Welcome to the Enterprise Sales handbook page!
The Enterprise Sales department is part of GitLab Sales and includes both Large and Public Sector sales teams. The sales field in Enterprise is made up of Major and Strategic Account Executives (MAEs and SAEs) who collaborate closely with their deal team (Inside Sales, Customer Success, Sales Development, Channel & Alliances and more) and work across functions to deliver maximum value to strategic and large prospects and customers throughout their entire journey with GitLab. When thinking about 'what good looks like' in this department, refer to your job family, the field competencies, and our GitLab values.
Besides this page, there are a few bookmarks you’ll want to set that will be your main sources of truth during your everyday work. These are:
The Enterprise Seller playbook is how a typical, high-performing SAE runs their business on an annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis. Use it as a guide to understand the basics of what key activities and collaboration points are required for things to run smoothly in your territory. This includes collaborating with your deal team. This playbook aligns directly to the manager version used by Area Sales Managers in Enterprise Sales.
As the account lead, your role centers on successfully orchestrating all of the resources and support available to you and your prospect or customer to reach their defined outcome on a reasonable timeline. That means knowing who's who and how to collaborate with them.
View the Enterprise Seller playbook for guidance on what types of meetings to host with your deal team and extended team, as well as how their roles and responsibilities might intersect with yours.
| Extended deal team members | How you collaborate |
|---|---|
| Channel Account Manager (CAM): | Understand and map the partner landscape: opportunities and collaborations, suggest partners for onboarding and recruiting, incorporate System Integrators into your plan, view current partners in the Partner Directory |
| Professional services: | Match the needs of your solution or customer to training, education, and adoption or deployment support provided by this team. Or bring them in to help you pitch services to your prospects or customers. |
| Field marketing and account-based marketing: | Include this team during strategic planning for your territory, accounts, and pipe generation. And when when planning to run & host events or webinars, attend relevant third-party events. Learn what’s scheduled: GitLab event site , All marketing activities (internal). Nominate priority accounts for Account-based marketing (ABM) support. Slack: #abmteam, #emea_marketing (EMEA), #fieldmarketing (Global) |
| Sales leaders and executives | You may need to provide executive sponsorship of an account, request an e-group member in a meeting, or request that Sid join a meeting |
| Sales operations and deal desk: | For structuring and closing deals, you’ll often work with Deal Desk, especially for non-standard quotes. #sales-support is also the go-to channel for any urgent questions around progressing a deal through our processes. |
| GitLab Support: | The Support Team serves our customers at different levels depending on what they’ve purchased. |
| Product team: | For strategic deals, it often makes sense to bring in an expert from Product to speak to your customer about the benefits or maturity of features they care about the most. Often times, if something is not yet possible in GitLab, Product has a plan and roadmap for when it will be available. |
| Strategic Field Organization | Or the strategic field team for large engagements that require a high degree of strategic planning - such as DevSecOps transformation, solution recommendations, and advisory for our customer's senior technical leadership in high-value, strategic deals ($400k+). |
| Compete: | You may also bring in the compete team to help with intelligence or positioning. Use the #competition channel on Slack to collaborate and view important resources in their bookmarks. |
| Customer Advocacy team: | You may want to construct a deal where the customer agrees to be reference or to logo usage, or perhaps you've delivered incredible value and they are ready to be a case study. |
Every Strategic Account Executive in Enterprise Sales should have a territory plan for how they're approaching their patch.
View important guidance on the Sales Prospecting handbook page. The expectation for Enterprise Sellers is that they have 3.5x pipe coverage.
Generally, surprises - whether in the form of sudden, major deals or sudden, major losses - are a bad thing. We have to strive to create predictable results. At first, this seems like trying to predict the vast unknown. But if you have a strong strategy in place for your pipeline, you’ll be able to see exactly how your year will turn out well before it happens. This means better, more reliable forecasts and less stress for you on whether you’ll meet that target. When forecasting, use the Sales Forecasting handbook page and Clari cheat sheet to help you.
Validate, validate, validate. Effective qualification is just the first step. As you invest in a prospect, it’s important to continuously validate the opportunity throughout the sales cycle and make sure it can deliver results for you and that we are the effective solution for the prospect.
Pipeline management is key to predictable, scalable revenue attainment and can make the difference between simply hitting your number and overachieving. It helps you allocate your time correctly, increase deal velocity, and increase total deal volume, size, and revenue through accurate forecasting practices.
The Enterprise Sales Stages Criteria defines activities and exit criteria for each stage and serves as a roadmap for moving a deal from discovery to closed won (or qualified out quickly). The following process is specific to the Enterprise Sales team.
How to use it: As you move a deal through the pipeline, the Enterprise Sales Stage criteria defines activities and exit criteria for each stage and serves as a roadmap to getting a deal from discovery to closed won (or qualified out quickly). Use it to help you validate your opportunity and forecast it correctly. This guidance gives definitions for each stage, tells you who might be involved on your team, what activities are typically done in each stage, and what is required before you can move it further in the pipeline.
Additional resources for opportunity management: At the bottom of each stage in the detailed spreadsheet, you'll also see major strategic resources that can help you be successful during each milestone of a deal - from prospecting to transitioning to a the post-sales team. For operational resources, head to the general sales page up top. For commonly used sales assets like marketing plays and pitch decks, head to the marketing resources handbook page.
Opp management starts with effective discovery. At GitLab, that means MEDDPPICC and having a complete Command Plan for all $50k+ NARR opportunities.
Use data to validate your opportunities. If you’re making big bets because you ‘hope’ a prospect will change their mind it’s a sign that you need to go back to the validation process:
Keep your opps squeaky clean: Pay attention to how long something has been sitting in a specific stage, and close it out when the time is right. For a tech company, the average strategic deal takes 6 months to a year to close. While it’s normal for an opportunity to sit, holding it prevents another team (or other resources) from helping it progress.
Holding hurts our prospective customers because while they’re sitting there, they aren’t getting any real value from us (and likely to get more value from a competitor). It’s for their benefit that we push deals along or move them to close.
If you're looking for templates, guides, customer 1-pagers, and other editable sales content, head to the Enterprise Sales Highspot page. If you're looking for skills-based training, LevelUp is where you need to go.
External training opportunities: GitLab also has a robust growth and development benefit to help you supplement your learning. And if you want to stretch your technical muscle and hear customer feedback, you can sign up to join our audiences in our CS webinars.
If you want to know more about what's available to help you be successful, reach out to your enablement lead in the #field-enablement Slack channel.
If you don’t have access to the items below and believe you should, open an Access Request.
View the Commercial Sales Playbook here.
