Aligning passionate TAMs with customers to ensure their success by…
Objective: Define the 3 ‘big rocks’ to take on in FY23 with the overall goal of moving our team forwards. These rocks need to move us forwards as a team and as individuals, enabling us to scale, be impactful, and be inspired/fulfilled in our roles.
What are 'big rocks'?
As outlined in this article, they are our priorities, our mission-critical objectives that we need to solve for in the coming year. We arrived at this list through TAM leadership discussions and final input from individual contributors.
Epic (GitLab Internal-Only)
The goal of the TAM is to drive growth. However, the role of the TAM has become increasingly broad over the past few years, deterring from the growth conversation with customers. As we have added more to the role (migration & infrastructure guidance, cross-functional escalation ownership, consultative support), the ability to focus as a TAM on growth has become increasingly challenging.
To continue to build a scalable TAM team focused on excellent customer experience and driving customer growth, we need to refine the role of the TAM. This initiative will include what a TAM is and what a TAM is not.
Key areas of exploration:
Epic (GitLab Internal-Only)
In FY22 we put considerable focus into use case expansion. The team have developed a well-rounded understanding of the use cases, but have not been given the space needed to become experts in driving any one use case. In FY23 we will seek to become experts in driving CI and DevSecOps expansion and maturity, knowing these use cases are the key drivers for customer stickiness and growth.
Key areas of exploration:
Epic (GitLab Internal-Only)
The TAM relationship with the customer has been architected primarily on engagement with GitLab admins, who are not responsible for platform adoption or business case value. Due to the TAM being pigeon-holed into these admin conversations, we are often not engaging with the right people in order to ensure excellent customer experience, use case adoption and growth. In FY23 we will seek to engage the development team leads and key users of the GitLab platform early and often, to ensure consistent growth strategies with our customers.
Key areas of exploration:
TAM Team Metrics Overview (VIDEO)
GitLab's Technical Account Managers serve as trusted advisors to GitLab customers. They offer guidance, planning, and oversight during the technical deployment and implementation process. They fill a unique space in the overall service lifecycle and customer journey and actively bind together sales, solution architects, customer stakeholders, product management, Professional Services Engineers and support.
See the Technical Account Manager role description for further information.
A Technical Account Manager is an advocate for both the customer and GitLab. They act on behalf of customers serving as a feedback channel to development and shaping of the product. In good balance, they also advocate on behalf of GitLab to champion capabilities and features that will improve quality, increase efficiency and realize new value for our customer base.
Technical Account Managers maintain the relationships between the customers and GitLab. Making sure that everyone is working towards pre-defined goals and objectives.
Technical Account Managers help to bring GitLab to all aspects of your company, not just software development. They can do this by showing other business units how to use GitLab for their day-to-day tasks and to advocate for new features and functionality that are in demand by other groups.
Technical Account Managers make sure that the adoption of GitLab is successful at your company through planning, implementation, adoption, and training.
Please reference this page for an overview of the areas your TAM will engage with you in: TAM Points of Engagement
The following articulates where collaboration and customer management is owned:
As a Technical Account Manager, it is important to be continuously learning more about our product and related industry topics. The education and enablement handbook page provides a dashboard of aggregated resources that we encourage you to use to get up to speed.
To ensure that opportunities are listed with the correct Order Type, this Salesforce report shows you all of the opportunities that have closed, or are soon to close, with your SALs. Tracking Order Type is important since TAM team quota and compensation depend on this. Please reference the latest Sales Compensation Plan information to know what is counted.
Next steps for you:
