Your goal as a sales representative is to build 2.5 -3x your annual ARR quota. The ability to achieve this goal is based on your ability to create Moments That Matter (MTM), interactions with a customer that make a positive emotional impact about the value you and your product bring to their organization. The ability to Engage and Educate the Customer is fundamental to creating positive Moments That Matter.
In this Sales Standard Operating Procedures page, the four phases of the sales cycle are:
In order to accomplish this you must understand your territory. Think of your territory as your book of business, patch, or market segment. Most often your territory or book of business will be a mix of net new and renewal accounts. Companies operate in many different business verticals. The steps to understanding your territory are questions you need to answer such as:
Create a visual diagram of your territory similar to this example on slide 5.
From this diagram you can determine what accounts need a point of entry developed. From the diagram, you will notice that within some organizations, there are departments/divisions who are early adopters and users of GitLab. Your goal is to leverage the early adopters success to leverage engagements with other low touch opportunities or net new opportunities.
Your strategic goal is to incrementally turn the red and yellow divisions within an organization into green GitLab users. Eventually the entirety of the organization will be green GitLab users. The question here is how do you ripen the fruit faster for harvest? By understanding how your customers buy.
Customers often buy software in multiple ways, but your ability to understand how they acquire technology will help you be more focused on the most common routes your customers use. The most common are direct purchase, through channel, and programs.
Determine your customers common routes to market and best strategies for territory engagement.
Work with your extended team to analyze your territory and build your strategy. Your team may consist of a variety of the following:
Your Routes to Market/Territory Plan will help you determine which GitLab resources to use to gain a point of entry into prospective opportunities. Use the list below with your team to determine the best activities to make contact with an opportunity representative.
At this point, the selected engagement activities should have generated a significant number of leads. It’s now time to sift through those leads and determine which may become opportunities. This requires an initial qualifying meeting and the quality the preparation you take for that meeting can mean the difference in having a deal or losing a deal. The steps that necessary to prepare and execute a successful meeting are:
Reminder: A Command Plan is not a one and done document. Nor will you gather all the necessary information in one meeting, so be prepared to work through pieces of the document over a series of meetings. Taking this time up front will help you better evaluate the deal by asking deeper trap-setting questions that will help you gather more insightful data about your customer.
As a rule of thumb, here is the cadence for updating your Command Plans.
Once you have conducted the initial qualifying meeting. You and your team should review all the data gathered in the Command Plan. This includes a review of the research conducted, the discovery questions asked, how much MEDDPPICC data was captured in the Command Plan, and what gaps you still have outstanding to capture. Depending on the level of data captured, the lead can then be evaluated according to the below listed criteria to recategorize from a lead to a Sales Accepted Opportunity:
Once the lead has been evaluated according to the above criteria, it can be designated as a qualified opportunity. An OPPORTUNITY can be created in Salesforce a) when converting a LEAD to CONTACT; b) from a CONTACT. All opportunities should be created with a Stage = 0-Pending Acceptance regardless of how you create the OPPORTUNITY. Once the initial setup is complete, the OPPORTUNITY Stage can be updated within Salesforce.
Your goal is to close deals and the best way to do that is to track where your sales stands within your sales framework as well as where the deal stands within the buyer’s journey. This is done through pipeline management and forecasting.
Pipeline Management is typically done in Salesforce, and forecasting is done in Clari. The common pipeline stages within Salesforce are the following:
Below are DAILY TASKS you’ll need to perform within Salesforce.
Forecasting in simple terms is determining if you will hit your sales numbers at a given point in time. Clari is the tool to help you track your sales projections. Clari delivers insights by pulling data from all your engagements (phone calls, emails, calendar, social media, and news) and fuses that data so that you can better estimate the timing and likelihood of closing. Clari is also a good tool to quickly understand your sales gap to quota and help you focus on your deals from best case to worst case.
Below are the WEEKLY TASK you’ll need to perform within Clari. Navigate to the Net ARR tab within Clari.
For in-depth training on Clari go to the Clari for Salespeople Instructional Videos.
Now you are ready to move into the next phase of the sales cycle, Facilitating the Opportunity.
