How to Specialize Your Sales Team So You Can Actually Scale

So just before we get started, I'm going to say I actually was first tasked or appointed or asked to moderate the prior panel on Outbound. And if you don't know me, Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue. But I want to do this one. So I said, no, I don't want to do the Outbound panel. I want to do this one on sales specialization because it's so important. But I've got two asks or one thing to tell you. So if you haven't gotten it yet, Jason bought a bunch of these. He's the one who funded like a thousand copies of the new book. But they didn't really tell. They put them in the very, very. Back at the top floor in the closet, hidden under the stairs, there's like a trapdoor and a secret code. But if you go up there, there's a. There's a bunch of books. You can go get one for free. And then we're doing a signing at the Carb IO booth. It's our software company at 12:30. So free books, make sure you get one. There's only a thousand books and there's way more than a thousand people here. But they're hidden, they're up, and it looks like you gotta pay for them, but you don't. That's one. And two is. You know, my 30 seconds on Outbound is actually, I just did three short videos on how people get so fixated on these damn cadences. Should it be four email sequences and a LinkedIn like, oh, my God, you're missing the entire fricking point. So I just did three short videos on Predictable Revenue, the blog, and people loved them. So go check those out. That'll be my 90 seconds or 30 seconds on outbound. So scaling. You can't scale unless your sales roles are specialized. Probably not news. Hopefully not news to people here. It's something. But a lot of this is also how to specialize the best way. Because there's a lot of questions that come up around. What if you have account management versus customer success? How many are the ratios? What if we do enterprise versus small business? So let's kick it off. I'm going to ask each of you just a bit about. Let's start with Bridget. Can you just introduce yourself? Is there another fact? First one, to maybe like a fun fact about you personally. Then I'm going to ask you about the team you've run.

All right. I'm the VP of Corporate sales at Sumo Logic. And starting with the fun fact, I'm one of seven, which seemed like A lot until I met Aaron. And my father was an entrepreneur. And I think my father really understood specialization very early on because he learned that among the seven children that on the weekends they had to specialize the tasks and they specialized indoor versus outdoor. The outdoor was the very early picking weeds the younger kids did. This is a tip for Erin. If any of you don't know, I.

Gotta work on this. I'm taking notes right now.

And the indoor, this was the more specialized. I was really good at ironing and I think about I hated to do the gardening, which I likened to my closing reps that don't like to do prospecting. So we learned special specialization very early on in my family.

Great. So actually just tell us before we get to dawn here, how big is the team and what kinds of roles do you have today?

Yeah, so on the team we've got a lead gen team that's a lead enrichment team actually that we contract out from the Philippines that does all the lead enrichment on the list. There's a lot of talk about list building. So we have that just on lead enrichment. We've got a BDR team, a closing team.

The BDR is doing prospecting 100% outbound.

All 100% outbound. We've got then the closing team and account management team. And then within the closing team, we've got SMB mid market in one segment and we've got field and sort of enterprise in another segment. And then we've got sales engineers, which is another area of specialization. And then of course management.

And roughly how many people overall?

Just Sumo Logic has 300 and some odd people on the sales team. There's about 8 in account management, roughly 15 in the field, 32 inside mid market, and about 10 on the BDR team.

Okay, so we'll get into that. What you'll find too is every team, you've always got places of sort of tension and friction again like customer success or account management, like who does what or inside outside. So but we'll get to that. Don, what's maybe a fun fact, secret vice or hobby, before telling us a bit about the team that you manage.

Well, I think people that know me, I think little fun fact about me, I mean I was in SDR for a long time, so I think one of the.

Hey, we've got that in common.

Well, you probably know this trick too. So every area you code in the country, you name an area code. I could tell you where it is. Oh, wow. Okay, give an area. I could tell you what the area code Is and it's just from having dialed so many numbers and knowing an associated city and where those were, you know, so having that.

Does it work the reverse if like Topeka.

Topeka I believe is 316.

I have no idea. But it's impressive. Let's pretend it is.

That's kind of my trick.

Okay, so size of sales team. Rough.

Like size of sales team. So today I'm at Data Hug. Today I have a similar. Similar to Bridget. We have a. I have a data enrichment person that I have that goes through and just finds names, builds out the lists according to the list.

Building is like actually a separate role and whether it's inside the company or not, it's like a separate function. List building, list enhancement. Okay, what else?

And then we have an SDR team. We have I just extending offers to two offers. Today we'll have a team of six prospectors. Prospectors managing the inbound as well because we're a little bit smaller than then Sumo Logic. So I don't have a ton of people. So a lot of people do multiple things. And then we have a team of three AES specialized between SMB and kind of mid market enterprise. And then we have a customer success team which also functions as our account managers. So they're responsible for renewals and upsells as well.

Okay, so first I'm just going to. There's got to be somebody in here. It's some company that doesn't have specialized sales teams or specialize as far as they should go. Because I say generally more roles are better. Like the more roles you have are the better. Like more people doing different things, but each person does fewer things better. But in case someone's still like hey, do we specialize? You know, we've got salespeople that are prospecting and doing a lot of prospecting more than 20% of their time and closing. I don't know, like my CEOs not really bought in but like why specialize or why take it to like an extreme.

So it's interesting coming. I've been at Sumo Logic now about eight months and many of you are starting companies or in companies that are smaller and maybe early on. And Sumo Logic definitely had this issue early on or not issue but situation early on where they weren't specialized and you could have a small team of salespeople that actually could pretty effectively do a number of roles. So just before I came on, a few months before the closing reps were also essentially prospecting. They were closing and they were also handling what we would now consider account management. And when you're small, you can get away with it. And sort of the prevailing thinking at the time was, hey, if it works for four, it'll work for 40. And I'll tell you what works for four does not work for 40. Because what happens is the lead flow also needs to be distributed amongst a larger group. And so there is more of a need for outbound. So for us, as we've gotten bigger, it's definitely been imperative that we do more and more specialization along the way. My encouragement would be, even at the beginning, even if you don't specialize roles and have a big team to have an eye towards specialization and know that that's what you're building towards. Another reason, actually, I'm going to.

This is such an important point. This might be like the number one thing to take away with you today is look back when you created a new role, from the time that you wanted to create it until you felt like, okay, this is basically, we figured it out. If you had to just guess how many months, at least six. Okay. So right when you're growing and you're like, okay, we're going to do outbound or enterprise or something, it's gonna take probably way longer than you think from starting to, okay, we're doing it to. It's not working. It's at least six months probably for a lot of these roles.

And Erin, you asked the question, kind of teeing this up around other people in the organization, not understanding why to specialize. And we've definitely, I've definitely encountered that at Summo Logic, where oftentimes the BDR or some of these roles are seen just as cost. Why should I add a BDR or an SDR role when I can hire a closer that I can associate revenue with? And so part of it also is an education process around the dividing up of the role and how that actually contributes to the overall quota attainment of a team.

Yeah, I think when I joined Data Hug, one of the things I found too is the BDR team that was there was doing a lot of the research themselves. So when you have a BDR team, the prospectors. Right, right, the prospectors. But then they kind of default to the easier thing. So, like, if you want to turn up the number of calls or you want to turn up the number of meetings, but they kind of default to doing the research, well, it's like, okay, I want to take the research off their plate so I can get them focused on the things that I want them to do so that as you're doing the specialization, you know, okay, my BDRs are doing this and it's going to create enough meetings for my AES. And so having that specialization allows them to focus and know that like, okay, this is my job, this is what I need to do rather than maybe default something that is easier or not as hard to do.

Yeah. So actually, Don, so when you, if you again, maybe you took off the research, when you made that kind of split and defined new roles, did you feel like six months? What do you feel like? Is that sort of time frame before we're starting it and how long is going to take to get it nailed down?

So the BDRs that were there before I joined were probably there about four or five months, you know, and I can tell you it was a little bit of shock to their system too. So it's like when I joined, I said, wow, I think you guys should be doing at least a meeting a day. And they were doing maybe, you know, a meeting a week. And they were like, there's no way we could do a meeting a day. And I'm like, yeah, there is. Let me help you get there. You know, all this research you're doing, I'm going to take that off your plate now. Now you can focus on making calls. And now they're doing a meeting a day. So it's like, you know, they were able to see that by, by offloading this piece that, you know, was burdening them with a lot of time. They were then able to focus on doing the things they could do, which is going to make them money because they get money for the meetings that they book. So when I upped the quota, took off the responsibility of doing that data research, they were then able to focus on making those calls and then making themselves successful.

Yep. So we'll say it's usually, it's for sure not painless to further specialize to add roles because it involves change, but it's better to bite the bullet. Sometimes it's easier to layer on a new role. Sometimes you got to restructure. But what do you think has so far been. For example, the. You mentioned the main way you change roles that helped make an increase. Was it this, let's call it outsourcing, like separating research from the prospectors? Or is there another one that really helped make the lives of someone on the team much better? It would be a second one.

Yeah, I mean, I think it just, it's like creating the problems at the different levels is what kind of forces us to specialize. So it's like having someone who's a researcher who's generating a lot of names to give to a bdr. BDR then creates a lot of meetings. You have enough meetings for an ae, then you know you gotta hire more AES. You have enough AES, you're closing enough business, then you know you gotta hire new customer success folks. You have customer success folks. Things are coming up on a year renewal. You know, you gotta hire ams. So it's just, it's like trying to break things at each level to know like, okay, now I gotta do this. Now I gotta do this. As you're going through and creating enough strain on the system to create that role and have those folks be specialized.

Yep. So yeah, so great point so far first, which is start thinking about future, like the roles you'll need to create early because it's going to take longer than you think. You know, just look for what people are doing in any of these roles. What's the low value tasks for them that other someone else should handle?

Yeah.

So actually Bridget, what is, what's one of the changes you've made that you saw? I don't know if you say proud of, but you're like, okay, we did X, we changed these roles and that really made a great difference. Really helped.

So I think the biggest thing is introducing we didn't have actually BDRs for the corporate team. So that's a brand new role that we're introducing and layering on.

Do you buy them predictable revenue when you hire a new bdr?

Oh, Aaron. We have predictable revenue.

It's all over the office.

