Sailing to Success in Sales

Managing Capacity for Lead Generation Teams

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

Today more and more lead generation systems in the software industry are adding another layer between cold leads and the sales rep. The lead qualification team, whose job it is to do outbound prospecting, or qualification of inbound leads, or both, has become a somewhat of an industry standard for companies once they reach a certain stage. OpenView Labs, the consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, has helped implement such teams into the lead generation systems of many of our expansion stage portfolio companies including Intronis, Zmags, and Balihoo.

I have helped hire, train, and mange a number of these teams, and for most of them I have provided the backend support and salesforce.com administration including lead provisioning for the team. I have always provisioned leads on a weekly rhythm, about 50/week/rep, because I suspected that controlling the flow of leads to the team had a positive impact on their performance, but I didn’t have any data to support that.

I would argue that controlling the flow of leads to the team based on their capacity:

1. Provides more focus

2. Systematically ensures contact to every lead that is distributed

3. Gives the team a sense of accomplishment when they get through all of their leads for the week and can ask for more

Recently I read a couple blog posts which support which give additional insights into the matter.

In one of my favorite blogs Marci Reynolds of the Sales Ops Blog recommends creating a lead capacity model for organizations which have lead qualification teams qualifying inbound leads. This approach also requires some kind of lead scoring model that would allow you to lower and raise the bar based on the volume of inbound leads so that only the highest quality leads within the capacity of the reps get to the reps.

The Kaleidico blog also suggest that “the right number of sales leads can improve lead conversion.” They also recommend using these factors to measure the capacity of your team.

· Sales call volume

Average attempts before a sale
Average attempts before a withdraw
Sales targets and quotas
Commission tiers (you will be amazed at the glass ceilings this causes in sales)

Do you know your team’s capacity?

Retrospectives: The Key to Continuous Sales Improvement

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

www.scrumalliance.org/articles/83-delivering-the-w-one-game-at-a-time
At OpenView Venture Partners one of our core values is continuous improvement. It is a value that is ingrained in our culture and that we practice on a daily and weekly basis through a management methodology called SCRUM. Those of you who are familiar with SCRUM know that is just one flavor of agile product development methodology, and is not generally applied outside of product development. That being said, ours is a slightly modified version of SCRUM, but the guiding principles are still applied, and we coach many of the operational and management teams in our portfolio companies on how to apply these principles.

SCRUM allows for continuous improvement by having a team follow a regimented work rhythm, punctuated by frequent “retrospectives.” The purpose of a retrospective is to surface impediments and bottlenecks in a process, and to identify solutions and opportunities for improvement. From there, you prioritize the impediments and ideas for improvement and systematically implement solutions.

Applying a retrospective to a Sales team will take your normal pipeline reviews to a whole new level. It starts with trust, candor, and commitment from everyone that the focus is on improving the process and the team’s performance overall. As the team gets more practice retrospecting, they will become better at identifying the root causes of problems and bring more poignant and actionable ideas to each retrospective.

Companies that have embraced this approach in their sales and marketing teams have seen almost immediate improvement in sales performance and productivity. Some companies have similar meetings, but without the rigor and commitment from everyone on the team, the meetings are not likely to provide quite as much value as a true retrospective.

Do you retrospect?

If you are interested in learning more about retrospectives and scrum check out these links:

Agile Retrospective Cheat Sheet

Agile Scrum News Letter

SCRUM Alliance post on the New England Patriots

How to Avoid Hirer’s Remorse

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

Hiring in a down economy would seem like a breeze, but in some recent initiatives with two of our expansion stage portfolio companies finding good talent proved more difficult than ever before. While recruiting for a position we have hired several times in the past with great success and in a short amount of time, on this round of hiring we had fewer and lower quality applicants. We did end up hiring some very talented individuals, but at four weeks into the sourcing we still hadn’t found any really good candidates and by then we were expecting to have extended an offer.

We began thinking about what was different in this search than in others and we came up with the following hypothesis:

In a down economy companies have to “trim the fat” and then some to decrease expenses. This means letting go all or most of the B, C, and D players at the company. Simultaneously, the A players, who a small percentage of may have otherwise been casually looking for a job, are not only clinging to their jobs for their lives, but have inherited additional responsibilities from the B, and C players who had to be let go. Being A players they are naturally inclined to take on additional responsibilities and excel at those, so they become even more attached to their current jobs

As a result the market becomes flooded with unmotivated B, C, and D players which effectively even further dilutes the A players that are actually out there looking for jobs. This means that you have to source and screen a lot more applicants to uncover the same number of qualified candidates for any given role.

This kind of environment can make finding good people even more difficult than it already is, and often people end up making a bad hiring mistake, which will inevitably lead to “hirer’s remorse”.

Here are some tips for how to avoid hirer’s remorse:

Make sure all of the key stakeholders have a very clear picture of who the right person really is
Don’t settle for anything less
Birds of a feather flock together, so try running an internal referral program to get your best people to recommend candidates for the opening
Always do reference checks
Don’t underestimate the importance of cultural fit

At OpenView Labs Diana Winings helps provide recruiting support internally and to all of our portfolio companies. Given that finding the right people can be so difficult, but have such a significant impact, recruiting support is one of the most important areas in which we provide overall operational support to our portfolio of expansion stage companies.

Good luck hiring!

Marketing Disruptive Technology

Thursday, February 25, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

The terms “disruptive innovation” or “disruptive technology” have become staples in the vocabulary of venture capitalists, especially those focused on investing in technology enabled business models. An article by Andrew Rudin, CEO of Outside Technologies, a sales management consulting firm defines it as:

“An innovation [which] impacts the hegemony of the market-leading company, companies, or prevailing technologies for a specific market.”

Sales and marketing professionals should always be thinking about this when planning an overall marketing strategy, or just next month’s campaign. Selling in an existing, crowded, or commoditized market with a perceived market leader is almost always easier than trying to create a new market from scratch.

In an existing market, most of the work has already been done for you. People already understand your product concept, they are somewhat familiar with the technology, and all you really need to prove to them is why you are better than the market leader, which in many cases is easy, because market leaders tend to be slow moving dinosaurs.

Salesforce.com is great example of a company the executed brilliantly on marketing their disruptive technology and this strategy is one of the factors that contributed to their rapid growth over the last decade. They approached the CRM market, and brought it on-line. While there is a lot more to it than that, a disruptive strategy can be that simple.

Creating competitive advantage to position your company against the market leader is an important first step. Your competitive positioning should show the market or some subset of the market why you are different than the market leader. Combine this competitive messaging, with an outbound lead generation system and some out of the box marketing tactics and you have a recipe for a disruptive marketing strategy.

Marketing Email Marketing Software

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

We are currently evaluating ExactTarget as a potential email marketing vendor, so today I decided to do some research on email marketing software to educate myself on the products, features, and capabilities available today. Almost by reflex, my research began with a Google search for the keyword “Email Marketing Software” and the results were intriguing.

Going into the search I expected to see what I thought were the most well known application on the first page of results i.e. Constant Contact, Vertical Response, ExactTarget among an array of other blogs, smaller vendors, and some marketing automation tools (Marketo). The results more or less met my expectations except for one thing: ExactTarget did not appear until the bottom of the third page of search results. At first I thought it was strange, but the more I thought about the more I was actually impressed.

Those search results could have a number of possible implications on how email marketing companies market themselves. For a major player in the email marketing market like ExactTarget to appear on the third page of Google search results for the search term “Email Marketing Software” one of two things must be true: either their competitors invest significant resources into SEO and SEM, or ExactTarget's online content is not optimized for Google search.

To test my hypothesis I put ExactTarget’s URL into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to find out what search terms their content is optimized for. Sure enough most relevant keyword turned out to be “Email Marketing Software”. This leads me to believe that ExactTarget’s competitors invest far more resources into SEO and SEM, and that ExactTarget is probably leveraging other channels to generate demand for their products. Email marketing is probably a big one.

A good email marketing tool can be an invaluable asset to a content marketing strategy, especially if it integrates with your CRM implementation and allows you to apply some logic and automation to the messages and content being sent to your customers and prospects. Executing a good content marketing strategy is one of the areas of expertise we are currently developing internally at OpenView Labs.

If we do end up buying and implementing ExactTarget you can look forward to my thoughts and insight on email marketing implementations in the future.

5 Ways to Blow an Interview for an Entry Level Sales Position

Thursday, February 11, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

One of the ways OpenView adds value to our portfolio companies is by helping them build lead qualification teams. A lead qual team can be an integral piece of the kind of lead generation systems we help our portfolio companies build. When fueled by an inbound marketing engine and managed through an integrated custom CRM implementation, a system like this can really help a company take off.

Our lead qual “teams” usually start out as 1 or 2 young ambitious professionals looking to start a career in sales. This role at one of our portfolio companies is a great opportunity for anyone interested in a career in sales. Since working at OpenView I have hired for this position multiple times and conducted dozens of interviews over the phone and in person. This blog post is intended for anyone applying for an entry level sales job, but some of these can probably be applied to any interview process.

1. Forget which job you are interviewing for

I get that people on the job search apply to a lot of different jobs at once and sometimes it can be difficult staying organized, but if you finally manage to schedule a phone interview, you better know which job it’s for. I had a phone interview with one candidate who actually asked me what job he was being interviewed for. That was a short interview.

2. Say that you are not really motivated by money

For some reason, many people are either not really motivated by money, or are afraid to say it. It’s not a bad thing, especially in sales. If you are not motivated by money, you probably shouldn’t be looking for a career in sales.

3. Give very short and unenthusiastic answers to questions

Most entry level sales positions are all about attitude. If you come off as confident, and enthusiastic about the job you are interviewing for you will at least make it to the next round of interviews. Sales is all about interpersonal skills and if you don’t demonstrate the ability to be enthusiastic and sell yourself no one is going to believe that you can sell their product.

4. Don’t prepare any questions before the interview

There is no way that going into a first or second round interview all of your questions about a company or a position have been answered. Asking relevant questions in an interview shows a potential employer that you are actually interested in the job and in their company. Not asking any relevant questions about the position or company shows that you haven’t put much thought into the company, what it does, and how the position you are applying for fits into that. Anyone who takes a few minutes to think about that should easily be able to come up with at least a few good questions.

5. Bring a copy of your resume folded up in your pants pocket –

This probably doesn’t happen very often, but it happened to me recently. I think that you should actually bring at least 2 extra nice clean copies of your resume to an interview in a folder or a notebook. If you don’t it’s not the end of the world, but it’s probably 1 strike against you. However, when someone I was interviewing pulled a wrinkled copy of their resume out of their pocket and handed it to me that was pretty much it for that candidate.

Good luck with the job search.

5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Salesforce.com User Adoption

Thursday, February 4, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

One of the struggles at expansion stage companies when it comes to their salesforce implementations is user adoption. And as I have mentioned many times before, user adoption is the key to a successful implementation. Here are 5 easy steps you can take to improve user adoption.

1. Clean up the page layouts – Go through the page layouts for the most commonly used objects in salesforce.com. Typically leads, accounts, opportunities, and contacts. Remove any irrelevant fields from the page layout, and group the remaining fields into collapsible sections where it makes sense. Reducing the clutter on the page layouts can go a long way in making your end users lives easier.

2. Clean up the views – If your end users use views to manage their leads, activities, accounts and opportunities keep the views pick list free of clutter. Figure out what the few key views are for each object that all end users need to have and set them. Then restrict end users from being able to create and edit public views. This can be done in the profile configuration.

3. Implement key activity views – While salesforce.com provides a number of useful canned views, there are 2 activity views that I use at all of our portfolio companies that make all of my end users lives easier.

a. My Activities today and overdue

b. My Activities this week and overdue

These seem obvious, but they don’t come canned, and most salesforce administrators don’t think to set them up. The view parameters should be pretty easy to figure, but please post a comment below if you need any help with that.

4. Get end user feedback – In almost any salesforce implementation there are probably a few small tweaks that would take an Admin seconds to make, but would make the end users lives much, much easier. Getting end user feedback and quickly reacting when you hear small changes that can have a big impact not only makes the end users lives easier, but it can also make them feel like active contributors to the implementation.

5. Implement console – Salesforce administration can often involve complicated tasks, but the console is probably one of the easiest to implement, and also one of the most valuable features salesforce.com offers. While mainly recommended for customer support case management, it is also a great tool that sales people can use to manage their activities, leads, and opportunities. If you don’t know what the console is download the user guide and try it out.

You can also go to successforce.com for many other great tips and ideas to increase your user adoption.

Leading by Example

Thursday, January 28, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

It has been said that leading by example is the best way to lead and I certainly agree, but in so many cases leaders take on an approach of “do as I say, not as I do”. Leading by example is based on the basic principle that you have to model the behaviors, you want others to exhibit. Why then, in the corporate world does this basic principle go by the way side?

