I joined Clari in late 2018. Clari was 5+ years old at the time, but I approached it like it was a blank slate. I had seen what good looks like at previous companies and by observing peers, and I wanted to put a real stamp on Clari’s GTM engine. We had 10 quota carrying AEs, 5 SDRs, a handful of managers, and an even smaller handful of revenue operations folks.
Fast forward to today: our team has quadrupled, we’ve brought on 800+ new customers and navigated two acquisitions, and revenue has increased more than 6x.
I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and learned plenty of lessons amid all the growth. The three most important lessons relate to:
- Designing your revenue strategy
- Building your revenue team culture
- Scaling yourself
Let’s explore each lesson in depth.
#1 Designing your revenue strategy
Early in their lives, most companies don’t have fully formed ideas about who their target market is, how to define their ideal customer profile (ICP), or how best to navigate the buying group. I had a bit of a head start at Clari since we had a good number of customers already. Even still, our GTM engine wasn’t nearly as focused as it should have been.
One of my first priorities was clearly defining and memorializing our ICP. I had seasoned reps who were flipping through their Rolodex and targeting huge enterprise companies that Clari just wasn’t ready for at the time. We could get initial meetings and create some interest among those accounts, but deals lost momentum and ultimately died.
I spent a lot of time with our customers to develop first-hand knowledge about what they liked and didn’t like, how they were actually using the product, and how they felt about pricing compared to other tech investments. Then I pulled sales, marketing, and product leaders together and we did an analysis of the current customer base as well as a deep dive on the short- and long-term roadmap. We determined that even though we could theoretically sell to a host of different companies, the ones that had the highest likelihood of turning into high-velocity pipeline and revenue were companies with 200-2,000 employees, using a certain set of technologies, employing a certain type of sales leader and operations persona.
The entire company rallied around this definition. SDRs and AEs built target lists, the marketing team designed their ABM programs, and the product team back-burnered features that didn’t matter as much to this cohort. We called this the “center of the bull’s-eye,” knowing that if we aimed there and defined a repeatable motion, we could expand to the next rings on the target.
Now that I was confident we were building real pipeline, I had to spend time bringing my “revenue cadence” to life. This is a philosophy I’ve had for much of my career, and it’s one of the reasons I was attracted to Clari in the first place. Running revenue requires a mastery of all the moments that make up the end-to-end revenue process: forecast calls, 1:1s, deal inspections, QBRs, board meetings, pipeline reviews, and everything in between.
I defined and documented all the revenue moments I needed the team to run and execute, and worked with my leaders to define how to run each moment. In the early days, we started with the most basic of these moments: weekly deal inspections, weekly forecast calls, and monthly “sequence of events” calls.
SOE calls happen every day of the last week of the quarter — every rep with a deal closing that month joins the call and talks through exactly what’s going to happen to bring the deal in. I listen, pressure test, and offer help where I can, and I leave the meeting with a high degree of confidence about where the month and quarter are going to land. And of course, we’re running all these moments out of Clari so there’s no burden of slide creation or manual reporting.
We did a similar exercise for our post-sales business. I dove in with Customer Success leaders to understand their processes, how they evaluated customer health, how they approached various customer touch points, and how key metrics were tracking. It’s critical that pre-sales and post-sales processes be tightly connected so the customer has a consistent experience across handoffs and you can deliver the value you promise.
I made sure that pre-sales teams were documenting all the things that matter most to the customer and were setting realistic expectations for when and how outcomes were going to be achieved. I got leaders on both sides of the aisle to sign off on this process, and once again, leaned on Clari as the single source of truth for all of this information capture and share. Now, I had confidence that nothing was going to get lost in translation and we had the right foundation for making sure our customers were maximizing their investment.
