http://www.leandatainc.com/

2

• Executive Summary

• Confirming Strategy

• Barriers to Success

• Solutions Considered

• Recommendation

• Adoption

NEW JOB RESPONSIBILITY

3WHAT WE SHOULD GET

5HOW TO GET IT

7PITCH DECK

9

CLOSING THE DEAL

16TIPS FOR HOW TO BE A GOOD BUYER

17REFERENCES

18

| CHRISTINE MAXEY had a suggestion about how to begin this guide. “It should have a cartoon drawing of me hiding underneath my desk,” Maxey said. “My phone is ringing. My CFO is peeking over my cubicle. I’ve got hundreds of unopened emails on my laptop. And I’m typing up a presentation for my executive team.”

OK, so Maxey has never actually trembled beneath her desk. But she admits there have been times in her Sales Operations career when she did feel like disappearing. In her previous role as the lead business analyst and Salesforce administrator at Pivotal Labs, Maxey was the point person for designing a smart sales process. That meant she played a key role in the purchase and management of sales technology.

But no one ever taught Sales Ops professionals how to buy tech stack tools, Maxey said. She had no instruction manual to follow.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has revolutionized how B2B organizations acquire the technology that is the engine of the modern sales process. With algorithmic solutions sold on annual subscriptions, organizations find themselves in an endless cycle of evaluating, buying and then later re-evaluating tools at renewal time. Managing this emerging world typically involves Sales Ops. Today, practitioners have influence over a growing

NEW JOB RESPONSIBILITY

3

NEW JOB RESPONSIBILITY

4

budget. They are expected to be diligent, educated consumers. They must explain to everyone why expensive and complicated tech tools are necessary to move the business forward.

It’s no wonder that they can feel overwhelmed.

“This is something that Sales Ops didn’t have to do five years ago,” said Maxey, the director of enterprise solutions at LeanData. “Vendor management is a completely new job responsibility. It requires a different skill set, and it doesn’t come easy.”

Perhaps the most challenging part isn’t even “vendor wrangling” – interacting with hyper-eager salespeople. Rather, it’s winning over colleagues in their own organizations about the value of a solution. It can be like herding cats.

That’s why Sales Ops specialists have to act like, well, salespeople.

“It’s very much like selling to a prospect,” said Dhiraj Singh, the insides sales and operations manager at MemSQL. “It’s about having a pitch deck, having the right people in the room and knowing your audience. When you’re selling internally, it’s just like selling to another company.”

The inherent nature of Sales Ops is to help. After all, they enable sales reps to be their best. The goal of this guide is to return the favor and make it a little easier for practitioners to acquire the technology they need.

Sales Ops can get what it wants. Here’s how.

"WHEN YOU’RE

SELLING INTERNALLY,

IT’S JUST LIKE SELLING TO

ANOTHER COMPANY."

WHAT WE SHOULD GET

5

You know the drill.

The business faces a problem. Or maybe a new initiative is being launched. Improve sales reps’ engagement with prospects. Increase lead conversion rates. Adopt an account-based strategy. Something.

As the Sales Ops expert, you receive marching orders from leadership: Come back with recommendations about how to make this happen.

Because technology is at the heart of the data-driven sales process, you explore software tools that could be part of the solution. You compare the cost and functionality of products on the market. You do demos. You test. Then you test some more because that’s what Sales Ops does.

“You drag vendors through the mud to prove their worth – and I say that in a facetious way, of course,” said Jason Paquette, director of sales operations at MongoDB. “But you have to evaluate thoroughly. If somebody says they’re going to save you time, well then how much? Make them prove it.”

Eventually, you come to a conclusion. You believe in one product. But now you must persuade others to believe, too.

The research firm CEB has found there is an average of 5.4 decision-makers in a B2B deal. Also, Garner Research determined that seven people are involved in most buying decisions for a typical firm with between 100 and 500 employees. Whatever the exact number, committees now make purchase decisions. And reaching a consensus isn’t easy when stakeholders represent varied constituencies such as finance, IT, marketing, sales managers as well as maybe C-level executives.

WHAT WE SHOULD GET

6

" YOU HAVE TO BE

AN INTERNAL SELLER

AND MAKE YOUR

CASE. YOU NEED TO

SHOW YOU DID YOUR

HOMEWORK..."

Sales Ops must be the catalyst to drive action.

“You have to be a good salesperson,” said Pete Kazanjy, the founder of Modern Sales Pros, a forum for Sales Ops. “You have to be an internal seller and make your case. You need to show you did your homework. You need to know your audience so you can pitch them appropriately. You need to break it down for people who might not understand operations so they get the impact on the business.”

Think of it, Kazanjy added, as doing account-based selling within your organization.

“But that’s also a very real pain point that all Sales Operations people feel,” he said. “They want to make an argument to the CEO or CFO for a tool, but they often don’t have their act together when it comes time to ask.”

Like many Sales Ops practitioners, Maxey doesn’t have a background in selling. Advocating for the organization to buy tech tools didn’t come naturally.

“It’s a weird position to be in where you do all of this work, but it still may not happen because you have to convince others,” she said.

So Maxey devised a way to get what she wants.

HOW TO GET IT

7

The centerpiece of Maxey’s internal selling technique is a killer pitch deck.

She created a template that can easily be tailored to whatever tool that she wants to recommend. The deck is designed to make a concise, analytical argument about why a solution is a “must have.” The slides include:

   Executive summary

   Strategy the organization is trying to execute

   Barriers to success and desired outcomes

   Solutions considered, including building internally

   Recommendation

   Implementation plan

“I want it to hit the high points,” Maxey explained. “It’s always the same format. So everyone gets used to seeing it over and over.”

The deck serves several functions. It shows the decision-making team that Maxey has done her due diligence. It explains the thought-process behind the choice and how a tool will address a problem. That last part is especially important for executives who might trust her judgement, but still need to understand what they are approving before agreeing to any big-ticket purchase.

HOW TO GET IT

8

" BUT TO HAVE REAL

CREDIBILITY, IT HAS

TO COME FROM THE

INTERNAL SALES OPS

ADVOCATE."

At the inaugural Ops-Stars at Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Maxey explained her slide deck process during a panel discussion featuring several top Sales Ops practitioners, including MemSQL’s Singh and MongoDB’s Paquette. Kazanjy, who served as the moderator, stopped Maxey with an observation.

“That sounds like something the vendor should do for you,” he said.

Yes and no, Maxey responded.

“Now as a vendor, I get this started for our prospects,” she added. “But I can’t tell them what their Go-To-Market strategy is. I can’t tell them exactly what their roadblocks are. I can listen and fill in some blanks for them. But to have real credibility, it has to come from the internal Sales Ops advocate.”

PITCH DECK

9

Maxey recommends that Sales Ops pros first email the completed deck to all the key stakeholders so they have ample opportunity to review the information.

The email should have the complete executive summary in the body of the email. Then, it’s showtime. Ideally, the decisions-makers are assembled for a formal presentation of the case. But the reality in our busy world is you might have to present it a couple of times – including people just swinging by your desk.

For this guide, Maxey created an sample deck that advocates purchasing LeanData’s lead routing solution to enable an Account-Based Marketing strategy at a mythical company called Acme Enterprises.

PITCH DECK

10

The Executive Summary is just that – a summary of key highlights. This needs to be sharp, clear and powerful. In fact, you need to go against the usual Sales Ops tendency of being as detailed as possible. This should be succinct and at a high level so even non-technical colleagues understand. These few sentences serve as the body of the email and then are the opening argument of the presentation. Maxey always uses a checklist of items to help organize her thoughts – the strategy, roadblocks, business requirements and so on. “In this example, we’re essentially saying, ‘We all agree ABM is the way to go, but this is where we’re having some problems and this is what I think can help us,’” Maxey explained. “It’s essentially a recap of the process and setting up the recommendation.”

Executive Summary

PITCH DECK

11

Confirming Strategy

“Here’s the reality: executives don’t care about tools,” Maxey explained. “They want to grow the business. The strategy is always the same. Make us successful. They only care about how tools can enable the overall strategy to do that. So you have to set them up for the solution by restating the business objective.”

PITCH DECK

12

Barriers to Success

This is where Maxey takes a deep dive into the challenges the business is facing and what is hoped to be achieved through the new strategy.

“Problems don’t go away,” she said. “A problem is going to remain until you figure out a way to solve it. It festers. If you can’t make your management successful, then you’re at risk. This is your opportunity to make everyone understand what needs to be overcome.”