I am sure that if you are reading this post right now the thoughts going through your head are of all the examples of this you see every day, but I will share some examples that I see at some expansion stage companies.

The sales manager who insists on conducting pipeline reviews on a spread sheet instead of using the SFA/ CRM implementation.
The project manager who prefers to keep documents stored on their desktop and communicates via email, instead of using the collaboration tool.

In Salesforce implementations leading by example can be particularly important, and I always try to lead by example when working with all of our internal stake holders (partners, associates, analysts, and admins). Likewise, I advise the people I work with at our portfolio companies to do the same.

Though I may be wrong, I think there probably are some situations in which a “do as I say, not as I do” leadership approach is warranted. However, leading by example is difficult, and it takes discipline and commitment. I believe that in most cases when managers resort to a “do as I say, not as I do” approach it is a result of stubbornness, resistance to change, laziness, or some combination of the like. To avoid falling into such behavior, managers should monitor and reflect on their own actions, as much if not more than the people they manage.

Setting that kind of example is likely producing great results.

A Rewarding Value Add Experience

Thursday, January 21, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

Often times at OpenView Labs one of the ways we provide strategic consulting services is by conducting some research or analysis to provide decision support to a portfolio company or to our investment team. Occasionally, we also do such research proactively if we think there may be a future need for such information. Making this information available to our expansion stage portfolio companies allows them to deploy the growth capital we provide them with even more effectively.

Last summer my team worked on an evaluation of lead source and data enhancement apps available on the salesforce.com appexchange. At the time a few portfolio companies had expressed some interest in such an analysis, but none of them really seemed to be serious about buying just yet. The project ended with a somewhat unsatisfactory feeling of completion.

This past week one of our portfolio companies reached out to OpenView Labs looking for some advice on apps that can append records in salesforce.com with missing data. I gladly sent the presentation that summarized our analysis and walked them through it, and they found it very helpful and informative.

All too often it seems like we spend time doing work that gets lost in a digital file cabinet somewhere in our hard drives, or in Central Desktop, but this week we were able to help guide at least one of our portfolio companies in the right direction.

Any readers in the portfolio are more than welcome to leave a comment or reach out to me via email at oyankelev@openviewlabs.com to see the full report.

Sales KPIs: Activities vs. Dollars

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

There is an ongoing debate over whether sales is an art or a science. While the debate continues, I think it's safe to say that it's probably a little bit of both. Another ongoing debate related to this is whether to hold sales people accountable to leading indicators like calls, conversations, new opportunities etc... or to only hold them accountable to their number.

When sales reps are consistently hitting their numbers, it's easy to ignore metrics like the number of conversations/ week, however when reps start missing their numbers, pipeline reviews can't always explain why. Activities are important leading indicators to the success of a sales person, yet many sales managers do not manage to them, or even hold their reps accountable to at least a minimum set of expectations for their activity levels.

On the other hand, managing too strictly to the activities can be detrimental if as a sales manager you don't have a good sense of the quality of leading indicators that you are measuring. At an expansion stage company with a growing sales team it can be particularly important to measure both. Holding reps accountable to leading indicators can help a young and growing company create a metrics driven and goal oriented culture within in their sales organization.

2010 New Years Resolutions for SF.com Admins

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by Ori Yankelev

Reflecting on the last year I have come to find that there are a few pain points that salesforce.com admins struggle with most at expansion stage software and internet companies. Those include data integrity, user adoption, and reporting. Here are some New Year's resolutions that salesforce.com admins at any company can adopt to ensure a better 2010 for their implementations.

I will do everything in my power to maximize user adoption throughout the entire organization.
I will not import records without matching by name, email, or salesforce.com ID to prevent duplicates.
I will only add fields that people actually use to my organizations page layout.
I will make all business critical fields required on all page layouts.
I will make sure I have the proper documentation and training material for my implementation so that people know how to use it effectively.
I will make sure my implementation is scalable by setting up a proper role hierarchy and org. wide default security settings.
I will not create reports or dashboards unless I know that someone is going to use them.

These are resolutions I will do my best to adhere to internally as well as advise the admins at our portfolio companies. If you think I missed any please leave a comment.

Happy New Year!

