When you’re trying to win new customers, it can be tempting to show the full scale and power of your product to anyone who’s interested. But that can quickly overwhelm your sales team, and ends up wasting valuable resources.
In a recent episode of the Demo Diaries podcast, I talked to Alana Kadden Ballon, Director of Sales Strategy and Operations at Wiz, about how to balance bringing in more prospects with using your sales team as strategically as possible.
Meet Alana
She’s been in the B2B SaaS world for more than 15 years now. After college, she started out at Salesforce when it was a much smaller company, answering inbound leads and learning about sales by doing it. She moved up the ranks into several different sales roles, including as an account executive.
And she found that while she loved sales as a function, she did her best work supporting sales, and that’s how she got into sales strategy and operations. In her current role at Wiz, she had the chance to build her team from scratch and they’ve gone from having just one salesperson to more than 20.
Measuring Demo Effectiveness
At every point in the sales cycle, Alana is thinking about how to maximize what they’re getting out of the sales team. Everyone who gets a full demo needs to be a prospect who will eventually buy the product, not just someone kicking the tires. They’ve figured out how to qualify their prospects with accuracy to avoid wasting sales resources.
They also need to strike a balance because at Wiz, they’re a newer business and need to give everyone an excellent customer experience even if they’re not a qualified prospect right now. Instead, they separate out people who are going into active evaluation and give them the royal treatment. Other prospects who aren’t good candidates to buy now, but might later, get a good experience with a tool like Reprise, but they’re not getting the full sales experience which costs hundreds of dollars per hour.
To qualify prospects, Alana looks for both a business fit and a technical one. They need to be comfortable with the pricing, the solution, implementation, and more before Wiz moves them forward in the sales cycle. They want to avoid having to do another entire demo to bring in the right people, so they use tools like Reprise to tighten up the demo stage of the sales cycle and keep the overall sales cycle as short as possible.
Weathering the Pandemic
Creativity is really important. We’ve all done enough Zoom happy hours at this point – people are overwhelmed and burnt out. There’s a tendency to rely too much on wellness and self-care, but it can just become more things to do when everyone’s already overwhelmed. Instead, make a really realistic plan for your team of what to take off their plates. You want to do lots of things, especially at a high-growth startup, but it’s about creating a better environment for your people.
Sales Operations
People often come to Alana with solutions they want to implement, but that’s not the most effective way to get her on board. Instead, it’s more effective to say, this is a problem, here’s how much money and/or time it’s costing us, and here’s how that’s related to our overall business. Don’t come in and say I want to integrate X with Y – come and say we can save our sales reps three hours per week instead.
Top Tip for Sales Process
Think about what is the one Salesforce field you can take out, or a single process you can streamline? You’ll get more in if you ask for less from sales. If you only require four fields, you have a better chance of getting those fields filled out thoroughly and accurately.
Watch the full episode here:
