Transcript of the discussion with Priyadarshini:

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On today's show we are going to be talking about sales strategy and operations and to help us understand this area our guest on today's show is Priyadarshini Routh who is a director of sales strategy and operations at SalesforceIQ. SalesforceIQ is a company that was acquired by Salesforce very recently. This was sometime in 2014 and Salesforce I'm sure you're all familiar with. It is a leading customer relationship management software company and is in fact a public company based out of San Francisco.  Priyadarshini has been with SalesforceIQ for a little over a year and a half now and prior to that she was a senior manager for Kindle content acquisition at Amazon and before that she has done a whole bunch of other things. Priyadarshini was in consulting for a while, she was a business analyst with McKinsey and Company and she was also in business development at Cisco for some time for a little over three years. In terms of her educational background Priyadarshini has her bachelor's in actually quite a few things - we will ask her how that happened. She has a bachelor's in economics finance strategic management and computer science from University of Pennsylvania and she also has an MBA in marketing and operations from the Wharton School. All right. So I hope you enjoy today's discussion. And without further ado let's welcome Priyadarshini.

 

Sonali - Priyadarshini, hello welcome to the show.

 

Priyadarshini - Hi. Nice to be here.

 

Sonali - I have been trying to get a hold of you for so long. So you've moved to Bay Area year a half ago and the only way I could actually meet you was because of this podcast.

 

Priyadarshini - Haha.

Sonali - True.

 

Priyadarshini - You make me sound inaccessible Sonali.

 

Sonali - You are inaccessible. But, okay so first thing which I'm very curious about. As I was looking at your profile it seems that you have a bachelors in four different subjects right economics, finance, strategic management and computer science.

 

Priyadarshini - You didn't mention my minor in mathematics.

 

Sonali -  Oh my God yeah. How is that possible in the same in the same duration 2001 to 2006?

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah. Well so Penn undergrad is that's where I went. So, Penn is actually organized into four different schools and you have a School of Engineering, the Wharton School which is the school of business if you will and then a nursing as the College of Arts and Sciences. So I was cross registered across two schools Wharton and the School of Engineering. So in School of Engineering my major was computer science. In Wharton we don't really have majors at the undergrad level. You have concentrations. So my concentrations were in Finance and Strategic Management.

 

Sonali - So you studied quite a few subjects at the same time.

 

Priyadarshini - Quite a few subjects quite a few areas yes.

Sonali - And I'm guessing this is not normal. Right like this is not the typical undergrad student that you have been.

 

Priyadarshini - I mean I wouldn't know quite honestly. But yeah double majors and dual degrees are definitely a small sliver of the entire population but it's not entirely like I wouldn't say that I'm like a unicorn or something.

 

Sonali - Because I was like wow. Which one should I mention there are like five of these.

Priyadarshini - I think it just says that I'm scatterbrained.

 

Sonali - Alright well thank you so much for agreeing to do this podcast. And we will be talking about what does someone in sales strategy and operations do. So what I was thinking we could start with is if you can just share your career path briefly with us so far and what led you to finally be doing sales strategy and ops in SalesforceIQ.

 

Priyadarshini - Got it. So as you mentioned in the introduction, out of college I actually started in management consulting so worked for a couple of years at McKinsey. where like any other management consultant I dabbled in a whole bunch of different industries. Bunch of different problems. Really speaking I think it would be quite a challenge to find a theme from management consulting days. But one of the most important things that first helped me realize was that ultimately I wanted to own a function within a company. I wanted to be a line manager and preferably be in some kind of like you know a general manager role at some point in my career. So every subsequent decision I have made is essentially at least I tell myself that it's in pursuit of that larger aim. So out of McKinsey went to Cisco with the idea of focusing on one industry technology studied engineering in schools so that was a little bit of the appeal over there. And I wanted to also see how like after that decision like you know after your recommendation has been agreed upon how does the decision actually get operationalized How do some of the things work and the guts of a company.

 

Sonali - This is compared to your consulting job ?

 

Priyadarshini - Compared to my consulting job.

 

Sonali - Because in consulting you would just stop at the recommendation you wanted to get into the actual implementation of that recommendation.

 

Priyadarshini - Right. Or at least have some visibility into it. So I went to do business development really more corporate strategy at Cisco. Again learnt a ton about the technology industry and Cisco had a wide portfolio of businesses. I got to understand how infrastructure is different than software is different than certain applications and it's different than networking which was Cisco's core bread and butter which gave me a great sense of what that landscape looked like. And largely my job at Cisco was still advisory. So I partnered with a lot of different product GMs. In some cases people more at the distribution side so I did a bunch of things sales focused but I wouldn't say I had tremendous exposure to sales in my time at Cisco. But it gave me a great general understanding of businesses and its end at least in the scope of my projects. It gave me a chance to do things more end to end where I would come up with you know a certain like identify a problem, identify what the right thing to do over there is and also have some sense of how to actually do that or push it over the finish line. Went to business school after that and coming out of business school what I really wanted to do was focus on that execution piece and so . And for a few years I had wanted to own a P&L. I wanted to find out what that experience is.

