Mastering the Art of Customer-Focused Sales with Klaviyo's VP of Sales, EMEA

Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining. I am Pia Heilman, VP of Sales at Klaviyo, which is a D2C marketing platform that enables smarter digital relationships. So very apropos to the topic today. We're here to discuss a topic that's not only near and dear to my heart, but also critical at this stage of SaaS for driving growth and revenue retention in in what is an increasingly competitive market. Mastering the Art of Customer Focused Sales now, before we get stuck into the tactical bits, I wanted to do a bit of context setting first and foremost. Having studied the history of art in uni, I know more than anybody that art is subjective. So there may be things that you love about this, there may be things that rub you the wrong way, but regardless, I hope it evokes some kind of emotion and critical thought. Secondly, why listen to me? What I'm going to share today is by no means revolutionary. In fact, many of you may employ some of these strategies already. But like many of the revenue leaders that I've met, I never wanted to pursue a career in sales. In fact, I wanted to be a marketer. Dinnertime chats as I grew up centered around brand marketing. Advertising with my father, who was at the time a VP of marketing and sales was not a particularly interesting profession. But when I graduated the market was pretty saturated and the only job I could land was in sales selling into marketers, which I thought was a great foray to better understand the world in which I wanted to pursue both as a profession. And this mentality of better understanding the other side became core to my approach relatively early on. The bulk of my career now has been spent at early stage startups, despite the fact that I am now at Klaviyo. But that afforded me a very unique opportunity in a sales role where my focus was not solely revenue related. There's so many facets of the business that you're exposed to if you're part of a startup that you don't get to see in large organizations because as you scale, those roles become more and more specialized. I remember the days of myself on mute during a demo to scream over to product and engineering, walking over to customer success when something I sold wasn't working. And that unique opportunity allowed me to see the other side. It wasn't again solely about hitting revenue targets, but that experience I gained in my first few roles made me obsessed with understanding my customer and the art of the sale rather than the sale itself. Today I'm excited to talk about how to put that customer relationship at the Forefront of your sales strategy. The most crucial lesson I've learned over the years is the importance of understanding and empathizing with your customers. And that applies at all stages of the customer journey. Now, to do that, you must align internally, first and foremost, understand your customer through data, both anecdotal and quant, and maintain agility and adaptability. Now, the world has evolved, and so have customer expectations. Again, nothing new. We as consumers expect a different experience. Whether that's a physical product that you've ordered from Amazon overnight or software. The expectation is that not only is the product different and the price different, but also your experience with that company. And that's where you can really differentiate yourself. We're all consumers. Again, whether it's a physical good or software, how do we deliver that differentiated experience? By leveraging the data available to you to speak to your customers in the language that they want to be spoken to at the time that they want to be spoken to, addressing the challenges that are relevant to them and in a way that they'd prefer to consume the solution that you're offering to them. And I don't mean from a product standpoint, how they engage with you and your team from their first interaction, maybe finding your solution on a review site, or googling you, to how they're interacting with you as a customer of yours as you negotiate renewal or additional product. Now, more than ever, every single interaction matters. Again, not rocket science, but over the last decade, sales has changed massively. Couple that with growing consumer expectations, and you can't solely think about a single channel or a single stakeholder, or even a couple of channels and a couple stakeholders. You have to count for every customer interaction that starts at the top of the funnel, even pre funnel, and follows throughout their entire customer life cycle with you and beyond. Even churned customers are valuable sources of data for you. You have to think about how they're consuming their interactions with you, what they see, what the value statement is. Is it consistent throughout the life cycle? If you didn't win the sale, why not? How can you go back and ultimately win the sale if you did? Why did they buy? Why do they continue to stay a customer of yours? How is their customer success and support experience, and what will engage them enough to renew? This may seem obvious, but it's not. So as I mentioned at the beginning, there are really three key points that drive how to activate customer focused sales. The first, and arguably most important is aligning internally. And this starts at the top. In fact, in some organizations I've been a part of we refer to this as corporate jail. It's where your C suite is locked in a room for a couple of days and they have