GitLab defines Commercial Sales as worldwide sales for the mid-market and small/medium business segments. Sales segmentation is defined by the total employee count of the global account. The Commercial Sales segment consists of two sales teams, Small Business (SMB) and Mid-Market (MM). The Commercial Sales segment is supported by a dedicated team of Solutions Architects (SA) and Technical Account Managers (TAM).
Solutions Architects are aligned to the Commercial Sales Account Executives by a pooled model. Requests for an SA will be pulled from the triage board by an SA based on multiple factors including availability, applicable subject matter expertise, and workload.
Technical Account Managers that support Commercial Sales are aligned by region, Americas East, Americas West, EMEA and APAC. Not all accounts will have a dedicated TAM. Account qualification is required.
A seamless customer journey requires a continuous flow of relevant information between the roles at GitLab with customer outcomes in focus. Below are some examples of the transfer of information between roles that may be required.
For commercial accounts, we do not currently offer our customers Slack channels unless they meet specific criteria and it would be highly beneficial to both the customer and GitLab teams. Prior to creating the channel and provisioning access, the TAM for the account must approve its creation and use. To qualify, the customer should be at minimum:
Collaborative projects should be suggested first with few possible exceptions (such as reference customers, early adopters or strategic partnerships). If the customer is evaluating GitLab or doing a POC for an upgrade, SAs or TAMs can request an ephemeral Slack channel, but the channel should be closed within 90 days if it does not meet the criteria shown above. Slack is simply too intensive to scale for Mid-Market and SMB.
Meanwhile, it is not always scalable for every customer to have a collaboration project either, and the CS team will determine the need for a project on a per-customer basis.
Since the SMB team does not currently have Solutions Architects, the SMB team may engage the Mid-Market SA team for presales support using the following guidelines:
SMB Customer Advocates may request asynchronous technical presales assistance for any SMB prospect using the Commercial Triage Board via the process documented on the Solutions Architects page. The Customer Advocate should obtain as much detail as possible and post the technical questions from the client into an issue on the Commercial Triage board.
The Mid-Market SA team will respond in the issue with answers within 48 hours unless otherwise noted by the SA team.
SMB Customer Advocates may request synchronous technical presales assistance when opportunity threshold criteria are met. This request for real-time presales assistance should utlize the Commercial Triage Board via the process documented on the Solutions Architects page. If the prospect does not meet the criteria below, Customer Advocates may still inquire about surplus bandwidth and/or availability of the Mid-Market SA team using the #cs-commercial channel in Slack.
Criteria for Synchronous Engagement:
Engagement Limitations:
