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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Shai Goldman, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank in NYC, to discuss “Building Communities to Support BD Efforts.” SVB works with the world’s top entrepreneurs, technology companies, and VCs to offer them best-in-class banking services. A large part of their strategy focuses on community building efforts with these different groups, and given that, we couldn’t think of a better person to host on today’s episode to discuss unique ways to build a community to service your customers! In today’s episode, Shai and I discuss the beginnings of SVB in NYC and many of the community initiatives that the bank has run over the years. One of the more eye-opening insights is the fact that despite being a large bank with tons of clients and programs, SVB’s community efforts are still built from the ground up. If you have a good idea, and it’s to the benefit of the end customer, you’re free to be entrepreneurial and run with that as a team. Perhaps this is the reason that we here in NYC have seen everything from surf days with SVB, to workshops for entrepreneurs in their awesome office, to “Tech Gives Back,” a multi-city effort over the course of one day to enable the tech community to volunteer their skills to the benefit of dozens of organizations. What tech companies are doing a great job of building communities, and how do they measure those? Shai and I also discuss that topic. In addition, Shai provided tons of insight on the tech stack he likes to use to build, and keep track of communities and the events his community engages in. Thank you Shai for taking the time to share a bit more of your world, and how you build communities to support BD efforts at SVB! Shai Goldman is the Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank in NYC tasked with engaging the local VC community. He moved to NYC from the Bay Area in 2011 to help build out the SVB office and launch a new group serving early-stage founders. Previously, he was a Venture Partner at 500 Startups, where he conducted investing, fundraising, community building and portfolio management. Shai also serves on the NYC Advisory Board for BUILD.org. He graduated from Santa Clara University. Similar to SVB, Shai has a global background, having been born in Israel and growing up speaking three languages. He is married to a California native and helps raise their two children and two yorkies.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jordan Wan, CEO and Founder at CloserIQ, to discuss "Transitioning To A Repeatable Sales Machine." CloserIQ is a modern recruitment firm that connects top sales talent to the world’s fastest growing companies. Combining industry expertise and innovative technology, they help clients align their sales strategy with talent that produce extraordinary results. CloserIQ is a rare boot strapped business located in NYC and founded by Jordan in 2014. In today's podcast, we begin by hearing a bit more about CloserIQ, and the current sales stage they are in. Jordan further describes where CloserIQ is at in terms of transitioning from founder led sales to a repeatable sales machine. We also dig in on a popular sales term, The Sales Learning Curve, coined by Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway. The Sales Learning Curve defines 3 distinct phases for sales, initiation, transition and execution, and we go through each of them in detail on the podcast. As a startup, it can be hard to know which stage you are in, so Jordan walks us through the distinct characteristics that describe each stage and exactly what that means for your organization. We also spend some time discussing how to prepare for a proper pass off of the sales team, and what should be in place in terms of processes, software, and where you should be at from a product market fit perspective. As Jordan explains, timing is everything when it comes to transitioning from founder led sales to a repeatable sales machine. Jordan shares key insights into where CloserIQ was when he felt comfortable transitioning and even why he retrospectively thinks he could have passed off responsibilities sooner. As part of building up a sales organization, Jordan is passionate about the types of goals you set for your team during the initiation stage. He does not believe that setting OKRs or MBOs right out of the gate is a winning strategy and he goes into exactly why this can be challenging. Jordan believes that a combination of a traditional revenue quota as well as more unique activity-based metrics makes for a more meaningful way to gauge progressions of the sales team. Towards the end of the podcast, Jordan shares his own learnings from scaling CloserIQ and how he ultimately was able to get comfortable transitioning from founder led sales to a repeatable sales machine. Jordan is the founder and CEO of CloserIQ, which he founded in 2014. Coming out of MIT with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Jordan began his career at Bridgewater Associates where he was a Trading Strategist. After over 4 years with Bridegwater, he transitioned away from finance and took a role at ZocDoc running sales strategy and operations. He then spent some time running analytics at PayPerks, and ultimately ended up starting CloserIQ.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jenn Etherton, Head of Sales at Klara, to discuss "Building Success Metrics for Early Sales Teams." Klara offers a secure healthcare communication platform that helps everyone along a patient's journey communicate more efficiently thus improving patient outcomes. Though founded in 2013, Klara already has over an 80% patient adoption rate and over half a million users. Before jumping into the topic, Jenn began with her personal story as an account executive who transitioned into working in sales for early stage companies and from there side-stepped into Klara unexpectedly after meeting the company's founders and connecting with their vision. Because companies that are just getting started don't have a lot of sales data to begin with, setting goals for their reps can be difficult. With that in mind, Klara gave four recommendations that startups should consider as they put in place success metrics for early sales teams: 1.) Start At The Top Of The Funnel. Before you begin measuring sales reps success meaningfully, make sure you're sufficiently focused on sourcing leads. You can set metrics all day long, but if you don't have the leads to begin with, the sales won't be there. 