Portfolio Acceleration Q1 2022

Q1 2022

Portfolio Acceleration Expertise to fuel fast-growing companies

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Letter from the founder OneGuide exists to make finding spoton expertise simple. Before founding OneGuide, I worked in a portfolio growth role for almost five years, and OneGuide is the resource I wish I could have offered those portfolio companies.

Fast-growing companies face new-to-them challenges all the time, but those challenges are rarely truly new. Investors add value by identifying patterns and making introductions to experienced operators, but it’s hard to make those connections scalably, and it’s challenging to consistently offer apt recommendations to every request. That’s where OneGuide comes in.

By aggregating thought leaders from across functional domains, we’ve created a single place for founders and leadership teams to find the kind of advice that saves hundreds of hours of trial-and-error. OneGuide is underpinned by a few fundamental truths: 1. It’s never efficient to reinvent the wheel. This is why young startups bring on experienced hires, and the reason consulting firms repeat similar project types and share insights across clients.

Small companies can’t always afford an FTE or a big consulting project, but that shouldn’t mean they need to fly blind.

2. Writing down knowledge makes it retrievable. Creating knowledge bases and internal wikis is a huge investment, but also a hugely powerful archive.

Documented knowledge is searchable and retrievable. But across most portfolios, most of that information is locked up in the heads of partners and experienced executives.

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3. Nothing replaces asking an advisor questions. There’s a lot of great business knowledge out there in books, blogs, podcasts, and conference keynotes.

But no mass-media communication can compare to the value of asking a knowledgeable expert specific questions about the situation you’re facing.

You’ll find our current roster of advisors at the back of this magazine. OneGuide experts include both operating executives who are passionate about sharing their craft and specialist consultants who’ve gone deep in disciplines like SEO, customer onboarding, and cold email copywriting.

Kate Hopkins

kate@askoneguide.com

If I’m an expert in anything myself, it’s aggregating and organizing useful ideas from across functions. If you’re looking to do more of that, I’d love to talk about your portfolio acceleration program. Email me at kate@askoneguide.com

“By aggregating thought leaders from across functional domains, we’ve created a single place for founders and leadership teams to find the kind of advice that saves hundreds of hours of trial-and-error.”

CONTENTS Featured guides Planning for Predictable Growth and Accurate Forecasting Anthony Cessario is the VP of Industries and GTM Solutions at Clari

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Identifying and Multiplying Your Best Customers with Segmentation Tamara Grominsky is the Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce

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Managing a Customer Success Team Boaz Maor is the Chief Customer Officer at Talech

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Meet the experts Marketing

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Customer Success

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Sales

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Data & Revenue Ops

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Product & Strategy

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Anthony Cessario Anthony Cessario is VP of Industries and GTM Solutions at Clari, the revenue operations and forecasting platform.

CATEGORY: SALES WHO IS THIS GUIDE FOR?

Founders and sales, finance and revenue ops leaders, especially at companies that are quickly scaling bookings goals and sales headcount.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Predictability isn’t a sales thing; it impacts the whole company because it dictates the operating plan.

• For better forecasting accuracy, align pipeline stages with how the customer buys, not how you sell.

• To hit your goals, ensure your capacity is focused on the segments that can have the greatest impact on your revenue.

• Invest in trustworthy reporting so that managers can spend less meeting time getting updated and more time on strategic coaching.

Planning For Predictable Growth And Accurate Forecasting What does predictable growth mean?

Predictable growth means having the ability to know how revenue will grow in advance of actually closing that revenue, with negligible variance.

It’s not just about forecasting – forecasting is just a snapshot. You need to do a lot of things right in terms of process to see repeatable and predictable growth.

It’s not just for new bookings – in recurring revenue businesses, you need to think about the full lifecycle of the customer, including churn, renewals, and account expansion.

Why is it important to invest in predictability?

The ability to predict revenue sets the pulse for the entire company – because the revenue prediction allows you to build the operating plan, and the operating plan dictates how much you can invest in growth and innovation. How well you deliver on the revenue you’re predicting affects the entire company.

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Who’s responsible for revenue forecasting (and who’s involved)?

Early-stage the head of sales and the head of finance forecast together – early on you’re likely hitting targets more out of sheer willpower vs. repeatable process. You might also be using some creativity to ensure that you’re hitting targets.

Sales ops becomes the owner once you have the function – sales ops is coming into companies earlier now, and they’re the natural instrumentor of the forecasting process.

Whoever owns churn should be involved – depending upon the selling motion, you need to think about post-bookings revenue to factor in net dollar retention and the ability to grow your customer base. When you think about predictable growth and not predictable bookings, you have to think about churn and renewal rates. This is important because high NRR leads to a higher valuation.

Involve the relevant teams if you have usage-based revenue – in a consumption world, predicting revenue

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requires understanding product usage, so tech, product, and marketing leaders can get involved.

When you first think about better managing your pipeline, what should your goals be?

Focused capacity – are you focusing your sales and marketing efforts and dollars on the right areas? This is about how you focus your resources and your team on the right segments of the business and the market, where you’ll see the highest ROI. Repeatability – are you building the repeatable motion that you’ll need to scale? This is key for predictability, and it will also help you accelerate ramp of new reps.

Trustworthy data – be sure to set up a process where you can trust the data because when there’s a lack of trust, so much of the go-to-market team’s time is spent just “reporting the news” as leadership tries to understand what’s actually happening.

What stages or events in the sales cycle are most important to track?

There are two different buckets: forecast categories and pipeline stages • Forecasting categories – how are you moving the prospect through your selling process.

• Pipeline stages – how is the prospect moving it through their buying process?

Align pipeline stages with how the customer buys to avoid slipped deals – how do they get budget? Who are their personas that need to be involved to buy this? At what point are they going to make a VOC (vendor of choice) decision? When you build those stages around how you sell that’s when you slip deals. Your seller could be moving deals through your process “Oh, we did a demo. And we did discovery,” but that

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could have zero correlation with how the prospect actually buys.

Add pipeline criteria to forecasting categories – you could say, “how come this deal is committed when they haven’t even allocated budget yet” or “you haven’t met with the CFO who we know needs to be in the process to buy this?” That’s when you can use stage and forecast categories to strengthen each other.

How should you think about calculating and reporting your forecast?

Forecast categories depend upon the motion – i.e. they can be different for new bookings vs. renewals.

In general, for new bookings, use 3-4 stages – think about it from the buyer’s side.

• Pipeline – everything else that’s in your sales process, but hasn’t yet reached a higher level of certainty.

• Upside – for deals you’re not ready to say are in commit yet, but they’re tracking well/better than others.

• Most likely/close to the pin – (optional) some companies add another step in between upside and commit, to give a more accurate idea of where a prospect is.

• Commit – this means “it better happen, signing up in blood.” Sometimes commit can end end up being too conservative because the definition is so strict.

Apply judgment through sales management layers for better overall forecast accuracy – give managers the ability to use judgment with what the person below them said (in terms of the number of deals that will close, as well as the dollar amount). This makes commit not as conservative and your forecast ends up being more than just what you’re committing.

Think about revenue types – TCV (total contract value) vs. ACV (annual contract value) vs. ARR (annual recurring revenue) vs. IARR (incremental ARR), so that you can report it up for budgeting and to the board. You don’t only need to know how much recurring revenue was booked, you need to know when you’ll get the cash, and what percentage of that revenue is new vs. upsold. »

“The ability to predict revenue sets the pulse for the entire company. The revenue prediction allows you to build the operating plan, and the operating plan dictates how much you can invest in growth and innovation.”

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What other factors should you consider, and how should you take them into account?

The historical lens is important – overlay period-over-period performance as a way to always have a point of comparison. The period could be quarter-over-quarter, month-overmonth, or year-over-year.

Linearity is important – when you have a hockey stick effect where all your deals get closed in the last few weeks of the quarter, or a snowplow effect, where all the deals get pushed and close in the first two weeks of the next quarter, that’s not extremely healthy because it can be difficult to drive predictable growth, and in turn, make operating decisions earlier based off what you believe is going to happen. Set linearity targets and actually be able to deliver on those.

allows you to understand how the business is acting right now vs. how the business acted at a previous point in time.

How far ahead should you try to forecast?

First, know your sales cycle length by product – it’s surprising how many companies can’t articulate how long it takes to sell their product. This is important because it lets you predict accurate close dates. If the entire GTM org doesn’t understand these metrics, you will see slipped deals, inaccurate forecasts, and likely set the wrong pipeline targets.

You need to have a good current quarter forecast (beyond that is hard) – even some of the most predictable companies have a difficult time forecasting consistently accurate predictions more than one quarter out.

If you have a longer sales cycle, look at the current quarter plus 1-2 quarters out – assuming it’s not uncommon for the sales cycle to last more than one quarter.

How should you instrument the revenue process?

What processes or touchpoints should you establish with Look at the entire revenue process – your team? how do we instrument the business in a way that we can give the visibility that we need. The execution piece feeds the predictability.

Instrumentation feeds time-series insights – with AI and machine learning, you’re starting to have a time series lens within that instrumentation. That

On a daily basis, keep the data clean – leverage automation so reps have to do fewer things manually. If you have trust and accountability in the data, you can waste less time reporting the news” on frontline forecast calls, 1:1s, etc., and focus more time on strategic coaching.

Instrumenting the revenue process Stage Top of funnel

Leads and marketing touchpoints – you want data from the top of funnel to gathjer a better understanding of how people are interacting with your brand.

In the sales pipeline

Stages and opportunity categories – you want to instrument your pipeline motion in a way that you can trust the data and make decisions off that data.

Among customers

You want to ensure that your customers are realizing the value that you sold them on, and that you’re continuously finding opportunities to deliver (&charge for) additional value.

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What you might measure

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Weekly 1:1s – front-line managers are the difference-makers in the revenue org.

Mastering the structure of those oneon-ones is important, especially when it comes to setting the right cadence (typically weekly). When you start to have more than six reps to one manager, it gets difficult to have effective weekly one-on-ones.

Pipeline reviews – these are not just forecast calls. They should be focused on the strategy that you’re looking to deploy, not just about “how much pipeline do we have.”

In addition to general pipeline reviews, depending upon selling motion, you might have additional types of pipeline meetings.

• “Big deal” reviews – these would happen regularly, to ensure that you’re putting the whole weight of the company behind these key deals.

• Cross-functional pipeline reviews – where you bring marketing into the fold to start looking out further and saying “what does next quarter look like?”

Forecasting Calls (2-4x per month) – depending upon the sales cycle length, revenue type, and point in time in the quarter. Cadence-wise, forecast calls for long sales cycles (6-12+ mo) might only be needed 2x monthly, especially early in the quarter, while higher velocity motions will require weekly calls. Renewals may also be on a different cadence than new business. Companies that are focused on out-quarter pipelines may rotate weekly, with a focus on forecasting the current quarter in even weeks and out-quarter pipeline build in odd weeks.

You need shared ownership and a shared language – along with shared numbers.

It’s really important that everyone is focusing on the same numbers, metrics, and definitions of each for clarity in conversation.

How can a sales leader help their team get better at making accurate projections?

Get pipeline rigor and accountability right – the forecast is just a reflection of how much of a command you have on

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“Linearity is important. When you have a hockey stick effect where all your deals get closed in the last few weeks of the quarter or a snowplow effect where all the deals get pushed and close in the first two weeks of the next quarter, it can be difficult to drive predictable growth.” how your team sells and what stages your deals are in.

Have a historical lens – even though this is less on the incentive side. You need to understand, how does my business look right now, compared to the same time last quarter, the same time last month, the same time last year, etc. It’s valuable because you can say, “based on how my business has performed in the past, how do I think it’s going to perform now?”.

If you build in incentives, incentivize accuracy – e.g. if you said you were going to hit $2 million this quarter and you hit $2.5M, that’s great, but what does that mean? That’s $500K in revenue that could have been put to work doing things like accelerating the headcount plan or product investment, instead, that opportunity was left on the sidelines.

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How can a sales leader pressure test their team’s projections?

your attention solely on bookings. In a recurring revenue business, investors want to see renewal and net retention rates growing as well.

Understand and track the risk factors – make sure that buyer journey stages (such as budget approval) support the forecast category. Also, check that activity or usage data (such as are they engaging with us? If so, are we engaged at the right levels? What was the last meeting we had with them? Are they responding to our emails? Are we sending files back and forth?) support the forecast.

Make sure your data is trustworthy – good data means your team spends less time “reporting the news” and more time selling. Along with accountability and rigor, this underpins predictability.

How should you communicate about your forecast and pipeline with execs outside sales (e.g. CEO, finance, board)?

Make sure you roll up the number the way the business needs – the forecast is not a sales thing, it’s a company-wide thing. Make sure that you’ve built the forecast in a way that gets these other teams what they need to make decisions about tomorrow, today.

Have a point of view on what stakeholders need to see – e.g. finance.

Make sure you’re showing them what they need to see to understand what decisions to make next.

Overshare with the board – they’re there to help you make decisions today about what’s going to happen tomorrow.

The more you keep from them, and the more you shelter them from reality, the less that you’re letting smart minds work for you.

What are the common pitfalls?

Lack of clear stage and category definitions – this is probably most prevalent. Because process rigor and data reliability underpin forecast accuracy, this is a foundational flaw.

Borrowing things blindly from a previous company – the buyer journey could be completely different at this company. A good question, when you’re hiring people to build go-to-market, is “what do you think is going to be different about the selling process here compared to what you’ve done in previous roles?”

Lack of trustworthy data – if you’re spending money on all these systems, and you can’t even trust what’s in there, then what’s the point?

Static reporting – these days, businesses move so fast, so be sure to have a way for your teams to look at the data in realtime as much as possible.

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Think about focused capacity – the best way to hit your revenue goals is to spend your effort where it will have the most impact. Take a more nuanced lens into the segments that matter most.

Look at the entire revenue process – it’s irresponsible to focus the majority of

CONNECT WITH THIS EXPERT To set up a 1:1 call or portfolio roundtable discussion, email sales@askoneguide.com

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Tamara Grominsky Tamara Grominsky is the Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce, and has previously led product marketing at other SMB-focused companies including FreshBooks and Yellow Pages.

CATEGORY: STRATEGY

Identifying And Multiplying Your Best Customers With Segmentation

WHO IS THIS GUIDE FOR?

Founders and product and marketing leaders, especially at companies that sell a horizontal solution, or have a varied customer base.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Segmentation lets you disproportionately focus on top-performing customer types.

• Look for segments that are large, above-average on key metrics, and that have market tailwinds.

• Use segmentation to shape your go-to-market from pricing packages to website messaging to sales battlecards.

• It’s a data-heavy exercise, but don’t delegate segmentation to the data team; product marketing is a better lead.

What does it mean to segment customers?

Divide up your customer base or market based on shared characteristics – the goal is to identify your company’s best customers and then build highly relevant products and experiences that will engage, retain and acquire them across the entire customer lifecycle.

“Best” customers could mean one core segment, or multiple (depending upon your scale) – how many segments you focus on is going to depend on the scale and resources that your business has available. Many companies (especially younger, smaller ones) choose one core target segment to focus on, and then think about adjacent moves they can make as they start to win that market to propel growth.

Segments need to be based on qualitative and quantitative data – you can’t base segmentation on the opinions and beliefs of your C-suite or employees across the company.

What is the business value of customer segmentation?

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Improving team momentum and alignment – focus is the key to a successful segmentation exercise.

Sometimes people worry, “what if I go through this process and I make a bad choice?” Honestly, my answer is “you probably won’t”. At the end of the day, if you’ve taken all of the data points into consideration and you’ve gotten all of your team’s focus on one customer segment,you’ll gain momentum. You don’t want to ask 10 different employees who’s your target customer and get 10 completely different answers.

Improving business performance (lower CAC, lower churn, higher LTV) – part of the process of customer segmentation is identifying high-performance segments. You want to identify the type of customers who usually perform better than the average customer. As you increase the ratio of your target customers, and decrease the ratio of your non-segmented customers, you’re actually able to increase business performance, drive down cost per acquisition, drive down customer churn, and increase ARPU or customer lifetime value. That’s the long-term impact that you’ll see if you’ve nailed that first alignment piece.

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More relevant and personalized experiences for customers and prospects – personalized experiences have completely become table stakes now. As a customer, you want to get your questions answered as quickly as possible, feel like you’re in the right place, and that there’s a sense of belonging. Segmentation provides that to you as a prospect because it allows you to decide quickly, “Is this for me and will I find this valuable?”

Segmentation factors in at the product level too – most of the time when I talk about segmentation, I think about it from a holistic business perspective, but it can be applied all the way down to the product level. For example, as a product manager or product marketer working on this product portfolio, what’s the best segment I can focus on out of our company’s main segments? So it really can be applied to both startups all the way to something like a scale up or a growth stage business.

What are signs that a company should invest in defining its customer segments?

If you ask 10 different people at your company who your target customer is and the answer isn’t the same – if you want to deliver customer value across all the functions of your organization, you need to be able to identify who the customer is.

Companies of all sizes benefit – you can apply it at different levels. The work just might look slightly different depending on what stage of growth you’re in.

Who runs the segmentation process, and who should be involved?

A product manager or product marketer runs segmentation – product marketing and product management need to be aligned, so that segmentation and product vision match up. I recommend product marketing take the lead if possible, because the team’s objective is to become an expert on both the customer and the market, and they’re

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market-facing. Product marketers already have the knowledge and skills to look both inward at your existing customers and outward at market potential.

A data team is a helpful resource, but shouldn’t lead – it’s valuable to have support from a data team in terms of gathering the right data sets and helping to analyze some of the data. Although your data team may be able to breeze through this exercise, you don’t want them to lead this project because they may lack the market and customer context to put it all together.

Other stakeholders and supporters will be users of the segmentation framework: • CEO/Founder(s) – if you’re really small, founders run the whole project • Data team • Marketing • Sales • Customer Success

What types of customer variables should companies use in segmenting customers?

Firmographics and Buyer Demographics – for B2B, things like industry, employee count, company revenue, and job title.

Geographic – it could range from what country they’re located in to a region to what neighborhood they’re in.

Psychographic – lifestyle choices, attitudes, personality traits. For B2B, this comes down to values – ultimately it’s still a human making that buying decision, and what they value is important. Some buyers might really value low prices and getting a deal, others might care a lot about service levels.

Behavioral – what are the different habits, purchase behaviors, and |benefits that a customer would be seeking? Think about how they prefer |to buy (self-service vs. salesguided), how they prefer to consume information, etc.

“You want to identify the type of customers who usually perform better than the average customer.

As you increase the ratio of your target customers and decrease the ratio of your non-segmented customers, you’re actually able to increase business performance, drive down cost per acquisition, drive down customer churn, and increase ARPU or customer lifetime value.”

Start with Demographic and Geographic, then layer in Psychographic and Behavioral – you’ll build your customer segments based on the first two categories. And then when you’re doing your persona work, go out and actually try to learn more about those segments to overlay psychographic and behavioral characteristics. »

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So you’ll want to build a cohort analysis for things like survivability over time or lifetime value over time.

“Once you own one segment of the market, start to think about which adjacent segments of the market you could own that wouldn’t require a complete shift in your go-to-market strategy.”

What are the steps in the research/analysis of defining customer segments?

(e.g. their subscription type). You want to walk away from this stage with at least 3-5 different potential customer segments or segment hypotheses.

Use the MAP model – I’ve developed a framework for building a segmentation strategy, MAP stands for measure volume, analyze performance, and prioritize potential.

STEP 2: Analyze Performance – this is the meaty step where you’re in the spreadsheet and you want to either validate or invalidate those hypotheses that you have around these potentially good segments. After this analysis, you want to have 1-3 high-performing segments that you want to pursue.

