GTM 77: Building a Top-Down Sales Strategy While Maintaining a Bottoms-Up Approach with Leena Joshi
Jan 17, 2024
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Leena Joshi, Co-Founder & CEO of CloseFactor, shares insights on go-to-market motions, building a top-down sales strategy while maintaining a bottoms-up approach, and the importance of hiring the right salespeople. Highlights include maintaining focus on the ICP, the value of curiosity and a beginner's mindset, and using outbound motion through inbound tracking. She also discusses the convergence of sales, marketing, and customer success in the SaaS industry and the significance of product and marketing alignment.
Starting small and experimenting before fully implementing a top-down sales strategy allows for testing and refining the approach without heavy upfront investment.
Balancing short-term and long-term thinking in sales is crucial for business sustainability and avoiding sacrificing long-term growth for immediate revenue goals.
Deep dives
Starting small and experimenting in top-down strategies
Even if you're building a top-down strategy, it is important to start small and experiment before fully implementing it. This approach allows for testing and refining the strategy without investing heavily upfront. By starting small, it becomes easier to identify what works and what doesn't, allowing for smoother execution once the strategy is fully rolled out.
Balancing short-term and long-term thinking in sales
A common belief among revenue leaders is the need to balance short-term and long-term thinking in sales. While meeting immediate revenue goals is crucial, it is equally important to consider long-term business sustainability. By thinking holistically and planning ahead, organizations can avoid sacrificing long-term growth for short-term results.
The importance of execution in sales
Contrary to the belief that a good product can sell itself, sales success heavily relies on execution. Salespeople play a pivotal role in driving revenue by effectively communicating the value of the product, building relationships with customers, and executing sales strategies. The skills, attitude, and expertise of salespeople significantly impact the success of a sales organization.
Emphasizing value throughout the customer lifecycle
Close Factor focuses on selling value to customers and consistently demonstrates the impact of their platform throughout the customer lifecycle. By showcasing the value delivered, providing ongoing reporting and metrics, and integrating with customers' CRMs, Close Factor enables revenue leaders to prove the value of their product, ensure customer satisfaction, and enhance long-term customer retention.
Leena Joshi is Co-Founder & CEO of CloseFactor, a GTM strategy and execution platform that helps enterprise tech hone in on the exact right prospective customers and accelerates their conversion by helping your sales and marketing teams be contextually relevant to them.
She has led GTM teams at high scale B2B companies such as Splunk, VMware, Redis and has a unique perspective on the convergence of sales and marketing into an efficient, high performing GTM organization.
What You Will Learn:
The differences in go-to-market motions across different stages of organizations.
The theme for the year is go-to-market convergence.
Leena's experience finding the right go-to-market motion at CloseFactor.
Creating an outbound motion through inbound tracking.
How selling value is a tactic that is working for CloseFactor.
Highlights: (14:08) Maintaining focus on the ICP in the early days, including turning revenue down.
(23:13) The importance of curiosity and a beginner's mindset.
(25:38) Finding a leader who has your back.
(28:19) Building a top-down sales strategy while maintaining a bottoms-up approach.
(32:28) The importance of hiring the right salespeople and balancing long-term and short-term thinking in sales.
(32:56) One thing revenue leaders believe to be true that Leena thinks is bull$***.
(36:03) One thing that is working for Leena in go-to-market right now.
Sponsor: Common Room enables you to turn any buyer activity into pipeline. It ingests all of your product usage data, intent data, social activity, community conversations, and CRM insights to automatically surface high-intent leads and timely, relevant context so your sales reps can convert more customers and hit revenue targets faster. You can try it for free today, or book a demo to go deeper at www.commonroom.io.
The GTM Podcast The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Scott Barker, GTMfund Partner, featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.
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