2.) Make Sure The Goals You're Setting Align. Early-stage companies need to make sure their metrics for evaluating sales reps' success align with the company's focus. For early-stage companies, the goals are usually customer acquisition and customer success so goals should be aligned with that. As the company grows and begins segmenting its sales org, make sure the overall goals remain consistent. While SDRs and AEs might have different specific focuses and metrics for evaluating their performance, make sure the sales org as a whole is working together to hit a broader goal - revenue for example. 3.) Build Your Data Quickly. It's never too soon to start collecting data, and while you shouldn't expect industry standards across your metrics immediately, data should be collected and used to determine what the overall sales org should be focused on to improve. Without this data, decisions are based more off instinct, which, though in some cases successful, is usually outperformed by data-driven decision making. 4.) Find Out What Motivates Your Employees. Sales reps can be driven by many different things, and in order to maximize their productivity, it's best to understand what individual contributors are after. Once you know what that is, Jenn explained that setting expectations is key. But, expectations must be very realistic and based on the company's individual goals. Sales reps should understand the growth strategy of the company so that they can see where they can fit in. To best achieve this, Jenn recommends developing a personal development plan with each employee. Jenn concluded by explaining how else these personal development plans can be used. For example, if an employee wants to be a manager, Jenn will often set that employee up first as a mentor to a new hire so that they can get a taste what that position might be like. She firmly believes in this model because it allows employees to hone their leadership skills and, in the event that they might prefer a traditional sales rep role, the model also lets employees self-select out if they realize managing is not what they're interested in. Jenn Atherton currently serves as Head of Sales at Klara and focuses on improving efficiency in healthcare communication. Jenn has a lot of experience working at early-stage companies, and was previously the Head of Sales at Zapper and DipJar and Head of Inside Sales at WayUp. Prior to those roles, she was Strategic Account Executive at Livingsocial and Snagajob. Jenn is uniquely qualified to talk about building success metrics for early sales teams. She graduated Longwood University with a degree in business administration.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jill Rowley, Chief Growth Officer at Marketo, to discuss "The Key Pillars of Social Selling." Marketo offers automation software that helps marketers build brand value, grow revenue, and prove impact. The Adobe company focuses on scalability, reliability, and openness for its CMO users and sells products across a wide range of industries. Jill first discusses how her personal success as a sales professional helped her develop the idea of social selling: using social networks, not media, to do research on buyers, customer lifetime value, and relationships that drive revenue. Over time, through social selling, you transition from finding buyers to being found by buyers. When conducted effectively, social selling directly correlates with pipeline generation. She then establishes the five key pillars of social selling: 1.) Personal Credibility. Look as good online as you do offline. You're one Google search away from being reviewed by your buyers, so your LinkedIn profile should be buyer-centric. Position yourself as someone who is knowledgeable and genuinely passionate about helping customers solve problems. 2.) ABC-ing and Socially Surrounding. Your network is your net worth. Take the people you meet offline and extend digital online connections to create a deeper network. Remember, if you’re sending generic invites on LinkedIn, you’re already one step behind. Personalize your outreach. 3.) Content as Currency. Read and share buyer-centric content across your social network. Read to get smarter about what impacts your buyers, and share to be more visible and valuable to them. 4.) Social Listening. If your buyers are active online, you should know what they’re saying. Enable real-time notifications and track specific tag lines. It'll help you keep up with the people you need to continue to build better relationships with. 5.) Measurement. Measure what matters. Set up systems to track new activity, and establish KPIs and benchmarks that you can track over time. After walking through the pillars, Jill explains the some common issues. Such as, many salespeople have recruiter-centric LinkedIn profiles, not buyer-centric ones. They don't tailor their profiles to buyers, because they simply don't know how. Workshops and LinkedIn profile makeover teams can help remedy this. Another common issue is people skip the reading and share content automatically. Not only is this unproductive for personal learning, but it also results in members of the same company sharing overlapping content. Lastly, Jill think that no genuine leadership commitment is another issue. Many leaders may engage in social selling outwardly, but are not truly invested in the effort. As a result, if a sales team misses expectations, leadership tends to automatically revert back to traditional sales outreach. This reflects a failure to understand the need for patience in network-building. According to Jill, within an organization, sales enablement should should own social selling. When sales enablement is weak or nonexistent, marketing tends to own the effort instead. In this case, however, the focus inevitably becomes social media and reach, not relationships, which are the true core of social selling. Sales enablement, across the board, is still emerging and becoming strategic—companies should focus on tightly aligning enablement with sales strategy and marketing. Jill Rowley currently serves as Chief Growth Officer at both Marketo and Sales for Life, the largest social selling and digital sales training organization in the world. She previously founded her own consulting practice, #SocialSelling, to help sales and marketing organizations evolve their digital transformation. Rowley has a rich history of success driving excellence at enterprise SaaS companies, having spent time at Oracle building a world-class training curriculum for the company's global salesforce. She joined Oracle through its acquisition of Eloqua, where she helped companies modernize their marketing for more than 10 years. Prior to Eloqua, Rowley worked at Salesforce.com. She has also held notable advisory positions at TrackMaven, HubSpot, and Affinio, among others.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Grant Halloran, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at OmniSci (formerly Map D), to discuss "Elements of Successful Product Marketing." OmniSci offers an advanced data analytics platform by combining the capabilities of software with GPU hardware. By bridging the gap between CPU and GPU computations, the platform allows users to utilize and interact with big data analytics on an accelerated scale. On this week's podcast, Grant Halloran first discusses the importance of an effective customer acquisition strategy. According to Grant, sales teams should really know the customers they want to sell to and why the product matters to buyers. Moreover, Halloran says that momentum matters. Once a strong momentum is established, product marketers should double-down on their efforts. Next, Grant talks about transitioning from Anaplan to OmniSci and notes changes in his marketing strategy. He mentions that OmniSci's close relationship with developers helped form a more competitive and technical marketing angle. Grant also offers his insights on what the biggest change in product marketing has been. Before, product marketing was very technical. Now, it's become much more business oriented. Additionally, there's a greater emphasis on bringing in marketers with deep domain expertise. Finally, data now plays an important role in marketing. Sales teams can implement customer data platforms in their strategies, allowing them to understand behavioural signals and act on those insights. After speaking about these changes, Grant explains some common pitfalls in marketing execution: 1. Poor integration of marketing strategies. Product marketers need to be 100% integrated within the company. Specifically, sales teams should understand the value proposition of the company and its core material. It's important for companies to design training programs that enable marketers to credibly and confidently talk about their products. 2. Not taking enough initiative. Sales teams need to see themselves as more than content teams. There needs to be more emphasis on marketing as a driving factor, not a reactionary one. This includes having the initiative to step into leadership roles and thinking strategically about what the team needs to nail down on. 3. Staying in the office. Field oriented marketers are often the most successful salespeople. Simply put, marketers shouldn't be sitting in the office all the time. They should also be spending time out and about with customers, adding value and learning from that process. In regards to a team's marketing methodology, everyone should be on the same page. Sales teams should be willing to experiment with different approaches to figure out what works and what could be better. Finally, creating good content and developing a presence on social media is crucial to a campaign. Towards the end of this week's episode, Grant discusses some misconceptions about B2B SaaS marketing and offers some final thoughts for listeners. He concludes with a last piece of advice for marketing teams: think carefully about which audiences you need to reach. Then, try to balance your team between business and technical salespeople accordingly. Grant Halloran currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President at OmniSci. In addition to his role at OmniSci, Halloran has an impressive history of leadership at other successful SaaS companies. He was previously Chief Marketing Officer at Anaplan, an advanced platform for enterprise planning, and served as Global VP & GM at Infor, the world's largest private B2B software company. He also co-founded and built three companies: ProductBank, Brand Manager, and Orbis. Notably, ProductBank was recognized as an award-winning SaaS business in the advertising industry. When Orbis was acquired by Infor in 2012, Halloran led its integration process and continued to build the company's growth.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Alex Hesterberg, SVP and Chief Customer Officer of Turbonomic, to discuss “Scaling Your Customer Success Organization Through Hyper Growth.” Turbonomic is a software company that delivers workload automation for hybrid cloud environments. The software understands the demands of application workloads and provides necessary resources in response, improving infrastructure supply efficiency. Alex first defines scaling through hyper growth as a transition from startup to “scale-up” mode, typically at the $100MM threshold. The company in question possesses a set of ride-or-die customers, has experienced a taste of its total addressable market, and now needs to tackle consistency in scaling. Management must address functional reorganization: individuals who were previously wearing seven different hats must specialize and wear one each. Alex then dives into the four key "interlocks" of scaling: 1.) Sellability - Empowering your field to sell through structured operational support (e.g. tools, demo labs), 2.) Deliverability - Ensuring that the field delivery team can deliver success based on customer expectations, 3.) Consumability - Bringing consumers into the development of the product itself and receiving real-time feedback (e.g customer advisory boards, beta programs, 4.) Supportability - Supporting customers in an ongoing way (e.g. recommending version updates). In terms of where to begin, a company must first focus on defining its customer journey. The company should examine its initial customer base and analyze why certain customers onboarded properly and why others didn't. Iterating this analysis allows the company to directionally align itself along four axes: onboarding, advisory, expansion, and renewal. Once aligned, the company can enforce the interlocks and determine how to divide internal responsibilities across the interlocks. For most hyper-growth companies, Alex explains, sellability is key. It's crucial to get your product off the ground and sell it to a greater audience. For companies with an unchanging product and market, the focus is instead on expansion and renewals. The most successful hyper growth companies actually combine the two—sellability and renewals.Alex also notes that many startups tend to forget consumability. Most become too comfortable with catering to their initial customer base and neglect to integrate a customer feedback loop. Companies consequently miss out on market developments and face the risks of competitive displacement and scale-up failure. Alex Hesterberg is Turbonomic's first Chief Customer Officer. He drives the company’s customer-centric business approach to help customers accelerate and activate their hybrid cloud journey, and is responsible for establishing, scaling and executing a holistic strategy for all customer-facing initiatives, programs and activities. Alex is a 20-year tech industry veteran with a track record of delivering end-to-end measurable customer impact, and building customer-centric services and solutions at hyper-growth companies.