Sales isn’t about closing anymore — What the next generation looks like
A conversation with Travis Bryant, Former Head, Customer Growth, Front and SVP, Global Sales, Optimizely; Jeanne DeWitt, Head of North America Revenue & Growth, Stripe; Kathy Lord, SVP Sales & Customer Success, Sage Intaact
The best tech companies today have broken the old sales model. Simply hitting your quota is no longer the primary focal point for success. In today’s new paradigm, sales has (1) shared responsibility for customers along their entire journey, and (2) is seamlessly integrated with departments working with customers before the sale and well after. Sales isn’t just sales anymore.
At our 1to100 conference, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin was joined by sales execs from Front, Stripe, and Sage Intaact to discuss the leader and team DNA required for the new role that sales is now playing. Each sales leader represented a very different point of view. Front focuses on SMB with a self-service and low touch model but has been looking up-market. Stripe started out as self-service in SMB but has moved into the enterprise with an increasingly higher-touch sales motion. Intaact has a direct sales team that’s been focused on the mid-enterprise market from the beginning. Despite the diversity of approach, there was resounding agreement from Kathy, Jeanne, and Travis on the changing dynamics in sales leadership, sales team distribution, and sales training.
Sales leadership — Creating a “CRO”- like role makes sense
For enterprise tech, sales has entered a new environment where you can’t just close a deal and move on. The revenue potential of the customer extends far beyond the glory of that initial close. Today’s most successful SaaS startups frequently don’t just “land”… they “expand” with models that carefully evaluate the balance of churn and Lifetime Value (LTV) against Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). According to Jeanne at Stripe: “A lot of times, the upside is in year three, four, seven…a big promise of SaaS is often the first product you sell in might only be where you wind up making 20% of your revenue over time. Stripe now has five different products that my team sells.”
Thus we’ve seen the rise of the CRO-like roles that cover more of the customer journey as evidenced by the speakers on the panel. Kathy owns both Sales and Customer Success at Intaact. Travis even coined his own title for a similar role: “Head of Customer Growth.” These titles point to a simple fact — customer success is now king. According to Kathy (an early adopter of the trend) everyone thought she was crazy: “How can you possibly own both [sales and customer success]?” Based on experience, she strongly believes success required more oversight across the customer journey: “As much as you can say, ‘Well, I work really well with the partner in customer success that owns that,’ you’re two separate executives reporting to the CEO with totally different objectives.”
The attraction of the role is that you can own it all. The risk? You also own it all. So what’s the right profile for success? Says Kathy: “I think the new CRO has to be very operationally oriented…process oriented, but still nimble enough that they can close deals, they can manage customers. I think it’s a new breed of a salesperson and sales leader that we haven’t seen before.”
Sales team — Distribute your team outside of the Bay Area
“You can tell how [sales hiring] has changed based on the first one-on-ones that I had with our VCs,” according to Travis. “One of the first questions they asked is, “So when are you going to have teams outside of San Francisco?” The Bay Area presents an affordability problem for most startups — especially when it comes to hiring sales teams. But which startups should distribute their teams? Where should they go? What are the potential risks and considerations?
Travis says to start with your model and ask: do you need to be where your customers are? For a high-transaction, pull through from a product trial experience, it’s simply not as important to have physical proximity. But, the higher your ACV, the higher the number of customer touch points that are required (and potential face time).
So, where to? Austin… Denver… Seattle… Portland? At NextWorld, we’ve seen companies choosing to open strong offices in diverse locations domestically and internationally (e.g. Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm). “We just couldn’t find the talent, so that was the challenge.” said Kathy, “We actually did a LinkedIn search… what top cities in the U.S. have the biggest candidate pool for our [desired] profile? Interestingly enough, it was Boston and Atlanta.” The key is finding the sweet spot between a locus of talent and the ability to hire effectively with some cost-consciousness. Says Travis: “I worry about places like Utah where it’s not a huge metro area, and there’s actually a ton of competition. Austin is the same way. But you think about places like Atlanta or Chicago. At least they’re a larger metro area.”
One of the risks of having a distributed team is the lack of “tribal knowledge transfer” as Travis puts it. That means you have to feel good about the frameworks, infrastructure, and principles you’ve put in place to ensure people execute with discipline. “Enablement, tools, cleaning up Salesforce data — all of those things that are unsexy…I want to do all that first and feel like there’s some amount of momentum there before we would feel comfortable transplanting people who are not going to always be connected to their colleagues in the way that you get from being at HQ.” Jeanne agrees: “You want that replicability. You want to feel like you can nail the process, and then export it to wherever your second hub is.”
One word of caution: ensure sales folks working out of satellite offices don’t feel like second-class citizens. All three panelists agreed that setting aside additional budget for bringing the team together is essential. Small things matter too — from synchronizing meetings that don’t always prioritize the west coast time zone to periodically running all-hands meetings from another office. “There are a few small tweaks that when you add up, it creates a bit more cohesion than if you just say that everyone orbits around the sun, that is, San Francisco” says Travis.
Sales training — Make it a buddy system
“It sounds obvious, but I think it’s not to a lot of people: recognizing that sales is a skill, just like writing code is a skill and building a financial model is a skill,” says Jeanne. “The number of people who show up on my doorstep that we’ve hired who have had a career in sales that I think do not have sales skills is still shocking to me.”
So how do you level the playing field and ensure the sales people you’ve hired are operating at the same level? Sales enablement should start from day one, be ongoing, and have community accountability. Sales training cannot just be a quarterly group activity. “I would double-click on the micro moments, and not pull people off the floor, so there’s this constant drip of learning,” says Travis. Upon hire at Stripe, a salesperson has 30, 60, 90 day checklists to ramp up. “You’re assigned what we call a spin-up buddy,” Jeanne says. “That person is accountable to making you successful. If you haven’t gotten a deal on the board, built enough pipeline, by the end of those 90 days, I’m going to go talk to your spin-up buddy.” Similarly Intaact requires new hires complete a combo of in-person and online training: “They have to use it. It’s their first 90 days. It takes them through all the elements of it in bite-sized chunks,” says Kathy. The biggest takeaway to make all of this possible? Consider hiring a dedicated sales enablement resource as soon as possible. Start early. Train fast.
Watch the whole conversation below for more insights from these sales leaders.
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