Jeff Wood: Building C-suite alignment and driving go-to-market initiatives is our topic for today. I’m Jeff Wood, and I’m joined by Parker Hoffman to discuss real-world issues that revenue leaders are addressing as they prepare for their new fiscal year launch. Today, we’re going to cover three key topics: building sea level alignment for strategic initiatives, your go-to-market designs that help accelerate growth and deliver solid execution, and preparing for your rollout and keeping the momentum going. So, Parker, you’ve seen a number of fintech and business service companies struggle with building internal executive alignment. Can you share a little bit about some of those top strategic areas that have been a focus for leadership teams recently?
Parker Hoffman: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me on here. I think it boiled down to really seven main points, but if I think about four of the top seven, the first one was around motivating sellers to close new logos. And Jeff, it was also the balancing of the expansion opportunity for immediate revenue impact. So I would say that was probably the pinnacle of the top fiscal year objective. The next one would then be the dichotomy or the difference between committed contracts versus uncommitted contracts. How do we think about increasing the mix of those committed contracts versus uncommitted contracts heading into the next fiscal year? And then of course, the prioritization of certain product sales. So as we think about margin, as we think about attach rates, as we think about the recurring revenue piece, uh, which priorities, which products should we prioritize moving into the next fiscal year? And then there was a kind of a fourth component here, as we think about direct versus indirect, to really optimize and leverage those embedded partners as a growth lever for the upcoming fiscal year as well.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, those are certainly some pretty big topics to get alignment. I know in the strategic product piece, we see pretty frequently in the fintech space, a lot of mergers, acquisitions, evolving product roadmaps as companies try to create a lot of value-added services that they can sell. And if you have different product managers, they all want their product to be the top priority. They’re trying to say, I want sales to be paid on this. And there’s this struggle there. Any comments or insights or how how to bring the alignment together across the executive team and really determine what is the essence of what’s most strategic and where sales should spend their time.
Parker Hoffman: Yeah, I think it ultimately started on the data standpoint. So just going into the account level data, the bookings data, the opportunity data to understand what that total addressable market is and then how we identify what that means, what the prioritization definition is and then understanding that not all products are going to be treated equal, and understanding that we can’t boil the ocean and make everything a strategic product. So I think one of the challenges was just making sure the stakeholders across the various product responsibilities were all aligned on what those products were going to be from a margin standpoint, from a booking standpoint, and what that priority was going to look like in the upcoming fiscal year.
Jeff Wood: Excellent. Great insights there. I’ll touch on two of the other topics that you’re calling out, and then we’ll kind of keep moving forward. But when you think about the commit and consumption strategies, like, you know, what’s the pricing model, do we want to land at span? Do we want to land the really big commit deal or get in the door and then drive for consumption and adoption? That can have pretty broad impacts around seller skill sets, how comp plans work, the whole rules of engagement. Any thoughts around that as you talk to executives recently?
Parker Hoffman: Yeah. I think one of the big pieces to on this committee contracts versus uncommitted was around the compensation plan specifically, Jeff. And so wanting to incentivize that guaranteed committed contract and how to pay reps or how to handle that from a commission standpoint to really drive the behavior and say, hey, we really want to prioritize or increase the mix of those committed contracts. But we still want to incentivize the reps to some extent on that uncommitted piece, which then I think we’ll talk about it here in a second, has some upstream implications as we think about territories and quotas and total addressable market and what it means to go capture market share.
Jeff Wood: Got it. Thanks, Parker. And then I think the last call out, I’ll just mention briefly the importance of the indirect or partner program has really been servicing a lot lately. And we’re seeing that over and over through a lot of our clients. And in fact, we just did a custom study that we’re going to be releasing here to talk about what 100 different executives said was the priority for their indirect programs. Some of the early indications were that it’s really around activating and scaling partners. So you can maximize that program. But, um, any of that resonate with some of the things you’ve seen in the past or how our firm’s thinking about how much investment they put behind a partner program?