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Alex Boyd, Founder & CEO of RevenueZen, to discuss tips for figuring out early-stage go to market pricing by way of utilizing your first point of contact with customers: your early sales team! RevenueZen provides companies with on-demand access to the sales and marketing strategies, tools, and teams they need, when they need it. Leveraging data-driven strategies, tools, and processes, RevenueZen’s team of growth leaders, marketing strategists, and sales reps jump-starts a path to scalable growth. Over the past two years, they’ve helped dozens of companies build, optimize, and execute successful growth strategies, augmenting their team by providing critical leadership expertise and experienced frontline reps. RevenueZen’s customers include the likes of Adlink, Andela, Flexreceipts, Silversheet and more. In today’s episode, we discuss with Alex all the ways in which the first sellers on your frontline can help you figure out how to price your product. Alex gives us tips and ideas ranging from how to talk to your CEO as an early seller subjectively, to how to run surveys, measure, and speak with data-in-hand as to how your buyers are feeling about your pricing. We also discuss the role of discounting (a taboo word to some!) and how that can be a useful tool to help sort out pricing points, figure out the true ROI of your product, and uncover how buyers set their budgets. Finally, we chat on early mistakes we all make when pricing and how to avoid those. Alex is the Founder & CEO at RevenueZen where he works with growing companies to help them scale their content marketing, sales development, and lead generation. Prior to RevenueZen, Alex was the Director of Sales at InDinero and has roots in finance and asset management. Alex was born and raised in San Francisco but currently hails from Portland, Oregon. RevenueZen works with startups all over the country, so feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in striking up a conversation with him!
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Julie Devine, Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Strategic Partnerships at Maxwell Health, to discuss “Acquisition Messaging: Before, During and After.” Maxwell Health is a platform that helps people make better health-related financial decisions by simplifying benefits and insurance. It operates as an online benefits marketplace to help consultants and small-to-mid sized businesses offer the best benefits to employees. Through its user-friendly platform, Maxwell streamlines administrative processes in HR and allows employees to easily choose and access their benefits. It was recently acquired by Sun Life Financial in June 2018. In today’s podcast, Julie discusses the effects of an acquisition on a company and how leadership can best communicate internally and externally throughout the stages of the deal. According to Julie, the timing and announcement of an acquisition depends on the dynamics of a company’s leadership and the deal itself. For example, if a company’s board of directors collectively decided on a strategic opportunity and is choosing to approach a buyer, the process would be more open. However, Julie cautions that the group involved in a deal’s execution be kept as small as possible. This not only allows key management to efficiently strategize but also controls for the risk of a premature leak to customers and media. When deciding on who gets looped in on the deal, executive leadership must be extremely confident that the acquisition is happening. Additionally, the timing behind an announcement to customers and employees is crucial. A company should avoid sharing too much information too soon--on the other hand, it also doesn’t want to communicate too little information at too late a time. Most of all, a business must be authentic and specific in its acquisition messaging. Leadership should be prepared to elaborate on why the merger is a good idea and why it was motivated. Additionally, a lot of preparation should go behind the announcement itself to ensure that messaging is cohesive, confident, and well-timed. According to Julie, some of the best ways to prepare for an acquisition is understanding the intensity of the deal, preparing in advance, and staying ahead of the game. Julie Devine is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Strategic Partnerships at Maxwell Health. Having joined in 2014, she has led the development of customer service, growth, and success at Maxwell. Her role touches on everything from account management to technical support teams and business development. Julie previously worked for eight years at Highroads, a SaaS startup offering health plan product management services to large businesses. Prior to that, she was a human resources consultant at Mercer. Julie holds a B.A. from James Madison University.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Jules Gsell, Director of Sales, and Heather Akuiyibo, VP of Sales, at Databricks to discuss “Building An Inclusive Sales Culture.” Databricks is a platform that streamlines data science and engineering for businesses. It provides a unified analytics platform, creating efficient workflows that make building and managing data products easier. Databricks has raised over $247MM from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures. In today’s podcast, Jules and Heather discuss the importance of forming team values, hiring diverse talent, and cultivating a culture of collaboration. According to them, building an inclusive sales culture starts with hiring. Before onboarding a potential candidate, it’s important for the team to communicate what its concept of inclusivity is and what skills, personality set, and values it’s looking for in a teammate. To help evaluate a candidate’s fit, it’s also good practice for the hiring committee to frequently interact with candidates in a non-interview setting. Jules and Heather also speak about conducting outbound prospecting to look for diverse candidates that can contribute valuable skills and perspectives to the team. Heather and Jules also point out that maintaining an inclusive team culture is just as critical as building it. According to Jules, a key factor behind a great team is fostering communication and collaboration between coworkers. This includes building bridges between different functions of a sales team and allowing SDRs and AEs to commingle on a daily basis. When encountering a situation that is toxic to the team’s culture, Heather and Jules stress that clear, direct, and timely communication is important to mitigating the issue. They also emphasize that it’s important for leaders to reach out to remote workers and spend time with their team. Overall, Heather and Jules believe an inclusive and positive team culture depends on a considerate hiring process, strong communication and collaboration, and a clear set of team values and expectations. Jules Gsell joined the Databricks team after working at box for eight years. At box, Jules served as Director of Enterprise Sales after being hired as its first SDR. There, she was responsible for building the company’s qualification and distribution process. Prior to that, she was an Account Executive for The Mercury News. Jules graduated with a B.A. in Applied Science from California Polytechnic State University in 2007. Heather Akuiyibo joined Databricks after serving as Director of Corporate Sales at Zendesk for five years. Prior to Zendesk, she was a Director at Bloomspot. Heather also worked for Google as a manager for online sales and operations, executing both ad sales and high-tech sales. She graduated with a degree in Urban Studies and Psychology from Stanford University in 1999.