STEP 1: Measure Volume – the first step is to identify how many customers you have in different groups, and patterns between groups, to develop preliminary hypotheses about your most valuable segments. Start by understanding how many customers you have in different groups.

Build a big dataset – in Excel or Google Sheets. There’s no fancy tools that you need. Merging all the data together is the hardest part of this. You’ll want to gather customer data from current customers, trialers, and churned customers.

Slice and dice the data to get 3-5 segment hypotheses – look for patterns or affinities between groups of customers. You’ll want to try and find information for all 4 categories (firmographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral), plus a fifth category that I call account data

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Compare segments based on performance metrics – for example, do these customers convert better than average, or have an above average high retention rate.

The variables that matter most depend upon your business model – if you’re a non-subscription business that depends upon repeat purchase, the number of times someone is purchasing from you, and lifetime value may be more important.

If you’re a self-serve business, trial to paid conversion rates is going to be incredibly important. If you’re an enterprise B2B, close rate is going to be more important.

Build cohort analyses – the dataset spreadsheet will tell you how much money you got from a segment over the course of 12 months, but it won’t tell you what that segment’s conversation rate was or what their survivability was like.

Model the potential financial impact of focusing on specific customer segments – for example, if I were able to increase the amount of customers I have in this customer segment by 10%, and they were performing at this conversion rate (compared to the average customer who performs at some lower conversion rate), how much would I be able to increase the overall conversion rate of my business?

You can start to see the impact and the ROI from focusing on really specific customer segments.

STEP 3: Prioritize Potential – the problem we want to solve here is, can we win this in the market?

Is the market big enough? – how large is this market? Even if you’ve found the best performing customers, it does you no good if there are only 10 more of them. You want to make sure that the target market you’re going after is going to be able to sustain your own growth ambitions as a business. Rule out if some segments are too small for you to focus on. This will also help you to hone in on a segment if you have limited resources and can only afford to focus on one How fast the market is growing? – how many new businesses or potential customers would we expect to enter into this market in the next few years? That could be from new startups coming into existence, existing companies adopting this product for the first time, or existing companies switching from one solution to another. Start asking yourself, what percentage has a solution today and what percentage will be looking for a solution.

What’s the customer acquisition cost – understand how much it’s costing you to acquire these customers today and whether that’s affordable. What channels are you acquiring them on? Is that acquisition strategy scalable? You don’t want to invest in a segment that you can’t scale meaningfully, so you want to assess that and then understand the impact to your strategy.

What does the competitive landscape look like – I say this one with a grain of salt

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because you never want to change your strategy based on what your competitors are doing. It’s more about understanding if your segments are a “blue sky opportunity” or if they’re competitive.

This will shape your marketing strategy as well as your modeling.

Use MAP to pick the top segments – knock out segments that are too small or too costly. Take everything into account to choose the most attractive markets (if you can’t go after every segment).

Add color with qualitative research – perform prospect/customer interviews & surveys to inform positioning, go-tomarket, messaging, and pricing you have for each segment.

What are the steps in rolling out segmentation to start treating segments differently in sales and marketing?

Bring key stakeholders along for the journey – you don’t want them to be shocked at the very end, and you want to start to understand from them, what do you need to be successful? They’re probably going to need some new positioning and understanding of how does this product, our existing product, work for this customer segment?

Audit what the customer experience looks like now for this segment/these segment(s) – to determine where along the customer journey you need to optimize.

Are you doing a good job at delivering relevant and personalized experiences for the segment today or is it completely generic? You kind of want to put yourself in the in the mind of that customer segment and start the entire journey.

Examples of segmentation rollout in marketing Test value props with PPC (pay per click) campaigns – validate the value proposition that resonates with new segments or potential segments.

Buying journeys on the website – if your customers land on the homepage, do they know where to go? If they go to

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your drop down menu, is there somewhere that directs them where to go?

Use segment-specific language – even if your value propositions are almost identical for each segment, you should word the proposition in a way that resonates with that particular segment.

Examples of segmentation rollout in sales Pitch deck for each segment – if you have multiple, the reps need to understand what the value propositions are for each of those segments.

Different battle cards – reps should be able to identify early on a call what segment a prospect falls into. Then they’ll go to that specific battle card.

Different pricing models – based on the segment the prospect falls under and what your business would be offering.

Sales enablement and training should incorporate segmentation – when you’re doing role playing, try to make it as personalized as possible within the lens of your new customer segments so that the sales reps are getting that experience.

Examples of segmentation rollout in Customer Success Capture information through in-app onboarding to inform messaging – present different product experiences based on the information the customer provides.

For example, if your two main verticals are customer success teams and marketing teams, but I sign up and say I’m on a marketing team, the communication sent to me should acknowledge that I’m on a marketing team instead of it being generic.

Begin meeting expected service experiences – if your customer segment expects that they’d be able to self-serve through chat, but you only offer phone support or email support at the moment, then you’ll want to meet with your customer success team to discuss how you can provide a support model that better fits with the customer segment.

Examples of segmentation rollout for Product Build roadmap around segments – be clear that this feature or this product is

being built for this segment to drive this impact. That makes the product team feel empowered because they know exactly who they’re trying to solve the problem for and then they can find the best solution to that problem. It also makes it so much easier for everyone else across the organization to know why the product team is investing in that, who it’s for, and where it will impact.

How long does the process take (the research, and the roll-out) to start acting on segmentation in sales and marketing?

Research phase length varies based on resources – as quickly as one quarter if you have one product manager or product marketer who can commit a fulltime effort to this project. It could take you 6 months though if it’s something you’re half investing in or if it’s a sidedesk project.

Roll-out is continuous – Once you have your customer segments, you should always be rolling out strategies that are focused on those customer segments.

But look for quick wins early, especially if you’re the product marketer. If this is the work that you’re bringing forward, you want to actually start to see those ratios going in the right direction as your customer base becomes weighted more toward the target segment(s).

How does segmentation impact pricing and packaging?

Pair segmentation with a willingness to pay study – you have a couple of options here. You could do a conjoint analysis, which is quite complex. Or you can do a Van Westendorp, which is a much simpler model that involves surveying buyers about the points at which a price is suspiciously cheap, a good deal, getting expensive, and prohibitively expensive. If I do the Van Westendorp, I also pair that with a MaxDiff kind of feature preference study as well.

Examine your value metrics and feature signals – are you pricing your product based on feature access or is based »

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OneGuide OneGuide on a usage metric (or both)? Is that a metric that your customers see as being meaningful for their business?

You might create one price book with different packages for different segments, or you might create multiple price books – if one price book, you’ll want your different packages to resonate with particular customer segments; it’s going to be clear who that segment is, and pricing is going to reflect that segment’s willingness to pay. Or, a great example of the multiprice book approach is businesses that support both companies and agencies, and have completely different price books for each.

Pricing should be iterative – this work that you’re going to do with your customer segments will give you a really great signal, but only once it’s out in the market and live with these customer segments will you actually be able to see how it performs and what pieces of it need to be iterated on. So it’s just part of that evolving, go-to-market strategy for each of your customer segments.

What tools and resources make segmentation easier (software tools, research ?

Excel – for the data model slicing and dicing.

A tool that supplements your customer data (e.g. Clearbit) – you can place a lot more information into your dataset with a tool like this because, as long as you have something like the customer’s email address, then you can supplement things like, what vertical are they in, how large is their business, how much revenue does their business run, especially in B2B. That’s what Clearbit specializes in.

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of performance data from each of your segments. Also includes the customer’s “job to be done” that they want along with what the pains and gains are.

How does your segmentation evolve?

Continuously develop a deeper understanding – I love to use the analogy of the game of Risk because most people have played it. It’s about world domination. The segmentation business is kind of about market domination. In Risk, the number one thing you want to do in order to win is win one part of the board and fortify your bases there so that you can start to get more resources. Most people will choose Australia as the first place that they want to own, but you’re never going to say “now I own Australia, I’m going to go after North America” because those are on completely two different ends of the map. You’re going to say, “what are the territories adjacent to Australia that I can start to make one move out, and then another move out.”

Evolve segmentation to enter adjacent segments once you “own” a segment of the market – customer segmentation is truly the same way as the strategy in Risk. You want to start to think that once you own one segment of the market, what are the adjacent segments of the market you could own which wouldn’t require a complete shift in your go-tomarket strategy?

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Internal docs • New positioning docs – frameworks for every customer segment is critical to making sure that all the go-tomarket teams are aligned.

Get buy-in from the beginning – make sure that the business is onboard with conducting a customer segmentation.

If the C-suite leaders or different stakeholders aren’t willing to change their business strategy around this customer segment, it’s going to be wasted and there’s going to be a lot of frustration.

• A segment profile one-pager – a quantitative buyer profile including metrics and key pieces

Take a data-backed approach – leave your ego on the table because this isn’t about opinion or different people’s

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biases. Those may drive some initial hypotheses that you have going into the exercise, but you have to be willing to let the data speak to you and show you what patterns are going to emerge.

Talk to customers – you can do the entire process with just the data, but there’s probably something along the way that you’ve missed. Why does this customer segment convert better than the other segments or why do they stick around longer: getting those nuggets of gold out of the customers are going to be key to being able to roll out your go-to-market plan effectively.

What are the common pitfalls?

Don’t just turn up the volume – don’t stop after step 1, “Measure Volume”.

You haven’t validated that this segment actually performs well yet and you haven’t validated that you can win more with this segment then your average customer yet.

Don’t wait until the end to bring in your stakeholders – you want to make sure they understand how they’re going to be able to use this and how it’s going to help them reach their goals.

Don’t get too stressed about the dataset – especially in the beginning, any data is better than no data. Some companies may have 100 columns of data while some may have 5, and that’s okay. Just starting with some opinion about your customer segment, you’re going to be better off than the average business who doesn’t even think about this.

Don’t have the data team lead the project – they don’t always have the market context, product context, or customer context to put it all together.

Making sure that you actually have the right team on this with the right experience level is really important too.

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Boaz Maor Boaz Maor currently serves as Chief Customer Officer at Talech and has previously led customer success at OpenGov, Mashery, newScale, and FreeMarkets.

Managing A Customer Success Team

CATEGORY: CUSTOMER SUCCESS WHO IS THIS GUIDE FOR?

Founders and customer success leaders, especially at companies that are building out proactive customer success for the first time.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Customer success exists to mazimize both the value a customer gets from your product, and the value your company gets from the customer.

• Customer success teams need to tailor their work with a customer based on the customer’s maturity level (how sophisticated that customer is) and their engagement level (how healthy their relationship is with you).

• Customer success may be responsible for upselling, especially at companies with higher sales velocity.

• Structure CSM compensation with a bonus (vs. commission) based on performance against a weighted set of objectives.

What are the key objectives of a CS team?

larger the program scope, the better.

However it’s not enough to just receive the money.

Maximize the value your customers extract from your solutions – if you’re in doubt on what to do, err on the side of optimizing for the customer, and 9 times out of 10 you’d probably be right. No customer ever wants the product, they want the outcome from the product; if they could get that outcome without using the product, that’d be even better.

Program execution – how well you execute to deploy and maintain the solution (so that the customer actually gets value for what they bought). If your implementation or support is poor, customers will get less value from the solution. Program execution is predominantly the domain of professional services for deployment and the technical support for availability.

Maximize the value of customers to your company (monetary and nonmonetary) – this includes things that are easy to quantify like retention, upsells, cross-sells and reduction in the number of cases to support. All of these are simple to quantify. It also includes non-monetary things like product feedback, references and case studies.

Program value – the value the customer sees from the solution.

Customer success needs to help customers see the value of the solution in terms of their own business outcomes. Help them by showing them the ROI, showing them the savings, and showing them the results.

What are the levers for maximizing the value to a customer?

Program scope – how much the customer buys from you, how many solutions did they buy, and how many people are using those solutions?

Initially, sales sets program scope, and depending on who owns upsells, customer success may expand it. The

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What are the functions within the broader customer success org?

Professional services – responsible for deploying the solution. Their implementation-type work is projectbased, and measured on time, budget, and quality.

Technical support – takes over the technical relationships with a customer after the customer goes live. They’re »

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measured on how quickly and how well they solve problems that customers encounter.

Customer success management – similar to technical support in the fact that it’s a time-based system as opposed to a projectbased system. However, it’s focused on the business relations, not technical relations and customer support. So what they’re trying to do is improve usage, drive program expansion and ultimately drive more value to the customer.

Specialist knowledge management and/ or customer ops at larger companies – some organizations might have a separate knowledge management department that’s responsible for creating reusable assets. Additionally, depending upon your revenue operations structure, a customer success operations team might support the other teams on projects by deploying methodologies, deploying tools, conducting reporting, etc.

What does proactive customer success do?

Helping customers see value from their contract – it’s always the responsibility of CSMs to optimize the initial deployment so that’ll be successful. CS needs to ensure that the customer is utilizing and seeing value from the full breadth of their contract.

Occasionally expanding the contract – sometimes program expansion (upselling) is also done by CSMs. Whether it’s executed

by CS or sales, land-and-expand is almost always a must-have strategy in SaaS because very few customers buy everything up-front.

