Tom Ordonez

TechWeek 2012 Talk

Sunday June 24, 2012 3:00pm - 3:45pm

At kCura, a B2B software company, sales has been turned into an operation like any other aspect of their business. While most companies go the traditional route of trying to hire “born salesmen” and “rainmakers”—and hope these people do a good job while being paid a huge commission—kCura believes sales can be taught, is repeatable, and should have a career path. They’ve found that a group-based approach leads to a better result for their clients, their prospects, and their team. kCura’s CEO and VP of Sales will discuss how they’ve built an effective sales machine on these principles.

Andrew Sieja, founded kCura in February 2001. Nick Robertson joined kCura in 2007

Identify the right people

• Scorecards
• Writing samples (Do they know what we are selling?)
• Topgrade (2-4 hrs interview with sales people)
• Culture interviews (Core value questions (company culture))
• Demo interview (Prep the company’s demo)

The team has to be a team

• team base commission
• team based goals
• weekly meeting cadence (understand what is going on with the product and the business)
• 3 annual all hands (cross department hang outs)
• career path.
• training (sales, software, communications)
• co-located. onsite people mostly

the team has to be tech

• certified sales professional
• certified administrator in software
• no SEs
• “we build tools on our software”
• co-located with support and engineering.

Communication and responsiveness rule

• writing guidelines
• yes/no answers (does the software do this? kind of questions)
• shadow period
• role play (the demo)
• demo surveys (how would you compare with other demos. Survey of the sales process)
• The sales alias queue (1 hr SLA with 3 hr escalation)
• New client email to all team (this was the problem, this is how we solved it)
• desired outcome/agreements/next actions (ask the client what went well or bad about the meeting)
• GTD

Crush the demo

• know your stuff (RSCP, RCA)
• verbatim script, outline, recording (make sure all the sales people follow the same script) dissect and change frequently
• have a color commentator if possible
• it’s a performance. treat it like one.

Operationalize everything

• sales values
• ops manual (wiki)
• the price is the price
• the crm is your friend
• clear negotiation guidelines
• eliminate channel conflicts

Potential challenges

• hard to find the right people
• many sales ppl are more comfortable as individuals
• diffusion of responsibility
• conflict around team goals
• continuing to scale