Gary: Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining me for this inaugural podcast episode. My name is Gary Schwartz, and I’m here to share with you experience and knowledge that I’ve gained over the past 20 years, so that you can put that experience into practice to grow your business efficiently and effectively.

As a sales and marketing leader for B2B SaaS companies, I’ve seen quite a lot over the last 20 years.

I’ve seen what bad looks like, and I’ve seen what great looks like.

Nearly 20 years ago, I lived in the United Kingdom. I was finishing up an interview with the CEO of a small SaaS software company in London. As we were getting ready to wrap up, the CEO turned to me and said, “marketing is just leads.”

Well, as soon as he said that, I silently thanked him for giving me the red flag early and for sharing how dysfunctional our relationship would have been. That CEO kindly saved me considerable time. That company’s sales and marketing teams would have been pointing fingers at each other constantly. “You’re not giving us enough leads!” “You’re not closing the leads that I give you!”

That is not what great looks like.

I’m here to share with you what great looks like. And you won’t just be hearing from me. Over the years, I’ve worked with practitioners who really know their stuff, who bring great into their businesses, and they’ve agreed to share their best practices with you.

What you’ll learn as you go through this series will enable you to build a, what’s the opposite of dysfunctional? Functional? No jamming. You’ll build jamming GTM teams that are collaborative, supportive, and that work together to enable you to drive at scale. That one key objective that’s required for your business to succeed: Predictable revenue.

Let’s start with a concept that’s a proxy for the speed at which your organization scales. I didn’t invent this term, but I found it to be a very useful tool to focus the business and to prioritize tasks for me and my team. That concept is sales velocity.

02:35:22 – 03:02:29

Sales velocity is represented by a relatively simple equation. In the numerator, we see the number of qualified opportunities, times the average deal size, times the conversion rate. Clearly, we want to work together to increase the value of each of these to amplify the revenue opportunity. In the denominator, we see the length of time it takes to close these opportunities.

Here we see that sales velocity is maximized when we reduce the time to close.

Sales velocity provides a terrific mechanism for teams to prioritize and focus their efforts. For one thing, if one spends time on items that don’t have an impact on any of those four factors to optimize sales velocity, it’s probably best not to spend a tremendous amount of time on those items.

If competing tasks impact sales velocity, one can compare and contrast to prioritize those tasks based on the relative impact and the outcomes those items will affect. Sometimes that is difficult to quantify, but in an environment where tasks can come flying at you from different directions, asking the requester to define the expected outcome can go a long way to ensuring that you are working on those items that will maximize sales velocity.

Sales velocity provides a good mechanism to foster collaboration between teams. I recently spoke to the leader of a sales enablement function to discuss with him how marketing and sales could work together to convert pipeline more quickly and effectively.

The company had found a clog in its sales funnel. A huge amount of pipeline sat in early stages, which could have indicated several possible problems.

The problem could have been caused by poor segmentation and qualification in the lead funnel, before opportunities were even handed over to sales.

Poorly qualified deals will not move through opportunity stages.

On the other hand, this could have been caused by an issue with sales training and enablement, or even our sales process with a lack of clear criteria for exit and entry into opportunity stages.

That enablement leader told me that all marketing had to do was create the opportunities, pass them over to sales, and they’d take care of the rest.

No different to that CEO we met long ago who set the stage for finger pointing.

05:10:22 – 05:24:03

In this case, marketing was asked to impact only one of the four factors that optimize sales velocity: number of opportunities, with sales deciding they could do the rest all by themselves.

Is it any wonder that company wasn’t hitting its sales targets?

Sales velocity allows us to focus marketing and selling activities to maximize revenue.

Marketing tactics all have an impact on sales velocity, paid digital campaigns, content, live events, email nurture campaigns.

Product marketing has a huge impact. Defining your ICP, your ideal customer profile so that your messaging is clear and appropriate for your target audience.

Customer advocacy plays a big role both in building awareness, which should impact opportunity, count and average deal size

And also in closing deals faster through reference programs.

In this podcast, we’ll look at a variety of marketing and selling strategies and tactics that will help you maximize your sales velocity and bring what great looks like into your business.

06:25:01 – 06:58:23

In our next episode, we’ll focus on metrics and goal setting. Today’s martech stack leaves no shortage of things to measure. Loads of books have been written about this. People are often asked to consider BHAGs. Those are big, hairy, audacious goals. SMART goals. Those are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time based. And who among us doesn’t have a dashboard full of KPIs that we measure?

I’ve seen best in class companies focused in a slightly different way, via OKRs: objectives and key results. Done well, this isn’t just another acronym. Done well, a company can focus on very few OKRs that determine the success of the business that align to its North Star. And that provides the context and the vision for the team to execute.

In our next episode, we’ll talk to a founder CEO who is taking this to heart, who’s OKRs support the company’s revenue expectations and utilization of the product and delivery of its corporate mission. And we’ll see how he uses that to set departmental OKRs that align to the company’s overall goals. Be sure to subscribe to the What Great Looks Like YouTube channel and join us for the next episodes.

Bye for now.