When does it make sense for CS to own upselling?

The longer the sales cycle (the bigger the ACV), the more sales should own upselling – the more investment the company makes in building personal relationships between salespeople and customers, the more you want the salesperson to continue to upsell.

If it takes years to build the relationship, you don’t want to transform that ownership to someone else.

If the initial sales interaction is quick, CSMs should own upselling – if the interaction is extremely digitized and quick,

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and there is very little relationship between the salesperson and the customer, then the CSM likely has the chance to develop a stronger relationship with the customer than the salesperson. In that case, you want the salesperson to churn through as many prospects as possible to yield the initial deal, and then pass it over to someone else to execute and upsell.

What does proactive customer success do day-to-day?

Assess customers – the more energy you put into understanding your customer, the better you can be in the service you offer.

Customer health – subjective measure of the relationship between me and my vendor or me and my customer.

Customer maturity – objective assessment of the customer’s ability to do their work. Some people are better equipped than others – some customers have more experience, more resources, less technical debt, etc.

Engage with customers based on that assessment – what you want to do with the customer changes based on their health and maturity. Those assessments dictate how CSMs need to engage with their customers.

If health is weak, CSMs may need to drive value; if maturity is weak, they may need to boost execution.

At what stage does it make sense to start having specialized CSMs? Early on, the customer success responsibilities are split across other teams – the head of product is doing deployment; the head of sales, or maybe even the CEO, is managing the relationship; someone from engineering is probably owning support.

As the company starts to grow, you’ll start to see more dedicated functions. The first one that you see getting established normally is support because you want to protect engineering from the disruption of hourly interruptions throughout the day.

Implementation/onboarding is next, so that product can get back to their day job.

Proactive customer success comes last.

At $3-5M ARR, it starts to make sense for a senior person to lead customer success – the exact scale depends upon the number of customers. If you have few,

large customers, it’s actually easier to manage longer without someone because the head of sales and the CEO are probably involved with every one of those customers. If you need lower touch customer success (to support many more, smaller customers), you’ll want to bring a CS leader on sooner.

How many CSMs do you need?

There isn’t one recommended ratio – there are two problems with ratios: first, ratios tend to be based on ARR, which is existing dollars.

Just focusing on retention and protecting existing dollars is very defensive. And second, any ratio based on current ARR could undervalue potential for land-and-expand growth. You want to manage each customer to their potential, but that potential is much harder to define.

Early on, over-invest – you simply have to make those early customers successful, even if you can’t create an ROI analysis to back up the investment. The success of growing, expanding, and scaling out depends on that early success. Also, factor in how much time a CS team frees up for other people, (e.g. sales, product).

When you get to scale, look at ROI – what results can you drive if you add people. This is the same as for any other function. You need to look at how many customers CS can serve, what the impact will be on retention or NRR, and how valuable that impact would be to the business.

When hiring for CSMs, what should you look for?

If the vertical requires domain knowledge, seek that out – some verticals have very specific industry knowledge, e.g. Cyber Security is all incremental. Every solution out there sells what they do with respect to what exists today. If you haven’t been there before, you’ll hit roadblocks with customers who know more than you.

Create diversity in the team to scale successfully – hire a mix of domain expertise, sales background, operations/program management, etc. when you first build out the CS team. Diversity allows for good team insights, then over time, you can start to narrow your target profile down as you hone the efficiency of your model.

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What metrics should be tracked?

Track the state of customers – track your customer life-phases: new customers, customers in the process of onboarding, live customers, inactive customers (the stages depend upon the business).

Track value derived by customers – this is often the hardest thing to do. You need to figure out how to measure the value your customers get from your product.

Occasionally, the ROI is easy. For instance, I worked at a company where customers reduced the cost they paid suppliers, and the value was the discount they achieved.

But, usually measuring the value you generate for customers is difficult, and it’s worth working very hard to figure it out.

Track things that customers give/do that are valuable to your company – if it’s very valuable for your business, you should track it, e.g. number of case studies, references, etc.

Track customer sentiment/experience – the customer outcome and the customer experience are different things. I can get the outcome, but I hate your company.

Or, I’ve had lots of customers that never got any value, but they just loved the experience. Include some measure of customer happiness (e.g. NPS, CSAT).

“No customer ever wants the product, they want the outcome from the product. If they could get that outcome without using the product, that’d be even better.” that customer. But if that case study is really important, then it’s worth it.

How should CSM comp be structured?

CSMs usually don’t get a commission, they get a bonus – it’s much more common for CSMs to get a bonus vs. a commission. This allows the bonus to be based somewhat on commercial impact (like a commission), but also to be somewhat based on driving value to the customer and on driving nonmonetary value to the company.

What tools are in the CS tech stack?

Track renewal metrics – financial metrics have to start with net renewal, in terms of dollars. Also look at on-time renewal. Of the customers who are up for renewal this quarter, what % renewed?

A CRM “source of truth” in the background – you must have a CRM to work with other teams, but CRMs are predominantly funnel-oriented, which isn’t ideal for everything a CS needs to do.

How do you set good goals for CSMs?

Customer management platform – a customer success-specific tool, like Gainsight. If you have very few, very large customers, you can probably get by with spreadsheets and Salesforce.

Factor in value to the customer, value to us, and non-monetary value – define a set of objectives that are focused on the value to the customer, a set of objectives that are monetary value to us, and a set of objectives that are non-monetary. Then assign percentage weights to each of those objectives that works towards the hundred percent of a CSM’s goal. The weighting allows you to go to the CEO or Head of Marketing and say, “How important is it to get that case study,” because if it’s really important, you can weigh it heavily, and you may compromise on some dollars from

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Input tools (to get data) – tools that help you get customer data, like telemetry for usage data, or research subscriptions (e.g.

Bloomberg, Gartner) for industry data, and LinkedIn for data on where buyers/users are moving.

Analysis tools (to analyze data) – BI and reporting tools to analyze and read out data so that the CS team can make decisions based on it.

Engagement tools (to act on data) – tools that allow CS to scalably connect with customers, e.g. email campaign tools, in-app guidance tools. It’s super important to use in-app guidance tools, like WalkMe or Pendo, because it makes sense for the customer to get a notification in the product on the page, as opposed to an email.

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Balance value to the customer and value to the company – like sales, CS should aim to maximize commercial value, but CS also needs to be a counter-balance. If the company focuses too much on extracting value, the ROI for the customer is going to be diminished, and they won’t buy. CS must help the customer achieve value.

What are the common pitfalls?

Deteriorating into glorified support or sales development – if you’re not crisp on what CS is, it’s easy for the function to deteriorate into glorified support (where it becomes entirely reactionary) or glorified sales development (where CS just gives opportunities to salespeople.