 

Sonali - P&L is profit and loss.

 

Priyadarshini - Statement. So essentially be held responsible to a number I wanted to figure out like you know is this something that I would like to do later on in life. I’ve always glamorized it in my head. What does it really look like. So that’s what took me to Amazon because most tech companies are single P&L companies. But if you look in e-commerce or consumer goods, retail these are places where people. I would consider myself still an early career professional. So I think in early career you have the chance to own a P&L. Yeah. Big or small. I found myself at Amazon suddenly gifted close to a billion dollar P&L.  And I was like who is this person who is trusting me to do this job.

 

Sonali - So you owned when you say you owned a billion dollar P&L what does that mean.

 

Priyadarshini - That means is essentially that I'm responsible for both the top line growth as well as managing cost initiatives that feed into that P&L.

 

Sonali - And billion dollar is the revenue for that particular P&L.

 

Priyadarshini - Correct. Yeah. And this is like it's Amazon scale. So practically every business operates at that scale. So I don't think I could replicate that by a different company.

 

Sonali - That's a big deal. So like your job would have been to try and improve the profit you're making on that billion dollar in revenue.

 

Priyadarshini - That's that's definitely one way of defining it. Yeah absolutely.

Sonali - And then what brought you to SalesforceIQ then.

 

Priyadarshini - So did that for a while at Amazon enjoyed the general management thinking but realized that retail which is essentially the part of Amazon that I worked in wasn't where my passion was I wanted to come back to technology. I had gotten this amazing general management experience I had certainly gotten implementation experience because everything that any initiative that I came up with I also drove right to the end. Whether it be like you know writing copy or like you know handling the customer issues escalations whatever it is everything came to my desk. So it was exciting but I wanted to parlay that experience and bring it back to technology. So I didn't because my career path hasn't been one where I can talk about like you know there isn't a function that I have. Like for instance marketing or sales or product that I have worked in for a long time so I don't necessarily bring that experience to the table but so I didn't it would be hard for me to transition directly to a function at least my own hypothesis. So what I decided to do was to step back into the advisory side where I had like you know I had the strategy skill set but this time to be very close to a function in this case the distribution function sales and post sales and also do it within a smaller company where I would have much greater visibility and participation in the decision making.

 

Sonali - I see. And so when you joined SalesforceIQ had just been acquired by Salesforce right.

 

Priyadarshini - No I actually joined a year after the acquisition.

 

Sonali - A year after the acquisition.

 

Priyadarshini - SalesforceIQ was still a very small company. We were only about 120 130 people maybe when I joined. And I think today we are probably at 250 so definitely skyrocketing growth. It was interesting to see the scaling stage of a business as well. But at least compared to every other organization I've been part of this I consider very small.

 

Sonali - For sure. And why sales. What made you pick sales as opposed to other functions.

 

Priyadarshini - I think you know you're making me realize that my decisions weren't as thoughtful as I thought they were.

 

Sonali - Which is true for a lot of people right just in case it's just always good to probe because you never know what might have gone behind that decision.

 

Priyadarshini - Sure I think. I think what appealed to me about it was that so when I think about Salesforce even in the industry it has a great deal of credibility as an amazing distribution machine. Cisco definitely had that too like a lot of people would tell you that Cisco is more of a sales driven company whereas I think when people think of Apple for instance people think of it as more of a product driven company. Right. So I think there was a little bit of that. The other piece was also in all the jobs that I had done I felt like the skills that I had picked up and the way I approach like any problem that you give me I always approach it from a general manager standpoint so to be able to ask questions like How do I hit like you know my top line revenue like what are some of the growth initiatives they want to put in place. How do I essentially like you look at how the business is performing. Figure out like you know what are the breakpoints if you will and what I need to change there. That was kind of the job I was doing at Amazon. That was a B to C or a business to consumer environment. I could parlay that same thinking if I was close to sales in a business to business environment. I felt like it was a good fit for my skills.

 

Sonali - Okay. All right. So if you can give us a very brief overview of what the SalesforceIQ does. And in as layman's terms as possible.

 

Priyadarshini - I will try. So SalesforceIQ started its life as RelateIQ. It was founded actually by a few Stanford GSB students. And the problem that they essentially identified in the market was that you have customer relationship management software which is valuable to any and all businesses however in the lower end of the market which is where they decided to start there were two distinct problems. One was that like if you think about cloud CRM like Salesforce the parent company today essentially is the incumbent in that space. And then of course you've got like on frame CRM you know a whole bunch of other older tech companies play in that space. But the tough part is that it still takes like you know time and money to deploy some of these applications and they can be and they're also complicated in terms of getting your data in there. So small businesses want something that's easy to deploy. That's like you know out of the box intuitive they're not going to hire like an Accenture or whatever of the world to help them in their transitions. So that's the need that SalesforceIQ in my view.

