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âDo we need top down sales at all?â And the answer is yes! [...] As the company starts to scale, relying purely on self-serve often results in an asymptotic flattening of the growth curve, resulting in linear or worse, declining growth. [...] And when top down sales acceleration is combined with bottom-up driven momentum, âitâs worth all the moneyâ,
While it is possible to layer in top down sales too early, putting it off can be even more detrimental to the business. One sales executive said, âIf we had operationalized the sales funnel earlier, we would be a billion dollar company already.â
Sales leaders agreed, however, on two conditions that every company should meet before layering in top down sales:Â
1) The bottom up flywheel is working: While the exact threshold will vary by company, there is a surprising amount of convergence that achieving between $20M to $30M ARR in bottom up-driven sales is a strong leading signal. [...] When paired with the right penetration heuristic, the bottom up motion serves as an important pipeline generator for the most successful top down sales.
2) The business (not the user) is demanding more: When weighing whether to add certain enterprise features, itâs critical to remember that individuals donât buy enterprise features, businesses buy them. [...] Building features for the business buyer, instead of just the individual, can be a big mindset and cultural shift for product-led companies. In the early days of Github, the strong market demand for enterprise features initially clashed with a developer-first product and engineering organization, leading to lost deals.
Four attributes rose to the top: 1) Collaborative decision-maker, 2) Analytical and technical orientation, 3) Long term relationship builder, and 4) Enterprise sales experience.
âStripe was uncompromising in hiring sales leaders with both strategic and analytical thinking.â
Comment faire travailler les sales avec le produit ?
How to explain to the product team: âThis is the feature I keep getting requests for. I know itâs not on the near term roadmap, but if you build it, I think it opens up an opportunity of $X size in the next six months because we have seen good product market fit.âÂ
Mutual trust is further enforced when the sales teams follow through on winning those deals. Sales leaders also noted that inviting the product team to join enterprise customer calls to hear new use cases and customer rationale firsthand helps illustrate the importance of a particular feature and leads to collaboration on the final decision.
Over time, companies might also consider creating a separate enterprise product team to resolve sales-product team clashes and facilitate stronger alignment, a technique that was used effectively at Slack.
Thereâs an amount of culture clash that is inevitable as a new sales motion is introduced into a high-functioning product-led organization. However, founders that support, rather than resist, these changes while respecting the product roots of the company are most likely to set their sales team and companies up for success.
The vast majority of the sales leaders we spoke with unequivocally recommend approaching sales compensation with a traditional 50/50 split (50% base pay, 50% commission).Â
While great entrepreneurs love to innovate, he warns that âbefore you innovate on sales compensation, make sure you understand the strengths of the old system.â
The typical quota will equal 10x base salary. I call this the Rule of 10. [in a world where 50/50 split between base and variable compensation is typical]
Lâonboarding et le training :Â
Les programmes de âtrainingâ de sales sont primordiaux, et trĂšs complexes Ă mettre en place.Â
For new AEs, the industry-standard time to hit productivity is 4 months, but this can be longer or shorter depending on how long it takes to learn the product and develop a pipeline.
The average team attains about 70% of their QC, so some over-capacity is needed to hit your goal. [âQuota Capacityâ (QC) refers to the total team quota. For example, if you have 10 AEs with quotas of $500k each, the teamâs quota capacity will be $5 million.]
If the team is hitting over 80% of QC, thatâs a sign you can hire more AEs. In fact, anything above 70% could warrant additional hiring as long as you have enough leads being generated at the top of funnel.
If an AE is unable to generate at least $400k/year in New ARR (implying $80k-100k OTEs), a sales-driven distribution strategy may not pencil.
Since OTE is 20% of sales, the fully-loaded cost of an AE will represent about a 25% cost of sales. Sales overhead (management, operations, sales development) will typically cost another 15-25% of sales. That means you can spend about 50% of New ARR on Marketing CAC (lead gen) and still keep your payback under 12 months. Of course, these are just rules of thumb â be sure to check the actual numbers.