Last Post of 2009

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

This will be my last blog post of 2009. It’s been a good year.

I have really enjoyed blogging so far on the Sailing to Success in Sales blog. I got a few comments and reflected on many of the things that I’ve learned over the course of the year about sales operations, sales support, content marketing, expansion stage companies, and growth venture capital.

I hope everyone has a great new year.

-Ori

Considering Jigsaw Data Fusion? Consider This:

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

I recently completed the implementations of Jigsaw Data Fusion (JDF) in one of our expansion stage portfolio company’s Salesforce.com database. For anyone who is not familiar with JDF it is basically an integration between your CRM system, and Jigsaw’s Database of over 18 million business contacts and 3 million company profiles. It then matches the records in your CRM system to records in the Jigsaw database and flags records as in sync, out of sync, or not matched. You can than allow JDF to automatically override your existing data with their data so that any matched records will be in sync.

While this sounds like an amazing service, there are several considerations to take into account before signing up for JDF. Above all however, the most important consideration to take into account is this:

Do you trust Jigsaw’s data more than your own?

While jigsaw may be a great source for new leads, depending on your business, there is a good chance that most of the prospects in your CRM system probably have accurate contact info (even though it may not always seem that way). If this is the case then you probably will not want JDF to automatically override your existing prospect data.

JDF can also be good for appending blank fields on records in your database (it does this automatically). However, if your goal is only to append missing data, than there might be better options out there that can provide more valuable data than Jigsaw’s basic business card level data.

Another thing to consider is your primary prospect profile. Run some searches in Jigsaw for some of your prospects, and try to build a list of target prospects. If the results are low and you don’t find any of your prospects in the test searches, chances are that most of the records will be unmatched (in which case jigsaw doesn’t really add much value).

Other questions to ask are:

What are you actually going to do with the data when you get it?
Do you need JDF to do this?
How does JDF fit into your current goals and overall company strategy?

Furthermore, from my experience dealing with their support (which was okay) I got the sense that JDF is like a Jigsaw pet project that they haven’t really put too many resources behind yet.

All in all JDF could be good for some companies, but I probably would not recommend it to other expansion stage companies with a lot of already existing prospects in their database.

A Great Way to Look at Sales Ops

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

I read another great blog post from the Sales Operations Blog called “Sales Manager Effectiveness… The Key To Sales Productivity”. This one is actually a guest blog post by Phillippe LeBaron President of LB4G Consulting, Inc.

In addition to some great tips and key takeaways, the post presents a really interesting way to think about the role of sales operations. Creating the inputs to produce the outputs desired of sales reps and sales mangers.

At expansion stage software companies there is often confusion on what the role of sales operations is, and the truth is that it varies a lot from one company to the next. I think the post provides a good framework that can be applied to any company to help sales operations figure out what they should be working on.

Please enjoy.

One Step at a Time

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

To wrap up our event with Salesforce.com we organized a follow up call between the attendees, and two of the sales leaders from Salesforce.com. The follow up call gave the attendees an opportunity to ask the questions that they thought of after the visit, once all that information had a chance to simmer.

One of the themes of the call was about where Salesforce.com was 7 years ago when it more closely resembled the expansion stage companies in our portfolio. What practices and processes did they have in place back then, and what changes in their business and in the market occurred that helped them achieve such rapid and steady growth?

An obvious point that many management teams sometimes tend to overlook is that you can’t do it all at once. The great thing about the call that the meeting lacked was a focus on the idea that Salesforce.com didn’t get to 1.3 billion over night. There growth came in stages, and their model has been iterated over and over again to help them get to where they are. And they will continue iterating on it as they continue to grow and change.

At OpenView Labs, some of the tools we are trying to develop are capability maturity models for different functional areas. These models are designed to help our portfolio companies identify where they are on the model in terms of capabilities and maturity, and help them figure out exactly what needs to happen to get to the next level in a particular functional area such as finance, sales, or product development.

In the future these capability and maturity models will be extremely valuable in our effort to provide operational support to our portfolio companies. The models will help them narrow their focus on the few things that matter, and will identify specific milestones that will show them how to bring their company’s to the next stages one step at a time.

Defining Opportunity is a Key to Success

Friday, December 4, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

This week’s learning from the November 4th salesforce.com visit is to have a very clear definition of a qualified opportunity.