 

Sonali - So it's easier to deploy. Like it makes deployment.

 

Priyadarshini - It's easier to deploy it's much much more intuitive like if you look at the interface of SalesforceIQ it looks like a spreadsheet. Everybody has been in excel at some point. So it's much easier for them to get started. And there's like I'm really like this is where a product manager can speak so much more eloquently.

 

Sonali - No but this is helpful that is just because you know a lot of your description of your job etc. will be in the context of you know what SalesforceIQ does.

 

Priyadarshini - At SalesforceIQ.

 

Sonali - Just trying to get some understanding. So customer relationship management software just for listeners who might not be familiar is just at a very high level it's a software that sort of keeps track of all your clients and you know the deals that you've had and how how to just continue that relationship. And what SalesforceIQ does is that it just makes the deployment of that software a lot easier as well as as well as the software itself is a lot more intuitive and easier to use.

 

Priyadarshini - That's correct. And it actually is the solution so it's not just it's not like a plug in to make something easier to deploy. It is it's own CRM.

 

Sonali - I see.

 

Priyadarshini - Completely so you can track your sales process you can track like you know any number of post sales processes etc. that you might be that you might have implemented for customers. It's just easier to deploy in itself and also much much more intuitive to interact with. And then SalesforceIQ actually brought out a second product and a third product now it's kind of expanded from that starting. Yeah so we also have like inbox application which essentially makes it a lot easier for a mobile salesperson. So you can essentially do all your transactions out of a mobile it has a nice suite of productivity features and on the back end it also so you are able to log everything to your CRM so it's essentially piggybacks off of the main Salesforce product. And then more recently for people following the news there have been a bunch of announcements around Einstein. Some of that was also developed.

 

Sonali - That AI stuff.

 

Priyadarshini - That's correct.

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Sonali - Okay got it. We don't have to go.

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Priyadarshini - Yeah yeah.

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Sonali - But. And so I think what's also important to call out over here is that your customers are businesses like other businesses which is why you have a sales team that goes out and sells to these businesses. Right. So here I would then ask you that if you can give us a description of what is your job what is sales, strategy and operations how would you describe it.

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Priyadarshini - Yeah. So when I think sales strategy and operations are the things that my team does. I think of it in a few different buckets. So let's talk a little about sales operations it's the more traditional thing in the industry that most I mean practically all B2B companies will have such a function to support their sales team. So it comes in a bunch of different flavors so on the sales side you're probably going to have to figure out questions like when you have a sales team like what are the territories like how do you allocate territories across your sales team. How do you compensate the sales team. What are those structural design philosophies if you will of compensation. How do you set goals and quotas for the sales team. So these are very traditional sales ops tasks and that's like you know one piece of the puzzle in other sales operations teams this is not true of my team because we leverage Salesforce' operational capabilities for this. You will also usually find people who are doing a lot of like you know contract processing order processing billing all of that. All of those operational tasks and also sometimes.

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Sonali - Which you might call like post sales or like completing a transaction.

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Priyadarshini - They are really to complete a transaction. I wouldn't call them post sales. On the post sales side because my team does look across both sales and post sales I think the equivalent of this would be like if you have renewal managers or if you have customer success managers again how do you allocate territories how do you set the right goals, quotas compensation et cetera. So anything to get these teams aligned in the right way to be able to achieve your top line goals is sort of like one bucket of things that usually are sales a sales operations function or a post sales operations function would do.

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Sonali - This is very good so what you're talking about is that sales operations has a lot of things that you will need so you will first set a goal for your sales team that I want to meet X revenue or whatever and then to operationalize getting to that goal that's what all of this includes including things like territory and compensation and all that.

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Priyadarshini - Correct.

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Sonali - Can you describe a little bit of some of these. For example I think territory allocation is a pretty interesting area. How how like what are the kinds of things that you would be thinking about to figure out how to allocate territory.

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Priyadarshini - So again it depends a lot on like you know what like what you're trying to optimize for. So let's say like there's a whole bunch of different models right like at the very simplest end of the spectrum. You could almost do this round robin and not even do like a territory carving model. You will probably have this in very rudimentary sales teams when you don't have a sense of how many transactions are coming in and what the geographical distribution is. For a sales team that's slightly more mature. You would think of things like you might carve them by geography you might and you would also strive for to the extent that people have like you know similar goals or similar quotas to hit you would strive for equitability across the way you carve territories.

 

Sonali - Equitability you mean like similar size of territories.

 

Priyadarshini - Yes because the territory essentially in some sense represents the opportunity for a sales person.

 

Sonali - To limit the amount of quota or the number of deals you can get.

 

Priyadarshini - Correct. Yeah exactly. So you would use like you know you want to be careful about equitability. And I think the other thing that as you're setting up this is more of a segmentation thing that comes in. For instance do you want to have like you probably don't want one team that covers everything from the smallest accounts to the biggest accounts because sales motions in those types of accounts can look different. It also comes down to building career paths for yourself.