This is especially common when CS reports to CRO).

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Setting a Blog Content Strategy – Maria Waida is a SaaS blog expert and the founder of SaaSy Copywriting, where she specializes in content to help companies develop thought leadership positions in their industries and propel inbound sales. In this guide, she describes the types of content that B2B companies should write for their blogs, how to align blogs with overall strategy, and how to tune content for maximum SEO impact.

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Security Compass and Uberflip, and has won an ABMie award for best ABM campaign at scale. In this guide, she shares how to select an ABM account list, and how marketing and sales should work together to execute ABM campaigns.

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Hiring a Product Marketer – Ryan Goldman has led marketing or product marketing at Pendo,

SoundCloud, Sentry, SignalFx, and Cloudera, and over the course of his career, he’s managed or hired 15+ B2B product marketers. In this guide, he explains how to find a product marketer who can serve as a bridge between the product, the sales org, and the market.

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Managing B2B Product Launches and Releases – Mary Sheehan is the head of University

Student and SMB Marketing at Adobe and she previously led the product marketing at SocialChorus.

In this guide, she describes how to prepare for, coordinate, and measure product launches of all types, from routine releases to major new offerings.

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Positioning and Launching a New Product – Dan Murphy has led product marketing at Privy and Drift, where he’s overseen over 70 product launches and more than a dozen large, new product style launches. In this guide, he walks through how to position and launch major new offerings, like new products, products introduced to new verticals, acquired products, and important partnerships.

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Designing a Sales Org for a Technical Product – Navid Zolflaghari is the VP of Sales at Branch (Series E startup with $350M+ in funding) and has previously been a sales leader for technical products at Boomerang Commerce and Google. In this guide, he lays out how to hire, train, and resource a sales team that needs a deep understanding of a complex product.

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LORI HARMON

Designing a Sales Org for a High-velocity Sale – Lori Harmon is currently Vice President of Global Cloud Digital Sales & Customer Success at NetApp and author of 42 Rules for Building a HighVelocity Inside Sales Team. In this guide she outlines how high-velocity sales teams should design their sales org, set up their processes and leverage tech tools to drive efficiency and productivity.

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Recruiting and Hiring Account Executives – Lianne Gong is a sales recruiter with experience

hiring hundreds of sellers for companies like Gong, Pluralsight, Zscaler, Anaplan, and SuccessFactors.

In this guide, she outlines what to look for when hiring SMB, Mid-market, and Enterprise AE’s, how to apply outreach and sequencing best practices to recruiting, and how to close great candidates.

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SALES ORG DESIGN & MANAGEMENT

Planning for Predictable Growth and Accurate Forecasting – Anthony Cessario is VP of

Industries and GTM Solutions at Clari, the revenue operations and forecasting platform. In this guide, he explains how good forecasts are a part of a bigger predictable growth strategy, and lays out how to design and instrument a repeatable revenue process with strong processes and accurate data.

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Driving Sales Velocity in Complex Enterprise Deals – Mark Vashon has led sales at major enterprise software providers including SuccessFactors, AgilOne, and ServiceMax. In this guide, he describes how startups should navigate the varied stakeholders, established processes, and long sales cycle that comes with enterprise selling.

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Building a Sales Development (SDR) function – Chris Flores leads sales development at Bennie, and was previously head of sales development at Namely as the company grew from 4 to 600 employees and $0 to $65M in ARR. In this guide, he describes best practices for designing the SDR role, establishing processes, and building the team.

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Planning and Managing Outbound Prospecting – Jason Bay is the Founder and Chief

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Building a Sales Enablement Function – Christi Wall has led Revenue Enablement at Series

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MARKET STRATEGY

TAMARA GROMINSKY

Customer Segmentation – Tamara Grominsky is the Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce. She’s also led product marketing at SMB-focused companies including FreshBooks and Yellow Pages. In this guide, she explains why customer segmentation is a powerful tool for improving conversion, acquisition cost, churn, and lifetime value. She outlines how to take on a segmentation project – from analysis to product packaging.

Market Targeting Lead Conversion

Deal Conversion

Retention

PARTNERSHIPS & ACQUISITIONS

SUNIR SHAH

Planning a SaaS Partnership Strategy – Sunir Shah is the founder and CEO of AppBind, a software company that facilitates partners reseller relationships, and was previously Head of Platform at FreshBooks, where he managed 70 integration partners. In this guide, he describes the different types of partnerships software companies commonly build, and how to approach both integration partnerships and channel partnerships.

Lead Volume

26

OneGuide | Q1 2022

Upselling

Retention

FindExpertise

Product & Strategy

ZAK PINES

PARTNERSHIPS & ACQUISITIONS

Enabling Service/ Consulting Partnerships – Zak Pines is VP of Partnerships at Formstack, a workplace productivity platform, where he’s built a team that manages hundreds of consulting and integration partners, responsible for 30% of the company’s new business. In this guide, he lays out the key components of partner enablement and outlines how to create power-users and advocates at partner agencies and consultancies.

Lead Volume

Upselling

Retention

PARTNERSHIPS & ACQUISITIONS

DAVID DEMRES

Integrating an Add-on Acquisition – David Demres is the Senior Director of Strategic Programs

at Revalize, a manufacturing software provider, where his responsibilities include M&A. Across similar previous roles, he’s helped integrate 10+ add-on acquisitions. In this guide, he explains how to plan for a successful add-on integration from pre-close planning to full integration 90-180 days later. David covers financial, operational, technical, and communications aspects of the integration process.

M&A

MARK STIVING

PRICING

Increasing Prices (Or Repackaging to Charge More) – Mark Stiving is Chief Pricing Educator at Impact Pricing, an advisory firm specializing in value-based pricing and author of the books Impact Pricing and Win, Keep, Grow. In this guide, he describes how to manage a price increase including deciding how much more to charge, which customers should see a price increase, and how to manage the roll-out.

Price Optimization

Upselling

PAYMENTS

GREG MYERS

Optimizing a Payments Processing Partnership – Greg Myers is a payments ecosystem expert and the host of the Monetize your Payments podcast. In this guide, he outlines the different types of payment processor relationship options available to software companies, along with the risks, benefits, and considerations that come with each.

Volume per Rep

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Retention

Upselling

Q1 2022 | OneGuide

27

FindExpertise

Customer Success

CS ORG DESIGN & MANAGEMENT

MARANDA DZIEKONSKI

Hiring Customer Success Managers – Maranda Dziekonski is currently the Chief Customer Officer

at Swiftly, where she’s also responsible for People Operations. She’s previously led success and support functions at companies including Lending Club and HelloSign. In this guide, she outlines what to look for in a CSM hire and how to evaluate candidates.

