Yesterday, Office Hours welcomed Lars Nilsson, VP Sales Development from Snowflake to talk about his learnings across 5 companies he helped take public.
Throughout the hour, Lars provided insightful perspectives on how to build sales organizations. These the five most memorable takeaways for me.
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In early-stage companies, founders sell for the first three to four quarters. Then, many founders opt to hire an AE. Hiring a sales or business-development representative (SDR/BDR) can be the better choice. Incoming account executives will want to see a significant lead volume before joining, especially when selling into the enterprise.
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Teams often overlook storytelling as a critical part of effective lead generation. Fear-of-missing-out or the inspiration of a potential future, stories equip champions inside customer organizations to sell the product through the buying process. Founders validate the effectiveness of their stories when hiring SDRs better. SDRs call ten-times as many prospects as AEs do. Much the better to iterate with greater speed and confidence.
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As the company grows, building the sales development team becomes the most productive source of pipeline particularly for enterprise-grade technical products. Hire for hunger. Then surround the new SDR/BDR with three pillars: strong training materials, a manager who cares about the employee’s success, and a peer to accelerate learning.
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At Snowflake, sales development lives within the marketing team. Lars manages his team through a single metric, meetings. Getting to an account late, a few days or a week after they’ve signed with a competitor accrues to the meeting metric (see why in the video).
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Last, exiting unlikely sales processes saves the company’s resources and boosts team morale. Closed – no decision is the worst outcome of an engagement.
We covered much more in the session including the techniques Snowflake uses to align account-based marketing with sales development & sales teams; how to structure career paths within the team; transitioning accounts between SDRs/BDRs to account executives; and the right SDR:AE ratios as companies scale.
Thank you, Lars, for the masterclass on sales development.
Note: I suffered some technical difficulties with video in the last 15 minutes and lost visuals, but the audio remains unblemished.
