Transforming Your Team to be Data Driven with Demandbase CRO Allison Metcalfe

Please keep in mind this is a very interactive session so I see a lot of cameras off and obviously if you guys want to turn them on, that would be fantastic. The more the merrier. We're all in this together. It's 30 minute session and interactive just like I said. We encourage you to keep those cameras on. Audio is muted. However, if you do want to speak, you are capable of turning your audio off. However, I can remute you again if we need to. Or you can raise your hand. It is one of your buttons in the bottom right hand corner and we can call on you throughout the participation. Something to keep in mind if you haven't already realized throughout the day all of these sessions are being recorded so don't do anything you don't want on film permanently. And they're also being live streamed. And last but not least, I'm sure you've heard this over and over again and I sound like a broken record, but we are doing networking on our Brella app which is another component of this and they're one on one meetings. We like to call it the Tinder of one on one networking, which probably shouldn't say, but that's the best way to explain it. I will link it in chat if you guys want to take advantage of it. And without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to Allison. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you. Thanks everyone for joining me this morning. First, want to call out if you signed up for my session. You may have signed up for a session focused more on the customer journey which we will be covering here. World Clocks is an analogy that I've come up with due to some mentorship I got that I'm really, really excited to share with you. So just a little bit of background for you in terms of who I am. So I started my career, I was a bit of a late bloomer. Started my career in Silicon Valley back in 2007 and made my way to Salesforce via one of their first acquisitions from a company called Jigsaw. So I was at Salesforce back in, I guess it was 09 through roughly 202011 and I learned a lot from some of the very best in terms of how to run enterprise sales and customer success. I was always a customer success leader by the way. I then founded customer success at demand base in 2011. I was there for two years before I went to Liveramp where I was for a couple of for about seven years and I wore various roles there. I was running customer success for a long time. I had the opportunity to be the GM of our television advertising business for about three years, which was a really amazing experience. And then for the last couple, last year or so, I was running field strategy and productivity before Demand Based came calling and asked me to come back to Demand Base to be their CRO. So now I'm at Demandbase and I'm tasked with a few things. One, probably like many of you, I have a very strong charter to improve retention and scale SaaS. Excuse me, scale our sales team to kind of transform our team from being, you know, scrappy startup, which is not totally fair, but to becoming a more enterprise, you know, data driven sales team. And so I wanted to share with you a little bit about what I had put in place at Liveramp, because my charter was quite similar there and what I learned from that and what I'm bringing over to Demand. Okay?

So I call it the World Clocks and I will tell you why in a moment. So one thing that I noticed, and again I noticed this both at Liveramp and at Demandbase, is that at scale, when your team gets bigger and bigger and more distributed, it can be really easy to lose sight of what the true health is of your field organization and what sicknesses may lie underneath. Like an expression I was using a lot at Liveramp was, I'm worried that we are quote, unquote, like skinny, fat, right? We're hitting numbers. We look really healthy, but if you double click on those numbers a little bit, there's a lot of data trends that are indicating something, you know, something's maybe not going in quite the direction we want them to go, the leading indicators, if you will. So that's one issue. But the other issue is that if we're not aligned on what those health metrics are, you can. And again, especially as you scale, you start to get your team struggling with the right process to set up to investigate. Your team can be wasting a lot of cycles barking up the wrong trees, or worst case, they are driving initiatives and putting a lot of time and resources into solving problems that are not actually the most important problems. We saw this a lot at Liveramp and so we introduced. Excuse me. And on top of that, I was going to further set up the problem. There's a lot of competing voices, right? So when you're the CRO, you're. You've got feedback from the cmo, obviously from your CFO and CEO and Chief Product Officer. Engineering might be getting in there, and all of those people have different points of view on what is the most important thing right? Your CFO might be really concerned about sales and marketing as a percent of revenue either. Sales ops is really worried about pipeline coverage, marketing is really concerned about reporting on demand gen metrics. But they all kind of are highlighting different things to be the most important things. And if you do that, you're going to run yourself ragged in a tizzy chasing a bunch of different initiatives that aren't going to ultimately result in anything good. So I was introduced to this concept by one of the executives I worked at Salesforce. And the way that he, and I don't even know if he said it to me or if it just kind of happened in my mind, but he said what you need to do to run your business is imagine kind of transform the business into this kind of vision of walking into a big world bank where you see all the cities of the world and all the times of those cities, right? And we need to do is replace Those cities with KPIs that measure the effectiveness of your business and the times being the goal of what they should be. So you know, you replace New York with sales cycle, you replace Paris with sales and marketing, a percent of revenue, you replace Moscow with, you know, pipeline coverage, et cetera, et cetera, ramp time, whatever those things may be. And then once you have like you've agreed on what the city should be and you agree with the time should be, you review that with a cross functional group of stakeholders at least quarterly to identify which clocks are off time. And it's really then only the clocks that are off time that deserve initiatives, time and attention paid to them to try to get them back on time. So how we did this, and again I did this at Liveramp and we're doing this right now at Demandbase. So you need to assemble the team. It's really, really important that this be cross functional. I think sometimes in sales leadership we can get a little bit siloed off in our own little corner thinking about our sales stuff. But the reality is even if you're, even if you're not asking, I guarantee you that finance and marketing and the CEO and product have opinions about how to measure the effectiveness and health of your team. They are giving their opinions somewhere, even if they're not giving them to you. So invite them in. Right? Then you need to define the cities, so to speak. So where we focus a lot at Liveramp and we're focusing a lot of demand base as well is sales excellence, customer health, pipeline health, growth, efficiency. And the final one that we focus a lot on is rep productivity. But I will tell you that choosing and defining those cities is one of the hardest steps at Live Ramp. This took us a full quarter to go through this because there was so much debate about what was important. And you have to be like, pretty brutal because if you start to get 150 rows of data that you're trying to measure, you're never gonna be able to take action on that. That's just way too much. So you have to cut, cut, cut, be brutal, get to what is the absolute most important. And you might have some micro numbers that you're measuring kind of below the macro. And that's okay. But ideally you gotta get it to like one slide. It should be like something that you can show your board. That's almost like a very quick and dirty health score of your field. The other thing that we spent a lot of time on was definitions, right? So for example, when I came to Demand Base, when we started talking about pipeline coverage, marketing had historically driven a lot more of the pipeline conversation at Demand based. Historically. And so it was really interesting how they did kind of, they defined beginning of period. Pipeline was a dollar, was a dollar amount of every single opportunity in the entire CRM. For me, I want it to only be every, you know, the dollar amount for every opportunity that's in play and has, you know, that's an at bat for this current quarter. So that was really important that we debated that and got very clear on what we actually meant by pipeline coverage. It's either going to shock you or not shock you. How. How much debate we had to have around how we were going to define retention and renewal rates and what should be included and what should not be included. And should we include multi year and should we include M and A? And what views do we want to show about retention? That took forever. We also debated a lot about ramp time. Like how do we actually want to define ramp time at Demand Base? What are the ways that we want to look at that? So this took a heck of a long time at Liveramp. Luckily, when I came to Demand Base, I was able to propose some things that had saved us a lot of time. But it's worth it to take the time to go through this and really discuss it. And I think you'll be surprised the debates you end up having. Growth Efficiency was also a very spirited debate. What Liveramp as a public company cared about in terms of growth efficiency is quite different from what Demand Base cares about in terms of growth efficiency As a private company. I was used to thinking about growth efficiency index and sales and marketing as a percent of revenue demand base is a little bit more focused on marketing as a percent of revenue. But again, it's worth the debate so that you don't run into trouble later. Then the next step is obviously gathering the baseline data to figure out where you are. Once you've made those different definitions, get the baseline data, and then the super fun stuff begins, right? Then we start to look at what, you know, what should our CSATs be? What should our sales cycle be? What, how do we want to think about pipeline coverage? So you go through every single clock and you kind of set the time of what it should be. And very soon you start to actually, you know, what emerges as a picture of what is actually wrong.

