Rev

Explain Rev in less than 60 seconds? You got it! Thanks to our friends at Allytics for helping us bring this to life.

Our Chief GTM Officer, Jeffrey Ha, sat down with Aaron Owens to chat about ICP intelligence and how different kinds of signals play important roles in your GTM process. Listen in on the conversation at the Growth Driver podcast.

As a founder, I’ve gone $0-$50M+ in total sales at 2 different startups. The biggest sales lesson I learned is that scaling prematurely is a death sentence. Here are 3 warning signs you're scaling too early (and how to course correct): 1. Your deals all look different You’re winning deals. Revenue is growing. The CEO and investors are getting excited. Step on the gas! Not so fast. Yes, you have some good wins. But you’re bending over backwards to win deals. Every win and every renewal is a scramble. You’re closing deals on sales talent, not durable product or customer success. Your organization can’t even agree what a good customer looks like. The next reps won’t be able to replicate your heroic wins. Promising a big number now is the easiest way to put your job at risk. You can’t scale what you can’t repeat. Start trying to create 5-10 deals that are EXACTLY the same. - Same customer type (segment) - Same approach (lead source) - Same message - Same sales process - Same terms This is the first building block of a scalable process. 2. Reps aren’t hitting quota Your deals look the same. Great! You’ve added your first few reps. Maybe you’re even beating your annual plan. Time to scale? Not even close. Inconsistent attainment is a big red flag for scaling. One reps is hitting 180% of plan - the other two are at 65%. The temptation, always, is to look at those two reps and ask: "Why aren’t they better?" It’s the wrong question. It leads you to the thinking that more, better reps are your answer. So starts the great revolving door of sales where reps, trying to scale an organization that just isn’t ready. The question that should be asked is: "What is that one sales rep doing right?" Your early go-to-market is like cutting a trail through dense jungle. Your job now is paving the path so the current and future reps can move easier and faster. Diagnose what’s working. What kinds of customers buy, and what are the situations where they buy biggest and fastest? What exact process do we use to make sure we deliver the right message to the right customer? And with all of those things working, how long does it really take for a rep to ramp to full productivity? Stop thinking your next new or replacement rep hires will accelerate you. Get your current reps hitting a predictable plan BEFORE thinking adding more. 3. You don’t know where demand is going to come from We’ve all seen the movie. We’re having some success. Starting to hit quota more often. Now, that sneaky, DANGEROUS math creeps in... # of reps X quota = sales *ran out of room! Post continued in comments. ??

3.7X more likely to meet quota…yes please!

We've been getting congratulatory notes for transcribing a speech last night. Yes, we are an AI-powered software but a different Rev. Corporate doppelg?ngers...gotta love 'em!

We continue to be grateful for our partnership with our friends at Allytics. Collaboration + honest feedback + shared wins = Partner Success Here's our partnership story. #partnersuccess

Growing 20%+ for 3-5 years feels daunting for sure. Our GTM advisory partner Barry Witonsky makes some good points for consideration if you are a PE backed business needing to hit this growth target.

Sounds like we need to give our CEO a quota...

In the last 12 months, Rev has increased our close rates by 300% and shortened our average deal cycle from 100 days to 40. Here's the 3-step playbook we used to increase sales velocity (without adding headcount): BACKGROUND Since 2021, sales benchmarks in SaaS have trending down: - Win rates have dropped 18% - Deal sizes have shrunk 21% - Deal cycles are 16% longer We’re all working harder and longer in every deal for less money! Unfortunately, this environment is here to stay. So what’s a Sales Leader to do to generate velocity in this market? At Rev, we follow a process that I call “SLC” - for “Stalled, Lost, or Churned.” Here's how it works: 1. Convene a SWAT team of your GTM leaders (Head of Sales, RevOps, Marketing, etc). It all starts here. Without getting the right people in place who can impact change across the org, nothing matters. The team is going to meet daily at first to generate a new and valuable report (see #2); then they will divide and conquer to resolve the issues slowing down your GTM. 2. Generate your Stalled-Lost-Churned Report The key insight here is that a standard “closed-lost” report isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you’re going to create a new report of every deal that closed-lost, but also any customer that churned and any deal that “stalled” (i.e. where there hasn’t been a positive change of close-% within three weeks). 3. Map your sales cycle and attach to each step exactly HOW MANY and WHY deals stalled-lost-churned. The WHY is the hardest part — the simple answers in Salesforce will not be good enough. You need to scrub the heck out of the opportunity list to dig deep and figure out real “why” answers. For example:? “Customer went dark” is not a good enough reason. What was really happening in the deal when the customer stopped responding? Were they not impressed enough by the demo? Missing a key feature? Scared off by pricing? Did a key persona refuse to engage or fail to see value? Talk to your AEs and listen to more Gong calls. The answers are there. You just have to find them. 4. Assign each of the WHYs to a member of the GTM team and work through a meaningful improvement Are we missing a slide that speaks to a key persona? Mishandling a certain objection in the sales cycle? Is our order form sitting in procurement too long? Each SLC issue gets assigned to an owner and worked until it no longer slows deals down. Here’s an example: One “SLC issue” we found at my past company NetBase was that our order form was being sent to legal review by our customer 90% of the time. So we removed the legalese from the order form and referenced online terms and conditions with a URL. The result was our buyers only sent the form to legal 10% of the time! That was a savings of 2-3 weeks on 80% of deals! TAKEAWAY Want to improve sales velocity? Find out the real reason WHY deals aren't closing. Not just why you LOST deals. But why deals stalled and churned. Use SLC.

We are 3 weeks away until #RevOpsAF and looking forward to learning the state of the art when it comes to revenue operations. If you are attending, give us a shout for a special ?? invite.