Yeah, it's all over the office. In fact, I was going to give a bit of a spoiler alert because I've already read from impossible to inevitable about another challenge that we've had is that so we have a team of 30 to 40 depending on any given point in time in the quarter of closing reps. And when I first went to introduce this notion of needing BDRs for the team, one of the thoughts that came from management was why don't you just repurpose some of the existing closers and make them BDRs? Ow.

Yeah.

Thank you for understanding. And ow on so many levels. Ow on taking somebody and saying here you've sort of graduated to this role. Hey, we'll still pay you the same, but we want you to go do this other role for a period of time which is not good for an individual's development. So that wasn't going to work. You have finance pushing back saying why am I going to pay a more experienced person to do something, an SDR role and still pay them at that higher salary when I don't need to? There was a lot of friction all over the place. Needless to say, this would have been what our CEO also cares about is what's going to come out on Glassdoor about Sumo Logic and how we're restructuring the team. So it's why I say it is really important to have an eye on specialization at the beginning and what we needed to do is then just keep layering in as opposed to repurposing some of the people there. But it's amazing what ideas you're always evolving it. Yeah, always evolving. I think the other thing is this isn't a set and forget type of situation with particularly cloud computing. These new disruptive technologies and companies are being introduced all the time, which can help in terms of work and products and services for salespeople. But it also disrupts markets. Also you never know what your competition's going to be doing, so you need to always be re looking and rejiggering the ratios of BDRs to closers. When do you add account management SES? Those ratios are going to continue to change as things change within the company and the landscape.

That's good actually. Do you have some current ratios you use between different roles? Don, let me start. I'm going to ask the.

Yeah. So today what we try to strive for is 2 SDRs to 1 AE and then we kind of manage the customer success team around number of customers. We try to keep it do you.

Have a number in your head for number of customer success people per number of customers?

Yeah. I mean 40 to 50 is what we're trying to track to. It's what I've tracked to in the past.

And by the way, that number will vary a lot based if you have enterprise small business. So don't just write down. Okay, one customer success person for 50 customers. No.

Depends on your ACV.

Yeah, there's a lot of things in the book. There's actually a case study on a company called Guild that goes through. They have three tiers. There's enterprise mid market, small business and their ratios about some ratios that you use. Bridget, for your.

Okay, so Don, let me just. You have two SDRs per account rep. Yep. Okay, so we've got. Ours is really the opposite. We've got one SDR per three salespeople.

Okay.

For three closers.

Well, average deal size though.

Yeah. I was Going to say deal size got to be higher.

Okay, what is your deal size? No, it doesn't necessarily have to be higher.

25K.

Okay. So our average, I mean it starts low, but the average deal size for my team can go up to, you know, 300k. ARR. However, the reason I'd love to get to that, that's my goal is to reverse it to have more of the prospectors feeding the sales team. Because I also believe, as per the last session, Outbound is really important. You can be very target.

Hallelujah.

I know. Let's all.

Peanut butter and chocolate. They taste great together. None of this like outbound bad, Inbound great.

No, they both have to work well together. But what I'm also dealing with is I'm starting with a one to three.

So one prospector to closers.

Correct. I'm hoping to shift it. And this is where it's important to have metrics and data and have clean data and to be monitoring that all along the way. And again, this isn't a set and forget. So one other thing that I would strongly recommend, particularly as you're setting up your sales team and your organization is pay really close attention to data and hire a sales operations person. Colin, are you listening very early on, because you can't all of these metrics you've gotta be monitoring over time. And here's again, I'll use what's happened at Sumo Logic as a great example. Fantastic growth and success and the company's doing well. Incredible. Growing quickly. And those are all great problems to have. But what got left behind was really paying attention to clean data, how we're tracking data, what are the important things to measure. Because the thinking was we'll get to it later, we'll get to it later, we'll get to it later. Makes it super hard to unravel. And then to determine what is the right ratio of prospectors to closers, when is the right time for us to introduce an account management team and how many accounts should they be managing. And again, it's going to change also it's not going to stay the same. So then having good systems in place to continually monitor it is also important.

I think one of the great things for me just personally coming out of Yammer, I joined Yammer really early and I was the first sales operations guy on the ground and it was just like I got there and it was like, okay, just please listen to me and let me help build this right so that we can make this a great company. And it was one of the. You know, one of the. To David Sacks, his credit. You know, it was like, just listen to what Don says. And, like, I went in there and I was like, okay, you know, you guys just bought Salesforce. I didn't have a mess to clean up. You know, I was like, this is the way we do data. This is how we're going to import stuff. This is what needs to be there. Here are the required fields. Having all that stuff laid out really early, having everyone on board really early, it's just. It's really, really critical.

Plus, I got to say, I really like your color palette.

Thank you.

The orange.

I was told to wear bright colors because we were on a dark screen, so.

Well, I didn't listen to that.

Yeah. So. But in all seriousness, so here's something about data, because I called out Colin, and he'll laugh at this. Colin, CEO of Predictable Revenue. But also our software company called Carb IO. And, like, for a year, I'm always. I tell him and the team, okay, yeah, there's this cadence, blah, blah, blah, and, like, email, blah, blah, blah. But it's really all it is about. You can't have an outbound team that is successful and scales past three weeks unless it's all about data management. Because if you don't keep your data clean, and this is true about not just outbound, but the teams, if you don't keep it organized to some level, because you can't keep it perfect, if you don't keep it organized or clean to some point, you're gonna hit a wall. You're not gonna. It's not. It'll be successful for three weeks or three months, but not three years.

And the wall, Aaron, that is a painful crash landing when you hit that wall. This is not like a bump. This is a. Yeah.

This is like when you bring in that sales ops person, they're like, oh, I got to clean this mess.

Yeah. And it's gonna take at least four months, if not longer, too, because, you know, now there's so much these great apps about more calling, more emailing, more social. But generally what that means, whether it's for prospectors or salespeople, is the more activity they're doing, the faster the database gets screwed up. So it's tough. We're taking a different approach to it. But I'm glad you brought that up, because it's really another major key alert. Cloth talk.

Another point I want to go talking about doing ratios. One of the things I try to stay away from is doing one to one, because I think when you have a one to one ratio between a prospector and a closer and you may have bad habits that develop between those people that are, did they come too close? You know, maybe a closer, you know, treat their prospector like their secretary.

Yeah. Have you ever had a prospecting team that was pooled where they weren't like, assigned to specific closers?

Yeah, it's typically how I try to do it. Like. Well, I mean, yeah, there's, there's. There'll be a group of ae. There'll be a group of the prospectors that'll just, you know, they'll have whatever, you know, whatever opportunity they happen to get for a meeting, it just goes off to whatever the correct closer is. It's not like a one to one ratio.

So, yeah, I'm a very evangelical believer that prospect, any kind of sdr, MRR has, well, let's say prospector has to be assigned to specific. Some number from, you know, like half to, you know, maybe four or five specific closures. Because that relationship in specialization is really about the relationships. So when a prospector and a closer work well together, when an account manager works well with an ae, because that can help trump, all the data is bad. If the process is bad, if there's miscommunication. It's not to get lost in the shuffle. But the relationships between the teams are so important. Any role to roll, because that really can tie it all together.

And I think, Erin, that's really important also for our customers. And one thing that you talk about in the book is this handoff. And is this handoff new book or old book? They all blend together.

Yeah, I think both of us have that. Yeah.

No, here's the question. Doesn't having people get passed off from one to another make service worse? That's what you're.

And I'm saying, no, it doesn't. It shouldn't make service. Service worse. But the service can be disrupted if there isn't a good relationship between the people behind the scenes. So I don't think it needs to make it worse. I think in most cases it should make it better. But if it's disrupted behind the scenes, trust me, it'll get disrupted for the customer also. So it's really important to have. I agree with you. Good, tight relationships by behind the scenes because that'll only help the customer experience.

Yeah. I will tell you, if you've ever either been in this place or had someone complain that, well, the customers hate being passed off from like the prospector to the closer to Account management. Well, because you're not doing it right. That's the problem. Either it's the relationship or the process or there's something there. It's not the specialization, it's how you do it that is the problem. Because we've seen it done well many, many times.

Right.

So there's one tricky area I want to dig into here, and that is this area of, okay, someone signs up, they become a customer. It's called account management, which to me implies there's like a quota carrying. There's someone who has a sales quota selling to current customers versus customer success. The two ideas, do you. How often. When do you combine them into one person? When do you have to separate them? So there's, there's not. You reduce the inherent conflict between, between. I want you to be successful, but I also need to make money. How do you balance those, what works and what doesn't? Maybe Don.

Yeah, I mean, the way that I've seen it done, where it worked really well, is making sure that the customer success person is tied to KPIs, paid on KPIs that have nothing to do with how much the customer's bringing in as revenue. So normally those things will get tied to how well are they engaged, how many users do they have? Maybe meeting goals or different things that aren't revenue related?

Yeah, it's hard to do that, but there's no perfect way. But you got to do something, you.

Got to find something. And then the account manager, of course, is going to be the person that's tied to making sure the renewal happens, making sure there's some level of upsell within the account. And then of course, the customer success and the account manager person have to work together so that they, you know, so that the account manager can be successful with that, with that renewal.

Yep.

Now, when you're small, I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to break that off. You know, it's, it's.

You got to start early. You got to start early when you're small. Earlier than you think.

Yeah, start earlier than you think. But I mean, yeah, if you're really small, it's going to be the same person. But I mean, that's going to be one of the first places you want to look, specialize, is to break those two people off.

Yeah. No, I mean, Jason says, and I believe Jason, you know, most companies, by the time they've got 10 or 15, most tech companies, 10 or 15 people, one of them is generally a dedicated customer, someone into customer success, whether they're an executive, they're. But there's someone who's like focused on that full time earlier than you think. Bridget, you want to add anything or when you've seen a fail.

We have an added layer of complexity. Here's the other. If this isn't already evident, news flash here. The distance between the idea of specialization and execution can be quite long and bumpy. Yes, it's not that easy. It may sound easy. Let's just specialize. It's not that easy. So for us, the closing reps we have, our product really lends itself to, to land and expand. So oftentimes the initial deal is small, but then it grows over time. So the first question you have to answer is when do I make the handoff to account management or customer success? Do I do it right at the point of close? For us right now, we settled on six months and we're looking at the data there because there's still a lot that they can do to realize more of the potential of that particular account. From there, it goes to an account manager that is very proactive, that looks at their usage, that looks at how are they doing based on a similar, let's say, cohort. Are they having any issues? They're very proactive where customer success for us is much more reactive and they work really closely together. In fact, all three groups have to work closely together. But we, as soon as the selling motion starts to tip from less selling and more maintenance, that's when we want it to go to account management. And so we're looking at that data again right now to see when does the selling motion tip to be more account management versus more selling or upselling. So it may go to nine months, it may go to three months. Again, it's back to data.