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Dharmesh Singh, co-founder and CEO of Fullcast.io, to discuss “Sales Ops Strategies for Growing Startups.” Fullcast.io is a software company that provides sales-ops-as-a-service to transform sales operations to growth operations. By automating sales ops functions that are replicable across companies, Fullcast.io enables sales ops people to devote their attention to more productive, big-picture strategies, as opposed to the micromanagement of day-to-day sales motion. To explain the foundation of sales ops strategies, Dharmesh hones in on the concept of sales planning. It’s essential to free a company’s sales ops person from tedious, replicable functions, like cleaning data and building reports, so that they focus on the company’s go-to-market plan. This plan must begin with a concrete company goal in mind, whether it’s revenue, profitability, or predictability. Once this goal is set, the sales ops team can think about the appropriate customer base, necessary investments, measures of progress, and so on and so forth: the team can fully operationalize its plan. Dharmesh describes sales ops as a “dynamic beast” and explains that issues arise when teams attempt static solutions to a dynamic problem. A bottom-up approach to sales ops inevitably results in infinite tasks and little productivity, as the team gets bogged down in the details. For instance, sales ops people often buy one-off management tools, building a “tech deck” that results in inconsistent, unreliable data usage and entry across the board. Team members also tend to be disconnected from one another, as they use disparate tools of communication like email or Slack. Taking a growth ops lens and using a platform like Fullcast.io, Dharmesh explains, allows teams to democratize data, automate the trivial processes, and elevate the discussion to the greater picture of the firm. Dharmesh finally divides sales ops into three distinct buckets and stresses the importance of treating each bucket differently. These buckets are 1. deciding the go-to-market design, 2. managing day-to-day sales motion, and 3. sales enablement (e.g. playbooks, bootcamps). Much of the design and motion processes can be fully automated, but sales ops people tend to get sucked into the technicalities of motion, in particular. According to Dharmesh, proper automation through tools like Fullcast.io allows sales ops people to devote more attention and resources to enablement, which will truly help a company produce more bang for its buck. Dharmesh Singh serves as CEO and is a co-founder of Fullcast.io. He brings over 25 years of experience in sales, operations and engineering, building and selling enterprise solutions. His background includes managing operations teams at both Salesforce and Microsoft where he developed his passion for molding ideas into action.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Somrat Niyogi, VP of Business Development at Clari, to discuss “How AI Impacts Sales.” Clari is an AI platform that equips sales teams with analytics, allowing them to focus on the right deals and optimize management of their pipelines. The Bay Area startup has been a pioneer in the sales enablement space, having raised over $60M from investors such as Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital Ventures. AI has transformed all parts of the enterprise, but has arguably had one of the greatest impacts on the sales function in particular. AI impacts sales as it is being used to 1) help sales teams work smarter and better by leveraging data that already exists; 2) enable automation of tasks and achieve scale; 3) drive data-driven decision making to augment intuition. The best companies in this space are the ones going beyond the technology to understand the core of the issue. Given this, the products that are focused on critical issues rather than targeting use cases that are too limited will be the most successful over time. Among these solutions, the products that have been welcomed widely by sales teams are the ones automating tedious, administrative or low value-add tasks that sales people don’t really want to do – finding emails, following up over email, logging interactions, etc – or the ones that complement a seller’s skills and enhance his/her ability to close deals. Ultimately, this is how most sales teams will be performing in the future – alongside AI technology. Hence, good sales leaders should have a deep understanding and futuristic vision of how they want their teams to operate, maximizing the revenue driving time they spend with customers versus on tedious tasks. Despite its strengths, AI technology also lags in certain aspects. In times of transition, such software may not have sufficient data to make accurate forecasts or recommendations. In addition, its effectiveness rests upon its human counterpart and how the seller interprets or uses AI-enabled suggestions. Here, companies and sellers alike need to be aware of various ethical issues that exist around using AI to sell into customer sets. Somrat Niyogi is the VP of Business Development at Clari, transforming the way sales teams work. Prior to this, he founded Stitch, a mobile-first sales productivity platform, which was acquired by SugarCRM in 2015, as well as Miso, a pioneer in the social television space, which was acquired by Dijit Media in 2013. He started his career in various data and technology roles at Salesforce, BMC and Merrill Lynch. Somrat received a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Blake Guerrero, VP of East Sales at Pendo, to discuss tips for “Communicating With Product Teams As An Early Seller." Pendo is a product experience platform that helps software product teams build software users love. By combining product analytics with qualitative