 

Sonali - What is sales motion?

 

Priyadarshini - So like you know what a deal cycle essentially looks like so let's say if you were like let's talk about Salesforce the parent company for a second because they have a much wider spectrum. So an enterprise deal looks very different like selling to a Coca-Cola or selling to I don't know Tesla or pick whoever you want. Essentially they might be like you know deals which will take multiple months. Often these will be like multi million dollar deals they will be a lot more complex. They're usually not one product deals they're going to be multi product. All the negotiations even painting the picture. The skills you need to sell into those types of accounts can be very different than look at the opposite spectrum like the emerging small businesses segment that Salesforce for instance has where essentially it's very high velocity it's like think of it like team where your sales development team shifts you leads and you call into those leads and in many cases like maybe in two calls you're closing a deal.

 

Sonali - This will probably be for smaller businesses.

 

Priyadarshini - Exactly right. So you figure out like you know what is your sales motion look and figure out like how you want to carve flex segments if you will. So we obviously have a much smaller microcosm because we are focusing on that lower end whereas if you look at a company of the scale and size of sales force you have a lot of different segments over there. So those are some configurations that you would think about in territories.

 

Sonali - What about the quota. Just to get into some of the nuances or details.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah sure. Quotas it's really about making making an estimation of what you think the productivity of your sales team can be right like you're giving them a number goal to hit every month. So it's based on your feel of of what that like you know what a salesperson's capacity to hit a number is given a certain opportunity.

 

Sonali - Is quota set per salesperson or is it at like some team level.

 

Priyadarshini - It can be, it actually can vary. So in most sales team individual teams will have quotas. Sometimes when so again all of this depends a lot on the maturity of your business and the maturity of your team. So for instance if you had a brand new product and there are like. So I will give you a specific example from SalesforceIQ today. So on our sales team because we've been selling for a while and we have a sense of what the productivity of the sales team can look like. So on the sales side our quotas are a lot more nuanced. For instance we will have quotas based on somebody covering the very lowest and or somebody carrying sort of like the mid-end or like the top end of our business quotas will vary by that and whereas and quotas are individual. So every AE in essentially if every AE who is covering a certain part of the business is held to a similar quota. On the renewal manager side where essentially they're doing the same thing. They're just working with a different existing customers and trying to renew that book. We've actually kept team quotas part of that is because we still don't have we feel the best understanding of exactly like you know how much someone can like we're getting to the point where we might do it in the future in the near future we might look at individual quotas. So I think it varies a little bit by that as well.

 

Sonali - I see. Okay.

 

Priyadarshini - So it's like when you feel.

 

Sonali - But quotas I'm sure there's a lot of art as well as science behind this right because I wasn't reading this in the context of quotas but this was in the context of something else where it is just like our goal setting at a very high level if you said something which is too much of a stretch it can be demoralizing because like how am I supposed to get there. And if it's too low then it's not inspiring enough. So how do you do that balance.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah. It's I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that you know it's as much art as science it's really really tough. And if I if I flatter myself that I have made all the right decisions then that's not true. It's it's it's it's very hard. I think what you're talking about is exactly the we always have that at the back of our minds as the business matures more and more you're able to make more educated guesses. You have like you know better data. For instance you would look at what the distribution of attainment across different AEs is.

 

Sonali - AEs is area.

 

Priyadarshini - Account executives i.e the sales reps. Right so if you look at the distribution you have a better sense of whether like whether someone is an outlier or whether it's like somewhat concentrated around a certain number that might give you comfort that okay that's probably like you know a fair quota to set. But what you just mentioned is absolutely the tricky part of this and there is no right answer.

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Sonali - And I'm sure over a period of time you keep on refining.

 

Priyadarshini - Exactly, it's iteration refinement and also maturity and experience and that's the reason like you know why you have people who have done this before also involved for these exercises.

 

Sonali - Sure yeah yeah okay. So this was sales ops so you talked about like things like territory compensation, quotas, contract processing.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah. I think the one piece that I didn't mention in sales ops is that there's also especially in a startup context there's a bunch of things around systems because the systems that you put in place and the processes that you put in place can be fundamentally can fundamentally affect the outcomes and the efficiency of your sales team. So we spend a lot of time understanding like you know which CRM we should use what kind of statuses we should track making sure that you know sales the sales team  is following disciplined in terms of how they are tracking and like pipeline setting up.

 

Sonali - Why did we win a deal. Why did we lose a deal.

 

Priyadarshini - All of that right. And then even forecasting right like for a sales manager to be able to forecast and have a sense of have some forward visibility of where the month will close you need like a lot of hygiene if you will around how you're tracking all of these deals. So part of sales ops' jobs and again it depends on the maturity but sometimes a sales ops person might be the person who's actually implementing that first instance of Salesforce or any other CRM software within their business and then setting up the policies and processes etc.