to agree on what the value is to the customer. Actually pre that before that they have to agree to who the customer is. And I think in some organizations you would be shocked to be to find that who your VP or Chief Product Officer believes that you should be selling to is different from your Chief Revenue Officer or your Chief Marketing officer. So first and foremost is making sure that you're all selling to the right person. Then it's understanding value alignment to that icp, making sure that it's applicable and consistent across the entire executive team. Only once you have that alignment at the top can you then cascade the communication downwards. And that's before it's even left the walls of your organization. But that alignment needs to be absolutely tight. The ideal state then is that regardless of who engages with your company at which stage of the funnel, in any role there's a consistent value prop that appeals to the buyer. It should feel consistent but differentiated across the entire organization. So they'll come to you and you'll have a consistent value prop and it will differentiate you from the competition with regards to how they've engaged with you. Every customer interaction is also an opportunity to set yourself apart from the competition. You'd be amazed by the creativity that's coming out of BDR teams right now. TikTok videos that appeal to innovative companies. Can't say that I'm a TikTok user, but certainly appreciate the creativity that comes behind outreach that's entirely social based. Renting things that are outside of the home billboards to catch attention. It's really amazing. But think about how you're differentiating from the competition who may just be sending emails at scale. Insert cringe slide here. Get ready to screenshot. As you think about this alignment and how to differentiate yourself and even how to hone in on an icp, I would ask yourself these questions. How are you listening to feedback from the various touch points? Are you spending time with the frontline to understand how customers are responding to the message? Is it resonating? Then workshop that from the top of the funnel to the bottom. And if you're familiar with the bow tie, even beyond what topics are most engaging to get people through the door and what topics are most engaging to keep and retain customers as they continue to get greater value out of your product? What are the hotspots on your site? What search words are popular? What events are people attending? Communities are they part of what content are they consuming? What feedback can you gather from your partners? Partners are massive in this case because they have access to the market in a way that you cannot as a direct seller. If you've not mapped the customer journey, I encourage you to spend some time doing that and then validating it with your sales team, with your marketers, and anybody from a customer standpoint who lives that every single day. And then how do you think about making sure that your sales team is equipped to navigate the customer journey themselves? Are they product experts? Do they have certifications that are required of them? Are there okrs aligned with the product? And then the question everyone always has how do you do this at scale? It's easy when you're reaching out to five or 10 people to personalize a message. How do you make sure that you can do that and still ensure that each customer feels as though they're experiencing a differentiated experience that each of their competitors isn't also receiving? So how do you do that? The answer? Through data. For those salespeople in the room, this is the importance of keeping your CRM hygiene good. One of the most valuable tools that you have is one centralized and consumable viewpoint on your customer. If all data resides in one place, you and the analysts can make smarter decisions and engage with people at the right time based on the behaviors that you can recognize through trends and analysis. Tech is huge here, but that's not where it ends. So what I would recommend doing is leaning on technology to assist you. But don't live and die solely by the tech that's available to you. Demographic insight, behavioral insight, market insights are amazing. But I'd also recommend just interviewing your customers, supplementing this with anecdotal data. The rich data enables us to leverage the information that we have to make smarter decisions around which organizations to target, when how to strengthen our value proposal and align it to a hard metric, revenue to the organizations that we work with. Weaving that data together from disparate sources allows you to tell a story about the customer where you can continue to position your tech more effectively. Which brings us to the next point. Maintaining agility and the ability to adapt. So go to market strategy. Again, not revolutionary. Is not a set it and forget it thing. It's a dynamic framework. It requires that you revisit what you initially believed, continue to test hypotheses and prove or disprove them. You may need to adjust it based on what you're hearing from the market, what you're seeing in the data, conversion rates shifting Overnight. Identify the areas of opportunity and the challenges and work with your team to understand them greater. That is where the anecdotal feedback comes into play. Put in place mechanisms to listen and gather feedback from the deals you won, but also those you lost. Sometimes more valuable are those closed lost conversations than the closed one. Closed one validates something you already knew. Closed lost allows you to identify things maybe you didn't within the sales organization at Klaviyo, we have a weekly closed meeting. It changes from week to week. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's lost, Sometimes it's focused on large deals, sometimes it's focused on volume. But that meeting includes our cmo, our cfo, our VP of product, Legal Finance. Broad audience, but we review thematic takeaways that allow us to take action where needed, whether internal or external. Often those meetings sit exclusively within a sales organization and it's great. But salespeople love listening to themselves speak. So adding in additional functions gives an empathy and understanding outside of the walls of the revenue organization often drives change. At the stage we're at with Klaviyo, we also have an incredibly diverse customer base. I imagine the same is true of some of you, whether you're pre product market fit, trying to figure that out or at scale. But what each of those customers needs and how they consume the product is different. Which requires us to not only attract those audiences differently, going to different conferences, different partners, reaching out differently with different messaging, but it also requires us to segment our go to market strategy. And at Klaviyo, we're very intentional about pairing our go to market strategy with remarkable people who can carry out plans where it drives impact. We leverage something like this. Again, probably not unfamiliar to many of you, but a sales skills and competency matrix. And within each of the segments that we sell into, there are different expectations of the members of the team. So for example, for Entrepreneur and SMB, those smaller organizations that we're selling into, we look to evaluate how the product may enable the sale so that the evaluation and buying journey is frictionless and salespeople can be hugely efficient with their time while still providing value to the customer. On the flip side, as we move up market to the mid market and enterprise, again expectation is different, so the skill set must be different. How do you best build and respond to an rfp? How do you multi thread internally with the appropriate stakeholders? How do you navigate the complexities of security and compliance? Last but not least, thinking about how you're aligning your internal resource so so CMO to CMO Connects CTO to CTO connects so that they can discuss challenges and goals. That in and of itself is delivering a differentiated experience because you're offering strategy in a way that maybe your peers aren't able to do, particularly not at scale. Last but not least, the sale extends beyond the sale. The art of customer focused sales does not just stop at leveraging data from customers to be more successful salespeople. It's also incumbent upon us to ensure we deliver incredible customer experience. What does that mean within our walls? It means establishing things like a customer advisory board, having a voice of the customer survey so that we can continue to gather information from our existing customers around what's working and what's not. Not QBRs with the customers themselves as a feedback loop that are then shared with the sales organization so that sales can continue to become smarter at where the customers are getting value out of the product that we're providing. We share an upgrade number across sales and customer success as well. So we've created a team who sells into our existing customer base, working closely alongside cs who's responsible for strategy and identifying additional value add within the product. But that shared goal allows us to work together so that our customers are getting greater value out of the product constantly. This focus on our customer and the value that they derive has allowed us to grow and innovate and stretch beyond what is our traditional icp. It's allowed us to experiment and understand other areas where we deliver value that may be within our customer journey that we'd mapped or our corporate jail we hadn't identified and that then goes right back to adaptability. How can we use that as a continued feedback loop and either establish a new segment or a new vertical that we can pursue. So if nothing else, I hope that you take away from this Internal alignment is required across all functions to enable a customer focused sale. There's rich data available to you assuming you keep your CRM updated and all of your integrations are working which enable you to create a narrative that resonates with your buyer. Agility and adaptability are key. Identifying key areas where you can invest more or shift the investment will enable you to continue to solidify your go to market strategy and grow quickly building out the frameworks and skill set within your organization. Hiring the right talent against those skill sets and frameworks. We'll make sure that you're holding your sales team accountable to the expectation of delivering a differentiated experience based on the segment that you're selling into. And last but not least, personalizing your outreach and the interactions based on the data that you've gathered, mirroring your prospects so that you're finding them when they want to be found, with the right messaging and communicating in a way that's relevant to them. Whether that's email, WhatsApp over LinkedIn in person will enable you to put the customer at the forefront of your sale.