This is a common story. A company builds a great product, but then struggles with building and scaling a sales organization to get that product into the market. This session focused on the three pillars of building and scaling a world-class B2B enterprise sales team: People, Incentives and Infrastructure. - People: Ideal team profiles at each stage of growth. - Incentives: Secrets to aligning compensation with company strategy. - Infrastructure: Best practices for enablement, cadence and tools.

1. Blueprint:
Building a B2B Sales Org
Trent Sisson
Mountaingate Capital
@TrentSisson
SXSW 3/10

2. A Classic Start-up Tale
Page 2
Step 1:
Product
Step 2:
Company
Step 3:
Profit
SXSW 3/10

3. Reality
Page 3
Step 1:
Product
Step 2:
Company
Step 3:
Profit
SXSW 3/10
Only 30% of Companies that raise a seed round
will raise series A and 17% Raise Series B

4. What goes wrong?
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The Chasm
SXSW 3/10
“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore
CEO Sells

5. Why Do I need a Sales Org?
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Sales

6. Blueprint to building GTM:
Page 6
Strategy
People
Composition Leadership
Incentives
KPIs Plans
Infrastructure
Process Systems
SXSW 3/10

7. Page 7 SXSW 3/10
Strategy*
*Likely the first time this word used in a SXSW presentation

8. Answer These Questions
• Customer: Who do we sell to?
• How fast changing is industry? Where do we fit?
• What metrics predict success?
• 18 month Goals: Users, revenue or profit?
• How ready is your product and team to scale?
• If successful, how fast will you scale?
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9. Mapping Strategy to Answers
Page 9
• Customer: Who do we sell to?
• How fast changing is industry? Where do we fit?
• What metrics predict success?
• 18 month Goals: Users, revenue or profit?
• How ready is your product and team to scale?
• If successful, how fast will you scale?
People
Incentives
Infrastructure
SXSW 3/10

10. Team Composition
You can sell to everyone, but you can’t target everyone
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11. Strategy: Understand your Customer
Page 11 SXSW 3/10
WHO
Who is
buying?
How sticky is
product?
Size of
Problem?
How
Research?
What
Authority?
Process to
Buy?
Lifetime Value (LTV)
= Years customer x (Annual Revenue – Cost of Goods)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
= Total S&M Spend / Number of New Customers
Acquired

12. Key Metrics
Page 12
Losing
Money!
1:1 2:1 3:1 4:1 5:1 6:1
Target Underinvested
SXSW 3/10
LTV / CAC Ratio
= How much lifetime value do I get per dollar I
invest?

13. What can you afford?
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Social SEO/Email SEM Inside Outside
Lower LTV Higher LTV
SXSW 3/10

14. A Tale of Two Strategies
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• Top-down focus
• LTV = ~$700k
• CAC = $165k
• LTV / CAC = 4.2x
• Bottom-up focus
• LTV = ~$80k
• CAC = $19k
• LTV / CAC = 4.1x
SXSW 3/10

15. Leadership
The most important sales hire.
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16. • Team breakdown (functional, geographic,
segment)
• Input on compensation & quotas
• Selling Methodology
– BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timing
– MEDDIC: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision
Process, Decision Criteria, Identified Pain,
Champion
Hiring GTM Leadership
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17. Strategic
How fast changing is your market? Where do you fit?
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Small
• Grow Share
• Build Team
• Limited support
• Selling Model
• Find Fit
• Creative
• Agile
• In weeds with team
Large
Team
• Professionalize
• Process
• Coach, not player
• Know how to use
team
• Reinforce Core and
Expand
• Industry knowledge
• Time with customers
Stable Fast Evolving
Company
Size
Industry Dynamics
SXSW 3/10

18. Three Questions
• What kind of sales methodology would you run?
How does that compare to your previous role? What
are the differences between your previous company
and this one?
• What kind of salespeople would you hire, and how
differ from the people you have hired in the past?
• How would you structure the compensation plan to
meet the needs of our business?
Credit: http://tomtunguz.com/three-questions-head-of-sales/
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19. KPIs
What you measure is as important as what you pay for.
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20. Strategic: What Predicts Success?
• Sales (Supply)
– Activity, Activity, Activity
– Pipeline health and growth
– Win Rate / Cycle Time / Average Deal Size
• Marketing (Demand)
– Brand Awareness
– New Leads generated
– Meetings set up
• Customer Success (Retention)
– Net Promoter Score
– Net customer retention
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21. Sales KPIs: Supply
• Activity: Are my reps busy enough to make quota?
 50% win rate for qualified buyers
 20% of initial meetings are qualified buyers
 Six week cycle time to close a new deal
 Need five meetings per week to close four deals
• Pipeline growth and health
• Sustaining Win Rate, Cycle Time and Avg. Deal Size
Page 21 SXSW 3/10