One key element of all this is a strong Revenue Operations partner. I see too many early stage companies stall on this hire and I think it’s a major mistake. Having a vision for what good looks like is one thing; actually implementing it is something else entirely. As much as you may want to focus on the operational things, the fact of life at an early stage company is that you’re going to be in the deals. You need to have a right-hand person who can lay the tracks and get the trains running right, helping bring your vision to life. If you don’t have this person already, make it your next priority. Trust me.
#2 Building your revenue team culture
Every hire is critical in a sales org, and that’s especially true in the early days. The type of person you’re looking for is not just a great seller. It’s someone who is willing and able to do the dirty work of defining processes, onboarding themselves, mentoring others, and staying cool through the highs and lows of the startup roller coaster. Experience matters to a certain extent, but attitude and aptitude matter more. I intentionally indexed toward sellers and leaders who were hungry, who had something to prove, and who were passionate about the product we were selling.
It’s also far more about quality than quantity in the early days. Don’t get seduced by the spreadsheet math that shows you “more reps = more revenue.” It’s better in the early days to have a smaller team of high performers than a large team of mediocre ones. It’s likely that you won’t have the pipeline to support a large team and you run the risk of putting in a lot of time and effort to hire and onboard, only to see high attrition rates. Building an empire of sellers for anticipated demand is unwise, especially in today’s environment.
Create a culture of performance and a culture of winning. Celebrate the behaviors you want to see, not just the results that people get. Keep your finger close to the pulse so you always know what’s going well and what needs extra attention. Make sure success and failure are communicated and documented and that your library of onboarding and enablement materials is updated constantly. Things move very quickly in the early days and you owe it to your early hires to give them the resources, coaching, and feedback they need to drive the company’s success.
A large part of my philosophy is empowerment. I hated to be micromanaged and I hate being a micromanager. I hire people who thrive in ambiguity and want autonomy to deliver their best work. I encourage people to take risks and try new things — especially in the early days. Your playbook is always evolving, and that evolution should come bottom-up from the people who are actually doing the work. This gives your sellers skin in the game, a sense of ownership. That’s the type of sales culture the best reps want to be part of, and it’s one you can create in the early stages of your company.
#3 Scaling yourself
My instinct, and probably yours, is to get into your team’s deals. This is necessary and helpful in the beginning of your tenure as you’re learning the business and building your strategies and processes. But you have to be very intentional about weaning yourself off of this habit.
Your job is to be the Chief Revenue Officer, not to be a “super rep.”
Always remember that you are infinitely unscalable. If the only way your company can win deals is based on your presence and your heroics, you’ve got problems coming your way sooner rather than later. This is why so much of my emphasis in building sales strategy is around building systems for scale.
Without making this a Clari commercial, I have to say that this is where our platform provides enormous value. Once you create and enforce the right cadence across your business, Clari gives you the ability to fly at whatever altitude you need to. You can get macro level insights from the analytics modules to understand trends, funnel views, and predictions, and you can zoom all the way into the deal-level to see precisely what’s going on and where there’s risk in the business.
And of course, instead of you and your team wasting precious time on a manual forecasting process, Clari makes submitting forecasts quick and painless. So you can always keep a finger on the pulse of the business and drive strategic conversations with your reps and managers. Of course, you always have to be ready to dive into deals, but you can multiply your impact by floating at a more strategic level instead of getting buried by granular details.
Ultimately, you’re able to make the right decisions for the company. The breadth of understanding you have allows you to allocate resources effectively, capture trends on deal cycles, and apply your energy and effort to high leverage areas of the business. Your CEO and board are likely not going to be satisfied with linear growth, so you need to drive the means for exponential unlock.
That’s what Clari allows me and countless other CROs to do.
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I hope this has been helpful. I encourage you to explore runrevenue.pro and to check out Clari’s podcast called “The Run Revenue Show.” You’ll find best practices we’ve gathered from studying the world’s best revenue teams as well as candid conversations with revenue leaders who are doing incredible things for their teams and companies.
And of course, if there’s anything I can help you with feel free to connect on LinkedIn.