feedback, Pendo helps product teams make informed decisions about what they are building and for who, and then provides contextual guidance, help, and communication so their users get the most value. Pendo’s customers include Yext, OpenTable, Emma, Zendesk, MetLife, and more. In today’s episode, Blake and I discuss the ins and outs of what it means to be one of the first sellers in your organization. How does a seller communicate back to his or her product team what he or she is seeing the market? We cover that and more. Blake was the second seller at Mixpanel and is a current sales leader at Pendo, both of which sell their software products into engineers and product managers at some of today’s leading software companies, so he’s well-versed in this conversation. In addition to internal conversations with your own product team, Blake and I also chat on what it means to be a seller whose main buyer is on a product team within a target customer profile. Blake answers questions around how to prioritize customer feedback, how product teams view the ROI of the products they’re buying into, and more. Blake Guerrero is the VP of East Sales at Pendo. Prior to Pendo, Blake was a sales leader at Mixpanel and cut his teeth at Salesforce too. A California native now living in NYC, Blake’s sales career has spanned both tech companies big and small, and he actually started off as an engineer before heading deeper into the world of sales.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Scott Rotermund, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Welltok, to discuss “How Early Customers Shape GTM Strategy.” Welltok provides a range of data-driven consumer health solutions. Their award-winning health optimization platform empowers population health managers to connect consumers with personalized health improvement resources and make it easy and rewarding for consumers to complete actions that optimize their health. Scott begins by explaining how early customers impact future strategy immensely. The period in which companies attract their first customers is a crucial learning stage, defining the course for future growth. He explains how relationship building with early customers is not just helpful for reducing churn, it also gives founders a fantastic opportunity to receive live feedback on product tweaks and changes. Further, experiences with your first few customers can inform not just your product strategy but also your sales and GTM strategy. However, this cannot be accomplished without a solid plan in place. Managers need to instruct sales reps and account executives on what kind of questions they should ask clients and how to collect those answers into an organized and shareable space that managers can easily access. Naturally, the development team needs to be looped in as well. It may even be helpful for folks on the strategy side to set up meetings with their clients and dev team members. Early customers should be appreciated as a massive resource, contributing to the development of product and GTM strategy. Scott is a Co-Founder of Welltok, and currently the Chief Growth Officer, driving new strategic partnerships and forging collaborations with the most innovative population health organizations. He brings more than 25 years of deep healthcare knowledge to Welltok with a focus on health plans. Prior to co-founding Welltok, Scott was a co-owner and led all sales for PSI, a healthcare services company acquired by Metavante Corporation in 2003. Following the acquisition, Scott served as Vice President of Sales for the Metavante Healthcare Solutions Group. Scott holds a bachelor of science degree from the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Matt Gahr, Chief Sales Officer at Chrome River, to discuss “Tips to Build a 30-60-90 Day Plan for Sales Leaders.” Chrome River is a global leader in enterprise expense reporting and invoice management solutions, based out of California. The company prides itself in extremely high customer retention and satisfaction. According to Matt, the first 30-60-90 day plan is more situationally oriented than formulaic, but this also depends on the company and objectives. While there may be some parameters around what the 30-60-90 day framework should look like, it’s highly contingent around the core task and goals of the sales leader. Matt himself firmly believes in setting the tone of the relationship from the start as that influences how that relationship evolves. First and foremost, it’s important to have clarity around objectives and tactics within the sales team. Once that has been established, it’s essential to do the same with your counterparts in other functions so you may jointly problem solve any obstacles in your way by leveraging a shared expertise, all while building relationships within the firm to drive sales forward. Finally, similar conversations must be conducted with customers to better understand their need and their feedback to your product. To lay the same out more tactically: in the first 30 days, sales leaders should have in-person conversations with sales managers within their organization to establish an open, trusting relationship as well as an understanding on motivations and objectives; in the first 60 days, they should conduct further conversations with the rest of the sales team; lastly over the 90 day range, they need to extend these interactions to customers for better understanding the value your product brings them and what defines success for them. At the end of this time period, a sales leader should become informed on his organization, product and market. Having done this a few times, a common malpractice Matt has recognized among new sales leaders is to come into a new organization and try to prove their value from day one, having a “ready-fire-aim” mentality. Instead, as mentioned previously, it’s essential to run diagnostics and better assess the team, firm, market and customer as well as understand the context and process through which each current practice was established, then move forward. Matt Gahr is the Chief Sales Officer at Chrome River. Prior to this, he was the Vice President of Sales for Americas at Cornerstone OnDemand where he helped grow the business from $25 million to over $500 million. Prior to joining Cornerstone, Matt was a sales leader at TriNet and Randstad. In the early part of his career, he also served as co-founder and VP of Sales for GetListed, a recruiting marketplace startup. Matt received his BS in Business Administration and International Affairs from University of New Hampshire and an MBA from University of California, San Diego.