 

Sonali - To track the data and making sure that sales team is adhering to like actually logging all of those details.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah. I mean it's jointly owned obviously with a sales manager because ultimately they will have direct like you know their direct influence ability but it's also pretty critical pyro for sales ops.

 

Sonali - Got it. Okay. So that was sales ops. What about sales strategy.

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Priyadarshini - Yeah. So as I know that I'm the one who kind of made a little bit of a false distinction if you will between the ops and strategy side because I think these these words honestly mean different things to different people and where you draw the line is up to you. But I would say that in typical sales ops or sales strategy and ops functions these are all things you would do. Things like I talked about the very operational task of really like you know supporting the team and making sure that the team is you know essentially operationalized to hit a certain target. But equally important whether you define this as strategy or ops is a lot of funnel analysis that we do. So as you think about like as a, as a manager of a business if you are held accountable to a number there's not a lot like a lot of people actually focus on what's the revenue I brought in. I would argue this is something I learnt at Amazon that that's actually not the most important thing that you should be focusing on because you can't do very much with something which is so much of a downstream metric. By that time it's like the game has been played. If you want to have any influence and if you want to be able to tinker around with levers you need to look a lot more upstream. So you want to monitor every part of your sales funnel starting from the time like any upstream demand generation activities you do you would want to capture all of that you want to make sure like you know how many of those leads that demand gen has kind of coming up with like what's the number what's the quality of those leads then like sales development which is sent which is usually the first function you have who like you know they are probably. So sales development would be the way to think about like why you usually have that gating function is that your sales reps you don't want to like when demand gen is coming up with leads some of them are like you know high high likelihood to close type of prospects and then there's low likelihood to close prospects.

 

Sonali - So actually let me stop you right there. So before we get into the details can you at a very high level tell us what is what does that funnel look like what are the stages in that funnel.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah. Good. Good question. So I will think about at least when I think about our funnel it's I would think about demand generation sales development and then the actual sale and then of course there's like post sales after that. It's kind of how I like the functions organized in order.

 

Sonali - And on the top you have demand generation. These are the guys who are actively going out and getting deals.

 

Priyadarshini - No so the way I think about demand generation is that they're essentially getting you leads.

 

Sonali - Not even leads deals yeah.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah leads. Right. So what are some demand gen activities. And again this depends a lot on the segment of the business if you're playing like in a small business segment like we do a lot of the traditional channels you might use there are things like you know paid social or search engine marketing right your website probably won't drive as much where as the sales ops.

 

Sonali - So is it like awareness. And this might be more slightly more slightly more than just awareness.

 

Priyadarshini - It's more than awareness. I think awareness is part of it but making sure that you actually drive to actual leads that someone can then like you know pick up the phone and call and find out like what is the likelihood to close.

 

Sonali - Okay. So that's demand generation.

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Priyadarshini - That's demand generation.

 

Sonali - And then after you said it's sales development.

 

Priyadarshini - Then you have sales development at least for us. So the reason most companies will have a sales dev function is because so sales reps if you give them like if you inundate them with leads of all different qualities your sales reps will be wasting a lot of time picking up the phone and calling people who are probably never going to buy. So you want a sales dev person or somebody you want some kind of a getting mechanism over there to be able to figure out which of those higher prospect leads.

 

Sonali - So prospect qualification.

 

Priyadarshini - Yes exactly. That's essentially what they're doing. They're qualifying leads. And I mean at the broadest level I am simplifying very much over here what they are essentially doing is anything which is high likelihood they send down the sales funnel whereas something that's low likelihood you might actually send back to marketing and marketing might do like nurture campaigns with them to get them to a point to feel it so that they will be high level.

 

Sonali - So like maturing them. You know I'm not ready to buy this yet. Okay got it. So that's the sales development function. And then you have sales itself.

 

Priyadarshini - Then you have sales itself. Then the account executives take over and usually the other people who are closing things. And then finally you have post sales and in post sales I see a bunch of different types of functions. So some of them will be involved in like the early onboarding driving engagement because those are the things that will drive better renewal outcomes at the end of an year. So for us most of our contracts are annual contracts and you have renewals people who are actually going to close these deals when they come up for renewal and I think the other very critical thing that post sales also plays a part in at least for us is in driving up sales and upgrades.

 

Sonali - Right right right so you're on level 1 package why don't you buy level 2 package or something.

 

Priyadarshini - Correct.

 

Sonali - Okay got it. Yeah. So you said that one big part of your job as in sales ops and strategy is to monitor this funnel right from demand generation because the more demand generation you have the more sales you will have.

 

Priyadarshini - May be.

 

Sonali - At a very high level.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah exactly.

 

Sonali - It depends on the quality.