Hiring

Customer Activation

Upselling

Retention

KRISTI FALTORUSSO

CS ORG DESIGN & MANAGEMENT

Codifying Your Company’s Customer Success Playbooks – Kristi Faltorusso is currently the VP of Customer Success at ClientSuccess and has previously led the function at IntelliShift, BetterCloud, and Sisense. Her specialty is scaling customer success at hyper-growth companies on their way to $100M in ARR. In this guide, she explains how CS teams can craft repeatable playbooks to handle common scenarios. She lays out four families of CS playbooks: risk, expansion, lifecycle, and objectives.

Customer Activation

Upselling

Retention

CS ORG DESIGN & MANAGEMENT

BOAZ MAOR

Managing a Customer Success Team – Boaz Maor has run customer success at Telech, OpenGov,

Mashery, newScale, and FreeMarkets, sometimes launching the function for the first time, and sometimes leading teams as large as 200. In this guide, he lays out how to run a CS function, including what the team should do, who to hire, what metrics to track, and how to handle compensation (including for CSMs responsible for upselling).

Hiring

Customer Activation

Upselling

Retention

CS ORG DESIGN & MANAGEMENT

EMILIA D’ANZICA

Emilia D’Anzica is the founder of GrowthMolecules, a customer success and customer marketing consultancy. She previously led CS at Copper and WalkMe. In this guide, she explains how customer journey mapping can help companies plan and optimize their customers’ experience from onboarding to expansion.

Volume per Rep

28

OneGuide | Q1 2022

Retention

Upselling

FindExpertise

Customer Success

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MARKETING

LISA PRATT

Managing Customer Engagement Marketing – Lisa Pratt is the Vice President of Customer

Engagement Marketing at UKG where she leads a team responsible for customer marketing, customer intelligence, advocacy, and community for more than 20,000 customers. In this guide, she explains how customer marketing can make customer retention and expansion efforts more effective at scale, and describes how to manage the function.

Customer Activation

Retention

Upselling

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MARKETING

MARY THENGVALL

Building a Developer Relations Function – Mary Thengvall leads developer relations at Camunda, and has long been a thought leader in the space, authoring the book The Business Value of Developer Relations and publishing DevRel Weekly. In this guide she describes what DevRel is, and how to stand up a function to drive developer awareness, enablement, and engagement.

Lead Volume

Retention

CUSTOMER ONBOARDING

DONNA WEBER

Developing a Customer Onboarding Process – Donna Weber is the author of Onboarding Matters and has CS leadership experience at B2B software companies like SugarCRM and Jaspersoft.

In this guide, she outlines the stages of a typical onboarding process, and how to structure customer onboarding, implementation, and education, especially for companies with a significant professional services component.

Customer Activation

Upselling

Retention

CUSTOMER ONBOARDING

SHAREIL NARIMAN

Scaling Onboarding with Self-guided Pathways – Shareil Nariman is the Head of Customer

Experience at Arrows. Previously, he led customer lifecycle management, including onboarding, at Sprout Social and Booking.com. In this guide, he explains how companies that offer lower-priced SaaS products can leverage cross-functional collaboration and automation tools to design high-quality selfguided customer onboarding experiences.

Volume per Rep

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Customer Activation

Retention

Upselling

Q1 2022 | OneGuide

29

FindExpertise

Data & Revenue Ops

SALES OPS

JEN FLANAGAN

Implementing Salesforce – Jen Flanagan is the Director of Sales Operations at Ordergroove, and has built or advised on dozens of Salesforce instances. In this guide, she explains what Salesforce can do natively, with integrations, and with customization and outlines, how Salesforce objects work and how to think about the right setup for your business.

Volume per Rep

Cross-functional Coordination

SALES OPS

RACHEL HALEY

Capacity Planning – Rachel Haley has run capacity planning while in sales ops leadership roles at

Snowflake, Sumo Logic, and Salesforce. In this guide, she explains how sales and finance should come together around a plan, details the steps of a good sales capacity planning process, and lays out the major deliverables.

Hiring

Volume per Rep

SALES OPS

SEAN LANE

Building a Sales Ops Function – Sean Lane has led revenue operations at Drift and Upserve, and hosts Drift’s Operations Podcast. In this guide, he explains the different roles sales ops plays, and how to build both the org and processes that make up the function.

Volume per Rep

Deal Conversion

Cross-functional Coordination

DATA ANALYTICS

TIM JENKINS

Building a Data Analytics Function – Tim Jenkins currently leads Strategy and Analytics at Lucid, where he was the first data hire and has grown the function to a team of 16. In this guide, he outlines the key responsibilities of data and analytics teams, the different pieces of technology they need to do their work, and how to structure a growing data function.

Market Targeting

30

OneGuide | Q1 2022

Cross-functional Coordination

Start Community Conversations With Monthly Roundtables SAMPLE PORTFOLIO ROUNDTABLE CALENDAR

Q1

INCREASING LEAD VOLUME

Q2 TRACKING AND FORECASTING

Designing outbound email campaigns

Building a lead to revenue operating model

with Elyse Savaki, cold outreach copywriting expert, Founder of OutreachCopy.com

with Mike Madden, VP of Demand Gen at AlphaSense, fmr Director of Demand Gen at Marketo

Optimizing paid search advertising

Building a data analytics function

with Greg Finn, digital marketing expert, CMO at Cypress North

with Anthony Cessario, VP of Industries and GTM Solutions at Clari

Customer engagement marketing

Customer engagement marketing

with Lisa Pratt, VP of Customer Engagement Marketing at UKG

with Tim Jenkins, Head of Strategy and Analytics at Lucid

– for sales and sales development leaders

– for marketing and rev ops leaders

– for marketing leaders

– for sales, rev ops, and finance leaders

– for CS and marketing leaders

Q3

HIRING AND TRAINING Hiring CSMs

– for business operations, rev ops, and product leaders

Q4

PLANNING FOR THE NEW YEAR Customer Segmentation

– for CS and people leaders

– for product, and marketing leaders

with Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly

with Tamara Grominsky, Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce

Recruiting AEs

Outcome-based Roadmapping

with Lianne Gong, sales recruiter with experience at Gong, Pluralsight, and SuccessFactors

with Rajesh Nerlikar, Co-Founder at Prodify and co-author of Build What Matters

Designing go-to-market trainings

Capacity Planning

with Roz Greenfield, sales enablement expert with experience at Optimizely and Oracle

wwith Rachel Haley, sales ops leader with experience at Snowflake, Sumo Logic, & Salesforce

– for sales and people leaders

– for sales enablement, sales, and people leaders

– for product and technology leaders

– for sales and finance leaders

Build your 2022 calendar of expert-led roundtables | Email sales@askoneguide.com

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