Sales

Capitalize on Product Led Growth by Building a Growth Engine

December 3, 2019

You’ve built a product that end users love and achieved product led growth  – what’s next?

With engineering, support and success teams in place, it’s time to deepen your investment in sales. But the game has changed. The traditional, seller-centric sales model has been usurped by better informed, more demanding buyers.

Now, customers set expectations. And sales, services and support must do everything in their power to consistently exceed them. Everyone from sales development reps to your CRO is now a partner capable of adding real value.

How do you turn your customer-facing teams into trusted advisors, at scale? By building a strategic growth engine. With the right functions, technologies and methodologies in place, revenue teams will be equipped for customer conversations that not only close deals, but build lasting partnerships.

Invent the Future with Operations and Enablement

Thirty years ago, the concept of inside sales was revolutionary. Pioneered by the likes of Oracle, and later Salesforce, the invention of the sales development rep role fundamentally changed the way businesses sell and grow.

Today, we’re on the cusp of another such shift – this time, with sales enablement and growth operations at the epicenter.

For the unfamiliar, sales enablement teams deliver the training, guidance and content necessary to empower an effective sales force. Growth operations drives optimization through analytics and reporting, as well as through managing transformational technology and process initiatives. Together, enablement and operations are the new growth engine for modern business.

Despite an increasingly diverse set of modern tools, many sales teams are still plagued by complex processes, multi-stage lead exchanges and numerous digital touch-points. Further intensifying these challenges is that today’s sales success is inextricably linked to the quality of the buyer experience. How can you transform a messy mix of backroom issues into a customer experience that’s second to none? Evolve your enablement and operations functions to optimize your go-to-market approach.

These two functions have the unique ability to see across all your revenue teams, creating a holistic view of how you’re going to market, what’s working and what barriers must be removed to accelerate growth. To succeed in driving positive change, enablement and operations need executive sponsorship and clear charters.

With sales enablement and growth operations as the beating heart of your buyer experience, you’ll have the foundation needed to deliver the lifeblood of every closed-won deal: guidance.

Empower Your Revenue Teams with Guidance

Teaching customer-facing teams to consult, not sell, requires absolute focus on the details that matter. We call this guidance – what teams need to know, say and show in order to win and retain customers.

Getting ahold of buyers is challenging. And when your sellers finally do connect, buyers have high expectations for the value. Emboldened by their own research, prospects seek out reps who can provide deeper product and industry insights. Once a deal is closed, success teams must also meet these expectations to satisfy customers and secure renewals.

Retaining and expanding hard-won customers now requires knowledge of what to know, say, and show for every scenario, available at the point of action. But unlike a call script, for instance, guidance doesn’t turn people into robots – it elevates human-to-human conversation. It’s the difference between a student who can regurgitate facts and one who can apply them. Done right, guidance turns talking points into personalized buyer insight, and strategy into action.

An effective sales play is a prime example of strategy becoming action. Prioritizing, building, delivering and optimizing sales plays scales guidance across your revenue teams. Here’s a glimpse into how it works:

      • Prioritize: Revenue teams can only absorb and implement a certain number of plays. The first step is understanding desired outcomes, so you can prioritize the plays that will drive results.
      • Build: Begin building your play by answering the right foundational questions, including:
        • What is the business rationale for this play? What specific metrics will this play impact?
        • Who is the internal audience that will execute the play?
        • Who is the customer persona that the play is targeting?
        • Who are the internal experts who will help build the play?
        • What are the scenarios in which your internal audience will run the play?
        • What goal will this play help your internal audience achieve?
      • Deliver: Your sales play will only be effective if it is adopted. Establish principles for landing your sales plays in a way that is familiar and consumable.
      • Optimize: Analyze and iterate – use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to inform your approach to guidance moving forward.

Done right, technology-powered guidance prepares revenue teams to enter every customer conversation with confidence.

Turn On Your Growth Engine

Achieving product led growth is a major milestone – but not the finish line. Your product can carry you only so far until you need to construct a model designed to scale your company with excellence. Product led growth is driven by your product. Next-level hypergrowth is driven by customer delight.

An engine where growth operations and enablement teams deliver clear guidance to your revenue teams is your secret to success. And the results are real – with our growth model in place, Highspot’s revenue, customer base and existing customer expansion are all more than doubling year-over-year.

When your engine empowers your revenue teams to be trusted advisors to your customers at every stage of their journey, accelerating growth is not just achievable, but sustainable.