Have a very clear definition of a qualified opportunity.

This becomes especially important when you separate the role of lead qualification and sales, which salesforce.com and several of our portfolio companies do. Having this definition agreed on by all stake holders – managers, lead qualifiers, and sales rep – will improve the quality of your pipeline, the accuracy of your forecast, and increase your sales reps productivity. This can also allow you to better quantify and track inbound marketing efforts and contribution to your pipeline.

The definition of an opportunity will vary from company to company. Here are some good ideas for what to use as a good starting point:

1.    Time frame for decision is within XX days
2.    Decision maker is identified
3.    Prospect is comfortable with pricing
4.    Prospect is interested in next step
5.    Prospect has taken a free trial
6.    Prospect has attended webinar

The right definition for your company is probably a combination of some of these.

Another thing this allows the folks over at salesforce.com to do is add a quality control step in the qualification process that allows sales reps to send an opportunity back to the qualifiers when the criteria are not met. In addition to keeping the sales reps productive, this will keep the lead qualifiers honest to make sure they do not stray away from the agreed upon definition and clog the pipeline with premature opportunities.

You can further implement and integrate this definition into your process by adding the criteria as fields in your CRM/SFA system, and creating a validation rule that will not let an opportunity be created without having those fields filled out.

User Adoption and a Metrics Driven Culture Come From the Top

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

Events like the visit to Salesforce.com on November 4th 2009 are just one of the ways we provide sales and marketing support to our portfolio companies. This week's featured learning from the visit is:

Drive user adoption and a metrics driven culture from the top down:

Salesforce.com repeatedly stressed the importance of this point, and the benefits they reap from practicing it. The fact is that if everybody managed themselves, we wouldn’t need to hire managers, and because managers are hired to track their employees’ performance, people care about what their managers care about. These two facts have significant implications for how businesses use dashboards, not necessarily in Salesforce.com, but any dashboards. If people don’t know what their managers are measuring them on they are less likely to meet their managers’ expectations.

What most companies do when they purchase a CRM or a sales automation system is setup dashboards to track certain sales performance metrics. One of the biggest mistakes I see expansion stage companies make is that they don’t show their reps the dashboard, and they rarely look at the dashboards themselves except at quarterly or monthly reviews (if ever). This is a huge mistake. At Salesforce.com the dashboards that have been setup to track sales performance metrics are communicated to the sales team, and the sales management team, and they are all expected to view these dashboards regularly. And they do.

At Salesforce.com it is not uncommon for a member of the sales management team, or even the CEO to email a sales rep about poor performance on an exception dashboard. Once a sales rep receives an email from the CEO they never appear on the exception dashboard again. Similarly, they have big deal alerts set up which are sent out to the entire sales management team when a deal closes above a certain dollar amount. Then a VP of sales or some other member of the sales management team can send out a congratulatory email to the rep that closed the deal. That is a huge motivator.

Setting up dashboards and big deal alerts are not break through ideas. The important thing here is that the dashboards and big deal alerts are used and sent out to the leaders of the sales team, and the leaders of the organizations in addition to sales reps and their direct managers. Putting this into practice is easy, and inevitably results in increased user adoption and a metrics driven culture (as long as your dashboards and alerts are setup to track the right things).

Check back next week for another best practice from the Salesforce.com visit.

Learnings from Salesforce.com

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

After giving it some thought and consideration I managed to narrow down all of the things I learned at the Salesforce.com visit to a few important leanings that apply to expansion stage companies. Here is the first one:

Get organizational alignment on your company’s vision

One of the things Salesforce.com did extremely well from the very beginning was that they successfully created a simple vision that was easy to understand. Then they educated the entire company on that vision, and made sure that there was alignment throughout the organization.

While this may seem obvious I think most CEOs of small companies would be surprised at the different answers they would get if they surveyed their employees on the company’s vision. Getting alignment on your company’s vision especially in the customer facing divisions of the business (sales, marketing, and customer support) will ensure that your customers, prospects, and other constituents are always being delivered a consistent message.

Doing this successfully requires that your vision be distilled into a simple message that is easy to understand. For Salesforce.com it is “The end of software”, and it is so simple that it can be communicated through a simple image that they use as their logo.

You know you have done this successfully when you survey your employees on the company vision, and they all give you the same answer and can tell you what it really means. I truly believe that when this happens the benefits of having this alignment can and will be recognized throughout the entire organization.

At OpenView, we try to drive this point home through one of the workshops that we run with each portfolio company. It is a full day interactive workshop in which we help our company’s senior leadership teams develop the mission, vision, and values of the company. Once they have clarity and alignment on these, it becomes much easier (though still very difficult) to identify and focus in on the most important goals and strategic initiatives they need to accomplish in order to achieve their mission and vision. The values they identify give them guide lines for how they are going to run their business and achieve those goals and initiatives.

After the workshop most of them put the mission vision and values that they have come up with into a presentation and present it to their entire company. We hope that helping them with this will help them get the kind of alignment and consistent messaging that Salesforce.com was able to achieve, and that helped them be so successful.

Check back next week for another best practice from the Salesforce.com visit.

Learning from the Best

Wednesday, November 11, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

Last week I traveled to Salesforce.com head quarters in San Francisco with a few other members of the OpenView team and a collection of portfolio company CEOs and sales and marketing executives. The purpose of the trip was to have a full day conference in which managers and leaders of Salesforce.com’s sales and marketing team presented the strategy and some of the tactics that have led them to such great success over the last ten years.

In addition to the excellent hospitality they provided, the event was an educational and inspirational experience to all those who attended. Salesforce.com pioneered the SaaS category and continues to successfully drive innovation within it. For the leadership teams of expansion stage SaaS companies to be exposed to the mother of all SaaS companies and how they became so successful was an eye opening experience.

While they shared a lot of their sales and marketing special sauce with us, one thing stood out to me as the most important contributor to their success. Focusing on the success of their customers and enabling them to share that success, has been the single most important thing Salesforce.com has done as an organization to get them to where they are today. This focus on customer success has also been one of Salesforce.com’s major differentiators from their competition. CEO and founder Marc Benioff further elaborates on both points in his book Behind the Cloud which I am currently reading, and would highly recommend it to any entrepreneur.

We are always trying to provide sales and marketing support and to introduce best practices to the expansion stage companies in our portfolio. Coordinating events like this is one way we do that. However, despite their success, not everything they do at Salesforce.com is right for every SaaS company, especially earlier stage companies like ours.

As a result it is important to be able to separate the best practices that apply to our portfolio companies from the ones that apply to Salesforce.com because it’s a 1.3 billion dollar company.

In my next blog post I will try to distill the more specific best practices that we learned at the event that are the most relevant to expansion stage SaaS companies.

Check back next week for some interesting best practices.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Ori Yankelev

In a project I recently completed with one of our expansion stage portfolio companies, we implemented a new way of organizing and tracking farmer retention calls in salesforce.com. We all know how much money can be made from farming, and this company was concerned that their North American farmers were not making the right touches at the right times in order to really leverage their existing customer base.

The implementation had a number of specific goals that I will list here broadly and in no particular order:

1. Increase farmer compliance with documented customer retention process
2. Increase visibility, and scalability of tracking farmer customer retention activity
3. Increase the number of accounts a farmer can manage
4. Increase renewal and add on sales

When we rolled out the new implementation to the global sales leadership team, the manager from one of the other regions seemed displeased. Not with the implementation itself, but with the fact that we had spent significant time implementing something he was already doing very well in his region. It seemed that he already had high process compliance with his farmers, and had visibility into the renewal activities they were completing.

While all of us knew that the new implementation would most probably not have any adverse affects on his farmer program, I think we all realized that a number of things had been over looked leading up to the whole initiative. Here are a couple of key learnings I took away from the project:

1. Knowledge and idea sharing is critical across regions especially within similar business units

The region in which the retention process was working was obviously doing something that the region in which it wasn’t working was not. Had there been some transfer of ideas between regions and better alignment globally with regards to managing the key retention activities, they may not have even needed to re-implement the process in salesforce.com.

2. Fully diagnose the issue before coming up with the solution

Had we put more time into fully understanding why the North American farmers were having such a hard time managing their accounts and retention activities we may have come up with a different solution.

I think that these learnings can be applied broadly when providing sales and marketing support to expansion stage software companies, not just for salesforce.com implementations. Furthermore, I think that applying these two basic ideas can significantly affect the success and amount of impact a project can have on a company.

While these learnings are things that I already knew, and actually seem like common sense, I think that putting them into practice is not always as easy as it sounds.