 

Priyadarshini - Precisely that's the reason why you do all of this funnel analysis right. It's not just quality if you think about it can also be capacity. Right. Let's say demand gen is doing a fabulous job sends a whole bunch of quality leads. But your sales development function isn't adequately resourced. They aren't able to follow up with all of those leads. Right.

 

Sonali - So you will.

 

Priyadarshini - Exactly. So these are all the problems that you want to keep a very close eye on. Like where are the capacity constraints where are things breaking and what are the reasons why it's breaking and essentially that is what I that I think is the most exciting part of my job because when I'm able to do that level of analysis I'm able to identify what are the things I'm going to change in the business and that essentially helps me like you know drive towards the.

 

Sonali - And you are able to spot like the right gaps. I'm sure the impact is like an immediate significant impact right like suddenly you open up yourself to many more leads or many more conversions adding like a few more people. Can you share an example maybe that comes to mind.

 

Priyadarshini - Around?

 

Sonali - Around like you know something that you did in this funnel analysis and something that you found which led to a like a big change.

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Priyadarshini - Yeah. The reason I laugh is because I think like the last year of my life has been like you know a lot of, a lot of small changes. Sometimes they're not necessarily big changes but small changes that actually did like you know incrementally get us do better in better places. So we for instance we heard a lot of complaints from our sales development. People had points that hey we're not getting the right quality of leads from demand gen. So we've gone back and looked at what channels end up converting better versus what are not and we substantially changed the way we allocate funds.

 

Sonali - So when you say channels as in like leads coming through different sources.

 

Priyadarshini - Different sources exactly vs like you know display ads et cetera. Each of them will have like a different conversion profile because because people with different types of intent are essentially captured in each of these channels. Then another very concrete example that comes to mind from my early days is we were moving SalesforceIQ like we wanted to go global we do sell the product globally today but not when I had started. And so I worked on the pilot program for getting us into UK and at the time we only had one account executive dedicated to the UK and we knew that there was more opportunity over there but we just weren't resourced as a team to put more resources over there and be able to milk all of that opportunity. So we made the case for expanding the UK team. So it went from one to actually six people this year and the UK business and especially after we sent people into the UK to actually be in market. It's like what we close these days is like it's almost like the first time we had a full team over there we closed 2x that month versus the month before.

 

Sonali - Right right. So that's the kind of impact you can have.

 

Priyadarshini - That's pretty immediate impact.

 

Sonali - Awesome so yeah so you said that I guess right now we're still more in the realm of sales ops than sales strategy.

 

Priyadarshini - I would consider it's again like I don't like the monikers I really don't know because each person defines it so differently. It sits on the borderline because I would think that some of these are very strategic questions as well. In my mind. Right. But the way I think about it is that there's a piece around which is operational activity to stand up the team every day. And then there is a set of questions around decisions that you will make which will help you hit a revenue target. And I kind of put this more in that second bucket.

 

Sonali - So is there anything else within this function.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah. I think other stuff that we do some kind of thinking through like where my team spends its time. There so often on you will get involved in I suppose more a longer term strategic questions if you will from a distribution angle. So for instance given the data that we have about customers about the way we go to market when we were revisiting like you know what pricing and packaging strategy should look like for some of our offerings then we can. My team yeah.

 

Sonali - That's sales.

 

Priyadarshini - So again there's like it's let's say we work in partnership because there's definitely like product controls ultimately the pricing and packaging decision. But because we are close to the customer and we are we have a lot of the distribution data we can help inform them.

 

Sonali - Give them that data.

 

Priyadarshini - Correct to make like you know better decisions. And then there's a bunch of like you know a lot of like executive like in any strategy function. There's always an element of executive support. So any time like for instance today when we go out and present our business to Marc Benioff who is the CEO of Salesforce you know the team will probably help and spend some time working on telling the story crafting the message.

 

Sonali - Yeah but this is great Priya because you know I've seen like a lot of MBA grads especially you know end up in some kind of like a sales strategy and operations kind of rule. It's a role that you see very often but I've never really understood what do these people do. I'm sure it's important.

 

Priyadarshini - Haha.

 

Sonali - Now I have a good understanding. So I also wanted to sort of walk through a typical project just to get a sense for the kind of activities you might engage in in a project. So is there a project that stands out in your mind. Either it was very interesting or just tough or just and we can then go to stages of that project.

 

Priyadarshini - So one of the this is a recurring project one of the most important things that my team does is we do like monthly business reviews and essentially we are putting together a fact back around the business. So it's very similar to all the funnel analysis that I talked about. So we look at like you know again the number of leads that are coming in. Do we have appropriate conversion. Are there any conversion drop offs across the funnel. Are we resourced appropriately. What does attainment looks like across the teams to make sure that we've set goals in a thoughtful fashion. We look at like you know what kind of pipeline are we bringing in and does pipeline to ECVs like essentially are it's not the equivalent of revenue but without getting into all the details essentially think of it as the dollar value of whatever we close at the end of the, at the end of the sale. So is are there like you know any breakpoints over there. So we spend a lot of time like obsessing about these types of questions. So I'm trying to think.

