BEST PRACTICES ON HOW TO LEVERAGE STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIPS TO CLOSE MORE DEALS IN 2022

Behind every great sales team, there’s a great go-to-market strategy with astute planning and team-management involved. There is also a great deal of relationship building and network leveraging that goes on, and we wanted to take you behind the scenes.??

In a recent Glynn Capital portfolio-company gathering, held recently and virtually, sales executives swapped pro tips to close more deals in 2022 by leveraging their engagement between their company and their investors.

At Glynn Capital “we are long-term-focused, partnering with entrepreneurs in an effort to accelerate top-line revenue and to attract, hire, and retain top talent. We think our firm’s network and our thought-leadership practice contribute to a strategic advantage when it comes to adding value to our portfolio companies,” noted Kim Moore, one of the firm’s Partners, leading Value Creation.?

This recent thought leadership discussion was led by: Mike Leonard, President and Chief Commercial Officer, Cleo, Kelly Griswold, Chief Operating Officer, Onna,?Dan Calpin, President, Hive – Enterprise AI, Chris Jackson, Area Vice President, Lyra Health, Jim Conway, Area Vice President, Business Development and Channel Partners, Lyra Health, Kevin Wiesniewski, Sales Operations Manager, Onna, Zack Young, Enterprise Account Executive, Gladly, Carter Mees, Regional Director, Enterprise Sales, Lucid, Jan Zeman, Vice President, Worldwide Sales, Iterable, George Cerny, Vice President, Growth Sales, B2B2C Sales & LATAM, Iterable, Russ Grant, Vice President, Revenue, Onna, Marc DeGaetano, Chief Revenue Officer, BigID, Tom Murtaugh, Vice President, Go-To-Market Operations, BigID, Eric Lightfoot, Area Vice President, DataRobot, and Todd Osborne, former GVP Sales – Americas East, New Relic, Inc.

The learnings fell into three buckets: COMMUNICATION, HIRING, AND SALES.

BEST COMMUNICATION PRACTICES:

The communication tips were first set out by Kim Moore, who noted that Glynn’s ecosystem contains more than 60,000 people connections -- it’s critical to be organized and thoughtful to leverage a network this large.

-Connect. CEOs, founders, sales leaders, marketing leaders, connect with each of your investors. Try to get a one-on-one introduction to the best person to talk about go-to-market strategy and how value can be exchanged. This can be done on LinkedIn or email to get started. Seek out these connections if you don’t already have them in place.

-Come up with a “cadence” for keeping in touch and keeping your relationships warm– monthly is often good, but it will vary according to the relationship and sense of urgency.

-Accountability is key. Make sure there’s a dedicated person managing the relationship between your company and each investor who is helping with network connections.

-Track and measure results. Track your investor relationships and track your introductions in the works. Make sure that different members of your team don’t make overlapping asks. If you’re tracking, this should not be a problem.

-Make your asks direct, clean, and forwardable. Try to answer the “who, what, when, where, and how” questions in a forwardable way. Example: Dear investor, I see you’re connected to Cindy Smith [who] at Acme Co. [where] We are working on XYZ [why] and we know that they might benefit from our product [how]. Do you mind making an introduction [what] before we’re both at the upcoming event? [when]

-Be proactive. In the word of one seasoned executive, “If you have an idea, a thought, a request, share it.”

BEST HIRING PRACTICES:

-Build in a demo between the recruiter screen and the hiring manager interview. It will help you see your candidates in action.

-Be candid in interviews about what the challenges of a role are going to be. As one participant put it, “We have found that if you give candor, you get candor in return.”

-Give tangible, numerical goals – don’t measure activity, which can be a “symptom,” as one panelist put it – but instead, measure effectiveness.

-Make it clear from the get-go whose responsibility it is to build pipeline. Clarify responsibility for new hires, sometimes you might have to recalibrate for existing hires where the responsibility is: “Here’s the RACI, and it’s got your name on it.”

BEST SALES PRACTICES:

-First, breathe, because sales management is a stressful job. “For go-to-market, you always seem to have either capacity challenges or pipeline challenges,” one leader noted, continuing, “either you don’t have enough reps to hit your goals or you’re looking for more pipeline to feed those reps.”

-Consider a “pipeline blitz.” One executive mentioned that his firm had had “PG (Pipeline Generation) Tuesdays.” Having that standing meeting, they said, helped their firm’s marketing and BDRs to drive towards the AEs being able to execute on Tuesdays. It can also be an effective way to build prospecting energy.

-Try small-group accountability; gather a group of less than 10, set individual goals for each member, and then have a meeting later in the week where each member describes what did, or didn’t work. This structure serves the twin goals of holding team members accountable and also teaching by example. “It’s a safe zone,” one sales leader noted, “and people like sharing what works and what doesn’t.”

-Understand the competing dynamics of what your go-to-market play is, what market you’re trying to play in, and give your reps time to align to that. In the commercial or corporate space, you might have a faster sales cycle than at the enterprise level – “where you are trying to solve business-critical problems, so people [customers] aren’t going to just take it for a test drive and buy it,” one executive noted.

-There’s no one-size-fits-all. Rethink your best practices as you scale up.

We hope you found these best practices helpful so you and your teams can implement them to see an impact for 2022 and beyond.