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Dave Govan, VP of Sales at Hitachi Vantara, to discuss "Team Selling Into The Enterprise." Hitachi Vantara is a Japanese conglomerate, providing an unprecedented range of solutions within data management to enterprises of all sizes. The company has been at the forefront of innovation within this space, leveraging decades of experience to enable their clients in tapping into the full potential of their data. Sales representatives often attempt to sell into large enterprises by themselves without much aid from other individuals in their sales organization or even other functions. Many times, they even keep such accounts secret until they think they can win the deal. Typically the gap exists due to cultural or educational issues within the salesforce where historically the sales team has not performed collectively. Ultimately this jeopardizes the company’s ability to manage such complex sales processes and secure these large enterprise accounts. This is where team selling into the enterprise comes in. Team selling is the practice of identifying the various stakeholders involved on the buyer’s side, better understanding what or who from the selling organization may be able to influence them in the right way, then involving those individuals from your own team within the sales process. For example, in certain instances, a head of product, engineering lead, or even CEO or a board member may be best suited to speak to their respective counterparts on the customer side, given their insightful perspective of the role and any considerations that come with it. Not only does this allow these team members to specify value adds of the product that sales representatives may not be able to otherwise articulate, but also this enables the selling team to show the importance it will give the account by involving key management from day one. Team selling into the enterprise is critical and most beneficial in cases where the total contract value is large and the sale is complex, comprising of multiple stakeholders and decision makers. Dave Govan is the VP of Sales at Hitachi Vantara. Prior to this role, he held a number of leadership positions within the sales functions of businesses, including Oracle, Sailthru and Dynamic Yield. Dave has also advised a number of startups in various capacities. In addition, he also published the book Crisis in the Enterprise. Dave graduated from Rider University with a Bachelor of Science in Commerce.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Stephen D’Angelo, President of Worldwide Field Operations at Aviso, to discuss “Data and AI In Sales.” Aviso is the only AI-driven platform on the market purpose-built to drive accurate sales forecasting and improve pipeline management. With Aviso Sales Vision, sales executives and CFOs deliver accurate forecasts, sales managers move deals through the pipeline faster, and reps close more deals with AI-driven smart selling signals. When we think about sales, we typically focus on the 3 main stages of a deal: top of the funnel, deal execution and closing. Stephen walks us through the ways that AI is now enabling sales teams to increase top of the funnel in a quality way by utilizing lead scoring. He then explains how high preforming teams are now applying AI and data to deals as they enter the pipeline, and are steering away from the more traditional “gut instinct” or reliance on a seller’s talent. He emphasizes the importance of deal scoring and activity scoring and explains his focus on the “moveable middle” when evaluating a pipeline. We discuss the importance of measuring all parts of the sales funnel, the most important metrics to track in the early days (especially the time it takes for deals to move from stage to stage), what AI is and what it is not, and how large sales teams should be before a company invests in tools like Aviso. We end the conversation by Stephen reiterating the importance of driving analytics in your business from the very beginning. Stephen has been in the software industry for three decades and has worked with many talented professionals around the world. His passion is building high performance global organizations focusing on blending the goals/objectives of the company with that of the individual. He is passionate about implementing world class practices to best serve clients as well as to help employees reach their maximum potential. AI, Machine Learning and Big Data are transforming many industries and he is excited to be part of that transformation.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Bart Lorang, CEO of FullContact, to discuss "New Channels For Lead Engagement & Intel." FullContact is a Denver, Colorado based contact management company focused on making relationships better through prospect/audience insights. The company is hellbent on delivering an effective product built on trust, empathy and understanding, both for and by the consumer. In today's day-and-age, the increasing prevalence of a multi-channel distribution strategy has made personalization and engagement all the more difficult. There are a multitude of avenues through which businesses can reach both prospects and existing contacts. With so many solutions, where does sustained value fit in? Bart says it starts with an understanding of people and a conscious betterment of relationships. He claims that today, sellers might often lack a true comprehension for the value exchange necessary in each interaction. In other words, they must be two-sided to succeed. As discussed early on, many of today's issues around consent are being solved through regulatory action (i.e. GDPR). In Bart's opinion, regulatory intervention can get the ball rolling, but ultimately market solutions will be most beneficial. As we moved on to the topic of using data to make more effective outreach decisions, Bart introduced an important strategy, the "3 P's", when thinking about building or maintaining a relationship. Personalization through data on one's personal interests, professional challenges, and passion pursuits can assist sellers in increasing lead engagement. In Bart's words, "Slowing down a little bit, to speed up, increases conversion rates dramatically." In touching on the importance of having a multi-channel presence, we discussed the rejuvenation of postal as it relates to personalization. Anecdotally, Bart brought up an Alumni Campaign through FullContact, in which knowledge on where someone attended college can be used to physically mail collateral, leading to increased engagement. Apparently, going the extra mile really does lead to better results. In our last chapter of the discussion, Bart touched on how social selling can be best utilized in today's market. In his opinion, sales representatives as thought leaders of content in their space ensures better outreach engagement. As opposed to pushing your product, you're educating. As part of our closing thoughts, Bart had one final message: "there's no shortcut to this, the more you can personalize and be thoughtful, and then consistently execute that thoughtfulness, the more successful you'll be." Bart Lorang is the CEO and Co-Founder of FullContact, helping businesses management both prospect and contact relationships more effectively. Prior to FullContact, Lorang worked at Dimension Technology Solutions as CTO, President, and Owner, as well as at v1.vc as a Co-Founder and Managing Director. Zach graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a degree in Computer Science.