 

Sonali - I mean it sounds like do you think it's a very like analysis heavy kind of role then. Because it's like just pulling a lot of data from Salesforce.

 

Priyadarshini - It's very data driven. But it doesn't stop at analysis. The person who is successful in this role is someone who can pull the data but then make sense of the data and can have a perspective on what you will change in the business if you can't do that last part I mean you're probably good as an analyst you're certainly not good as a sales strategy and operations person especially as you think of people more senior.

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Sonali - I see. Yeah. So apart from so like if I were to think about the key activities you would be doing in this role depending on of course the kind of problem you're trying to solve for it will vary but there's a big part of data analysis. And then apart from that what else would you think like in this example like when you're putting together these monthly reviews so you do the data analysis you might come up with a recommendation based on what the data is telling you. Do you do something else like is there a lot of socializing involved of your recommendation or like going out and speaking with customers.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah socialization not so much because it's a much smaller company so things can you know move quicker and nimbler. It's just not that many people if you will to socialize with we do we as the audience for this the monthly business reviews is the entire sales management hierarchy. So the person who heads sales, person who heads GTM and GTM is go to market. So it's both sales and post sales. And then all the sales managers all the post sales functional leaders will all come together and like you know will take a look at the data and essentially what coming out of that meeting often we will have very concrete things that we're going to chase down. So going back to your earlier question around projects. So let me give you an example from the post sales side because we've talked a lot about the sales side of the house. So on the post sales side we look at churn is a very important metric that every single SAAS company obsesses or should obsess with. So as you think about bringing churn under control some churn happens at the time that your that contracts are up for renewal. But even during the year when people are supposed to be locked into a contract you can still have churn. For instance it could be that somebody goes out of business. So you're not going to get money from them. So understanding what's the quality of customers that you're selling to for instance is your bad debt read essentially going up. It's not it's not terribly controllable but it's something important to know at the same time. Also and even though I said that it might not be like you know it's not terribly controllable there are controllable aspects of it because for instance you may want to make sure that people who are approving like these refunds like are we being thoughtful about their approval processes. Have we like you know put the right like gating mechanisms are we putting the right offers. So these are things like you know we call it off cycle churn internally. So we've been chasing down for instance off cycle churn. Could be like you know one specific initiative or something else that we might think of is that as our renewals book has grown exponentially it's not possible to do like the hero model in which we served customers before. Right where every single customer gets the exact same kind of high touch renewal conversation.

 

Sonali - So you might vary that a little bit.

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Priyadarshini - That's right. We so for some of the smaller accounts we've tried to put in place you know some scalable mechanisms where you have like you know a large maybe like you start things out with like bigger email blasts rather than having the renewal manager pick up the phone. So all of these like even designing that model like what are those thresholds at which we are going to cut off and implement different types of processes people on my team have been involved in some of these.

 

Sonali - No this is very helpful. Because it just gives a flavor for the kind of things you might be working on. And I think the other thing which will be very interesting to talk about is the kind of roles in terms of hierarchy maybe that you can expect in this kind of a function. So for example you're at a director level right. So now you have a big team that you're managing but let's say someone is out of undergrad or maybe grad school. So to take an take an analogy in consulting you will have analyst associate manager principal etc. right so similarly in this if you can give us like a flavor for what are the how's the team put together.

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Priyadarshini - Yeah. So I can talk a little bit about my team. I would say that it's not very standard though I think it really depends so much on like you know the context of the business, the size of the business even sometimes the leaders the individual team leaders philosophy. So for instance I like flat teams lean teams with people who have like you know large jobs scope's rather than layering up a team too much because personally I feel like the put like you know the further off you are from a certain point it's harder and harder for you to have visibility and to really feel like you're empowered to make decisions in the business. So that's just like a personal philosophy. So on my team we've operated in different ways and we usually have a couple of people like you know maybe focus on the sales side some people focus on the post sales side. So that's like one way of dividing it up. There have been times when I've tried to do a little bit more almost project based or initiative based in the sense that people would be able to cut across lines so maybe you have a subject matter expertise in sales but you also once in a while get to do something which is more of a post sales problem. So it could be that. Let me talk a little bit about how Salesforce does it because they have a much larger sales strategy and operations function I've got a sense of how they are organized. So they actually organize a little bit by and this is I think you will find more examples of this in the industry as well in a business partner model. So what does that mean. Essentially they organize their hierarchy so that people are matched to people in the sales hierarchy. So at Salesforce you have like the enterprise business unit you have a commercial business unit and then you have the emerging small business unit. And essentially the difference between those three different units is how large are the companies that you're essentially selling into. So you might have you do actually you have their EVPs at each of those levels. So you might have someone at my level who is mapped to each EVP and then each of those EVPs may have like you know several SVPs who are like have different segmentations and then similarly on the sales strategy and operations side you have a team where people reporting to me would essentially be mapped to those SVPs and would work in a business.

