Pointing your growing sales team upward through the twists and turns of rapid growth
This piece is from Ed Calnan, co-founder and President of Seismic.
Growing a company is hard. As a sales leader, your team has to continuously bring in customers to drive that growth. And having led sales here at Seismic since co-founding the company in 2010, I know what it’s like to grind to create that early momentum and spark growth.
The role of leading a sales team, though, evolves and changes during and after rapid growth. What worked for a sales team of 5 won’t work through a team of 50, or a team of 500.
But through my time growing and scaling Seismic’s sales organization, there are some key lessons I’ve learned on how to get your sales organization prepared to drive rapid growth and sustain it afterwards.
Key #1: Goal-setting and motivation
When you grow rapidly, expectations change every time you even make a sale. Your pipeline is going to make some massive jumps as you continue to expand. On the leadership level, this is one of the hardest things to do, involving team management as well as revenue projection.
As a small, fast-growing company, revenue projection is a combination of art and science. The “art” is sensing your competitive threats, understanding how your go-to-market strategy is changing, and how you think any new product launches will affect revenue. The “science” comes from looking at past quarters, analyzing growth in the industry, and tracking the overall marketplace. With modern sales technology, you can understand how much activity to project and how much revenue that will result in. You can even track it down to the sales call, as we do now. But to motivate your team, you always have to put goals out there on the individual level as well as the company level.
To keep a team focused, you need to work towards something. It can be as simple as “Let’s get 10 customers to pay us by the end of the year,” as it was in our early days at Seismic. But growth leads to more sophisticated strategies. Tying individual performance to organization-wide revenue targets also conveys to each seller how they directly impact the company’s success. At Seismic we always give praise when it’s due, and keep our team focused when they’re lagging. The combination of aggregate goals and individual goals shows our team how they’re succeeding for themselves as well as the company.
Key #2: Coaching to rapidly transfer knowledge to a growing team
Figuring out revenue goals and pipeline is critical on the larger level. However, that’s coupled with individual-level concerns as well, to scale for growth.
And to scale for growth effectively, it takes institutionalized processes to get sellers ramped as you grow.
In the early days, we could rely mostly on effort and tenacity to get things done. With a smaller team, you can control the entire team’s effort and workflow much easier, and knowledge transfer is much easier. But when you grow past a certain size, that knowledge transfer becomes harder.
Seismic’s 800 employees can’t all sit in call rooms with our veteran employees to know how we do things.
When you have sellers joining rapidly from different offices — and sometimes different countries — it takes a more formalized approach to getting your sales team onboarded and in-step with your methods, strategies, and messaging.
As Seismic grows, we’ve relied on a more formalized sales training program to get our new sellers ramped as quickly as possible. And a key for us has been something we have always done well at Seismic — just-in-time coaching.
Doing detailed prep before a sales call, and following up with a breakdown of performance on the spot, allows our sellers to immediately understand their performance and adjust as needed for the next time. Formalizing this kind of coaching, instead of doing it ad-hoc when we had a smaller team, has allowed us to continue to succeed in getting valuable real-time feedback to sellers.
The sooner you can get your sellers feedback, the better. Once they can get up-to-date on your process, they’ll be ramped and productive as quickly as possible.
Key #3: Keeping a focused sales team
One of the major successes for Seismic is keeping our eye on the ball and not getting distracted. Since the days when we were still making a name for ourselves and for the sales enablement industry until now, we have always understood our value and communicated it as well as possible. We make sure our sellers know exactly what was important to them — that our product was good, solved a real business need, and could make a difference for the organizations we were selling to. And especially critical early in growth, we don’t let our sales team get distracted by loftier goals or things we couldn’t impact.
By keeping laser-focused on our value, and refusing to set expectations around things we couldn’t reach, we keep everybody in line. Nobody on our sales team was thinking about an IPO on day one, or that our product could solve every single problem in marketing and sales. It is about getting the right message to the right people, so they could see how our product would impact their business and address their needs.
Now that we’re a larger company, we can take on more capabilities in our product and address more of how we see ourselves as an organization. But our sales organization still focuses on what we can control — what our product does, how we can communicate that value, and the people who need to hear our story.
Even with all the evolutions and changes through rapid growth, what has remained constant at Seismic has been our culture. Our attitude has always been the same. Skills change, and goals change. But our attitude has never been different. If you keep your sellers motivated, informed, and focused, then your sales team of any size is poised to succeed.
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Ed Calnan is the co-founder and President of Seismic. Find him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.
