calls that didn't make it through to the next phase. All right, looks like I got one more minute here. So what levers do you pull for land and expand to get more customer share of wallet? This is a really fascinating one to me because we've really, really thought a lot about this because it's so tempting to want to land with an ela. It's really, really tempting. When you are talking to a prospect and they say, I want an enterprise wide license, I'm looking at a $500,000 deal. And it's so easy to get stars in your eyes and go for that deal. What we've really learned the hard way is to cool your heels, cool your jets and say, you know what? We find it's best if you work with us by starting small and growing with us. And that answer builds trust and goodwill with your customer. It's the right thing for both sides, and it means, frankly, you're much more likely to close the deal. It's really hard to with a massive deal. It's really hard to land with a whale. It takes forever. It takes a ton of stakeholder buy in. Start small, build the value and grow. That is the right motion for pretty much every sales organization. As tempting as it is to want to start with a million dollar deal, Sam.