 

Sonali - But why you map to people in sales are you enabling the sales team is that why.

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Priyadarshini - No you're not enabling the system enablement is actually a separate function. Usually in most sales organizations we'll have a market readiness / enablement function which also sales strategy and operations serves. So for instance I on my team like I know I didn't talk very much about that in the examples I gave.But we have talked about for instance how do you measure the success of the enablement function or where do you plug in enablement. But going back to your question of like why do you do the mapping. I think the logic behind that mapping is that you are essentially an advisor. You are helping to solve whatever the top of mind problems are of the sales leader. So for instance if somebody comes in and says tomorrow that hey we need to focus more on enterprise like for whatever reason we feel that we're not getting. And I'm just making this up, this is a completely hypothetical example like we're not getting what we want out of enterprise deals. That's an interesting problem that somebody then needs to go and chase down like why is that. Is it because like I could think of different reasons like maybe your product isn't enterprise ready maybe you haven't organized your sales force the correct way.

 

Sonali - I see.

 

Priyadarshini - Yeah.

 

Sonali - So sales might come to sales strategy and ops to say this is a problem that we're seeing. Can you help us figure out why.

 

Priyadarshini - Exactly.

 

Sonali - And within this mapping that you describe the roles within sales strategy and ops group might as you become more and more senior are you just handling bigger and bigger projects. Is that the difference then.

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Priyadarshini - In terms of seniority yes I would say so yeah. And even the level I think the way to think about it is almost that a sales leader will get more in terms of you know advice judgment perspective if you will of a more senior person versus somebody who is.

 

Sonali - Like an accounts manager.

 

Priyadarshini - Sorry.

 

Sonali - So you said that there's mapping to each of the individual salespeople so like a sales leader might get way more advice than like just an individual account manager.

 

Priyadarshini - So you are never mapped at the individual account manager level. You are always you are just mapped to different people like different levels of hierarchy in the sales management structure. So like whether you're mapped to a sales leader who's an EVP or maybe a sales leader who is an SVP. I don't actually think we have any mappings under that.

 

Sonali - So it's essentially at the leadership level.

 

Priyadarshini - It's at the leadership level. Yeah I would just say that if you think about like you know what is the higher up you go in any function you're essentially looking at more ambiguous problems right. More like you know the problems might be of bigger scope. Like instead of solving it for it's one thing to solve it for a team of 40 people it's quite a different thing to solve it for a team of 4000 people. So those types of complexities is what distinguishes even like where people are placed along sales hierarchy and similarly those mapped to the type of problem that someone in sales strategy will do.

 

Sonali - All right. So this is this is super helpful because I think this is a great overview of what this function is. So now I would love to get into some of the more you know just your personal thoughts on this job. So what do you think are the most interesting aspects of working in sales strategy and ops.

 

Priyadarshini - For me personally it's the fact that I get to put on a general management hat every day and take a look at this business. It really feels like operating a part of the business myself. Do I actually get to do that directly. No not by a long shot I would be disingenuous if I suggested that but I love the fact that I'm able to put that hat on and ask myself that if I had owned this business or if I was running this function and I saw this problem what's that concrete decision or what's that change I would make. That's for me that's the most exciting what supports that is this thought process of of analytical problem solving which is something that you know I've been trained to do right from my first job out of college. And that's something that I enjoy being able to look at data tell a story come up with concrete recommendations and then make changes. And sometimes actually be able to see the effect of those changes both good and bad.

 

Sonali - Haha, both good and bad.

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Priyadarshini - Yes that is a very good learning.

 

Sonali - Do you think that your first point is very interesting that you get to think like a general manager and think about what decision I would take if I were to own the business. Yeah. Do you think that's more of a function of the fact that you're a director. And so you are someone who is pretty senior as opposed to someone who might be slightly more junior but still working in sales strategy and operations.

 

Priyadarshini - I personally think it is a function of personality and training. I don't actually think it has you like I don't put a lot of like I don't think your level in an organization needs to constrain you. You can always think like that if you are pushed to think like that. And if you're trained to think like that. So what do I mean by that. So today I have like you know four people on my team. Couple of people are a lot more junior so they're only two years out of college versus two others are I don't know somewhere in like seven eight years experience range. So very different profiles. But whenever I whenever there is a problem that anyone is solving the question that I always ask them is could you put yourself in the shoes of actually my manager who heads all of GTM if you had the chance to make the decision what is the decision you would make. It's obviously a lot easier for some, the more experience you have to relate to that level of thinking. But I don't think that thinking has to wait.

 

Sonali - Absolutely. So let me put my question in a slightly different way what you describe is something which I think anyone can feel in any function right.

 

Priyadarshini - I think to a certain extent that's true.

 

Sonali - You should try and feel like you know.

 

Priyadarshini - I think so.

 

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