Nearly all sales leaders we spoke with wished they had focused on retention sooner. Instead of treating customer success as an afterthought, the function should be built up alongside the sales effort
That said, many agreed that the traditional customer success model of handing over the customer account immediately after landing the deal doesnât work in a bottom up-driven organization, where net expansion is a critical driver of growth. Â
đLe CEO dâOkta partage des tips sur son IPO (twitter), quelques morceaux choisis :
Concerns pre-IPO:Â
Being public would make it harder to invest in the long term.
Weâd be constrained, no longer agile & aggressive.
Employees would watch the stock price & lose focus.
Less intensity after âreaching the goalâ (which is why you have to move the goalpost).
Benefits of being public:
Helped us tell our story (biz press interested in @okta in a way they never were before).
Gave us stability & âvalidityâ (which customers appreciated).
Gave us access to capital markets (raised $2B in 2 quick fundraisers).
Other takeaways from going public:
Itâs not the fastest path to liquidity. After the IPO, there's a 6-month lockup, then your stock sales are public/scrutinized by investors. M&A = quicker, but wasn't for us.
Limits what we could share internally. Transparency gets harder.
Netflix est un excellent exemple sur comment maintenir la transparence interne mĂȘme si câest trĂšs dur de maniĂšre externe.
Can't forget the roadshow. In venture rounds, you might meet with 2 or 3 $1B funds. Pre-IPO, it was 8 meetings a day with $5-20B funds.Â
Cela a lâair dâĂȘtre un vrai marathon.
Got the crash course in IR: it's all about being consistent with your message & setting reasonable expectations, then exceeding them. This is the foundation of a stable predictable business.
The dumb idea paradox is what happens when an idea sounds dumb, and yet you have a (usually very small) group of people highly engaged in doing it. And maybe that group of people seems to be getting bigger and bigger.
URL2Video, a research prototype pipeline to automatically convert a web page into a short video, given temporal and visual constraints provided by the content owner. URL2Video extracts assets (text, images, or videos) and their design styles (including fonts, colors, graphical layouts, and hierarchy) from HTML sources and organizes the visual assets into a sequence of shots, while maintaining a look-and-feel similar to the source page.
Thatâs when the company introduced a feature that automatically adds animated text captions to selfie videos taken inside the app.
One reason why Threads took off on TikTok is that the selfie messages bleep out many curse words, replacing them with #$%^&-style gobbledygook. It turns out that, if you are a teen, itâs very funny to see your mild curses imperfectly bleeped out by an algorithm.
The Federal Trade Commission voted to sue Facebook for illegally maintaining a monopoly in social networking, arguing it has used acquisitions and harsh restrictions on third-party developers to prevent competitors from ever gaining a foothold.
If successful it could force the company to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp.Â
The agency reproches to Facebook to have nipped the competition in the bud as well as the potential benefit for the consumers.
If they own the data (via their hardware), analytics (via their cloud software), and distribution (via their consumer platforms), insurers are at risk of being commoditized or disintermediated.
Amazon is working with Cigna to provide convenient healthcare access through its Alexa smart home devices. It also teamed up with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts to integrate its PillPack offering into the insurer's member app.
Amazon already provides telemedicine, medication delivery and app-enabled house calls for its own employees. On top of this, in April 2020, Amazon sent a survey to its e-commerce sellers, of which there are 900,000 in the U.S. alone, asking about their current health insurance needs and pain points, according to CB Insights.Â
Apple smartwatch now measures the oxygen saturation of users' blood so they can better understand their overall fitness and wellness. [...] The company is a flagship partner in John Hancockâs Vitality program and UnitedHealthcare's health plans.
In August, Google announced it was forming a subsidiary health insurance company called Coefficient Insurance. In partnership with Swiss Re, Verily plans to provide stop-loss insurance by leveraging its expertise in hardware, software and data science to offer a new data-driven solution for employers.
There is the potential for these companies to take more ambitious steps, such as becoming a licensed insurance broker. Amazon has already done this in India with Acko, the report said.
But the historical returns of the insurance industry are lower than the technology markets these companies primarily target, which makes it unlikely for tech giants to become direct competitors to insurance incumbents.
