What are the most significant obstacles you've faced in this transition to a "rep-free" sales model, and how are you overcoming them?
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Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)6 months ago
I believe that the biggest obstacle is the people change. Changing people's behaviors is a change management issue, and it needs to be done in a story-based format.Another significant challenge is data and data across the whole spectrum. When you're moving to a rep-free world, forecasting and predictability become major issues. It becomes a data science exercise, and there's more ambiguity in predicting when deals will close or when revenue will hit.
This requires a strong partnership with your finance, your FP&A team to build a more intelligent forecasting model using inputs from the product, CRM, and any level of human interaction involved in your customer journey.
If there is a human element, then operationalizing and orchestrating all the moving pieces of the data becomes a challenge. You need a strong revenue operations backbone that works cross-functionally across product, sales, and customer success, thinking of the customer journey as a flywheel or a bow tie. Once you unlock that data, that's where you're unlocking the insights that allow you to orchestrate a more definitive customer journey.
This challenge extends to the need for a specific 'hunter/farmer' mindset, those who can find new logos. To tackle this, I'm currently working with a client on a project focusing on account-based marketing, or 'spearfishing'. We're targeting a vertical capacity in the security software space, specifically relevant for cybersecurity in financial services.
The key is to isolate the vertical and target a message to that audience. This approach involves a very targeted digital campaign to get the attention of key stakeholders and people driving the strategy within those target accounts.
The challenge is also about making the sellers understand the strategic initiatives of the CEO.
They are responsible for sustainable, profitable growth, and they run two strategic plays - a cost play and a revenue play. Simplifying this message for the sellers and showing how they can drive the conversation to the C-Suite is a significant part of the challenge.
Another aspect is making people aware of what we do, that we exist and we can solve problems for them. This is particularly important when pursuing new logos.