Tactics to Grow Sales Revenue, Areas of Opportunity in AI, Solutions to Common Sales Problems and More- Tactician #0030

09/01/2024

TACTICS TO GROW SALES REVENUE

Ashley Kelly, VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling conversates with Sam Blond to discuss how together they successfully grew Brex’s sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR in “From Zero to Hero: How to Dominate Outbound SaaS Sales with Rippling and Founders Fund on CRO Confidential”

• Hiring the Right SDR Profile:

  • "Ashley focused on the key characteristics of what makes an SDR successful: Coachability, Whether they have the ability to navigate change and failure, How organized they are, Hunger and motivation."

• Creating a Supportive Environment for SDRs:

  • "SDRs thrive in structure. ... Ashley has done this by creating calendar blocks of times for reps to make outbound calls, write emails, and follow up with accounts. She gives them clear KPIs on how much sales activity is expected of each SDR."

• Determining What to Measure in Performance:

  • "Initially, sales-qualified opportunities might be the metric, but as the team grows, a shift toward quality over quantity is necessary. ... Once they [Brex] saw this in the data, they switched from sales-qualified opportunities as the top KPI to closed-won revenue."

• Career Progression for SDRs:

  • "As the team scales and more SDRs are hired, consider the ramp time to full productivity and the potential for SDRs to advance into leadership roles within the company. ... 'Whether they stay in the SDR or if they move into accounting executives, marketing, recruiting, customer success, or management.”

AREAS OF OPPORTUNITY IN AI

Faraz Fatemi, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners interview Zefa Hakim, Head of Products, Generative AI, ML, Data Monetization at Yelp in “FOUR AREAS OF AI OPPORTUNITY, FROM ZEFA HAKIM OF YELP”

• Monetizing Data with AI:

  • "Companies with large or unique datasets can use AI to convert that data into entirely new revenue streams.”

  • Using Yelp as an example, Zefa highlighted the company’s vast datasets, including hundreds of millions of business reviews, user-generated photos and videos, and billions of consumer searches. Using AI, this data can be analyzed to identify new opportunities or risks, including changing consumer trends, a business, or location’s changing popularity, or identifying vulnerabilities to uncover insurance risks, or uncovering popular food or beverages for food and alcohol distributors.

  • Companies should always ask themselves how their data is reusable and how AI can help unlock its additional potential.

• AI in Analytical Capabilities:

  • "An area of AI innovation that’s still largely untapped is analytical capability. […] as AI advances and becomes cheaper and more democratized, we’ll likely witness it becoming more analytically capable. Ripe for growth are AI-powered applications that help people make decisions, including shopping choices, social interactions, and other scenarios that involve context-specific coordination between multiple people and places (e.g., choosing what restaurant to visit for a particular type of experience).”

  • Other similar potential opportunities include the development of AI-powered tutors, coaches, mentor, and possibly therapists—among other services.

• Collaboration Between Established Companies and AI Startups:

  • “More often than not, new AI companies are coming up with ideas that we haven’t even thought about. But, using our data and insights, they can build different kinds of solutions that can power bigger insurance companies, bigger banking companies, and things like that. So, we keep an open mind. If you have an idea, and you can use our insights and use our data to go build something new, we’ll listen and we’ll partner.'"

SOLUTIONS TO COMMON SALES PROBLEMS

David O. Sacks, Founder/Partner at Craft Ventures, highlights potential pitfalls in sales team management and offers solutions to mitigate them in “The Dark Side of Sales“

• Poor Customer Handoffs:

  • Problem: "If the salesperson immediately forgets about the customer, the handoff will be poor."

  • Solution: "One way to encourage better collaboration between Sales and CSM is to withhold quota credit for a sale until the customer has been successfully implemented."

• Metrics Creep:

  • Problem: "If the Sales department is responsible for its own metrics, the metrics will inevitably evolve in ways that make it easier for them to hit their numbers."

  • Solution: "Let Finance define and report the metrics, just as it has responsibility for revenue recognition."

• Toxic Sales Culture:

  • Problem: "If your sales leader is myopically focused on hitting the number at any cost, that attitude will pervade the entire Sales department."

  • Solution: "You need their focus to shift toward emphasizing quality control while still hitting the number."

• Sales-only CEOs:

  • Problem: "They will push growth at any cost, and view the time spent on audits, inspections, and legal compliance as slowing down the vital business of the company."

  • Solution: "They must think like a CEO first and a salesperson second... You have to balance the incentives of sales with quality control, honest accounting, and legal compliance."

OPTIMIZING FREE TRIALS IN SAAS

Faith Storey, Growth Marketing Manager at Contrarian Thinking, shares insights for optimizing free trials in SaaS businesses, based on Tomasz Tunguz's extensive research involving 600 companies in “Top 10 Learnings about Free Trials with Tomasz Tunguz”

• Annual Contracts are Standard and Effective:

  • "What does this mean? It means that for most companies, an annual contract tied to a free trial is the best way of going about it.

• Time and Usage Trials Increase Conversion Rates:

  • "Time and usage trials actually convert twice as effectively as features and seats, and this is statistically significant. So if you are structuring a free trial, you really ought to be considering a time bound free trial, or a usage-based free trial, rather than a feature-based free trial, or a seats-based free trial."

• Shorten Trial Length for Better Conversion:

  • "There’s no meaningful difference in conversion rate from a seven day trial to a 14 day trial, to a 21 day trial, to a 30 day trial or longer. [...] Capitalize on that point of maximum intent, and get the salespeople to call as quickly as possible."

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