PITCH DECK

13

Solutions Considered

This is the “show my work” part of the presentation. It’s a review of the multiple vendors considered, their functionality and their price points. Notice that “cost” isn’t just the check you write to purchase a product. Maxey makes sure to address ongoing costs associated with every solution considered. Also, a large part of Maxey’s presentation is always focused on the age-old question of Build vs. Buy.

“Spell out the math about how much it costs to build something,” Maxey said. “It needs to include developer time, cost of maintaining the solution and so on. Try to put some numbers on it. They can be completely presumptive, and that’s fine. But there needs to be something there to help everyone understand what building this entails.”

PITCH DECK

14

Recommendation

Notice that there has been very little selling so far in this deck. It’s about setting the stage for the solution. But here, the pitch begins. “This is where the internal champion kicks in,” Maxey said. “The other stakeholders already believe in you because you’ve shown your homework. Now you have to sell the solution.”

PITCH DECK

15

Adoption

This slide explains what the implementation process will be for the recommended tool.

“In order to be truly successful, product adoption is a must,” Maxey said. “If you truly believe in your recommendation, you also need to make sure the organization is invested in successfully implementing and adopting it.”

CLOSING THE DEAL

16

A strong deck answers every important question. That empowers the buying committee to make a decision.

“Generally, they can decide right away,” Maxey said. “Now they might say, ‘You said it’s $20,000? OK, can we get that split with another department? Or can we negotiate more with the vendor?’ But I believe this is always true: if there’s a problem, they’ll find the budget. But that’s only the case if you can solve their problem.”

And 12 months later, you get to do it all over again when it’s time to discuss renewing the product. Maxey suggests that it’s good idea to know what you’re going to recommend after 10 months – two months before the renewal date.

“You don’t want to experience any interruption of service just because you’re not prepared,” she said. “Unplugging something is a big decision because it could have implications throughout the entire stack.”

Maxey added that it’s important to remember that when you’re making a recommendation, your reputation is on the line. Your ability to influence any future purchases also is at stake. But at the same time, the great thing about the SaaS model of annual subscriptions is you get to re-evaluate your decision in 12 months. A good manager will understand that there’s a

risk associated with the purchase of any technology and that business needs can change over the course of a year. But Maxey said that Sales Ops pros sometimes also have to be mature enough to admit: This just isn’t working out.

As a vendor, Maxey helps potential customers create these decks. In fact, she believes everyone should hold vendors to this standard. After all, why wouldn’t they want to assist you in explaining the value of their product on your organization? But if it’s not a service offered by other vendors, Maxey believes Sales Ops pros should invest the time to do it themselves – using this example as a template.

But she also cautions that even the most well-prepared sales pitch can fall on deaf ears.

“They still might say no,” Maxey said. “There’s never any guarantees. But you’re definitely not going to get your way if you don’t put the work in. And this is the best way to get what you want.”

TIPS FOR HOW TO BE A GOOD BUYER

17

UNDERSTAND YOUR PROBLEM. Make sure leadership has articulated the pain points that you’re expected to alleviate.

1 IDENTIFY YOUR BUYING COMMITTEE. Understand all the players who will have to sign off on a new technology and bring them into the discussion early – especially IT and legal.

2

KNOW YOUR BUYING TIMETABLE. Be honest in communicating that schedule to vendors.

3 ALWAYS ASK FOR A DISCOUNT. And let leadership know that you’ve negotiated hard with the vendor.

4

DEFINE SUCCESS METRICS. The vendor should understand what will constitute success, and then hold them accountable to that standard.

5 HAVE AN IMPLEMENTATION PLAN. It should include a schedule for communicating the process throughout the organization.

6

REFERENCES

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CHRISTINE MAXEY | Director of Enterprise Solutions at LeanData

DHIRAJ SINGH | Inside Sales and Operations Manager at MemSQL

JASON PAQUETTE | Director of Sales Operations at MongoDB

PETE KAZANJY | Founder of Modern Sales Pros

LeanData simplifies the complexity of the B2B sales process through a better lead management process. LeanData’s strategic solution makes sales teams more efficient by matching leads to accounts and automatically routing them to the correct owner. A member of the Salesforce AppExchange, LeanData maximizes the value of every lead by providing richer insights into accounts so businesses can increase sales velocity and close more deals.

Learn more at leandatainc.com

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