I mean, similar, similar situation. You know, I've seen it where the, because when, when you have a land and expand situation, you have a closer who just wants to get their foot in the door. But then you have to have some, they have to have some level of time to be able to do that upgrade and get compensated for that upgrade. And you got to have that clock so that they know, okay, I got to do this within this certain time frame or else I'm not going to get compensated and it's going to get handed off to my customer success person or the account manager and they're the person that's going to get the upgrade. So you got to figure out what is that for you at six months? I've seen it, we've done it 90 days because we want to keep our closers focused on closing. But again smaller acv, it's a little bit more transactional but you got to have that point in time and it's got to be in comp plans and everyone's got to know this is the date that it happens and it has to be exceptions that that occur and everyone knows what the rule is.

Actually here's a trick and I like that. I think everyone struggles with that. AE to am account closer to account manager handoff at what point do you generally does the AE or closers introduce either the idea or the person of the account manager? Because it's not going to be, let's say there's a six month handoff. That's not when they do it. They should do it earlier. Is it like 30 days earlier? Is it actually when they buy, how early do you start introducing that there's going to be a handoff? Here's the process, here's the person.

Yeah, go ahead John.

Yeah, so for, I mean for us, you know, typically it's as you know that there's a contract out to be signed. You know, we'll get the customer success person involved. Normally our customer success person's typically involved in the trial. So the person's already introduced into the account. People know who that person is.

Earlier is better.

Yeah, earlier the better. And then like once it's transitioned off of off of the closer, it's the customer success person that's managing the account. So then as they, as they identify, okay, hey, there's going to be an upgrade potential then or it's getting closer to renewal like within a 90 day of renewal. That's when we introduce make sure that the account manager is introduced into the account.

Yeah, I would agree. In an ideal world in which we don't live the earlier the better. Like right away you want them introduced at least the concept that they are, this account is going to move to an account manager that's going to be able to be proactively and take better care of them. Like to your point that they'll get better care with specialization and handing off than if they'd stayed the salesperson. The reality of it for us is a little bit different. There is this tension of a salesperson trying to optimize the amount of, let's say upgrade or revenue potential that they could put could get from this account within the first six months. You know, it's important to me that nobody on the team is doing, you know, unnatural acts to try to Pull in additional revenue that's not good for the customer. So having just sort of a healthy balance between trying to optimize around the revenue but always bearing in mind we, you know, the customer has to be first and has to be what fits the their buying schedule as opposed to what we need to do. Because the account's going to cross the line and go to an account manager.

No, that's true. And ultimately you have to keep that principle in mind which is customer success is not just the role, it's the teams together working together. Even if the rule, sometimes you have to break the rule. It just doesn't make sense. Let's make the customer successful for XYZ reason.

And that goes back to your point Erin, about just having good relationships between us and the team and where there needs to be a lot of trust and that's really in any SaaS business it's so important that all the different functions, product and engineering and marketing and customer success and account management and sales and finance, all of it has to work so seamlessly together. Having one single agenda which is the customer and at all touch points that everybody's thinking, thinking about really how to optimize that experience. If we optimize to that experience, everyone is going to do better. But it's in reality again it's hard. People do have their own different things that they're optimizing towards and so to get all everybody rowing in the same direction takes continual sort of diligence and effort.

Yep. All right, I'm going to ask so we're going to, I'm going to take open this up for questions pretty soon. So if you have one. But I'm going to ask one last question here is in terms of executives, do you have where does there's sales, there's sales development, there's customer success. Like what's the basic leadership structure for the teams that are touching customers, you know, in either sales cycle or prospecting cycle. Sales cycle after is it all to you? Is there a couple other how's that work?

So for us, customer success reports directly into the CEO which is great. I think that's where it belongs. I think, I think sales operations. My opinion right now it reports into the SVP of sales but I also believe that should report into the CEO. It's very cross functional. The SDR team reports into me. What else did you ask an account executive's report up into me.

Yeah.

Okay, so you acu, there's a customer success team and executive who's a peer to yours, right?

Right, yeah. The SDR team reports into sales ops, they report into me. AE team reports into our VP of Sales. Customer success reports into the CEO today or small, you know, I mean again, as you grow that kind of splits out into more of a.

It's all relative because to a two person business here, you're huge.

Yeah.

All right, so let's see, any questions so far? All right, we got some hands. Who has the mic? Actually, we got a bunch of questions, so let's, maybe we'll use the rest of time for questions. I don't know if you guys have this, but can you talk a bit about the boundary between. Sorry, where are you? Okay, why don't you stand up for a second? Can you talk about the boundary between an SMB team and an enterprise or mid market team and how you draw the line and then how you segment those? Right. How do you, how do you figure out where the segment is and what kind of relationship is there between the two teams?

Today the way that we do it is we look at the number of people that are on LinkedIn. Right? Because I mean again, this goes to data sources and data cleanliness. You know, there is, you have to figure out what your one true source is, right? Otherwise you'll have someone going, oh matter Mark says this and LinkedIn says this. But then I look, look at this press release, they say this. So you always have to figure out what your one true, you know, source of truth.

Even if it's wrong, it's better to have like one.

Exactly. Yeah. Even if it's wrong. But usually like looking at the number of people on LinkedIn, you know, if someone says they're working at the company, that's usually a good judge of knowing like how large company's going to be. And that's kind of what we rely on. And then you just figure out what your, you know, what the demarcation point is between SMB and enterprise and you.

Know, what is it for you guys.

Or we do 0 to 200 is SMB employees. Yeah, employees. 200 to 1,000 is mid market and then over a thousand is enterprise.

For us, I could almost just say ditto, Ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto. We also use LinkedIn as our source of truth. And I agree, it actually doesn't matter, just pick one and then stick with that one.

The consistency and the important thing about.

LinkedIn too isn't what they say. The company ranges, but the actual number of those people that are, that have profiles. Yes.

The only issue that we're running into with that. Is that around lead routing? It's hard to do automatic lead routing because LinkedIn doesn't have an API that tells you what that number.

Exactly, exactly.

But we also, we now have SMB and mid market right now together and that's less than 1,000 employees as measured by LinkedIn. And then 1,000 and above is field. But again it's going to vary by company and industry. And really the sales motion, when do the sales motions look different? And for Sumo Logic you may have the same. At datahug, we can have very big deals because all of our pricing is just around the amount of data that you're ingesting. You can have a small company that can have a huge deal. You can have a very large company that does very. They're not as likely to, but has, has smaller deals. So you just have to look at the complexity of the solution, the complexity of navigating your way through the sales process. Those are two factors to determine where the line.

So basically, in other words, like most of the answers, you have to use your damn brain to fit it to your business.

Damn. I know. Can't just read it in a book.

The other important thing.

Well, only this book.

Well, that one.

The other important thing is too is like once you stick with the team, you know, if someone happens to find that it changes. You can't change the team. You know, I think that's another good point. Like you don't want to shift teams just because, oh, LinkedIn now says this. So now you're going to get a new sales rep. Like if you're with a T. If a team you know is working with a customer, you want to stick with that team regardless of what ends up happening. If they end up having, having explosive growth and they cross over some point where they're now, you know, enterprise instead of SMB, you want to stick with the team that they started with.

And just so you know, even that point is highly debatable. So like companies just companies will do it different way. You just have to decide how to do it. Do you decide that? Do you make the decision that no matter how big or small the company gets, it stays with that particular segment or person who's selling? Or is there some rule that when it crosses a threshold for X amount of time, either higher and lower, that you make a change? I think you just, there's not a right or wrong. You just have to have some way otherwise you're going to get all kinds of territory disputes.

Yeah, that's like a.

Have the Rule. Have the rule and make sure everyone knows what the rule is.

That's really important. So I hope you heard that is like, you know, you pick your rule and it's never going to be perfect.

Perfect.

But you have to say stick to it. It's the consistency which is super important. Not like it doesn't matter if it's 200 employees to 250 or again whether if companies grow, they change. It's like pick something and stick to it. And then of course you'll change it. When you change it, you change the whole thing. Everyone knows because you're always changing it. So it's sort of a. It's a paradox. You pick one thing and don't change it, but then you change it like all the time, unfortunately.

Exactly. That's exactly what you do.

There's your answer.

That's why I'm saying this is, this is easy. This is messy.

All right, another question. Okay, we got a bunch of hands. Who's got the mic? Ok. Hi. Yeah, a bit slow here. This guy first. 1, 2. What do you have to say about micromanaging cold calling scripts down to the word and even though like demo scripts. Good lord, I hate that. Okay, so first of all, in the outbound session, I don't know what they talked about around that, but I will say scripts are very handy in training. In training, as soon as someone's trained they should go away. Basically. They might have cheat sheets, but so be as micromanaging, as anal as you want in the training. Once that's done, let them do their thing.

Trust that you hire the right people to do the right thing because you don't want to come off as scripted on a call. I mean that's the worst.

It's the kiss of death.

I think the way also just to think about it is thinking, think about how you respond to a scripted message, whether it's a phone call or an email. But I agree that to learn it is super important. Hello.

You have won a free trip to the Bahamas. Okay, question. Next one.

Yeah, I had a good quick question. So my team originally. So take SDR and then to sales rep. And my original ratio for my sales reps is they were booking 50% of their meetings. Drove that down to 25 now drove it down to 20. Have it probably at 15% next quarter. Do you recommend taking that all the way to zero? Are you saying that a sales rep doesn't need to prospect at all? It's just.

No. Okay, so let me answer this because the sales reps Shouldn't. What he's basically saying is sales reps used to do half of their own meetings and by having prospectors, they've been able to reduce the amount of meetings that the sales rep has to do for themselves from 50% to like 15%. Should it go to zero? No, it shouldn't go to zero. I mean really, it's more important. The dedicated prospectors should do all like the high volume prospecting. The sales people or people who sell should do their own prospecting, but just to a much smaller list of target, like key accounts, you know, like 1 or 5 or maybe 10 or 20. It could be strategic partners that are going to generate recurring relationships, could be big accounts, but like a small number of important ones. So. All right, question back here or right here? We got some back here.