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Nicolle Paradise, Senior Director of Client Experience at ADP and a renowned keynote speaker, to discuss “Client Journey Mapping.” Nicolle is a senior leader in the customer success industry, more specifically focused on client experience. She is a well known author and speaker in this space and gave the listeners a great point of view on client journey mapping. Readers of this blog know how important customer success is and how we view it in the context of building a great early stage company. Client journey mapping is not something that is super obvious to most of our listeners. Therefore, we dove right into it on the podcast. We set the framework and define what client journey mapping means. We discussed how to actually execute it at your company. Timing is important for client journey mapping, so we examined when exactly a founder should think about doing this. We covered value levers and details on the people that tend to own this exercise for your organization. Finally, we talked through some businesses that do client journey mapping well and those that do not. Nicolle Paradise is Senior Director of Client Experience at ADP. She has been architecting, measuring, scaling, and leading client-centric organizations for 15+ years that deliver value for clients, profitability for shareholders, and inspire associates. Prior to ADP, she was Head of Customer Success for a Silicon Valley FinTech SaaS company that helped retail banks optimize pricing for both deposits and lending. Nicolle resides in San Francisco, California with her husband. She is an accomplished keynote speaker, Head of CX for TEDx San Francisco, and has had the good fortune to travel to all 7 continents. Her Bachelor's Degree is in Business Management and additional information can be found at nicolleparadise.com.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Patrick Campbell, CEO and Founder of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently), to discuss “Building Your First Pricing Model.” Price Intelligently helps growing SaaS companies to optimize their pricing, and ultimately unlock 30%+ growth as a result of doing so. Price Intelligently is operated under ProfitWell, which helps you keep all of your subscription and financial metrics in one place. Patrick and his team have helped some of the most successful SaaS companies in the world to optimize their pricing. Their customers include Atlassian, Hubspot, New Relic, Pipedrive, and more. As an industry-leading expert on pricing, Patrick shares expert advice with us, which growing SaaS companies can use instantly to generate more revenue! In today’s episode, Patrick and I discuss everything from the “pricing” models of our own personal early childhood businesses of trading animal crackers and building tree forts, to how today’s best SaaS companies can utilize value-metric-based pricing to grow their businesses 50% more than they otherwise would. What a journey! Patrick explains that "your price is the exchange rate on the value you’re providing," and therefore it’s important to think critically about what your points of value are, and how you package that in a simplistic, but meaningful way for your customers. We also discuss examples of best-in-class companies and their pricing to examine the tactical things that they’ve done well to scale their pricing many years into their respective businesses. Patrick Campbell is the CEO of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently), the software for helping subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies. ProfitWell also provides free turnkey subscription financial metrics for over eight thousand companies. Prior to ProfitWell, Patrick lead Strategic Initiatives for Boston based Gemvara and was an Economist at Google and the US Intelligence community.
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This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Cory Treffiletti, Chief Marketing Officer of Voicera, to discuss "Partner Marketing Strategies at the Early Stage." Voicera is the platform behind Eva, an AI-powered Enterprise Voice Assistant. In today's episode, Cory and I discuss how startup leaders can leverage partners--customers, complementary startups, and even investors—to jumpstart marketing efforts in a cost-effective way. In today's podcast, we'll walk through Cory’s approach to a successful early-stage partner marketing effort. We begin where most startup leaders would: how do you go about identifying who potential partners even are? You’ll learn how to leverage not only traditional channel partners, but also customers, technology partners, vendors, and even investors. Next, we address the three key partner marketing disciplines, as Cory sees them: Sales Enablement, Content Development, and Co-Marketing. By the end of the episode, you should walk away with a good understanding of how you can use partners to develop a high return on marketing investment even at the early stages, when marketing budgets are scant. Especially for Seed enterprise startups, today’s podcast is a must-listen. Cory Treffiletti is the CMO of Voicera. Voicera is a strong addition to the emerging class of human-machine collaboration platforms seeking to usher in a new era of enterprise productivity. Eva—the company’s AI voice assistant—takes notes and identifies action items & decisions in meetings automatically, enabling teams to focus on collaboration and problem solving rather administrative work. Founded in 2016 and based in Menlo Park, the company has raised $20MM in total, closing its Series A financing about a month ago (March 2018). The company was previously known as Workfit. Previously, Cory served as CMO for the Oracle Data Cloud, the latest role in a nearly 4-year leadership stint at Oracle. Prior to that, he was SVP of Marketing at BlueKai, a role he assumed after nearly 20 years in various roles at startups and agencies in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Cory is a Board Member of the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), and previously served on the Board of the Ad Council and Advertising Research Foundation.
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