Each month at General Catalyst we host leaders from high growth startups across New York for a working session on a relevant functional theme or challenge.
Our most recent session, led by Adam Clay, VP of Worldwide Sales at Black Duck Software, brought together top sales leaders for a conversation on building a world-class sales culture.
What are the necessary preconditions for scaling a sales team? How do you build the infrastructure to support high velocity growth? What simple hacks foster productivity within organizations?
Black Duck is a prolific cyber-security company focused on eliminating open source security vulnerabilities. The company has scaled to nearly 300 employees and serves over 1,800 customers including Intel, NEC, Nintendo, Olympus, SAP, and Samsung.
Clay’s perspective was complemented by a mix of retail, consumer, and enterprise sales leads including Outdoor Voices President Andrew Parietti, Abacus VP of Sales Michael Rosenberg, WayUp Head of Sales Jason Scheckner, Managing Director at Cadre Tom Stults, Rebagg Head of Business Development Ryan Russikoff, Neverware CEO Andrew Bauer, and Flow.io Vice President Samantha Kent, making for an interesting and comprehensive discussion.
- Define success between sales and marketing by one trackable metric
At Black Duck, success for lead-generation activities is benchmarked by one trackable metric: the sales qualified lead. Standardizing one metric for success between the departments creates focus and consistency, Clay says. While other metrics should inform this success and drive your demand generation strategy, aim to hold inbound and outbound teams accountable to at least one shared and well-understood metric.
2) Don’t underestimate the value of hiring a VP of Sales Operations
Hiring a VP of Sales Ops promotes productivity by enabling the VP Sales counterparts to focus on strategy and deal execution, Clay says. This hire functions as the traditional Sales VP’s data-focused partner and is responsible for things like forecasting, commissioning, quotas, systems, and financials, like customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratios.
“You can exhaust a tremendous amount of capital — even goodwill — in the organization by having the VP of Sales manage these aspects of the modern sales organization,” Clay says.
Clay recommends hiring someone with a strong finance profile, who is focused on operational excellence, shareholder interests, and winning. In fact, Black Duck’s VP of Sales Operations Ed Loftus is a former controller at Greylock Partners.
At what point does this hire make sense? As early as possible, Clay says. “Black Duck added it at 15 salespeople, but it would have been valuable at 5.”
3) Invest heavily in sales enablement
Taking the time to formally enable all members of the sales team — regardless of seniority — shortens time to productivity, fosters a strong culture, and creates consistency throughout an organization. Most importantly, enablement helps members of the team feel valued, while providing personal and professional growth for the individual. “We view an investment in sales enablement as both short- and long-term investment in our people and the company’s success,” Clay says.
While in the early days of a company this training can come informally from the sales manager, this process quickly proves inefficient at scale as training begins to distract managers from their core work. “If you’re hiring more people, by definition you have a large deal pipeline to address, and this will generally take priority for sales managers” Clay says. Black Duck handled this by investing in a global sales enablement organization responsible for ramping new members of the team and keeping skills sharp for everyone.
When does formal sales enablement become essential? While enablement isn’t one size fits all, Clay points to a 15–20-person sales organization as a rule of thumb.
Black Duck divides onboarding into two programs: Ground School and Flight School. Ground School is essentially a 20-hour “pre-orientation” program that incoming hires complete before their first day. This material educates incoming hires on the industry landscape, common customer pain points, and competition before their first day.
Having new hires complete this training on their own time builds an immediate culture of accountability and enables the onsite portion of training to be high-value.
4) Be hyper-prescriptive about process
Clay points to Vince Lombardi, former coach of the Green Bay Packers, as an inspiration. Lombardi famously required players to master one core play — the power sweep. Lombardi embodied the principle that “freedom comes through structure and discipline.”
Lombardi’s highly regimented coaching strategy is effective for any team — football or sales, Clay says. Black Duck’s “power-sweep” is their own selling system, which employees master before they start to innovate. “People may resist it at first, but it inspires confidence when they realize it helps them win as a team. Most of our sales innovation comes from our people — particularly those that have mastered our basic play,” Clay explained.
5) Identify what makes an effective employee, and let that inform your hiring.
Identify common personality traits among your most productive employees, and then hire based on these traits, Clay says. Black Duck, for example, screens for employees for the highly documented growth mindset, meaning they believe attributes are developed rather than innate, and are eager to cultivate these attributes.
Clay offered a tactics for screening for the growth mindset:
Make interviews behavioral. Instead of asking “how do you respond to feedback?” offer them constructive feedback and see how they respond. If a candidate says “um” a lot in an interview, for example, Clay calls them out and says “Hey, this is something we’ll have to work on. Are you ok with that?” He’s looking for someone who is receptive rather than offended by this feedback.
People with a growth mindset will also appreciate the heavy investments that make in sales enablement — it’s a “win-win”.
Icon credit: “Book” by Arthur Shlain from the Noun Project