I think there's one here.

Yeah.

Can you comment how this would all work in an organization that is larger? Remote. That's larger. That's largely remote. Largely remote.

Haven't really ran into that. I mean we try. I mean one of the things I think that I've always tried to do is like it's good having everybody at least on the, on the same principles. Having. Yeah. Having people all in the same room and being able to feed off each other's energy and hear how things. What's working, what's not in the same room is always a good thing. I'm not really running into it as much for a remote team.

It's just more communication.

Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't do anything differently if everyone is distributing remote in terms of specialization than I would if everybody's together. I still think it's just as important. I think the communication is what is gonna, that's where you're gonna get challenged. You have to really spend more time.

On that because again, the relationship building between teams between people is really, really, really, really. This is. My 3 year old would say, because she'll be like really, really, really, really. She'll just keep saying really important. Really important. Hey Aaron, who's got the mic?

I just jumped in back here, Colin.

All right, here's the carb IO guy, my partner.

We deal a lot with like remote prospectors and all of our entire account executive team is remote. We'll actually have our guys like when they're new to the company.

You hold the mic a little closer.

Yeah, we'll have them jump on the, on demos. We'll have them like on weekly calls and on check in calls on the customer success calls all the way sort of through the pipeline just so they get to know the account executive, they get to know the customers. And you guys are right, the more that you can actually get them to maybe not face to face, but on FaceTime, on Hangouts, on, you know, whatever it is just to kind of build that relationship so that they're not just an email address that pops up in your Gmail. When you see those, it really helps build that relationship.

Yep. Make them real people behind the email and phone.

Great. So I've been waiting just a second. So firstly, thank you guys, great discussion, really appreciate all the knowledge for some context. Six months ago, my company, we were all inbound AES fielding everything. We started piloting outbound late Q3, saw some success there and are scaling that currently. We're now at a stage where we're ready to further specialize and do inbound SDRs. So curious to hear your experiences with inbound SDRs. What attributes do you look for among inbound SDRs as opposed to outbound and any best practices for taking that kind of leap of faith and, you know, not. We don't want to squander those opportunities with more junior level employees.

Yeah, I mean it's a, it's a great, it's a great place to hire entry level folks. Like I think, I think having, having an inbound SDR usually, I mean, I know you say squander opportunities, but normally, you know, those inbound, inbound leads are usually the best ones to put people on in case it does get squandered. I mean, it's not, you know, that's where you want them to really, you know, cut their teeth to understand, you know, what do people say when they, you know, when they're coming inbound? When I talk to them, they can hear the things, hear the key.

Follow those white paper leads that they mentioned.

All those white paper leads. Yeah, it's a good place if you can have the ability to have specialization down to that point. It's a great place to have those entry level people to be able to, you know, if you have enough specialization, you can then move them into an outbound role and have an outbound role move into an AE role so that you have some sort of a nice career path for someone to be in.

Did you guys have a sense for how many leads a month that they have to sort of review or touch? Can one now inbound SDR or Mr. Market Response rep handle, do you? I used to say 400.

I've been at both ends of the spectrum. So like, you know, I Came from yammer, where it's like every signup was essentially an inbound lead. And so we had all these inbound leads, like hundreds, thousands of inbound leads to a situation where we don't necessarily have a freemium product, so we get maybe five. So I've been at both ends of.

The spectrum in terms of what if you're thinking if we have 2000 inbound leads a month that need to be checked by a human, how many people do we hire to handle those?

I think that's also a hard one to answer, Erin, because it depends on how easy it is or difficult to qualify or disqualify and you disposition them some things. It's depending on the market or the segment you're in, it may be very easy to determine whether, yeah, this looks like a good lead or not and who it should go to. And if that's the case, they can go through a higher number more quickly. But I know for us, there's a lot of research that someone needs to do to determine is this actually a good lead for what we're doing and size and so they can go through a much smaller, smaller number. So I don't have a good answer.

I'm going to stick to my original and one. One, like, benchmark of one dedicated, you know, inbound ser. Market response reps can touch, like handle 400 leads a month. Again, that human needs to touch. That doesn't mean they're.

That's 20 a day.

Yeah. 20 a day. Well, it's like deleting Santa Clauses and now that can vary if everything. If you get 2000 leads and are all webinars, you may need one person. If you get 2000 leads and they're all contact me, you might need 10. But, you know, one to 400 for inbound is still.

It's not a bad number.

Yeah, I'll say that's it. Because why not until you change. And I was. That's the role. I started in Salesforce, so I have some experience with that. 20 a day. Yep. They pile up. Doesn't sound like a lot, but they pile up.

Yeah.

All right. Another question here. There we go.

Hey, so you were mentioning, Don, that when you started out and you got your Salesforce set up, blank slate. If you guys were going back and deciding to track data that you want to track that you find the most relevant and especially things that you would recommend people to be tracking early, what are some items that maybe aren't the most obvious? Like, obviously, revenue opportunities, all that. Everybody's going to be tracking. What are some non obvious things that you definitely recommend setting up an early.

Salesforce if you have the ability to do it. If you can have. Have some way to tie in your usage data back to Salesforce, your product usage, that. Yeah, because a lot of times what happens is you have all this backend data from your own product that doesn't associate itself with Salesforce, but that's really good data if you can marry it. And so if you have a way to either use an API to sync it into Salesforce or create a data warehouse so that you can then say, oh, hey, for all of our users, I know now I now know all this demographic information or people still use.

The term data warehouse. I lost track. But that's a good question, a good answer.

Yeah, I mean if you could do that early on, it ends up being such valuable information for your product team. You have a lot more. Because I mean like Yammer. Yammer is the example I'm thinking of. Right. So like when people sign up for Yammer, they would use an email and that's all we would have. Right. So then my team was responsible for going, okay, if someone came up from this domain, tell me information about this domain. So we got inside view and we said, okay, I know I have this domain. And then now I know, okay, revenue, I have location, I have number of employees, I know what industry they're in. But none of that existed on our back end system. All we had were these emails. And so what we did is created this data warehouse to say, okay, now for all of these people that I know that are users that are most frequent users of our product, you know, they're in this city. So why don't we have a roadshow here? Like you're able to start doing that kind of, that kind of analysis.

Do you get many AOL emails?

Well, no. Well, not free, Amber, because you had to have a corporate email to sign up for Ammer.

All right, how about.

And I totally plus one that I would say usage data, that's probably the most significant that you can incorporate to give an idea of what a sales rep should do with regards to a prospect or a customer or whatever.

And then you can also start measuring your CSMs that way too.

Yep. So we have time for a couple more questions. We're going to end a couple minutes early partly because I have a book. I'm doing a book signing at the carburetor, the Carb IO predictable revenue booth at 12:30. So either we've got books or if you get your free one upstairs in the swag shop. It's away at the top in the back, like hidden under like blankets. Yeah, it's like so 12:30. But. Last couple questions and how about this gentleman here? This one? Okay, you first.

Sure, sure.

So I know that the topic of scripting a sales process is obviously controversial, so I was interested to hear that the three of you agree post training to not script it. So I'm curious, how do you recommend evaluating what is and isn't working if you're not scripting it? After training.

You look at the final metrics. Plus you just do one on one coaching. Typically, I mean the final like metrics are useful, but they can also lie. So if someone's like.

But if you don't know what they're saying on the call, how do you know what to recommend as best practice?

First it's you find out is someone struggling and, and then you would listen to the call. If they're doing well, great. If they're doing super well, you would listen too. Like, what are they doing so well?

Yeah, a lot of what we do. I know Kyle was on before, but we do use Salesloft. One of the wonderful things about that is it has a click to dial where it records the call. So every call is attached to the Salesforce record. So it's really easy for us to go back and go, wow, you had a great call. Or if someone is struggling, be able to go through their calls and help them, you know, do some coaching around. Like, hey, maybe you want to try this, try that. Because yeah, I mean it falls back to metrics. Like are they, are they booking the meetings that we say they're supposed to be booking?

You know, and are the meetings turning into real deals versus just being, you.

Know, are the meetings with the right people, are they quality meetings?

Yep.

So when the metrics are down, you kind of steer them back to what you see as the best practice.

Yeah.

So. And that's why it's so important, because it's sort of like consistent, like clean data and consistent rules can lead to useful metrics. If you have irregular data and you have like people doing different things, the metrics are worthless.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Awesome.

So I guess we talked about deciding when to introduce and adjust specialization. You know, would you look at any particular revenue, cost or growth metrics in order to make or adjust that decision? You know, there's the decision to introduce specialization. You know, ideologically you have to overcome management's concerns and challenges about, hey, you know, we're going to introduce what used to cost us just the closer to bring the deal in. Now it's going to cost us the CO closer, the bdr, the list builder, all these extra costs, at least initially.

Extra investments.

Extra investments. So how do you. What metrics. What metrics, if any, would you look at or other factors to make and adjust that decision?

Employee happiness is one of them. Right. Because I think one of the important pieces of specialization we haven't really talked about is being able to give somebody something different to do. Because, you know, doing these especially like the prospector's job, you know, the SDR job, it's hard, you know, and people get. People can get stale, they get burned out really quick. But if you have specialization, you can move them into something different, you know, at a relatively, you know, that's. Maybe they start as a prospector and then they. They start inbound, then they do outbound, they shift from outbound, and then they farm team target accounts, you know, and then they do target accounts and they can start closing SMB deals. And then. So as long as they have something different to do at each stage, they're going to be happier employees, they're going to stay with you longer, you'll retain them. I mean, it's hard to. It's hard to quantify.

Yeah. Well, first you have to do it the way you do. It could be a bit different. Like, you can start small to get some data if you feel like you need. But you have to do it. It's not an option.

I agree.

The only time you don't have to do it the same way is if you sell, like one call consumer, you know, one phone call, and you close it and you're done.

Yeah, if it's transactional.

Very transactional. So I'm gonna, We're gonna wrap up. I'm gonna be here. I'll say hi to you. But hey, thanks very much, Aaron.

Don, Bridget. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.