22. Marketing KPIs: Demand
• Brand awareness
– Will increase organic conversions and leads over time.
• Activity: Do reps have enough demand to hit quota?
– Five meetings per week…65 meetings in a quarter
– Driven through combination of:
• SEO: ~1% conversion of leads to appointments
• Cold call: ~2% conversion of leads to meetings
• Email marketing leads: assume ~5%
• Content marketing leads: assume ~20%
– Based on a blended average of 9%
– Need 720 leads to generate 65 meetings
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23. Success KPIs
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
– Seek out voice of customer regularly
with surveys and interviews
• Customer Retention: Cheapest customer is
the existing customer
– Annual Gross Retention: >90%
– Annual Net Retention: >100%
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24. Incentives
At the end of the day, everyone is coin-operated.
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25. Strategic Questions
• What is our focus for next 18 months?
Users, Revenue or Gross Profit?
• What can team control?
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26. Mapping Goals to Incentive Plans
Page 26
Goal / Strategy User Adoption /
Market Share
Revenue
Growth
Gross Margin /
Cash Flow
Measure Sign ups Contract Value Gross Margin
Dollars
Risk No incentive to
sell
Maximize dollars
at zero profit
Slower growth
Payment Terms NA On invoice On cash received
Customer
Success Metrics
Sharing /
Conversion
Churn rate,
Upsell %
NPS, Churn rate,
Upsell %
Gates /
Accelerators
Bonus for
conversion to
paying
Minimum new
customer count,
max discount
Profit sharing for
higher margin
SXSW 3/10

27. Case Study
Page 27
Credit: https://hbr.org/2015/04/the-right-way-to-use-compensation-2
• $2.00 payment for each $1.00 MRR
• Strategy evolved
• Tiered plans based on customer success
($4.00 - $1.00 per $1.00 MRR)
• Strategy evolved
• Pay timing based on cash collection
SXSW 3/10

28. Other Considerations
Page 28 SXSW 3/10
Accelerators MBOs
VP / Business
Owners

29. Infrastructure: Process
We all work IN sales, we don’t all work FOR sales.
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30. SXSW 3/10
The Go-to-Market Playbook
• Process:
– Meeting cadence (Activity)
– Forecasting and measurement
– Language of sales stages and methodology
• Communicating the Message:
– Standard pitch deck and presenting templates
– Case Studies and competition battle cards
• Closing deals: Negotiating authority and process
• Account ownership and dispute resolution
• Onboarding / training tools
Page 30
Sales
Marketing
Finance / Ops
HR / Ops

31. Training Case Study
Page 31
• Need to understand
daily user challenges
• Through training
build and market
website
• Become power-user
of product
SXSW 3/10

32. Infrastructure: Systems
Let’s get nerdy.
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33. Sales Operations as Headlights
• Basic tracking
(win rate, deal
size, cycle time,
CAC)
• Scrub CRM
• Close out deals
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Evolution of Sales Operations
• Tracking
(activity,
pipeline health,
LTV)
• Exception
reporting
• Forecasting
• Advanced tracking
(customer
targeting, win
rates by ‘demo’,
LTV by customer)
• Automate process
• Accelerate Deals

34. Technical Infrastructure
Page 34
CRM
Outreach
Marketing
Automation
Research /
Networking
Incentives
Activity
Tracking
Incentive
Reporting
Coordination
RFP-
Response
LMS System
SXSW 3/10

35. Team
• CRM / Systems Admin
– Run technical infrastructure, build workflows, permissions
and gates to automating the management of sales processes
• Sales Operations
– Support building reports, crunching data, forecasting, KPI
reporting, set quotas
• Sales Finance
– Contract negotiation authority, design commission plans
• Sales Enablement
– Support building training materials, running onboarding,
improving processes
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36. Bringing it all together:
Communication
Everything flows from the strategy…
…must be communicated consistently and constantly
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37. Thank you
Page 37 SXSW 3/10
Trent Sisson
Mountaingate Capital
@TrentSisson
Email: tsisson@mountaingatecap.com

38. Blogs
• https://labs.openviewpartners.com/
• http://firstround.com/review/
• https://www.alexandergroup.com/blog/
• https://www.salesforce.com/quotable/
• https://www.saleshacker.com/
• https://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog
• https://www.insidesales.com/insider/
Page 38 SXSW 3/10

39. Articles
• https://www.saleshacker.com/establishing-framework-build-inside-sales
• team/https://www.salesforce.com/quotable/articles/teaching-sales-reps-to-sell-new-products/
• https://labs.openviewpartners.com/customer-success-the-path-to-pricing-success/#.WqWViCjwaUl
• https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/ultimate-guide-to-sales-qualification#sm.001cw73rr1bwhde7qyg1evv89yi7j
• https://labs.openviewpartners.com/how-to-actually-implement-account-based-marketing/#.WqWWOijwaUl
• http://firstround.com/review/this-sales-plan-moves-the-needle-on-every-success-metric/
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-took-appdynamics-from-100m-37b-4-years-jeremy-duggan/
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wrong-way-scale-sam-jacobs/
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sales-enablement-really-hard-cory-bray/
• https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/2017-saas-ae-metrics-report/
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-first-playbook-ryan-reisert-/
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-first-playbook-ryan-reisert-/
• http://tomtunguz.com/three-questions-head-of-
sales/?utm_content=bufferce4f7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-startup-founders-need-know-sales-amy-volas/
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