Lessons Learned from Scaling a 100 Person Sales Development Team at Apttus w/ Kent Venook
The Brandon Bornancin Show
English - June 10, 2016 10:00 - 31 minutes - 25.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 73 ratingsMarketing Business Technology account-based selling sales inside sales sales acceleration demand generation sales operations cold calling big data analytics salesforce.com Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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Apttus provides quote to cash solutions on the Apttus intelligence cloud. Since it's inception in 2006 Apttus has experienced rapid growth and was valued in 2016 at over one-billion dollars. Bootstrapping in the early days the company started with one and grew to 100 sales development reps in 18 months. Kent Venook, Director of Global Sales Development discusses his six lessons learned from accomplishing this amazing task.
1) Standardization of process
In the early days, reps were each doing their own thing. It was more of a cowboy town than a well-oiled machine. Visualizing the process on a white-board and looking for areas of optimization, the team was able to move to a scalable process that each rep followed.
2) Key KPIs
After a lot of debate, the team standardized on sales accepted opportunities as the primary metric to have sales development reps focus on. Although, Apttus runs an account-based model where sales development reps are closely tied to account executives, Kent decided not to listen to outside sources and pay his reps on ACV or revenue. Kent believes reps should be paid for things they can control and what they can be coached to improve.
3) Continued Training
Kent set up a two-month onboarding program called the Sales Academy. Apttus is a robust product and Kent found he could train his people for a few days and let them try and figure it out for the next six months or train them for two months and them fully ramped by month three.
4) Management Team
When Kent began he hired 60 reps so quickly that everybody reported to him. Looking for key characteristics and top performers, Kent quickly put in a management team that increased engagement and overall productivity for the team.
5) Don't be Afraid to Fail
Testing is the name of the game. Try different things to increase productivity results and have fun with it.
6) Investment
Great people and great teams don't get where they are alone. Realize that to get to an optimized state you will need a powerful sales stack.