Parker Hoffman: Yeah, I think it came down to, in this situation, understanding the types of partners and the use cases for the types of partners, whether they were or resellers and understanding then what the scalability was or how, what the growth strategy was behind the partners. Right. Whether it was going to be a co-sale up segment or if it was going to be more of a reseller down segment from a low-cost-to-serve standpoint. So just understanding what those partners were and then understanding what the partner programs were. And then to your point, how are we going to utilize the partners and leverage those based on the strategies that we all stacked hands on in terms of the products and the mix of new logos and committed contracts that kind of fit the fourth leg of the stool.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, it takes so much to get the right partner in play. You really gotta make sure you can scale it and enable that partner to succeed. So that’s that’s those are great insights. Um, if we kind of move on towards the go-to-market designs that really help accelerate growth and drive solid execution. Um, can you talk a little bit about the types of initiatives that you went through in this kind of annual planning process and how you tied that back to some of the executive-level alignment that we established on the strategy?
Parker Hoffman: Yeah, it sort of became the strategy, right? Stacking hands, making sure we’re all talking the same language and where we want to go from a direction standpoint. Then it became, okay, if we want to do this project or just initiatives as well, how do we create consistent, repeatable processes that we can leverage at scale? Then it was okay. What does it mean for a better sales outcome? So it’s easy to say better sales outcomes, but is it higher win rates? Is it less churn? Is it less attrition? So just aligning everyone on what that means from a sales outcome standpoint. And then it became very tactical from that standpoint, Jeff, which I think is what we’ll talk through in terms of how do we rightsize territories, how do we correlate quotas and addressable market to those territories to ensure that each incumbent has equal opportunity to go drive that bookings number? And then how do we quantify the territory scores, and then how do we drive rep payout, which is correlated to the correct amount of effort and performance rather than just territory size or quotas? So it became very practical around the initiatives that we wanted to drive from the strategic intent that we kind of all stacked hands on.
Jeff Wood: Got it. So you really, when you think about new products and new opportunities that a company is coming to market with, if they’re going through this transformation, you have to reevaluate the opportunity that’s out there, where the green space is, where the white space is that you can really tackle. Align that to your territories. And then you were mapping the jobs to those territories to make sure you could hit maximum results, if you will, with the sales results by territory. Is that part of the flow?
Parker Hoffman: Yeah, absolutely. I think the one piece there I would continue to articulate to is just back to the jobs piece, Jeff. Right. So there was some uncertainties here on where account executives and account managers were covering the customer engagement lifecycle. There was some, uh, ambiguity around how we wanted to handle the adoption piece with some CSM roles or kind of the post-sale piece. So once we understood the segments and once we understood the prioritization pieces, making sure those jobs were aligned, then it helped us derive the right territories and quotas behind that.
Jeff Wood: Right. Thanks, Parker. And so you go through your annual planning. You go through these key kinds of grip and go-to-market initiatives. You’ve got your designs complete. Talk a little bit about the key steps now. As the client heads into the Sko and they’re preparing for the rollout, what are the things that they’re doing to make sure Sko is successful? And then more importantly, how do they make sure it sticks throughout the year and they keep the momentum going?
Parker Hoffman: Yeah. So I’ll break that down. The first piece. So it became very tactical. So we broke it into buckets, territories, quotas and comp for this annual planning exercise. And so each one is going to have its own roadmap, activities and different timing that’s required to really support that successful launch there. I think the Sko was probably somewhere around February or late January, but on the compensation side it became costing updates, plan abstracts, uh, calculators to help adoption and really enabling to your point around how do we ensure it’s not only a successful rollout, but the reps are bought in making sure that the first line sales managers not only can articulate the plans, but they’re also bought in as well. It’s a very critical role from a buying standpoint. The quota pieces then became the methodology. So how do we think about top-down versus bottom-up? How does that then flow in from a system standpoint? Who and when do certain stakeholders need to be brought in to help refine and approve those quotas? Was a big piece. And then on the territory side too, right? It’s really nice to design territories in Excel or a territory system, but at the end of the day, they need to be implemented into a system. So what are the system timings and what are the different cadences and points to make sure that reps at ESCO not only have comp plans to drive the right behaviors, but they know exactly the accounts that they’re needed to go after based on GEOs or account deployment. And then what’s the correlated quota to go get that so the reps can hit the ground running and are bought in the day after.
Jeff Wood: Parker, thanks so much for sharing your insights on how you took it from strategy to go-to-market initiatives to full rollout. If you’d like to hear more about some of the use cases and case studies of how we actually help companies do this, feel free to visit us at AlexanderGroup.com. We’re happy to set up a briefing with you and cover any of the top go-to-market initiatives and topics you’d like to cover or benchmarks. Thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it.
