Becoming "Mr. Repeatable"

It was just over 2 years ago that I was sitting at Starbucks, reading Jason Lemkin’s article posted on Saastr about the 48 different types of VP of Sales. I had just accepted the offer to join Allbound as Director of Sales and was definitely in a little over my head. All I knew was that I had probably about 3 months to figure out how to become “Mr. Repeatable” or I would be out looking again. I needed to become this type of VP of Sales. Here is what I learned over the past 2 years, growing Allbound 380% in revenue and 1000% in new customers - resulting in a successful Series A round of funding last month.

1. Make sure your pricing fits the stage your company is in, the size of the company you are selling to and is in line with your buyer persona. Allbound’s founder, Scott Salkin and our first VP of Marketing, Jen Spencer  and I went back and forth one weekend ultimately using this document from Openview Partners  - Seed Stage Pricing Strategies  as a roadmap for our future pricing. We took what we didn’t like about our competition pricing strategy (pricing per partners, users etc), made sure it aligned with our marketing buyer in the mid market and did our best to make sure it was within budget of our buyer. Looking back, we nailed it with our pricing!
2. Pricing needed to reflect a Jobs to be Done mindset. It was the summer of 2017 and we were trying to figure out who Allbound was to our customers. Paul Winandy is a local legend here in Phoenix, leading WebPT through its hypergrowth years. He came in and really opened our eyes as to how we should think about product and our company as it pertained to the jobs the users at our customers were trying to accomplish. Channel sales managers had jobs to do, channel marketers had jobs to do… Our pricing and the way we package it needed to reflect in a way that it would resonate with our buyers and their jobs. So, we packaged our features into modules that resonated with our respective buyers. Our ACV has grown almost 45% in the past year as a result of this strategy.
3. Make seeing your product a fast and easy process! 30-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first This starts with the SDR team and is more influenced by attitude than strategy. Allbound SDRs operated with the belief that if they didn’t respond within a few minutes to something like a chat, a demo request, G2Crowd contact form or any other lead for that matter their chance of success with that lead diminished drastically with every passing moment. So, a lead into Allbound was called, on the calendar and sometimes a meeting took place all within a 24 hour period. Urgency wins in today’s competitive market. Our goal was to get our prospect’s eyes on our platform before our competition even responded to an inquiry. Some might say the SDR’s role is to try to qualify (or disqualify) however this is a function of the vendor being selfish with their time, and is not indicative of a customer centric mentality so… Our prospects got on the calendar fast! How fast? Super fast!
4. Stop the powerpoint madness! One of the best lessons I learned early in my sales career was this: “No one cares about your product or company until you show them how it can help them fix their pain.” Michael Thome  taught me this within the first week as an SDR at Act-On Software. I have his this article Gaining Attention of Buyers in a Hyper Connected World bookmarked, and refer to it often as a guiding principle for how we sell and questioning whether it aligns to the goals of our buyers as it relates to keeping their attention. At Allbound we recognize that our prospects have better things to do than meet with us and we take that mentality into our sales meetings. The goal of our prospects is to see our product, understand if it can help them and move on quickly if we can’t. Within the first 10 minutes of a call with us our goal is to identify the top 5 things that are important to them, and then if we can deliver, show them, if we can’t, we send them on their way (hopefully being able to point them in a better direction). We outlawed powerpoint presentations 2 years ago because all they serve to show is our marquee logos, how much money we have, what awards we have won and how awesome we are blah blah blah… no one cares unless you can prove it helps them - get to the medicine fast!
5. Hire awesome people and let them be creative. It is a little scary trusting your success to your team, but I learned quickly that 4 or 5 people trying new things makes learning what works and doesn’t work much quicker. For example, Ross Van Wyk was a podcast junkie and brought a very specific approach and message to the table that worked well when Gina Sandoval was playing with outbound prospecting using video. By fostering an environment based in collaboration we all learned from the things we tried, and all gained mutual benefit as a result. Yes, competition is healthy in sales, but fostering a team that recognizes we are all trying to win is the key to crushing your goals.
6. Make winning easy for your team. In a startup you have to capitalize on momentum. There are gonna be hard days, days where you lose the commit deals and days where you feel like you are getting kicked in your teeth. One of my goals as the sales leader was to make it as easy as possible for my reps to win business, and to that win business often and fast. This meant that I gave them flexibility to discount when necessary, throw in free time when needed, utilize monthly billing (as opposed to annual) and approve as many of the redlines as we could. Our contract was also super simple - we took it from 7 pages to 2. Working with a board and a CEO who is onboard with this approach is helpful as it’s not always easy to do this depending upon the margins and cash position your business needs to operate.
7. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. When I started Allbound was priced at the high end of the market, and looking back our pricing was wrong then. We fixed that quick. On top of the research I mentioned earlier, I personally called 160+ opportunities that we had closed/lost to figure out where we went wrong. The feedback I got was consistent with the research we were leaning on… our pricing was not inline with the market and our product. At the time the leaders in the space, the vendors who had been around a while had priced their solutions in the six figures, sometimes below $10k and all in between. They all also tiered their pricing based upon how successful their customers were (more partners = more money). When Allbound came to market with our new pricing within 3 months every single one of our competitors had either taken their then public pricing off their website, had broken their pricing into modules and had expanded their tier model to be basically unlimited. We rocked the market, and acted as a catalyst that ultimately made PRM an investment worth making for companies competing in the mid-market. We knew we were right with our pricing when we saw this happening - disruption is fun!
8. It’s not possible to do it alone. One of the biggest lessons I learned is that in a startup that is going from 6 employees to 30+ everyone is in sales. We haven’t been big enough to have Sales Engineers, or a dedicated legal team. The most important lesson I learned in the last 2 years is that everyone is in sales, and sales cannot compete without the help from product, from engineering, from customer success, from accounting, from executives… it takes a team to win in today’s environment and being a sales leader has taught me that while yes, the sales rep who hits the gong gets all the recognition… that gong isn’t hit without the supporting team.