Or off.

Time, I should say. So when the clocks are off time, you know, then it's like, okay, what do we do about this? So the way we talk about this, the way that I think about this is we have to hypothesize and then toolbox it. So the reality is the data is showing us that a clock is off, is off time, but it's not going to automatically show us why it's off time. So we have to hypothesize and toolbox. Right. Why is our sales cycle taking more than 120 days? We think it should be 100. Well, we need to get very surgical and granular about every step in the cycle to see what's going on there. Why is our marketing as a percent of revenue skyrocketing where we know what parts of the budget are blipping up more than they should be? But the other really important thing is when you have an hypothesis and you want to toolbox something. Where I think folks can get in trouble is realizing, like not setting goals as to when they think this XYZ initiative should start to actually start bearing fruit. We ran into this a lot at Liveramp. I'm trying to change that. It's man base where we say, okay, we're going to stand up initiative A to fight this clock that's off time. If it's not starting to produce results within six months, we need to abandon this, it's not working right. And get really, really ruthless about it, and then obviously need to review and optimize. The other thing that I would also point out is any initiatives that your team is doing once you. One of the beauties of the world clocks is if someone comes to you and they have an idea or a solution that they want to bring and they want to put forth energy and Resources into you. You go back to your world clocks and say which of these numbers that we've all agreed are the most important are actually going to be, are actually going to be solved with this initiative that you're talking about. So here's some examples of what we did. These are some actual board slides. Obviously the numbers are grayed out in terms of what we were starting to show. You can see this is kind of the kind of snapshot board level data that we were showing. And what you can see on the right is some of the initiatives that we were running. You can see what we're highlighting and that we're not happy with. And then we're running and these are the initiatives and action plan that we're focusing to move those needles, move some of those numbers forward. We also talk a lot about action plans. And so again, this is at live ramp we settled on. These were kind of the five pillars of clocks that we were focusing on. And what you see in the smaller boxes is the different initiatives that we were running to try to move the needle on those projects. And again, each of these projects would have outcomes we were trying to achieve with the project and a timeline as to when we thought we would start to see the benefits of this project so that we would know we needed to abandon it if it really wasn't going anywhere. A lot of this, as you can see, is driven by your productivity team and your sales ops team. But then you've got customer success metrics over here. Growth efficiency is typically coming from finance. Oops, I went the wrong way. Excuse me. So again, the takeaways, the reason why you do this and the reason like when I got to demand, basically it was the first thing that I did was there's a lot of noise I think again across not only your own field organization, but across the company about where you know what the true problems are. And I also so strongly believe in the importance of getting a cross functional team set up to tackle this. Because like I said earlier, if you're not asking them, they do have an opinion and they are weighing in somewhere. They're just not talking to you about it. So get that cross functional team together, align on what matters and prioritize based on what is truly off key, if you will, or off time. I cannot stress enough how important I think it is to be ruthless in your execution. I'll give you an anecdote I had. There was someone that was working on the team last year who was talking about all the programs that they had done and they're really proud of the work they had done and it was good work. There was output there. But ultimately I said, what was the point of these projects? What were you trying to achieve? And the reality was they were trying to achieve retention. But the projects were all very much focused on cms, CSM productivity. And the reality was productivity was not the problem, retention was the problem. That's about business value and success plan, not about CSM productivity. Right. So we had to be like really ruthless and say it's not that this does not have value, it's just not the most important thing. And you're not understanding, you know, that this is not actually driving towards. This is the clock that's off time, not this one. So you're focusing your efforts on the wrong thing. And then the final piece of advice I'll give you is just accept that the land we live in is whack a mole. You will never have a scenario where you open up your world clocks and you look at it one corner and you go, you know what? Everything's on time. We're great. There's nothing to be adjusted here. Let's just call it a day. That's just never going to happen. So don't strive for that. I think my goal in this is always just to strive for ensuring that myself and my team are focused on the right things, that we're being led with data and not anecdotal evidence about what someone feels is wrong and that we are holding ourselves very accountable to making sure our efforts are producing fruit. And that is the concept of the world class. Any questions or feedback?

