3min chapter

Decoding the Gurus cover image

The Science and the Art of Gurometry

Decoding the Gurus

CHAPTER

The Pros and Cons of the Gurus

GPT: Gurus tend to have very high levels of verbal fluency. They're able to speak and then auto-diadactic kind of way, just stream of consciousness,. Often their use of metaphor or metaphorical language also marks them out. The major point in favor of the debunkers is the fact that we've never gotten good evidence.

00:00
Speaker 3
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk, and I'm here with my co-host, Nick Segelski. And folks, we have one of the greatest sales leadership episodes we have ever recorded in all time. It is with Eleanor Dorfman. She is the head of sales over at Retool. I believe she's led the organization from zero to 100 million in ARR in her four years there. And holy smokes is this one to listen to. Nick, why should people listen? We
Speaker 2
got into a couple really insightful topics. One, building customer retention slash churn into the comp plan. We got into the specifics of how Eleanor has structured teams both down market and up market, her approach to setting up triggers to run deal inspection and the rhythm of how she runs that deal inspection, and then the two different types of sales motions that she runs, both the top down and also the land expand, which we will drill into in this episode.
Speaker 3
All righty, Eleanor, welcome to the show. We start every show with your top three actionable leadership takeaways. Let's get your three.
Speaker 1
I would say top three for me, and this is a very common sales leader trope, expect what you inspect, but I honestly believe that inspection is the single biggest way to make sure that you're running a predictable, well-executed sales team. And so for me, very tactically, it means making sure we have a programmatic way of inspecting the most important deals. So when a deal over 50K, which is a reasonable threshold for us, it shouldn't be your largest deals, but not your smallest one where it's worth the time to inspect. When a 50K deal hits stage three, I get a Slack notification over 50K and I schedule a deal review with the rep, the reps manager, the sales engineer, sales engineering manager, and myself, we do an early stage review. Are we ready for the POC? Do we have access to the economic buyer? Do we know the required capabilities? Do we know the competitive landscape? Are we set up for success in that POC? And how do we know and have that confidence? Similarly, when a deal hits stage five, I did a Slack notification. A deal over 50 days hits stage five. We schedule late stage deal review. We have different templates for each. The late stage deal review is more focused on do we have a mutual action plan? What is our path to close? If this deal doesn't close, why will that be? Sort of the end stage risk mitigation. Do we have our bases covered? Do we know who the signer is? Where are we on pricing? Have we started procurement? Do we have a paper process in place, the sort of later stage med pick inspection? So takeaway one is make your inspection as programmatic as possible and make sure it's focusing on the right moments for your deal cycle. That is so damn good. What do you have for two? For number two, I think a lot of number two comes from my background in customer success. Post-2022, retention has always been extremely important. Retaining your customers is now even more important. There's so much noise in the market. There's hot new tools. There's AI. There's shiny objects. There's so many distractions. Closing good deals up front is so important. And honestly, I do believe that expansion and retention starts with that first discovery call. And so making retention some component of an AE's comp plan, if they're going to own an account cradle to grave, is controversial. But something I do feel strongly about and drives the team to sign better deals and to keep their head on a swivel on are we setting this customer for success? One other reason is I think it's important to align pre-sales and post-sales and make sure that they have shared incentives. way we did this at segment was for every dollar that churned in your book of business 50 cents was added to your quotas so that's taking a more ndr and holistic approach and i know some companies will even do dollar in dollar out depending on their structure at retail we've actually made it a percentage of your variable so some percentage of your variable is tied to the retention rate in your book of business every quarter. PandaDoc helps you create, manage, track, and eSign proposals.

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