Oh, we got a question in here also. Again, if you guys have some. And Chris, I saw you raise your hand so I'll get to you, Christine, but if you guys have questions, feel free to pop them in here. I know we have about 10 or so minutes left, but first question before we get to you, Chris, is how would you, or should you apply this to early stage? For example, first 12 months of a startup with limited data?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I mean, I think frankly when I was. Well, first six to 12 months of a startup is very, very early. I think probably the first six to 12 months of a startup you're really focusing on like product market fit and things like that. But I do think it doesn't really matter how big or small you are, there should always be data that you're measuring yourself somehow, I think. But that just goes back to assembling the team and having that debate about what really matters. Another thing that I'll throw out there that might be more applicable to the first six to 12 months is the concept of V2 moment. If you're not familiar with that, that's a sales method or it's not a management methodology that Mark Benioff invented at Salesforce. It stands for values. Excuse me, vision, values, methods, obstacles, measures. And I think that might be a better framework for really early. Because what v2mom strives to answer is what do we want? How will we get it and how will we know we have it? And I think that that final question would be really, really important for you to be able to answer with data when you're. That I do V2 mom as well. I see more. Oh, sorry. What CRM data analytics would you recommend as you scale? So great question. So we obviously, I mean, not obviously, I guess we use Salesforce. And one thing at Liveramp that we used that really was pretty awesome was Clary. That was a really good tool.

Click.

Clary helped us be able to look at historical data. At the moment, Demandbase is evaluating both Clary and Einstein as part of Salesforce to help us get some of this data, especially some historical data. One thing that is driving me bonkers right now is because of the way that we were thinking about coverage for Pipeline in the past. No one can tell. There's a general rule of thumb you want 3x pipe to your goal, but that's a rule of thumb. Every company is unique and different. And because we haven't been tracking that that way at demand based, no one can tell me like what our rule is there. So I do recommend, you know, getting alignment on this stuff early because the reality was when we built our world classic demand base, I would say maybe 30% of the most important data that I wanted was not available to me because we did not have the right tech stack, which was extremely frustrating. So we're looking at clarity, Neinstein. There's other solutions out there.

I do know Chris Dean had a question. I can unmute you or have you unmute Chris directly.

Yeah, I mean I should have typed it in. Sorry.

Oh, sorry.

It's okay. So my question is like we have a super long sales cycle, like 100 days. I wish it was 100 days. Right. It's like 400 days. It's terrible. Like in part of our, like if we. The lead time, like you know, Moscow so far ahead or you know, of the other times, like us doing an experiment just takes a really long time. Do you have any tips, any advice here? Like how we could, like clearly I want to shorten the cycle, but you know, we do that, you know, what do we do?

So I mean one thing that I'm doing is I think a sales cycle to me is really intimidating because there's just a lot like saying let's reduce the sales cycle is like, okay, great story, you know, like, how the hell are we going to do that? But I also, how about you grow faster?

Cool.

Yeah. You want me to grow faster? I thought you wanted me to slow down. I actually take a lot of what I learned as a customer success leader and apply it to sales cycles. So when I was a customer success leader, I focused a lot on the customer journey. Right. Time to live, time to value, time to, you know, time to grow. Ultimate lifetime value. And when I would think about improving the customer journey, I would never, very rarely, when I talk about it all in one thing, I would say we're going to really focus on time to live right now because each kind of section deserves its own attention and I intend to do the same thing. We launched a new product last month and we need to do the entire, we need to redo the playbook. And I do like, I empathize that yours is 400 days, ours is a little over 100ish days. I would love to get it to like 100 and below. But my approach is going to be, you know, looking at the different sales cycles and looking what levers I can actually pull because I can't. You know, for example, one like silly thing is we, when, when folks want to kick the tires with our product, our legal team was forcing us to do a zero dollar order form. Well, that order form would take two weeks to get through legal. And so what we're doing instead is we're prioritizing getting a click through on the, on the app itself so that clients can just accept the terms and conditions. That's reducing our sales cycle immediately by two weeks.

Right.

Another thing that we're doing is looking at some of our legal language and if, you know, if we're finding that there's common bundles of products, we're starting to have legal build templates so that, that's just kind of like pre built that people can pull off the shelf versus so and that's an example of like us becoming more efficient internally, that should drive our, that should drive our sales cycle. So my biggest advice is look at what you can control yourselves and look at the sales cycle in stages versus the whole thing because otherwise it's just way too Overwhelming.

Awesome. I know. We keep getting more in here too in our chat unless anyone else wants to verbally ask anything. But one of the ones to get traction is this best executed top down. And if that's not possible, can one build mass middle up?

So I love that question and actually.

It should be bottoms up in terms.

Of the execution of how you roll it out. And I think my, a big takeaway.

I've had in the last couple of years is how critical the frontline sales management layer is. It's and like they. Because even when you talk about sales training and putting people through like Miller Hyman or sales methodology training, like what happens 90% of the time is these ICs, you know, they're like puppies. You know when you buy a puppy and you have to, you have that window of time, you gotta socialize it so it's not afraid. And if you wait too long you can't really change them. And they're scared of the mailman. Right. ICs will go through some kind of training and they leave that training and they're really open minded and they're thinking about new ways to do things and then they go to their first one on one with their sales manager and have the same old conversation they've always had. And so what I really want to do is what you're looking at here is really a board view of this. But this needs to be sliced and diced and given into the hands of every sales leader. They should take ownership of these metrics. They should also understand like I think like the biggest problem is that sales management gets way too focused only on pipeline management and forecasting and that's all that they care about versus actually and that's how you become skinny fat. If all you do is focus on that, you are not focusing on the metrics that like are lurking underneath. That could actually be like if you know, if you could dial this or dial that you would, you would see tremendous results. So I think that the numbers here should be debated at a top down level. Like the executives should decide what's most important with you know, you can get weigh in and buy in from others but ultimately like the most important thing is that your C suite is aligned again to quell the noise. But ultimately you want to give this into the hands of your, of your individual leaders and challenge them too to start managing to these metrics because it will make a difference for them. And someone had wanted Lauren had asked about the KPIs. I think Lauren, this is the slide that we were looking at. And again, this is like a macro slide. This is kind of like this. There's probably if you double clicked on this internally, you would see a lot more data here. But these are the ones we decided were like ultimately the most important things. This will not always be the same for every company, but for example, win rate, how many, you know, if we have 10 at bats a quarter, how many are we winning? And then getting really, really, really ruthless about understanding those loss codes. Because what if you could win 10% more time a quarter? Like that would be. That would. That would move the needle for you, right? We talked about average sales cycle. What if you could reduce your sales cycle by just 10 points? That would be huge for you, obviously, renewal rates. We all know that. The other one that I like, I like to look at is average percent of quota attainment. We've always been shooting for 80% at.

80%.

To be able to truly understand if we have a performance issue with our field or if we have a product issue. Right. Or product market fit issue. But these are like the main highlighted ones that we would show the board. But there are certainly, I would say at least three times more data than this. But again, I wouldn't recommend more than like, you know, I would say no more than 20 numbers total. Because again, when you get more than that, like, it starts to become so diluted and completely unactionable.

Awesome. Well, we are almost at the end of the mark, so with that, I will thank everyone for joining us and thank you, Allison, for participating and taking the time to be one of our roundtable hosts. I know we mentioned at the beginning we have Brella going on for networking and a bunch of more roundtables throughout the day. I know we kind of just kicked off and it's flying by. And we hope to see you guys tomorrow for sessions as well. And again, Allison, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, guys. That was fun.

Have a good one, guys. Enjoy your day.