Laying a Foundation of Success with Your Counterparts in Sales with Mark Maughan

Overview

In his presentation, Mark clearly lays out the strategies that he has used to find success in sales. Mark shares examples and experiences from Domo that clarifies his points.

Speaker

Mark Maughan is Chief Analytics Officer at Domo, a low-code data app platform.  

Quotes

“So how do we bring those two things together [sales and marketing] to drive business success? In my experience the answer is data.”

“It’s a helpful exercise to inspect what you’re doing. If you do that, people know that that’s important to the organization, and they’ll pay attention to it.”

Key Points

How to lay a foundation of success:

1. Set expectations for lead production, making sure that everybody knows what is expected
2. Create a unified view of the sales and marketing funnel that everybody can look at and align to
3. Inspect those metrics and look at those metrics regularly

Transcript

All right. Let’s jump into this PowerPoint.

Well, welcome. I’m excited to have you here with me. If you thought you’re joining a business presentation, I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you that you’ve actually been tricked into a couple’s therapy session. So, I hope you enjoy the next 15 minutes.

But in all seriousness, I’m excited to talk to you about laying a foundation of success with your counterparts in sales. If you’re in marketing or if you’re in sales. And hopefully help us all get to a place where we’re leveraging our marketing and sales dollars in the most effective way possible.

Before I jump in, give you a little bit of background on me and on the company I work for. So, Domo is a platform that businesses big and small use on a daily basis to run their business. So, the Domo solution allows you to bring in data from 1000s of different systems, aggregate that data and then transform that data and ultimately, leverage that data and metrics and in applications. We were founded 10 years ago, actually 10 years ago this month, we IPO’d in 2018 and are traded on the NASDAQ so feel free to pick up a share too if you’re so inclined. I’ve been with Domo for about half of its life. I oversee the operations and analytics teams here. So, it’s my team that’s using the Domo platform to analyze and run Domo as a business.

So, knowing that I run analytics is critical information for you to understand my lame humor. And my next joke here. You see what I did there? You pay for the presentation, but you stay for the jokes, right?

But seriously, I’ve been in more sales and marketing syncs and more sales and marketing meetings, and I probably like that I probably like to count in my career. And I know that the relationship between sales and marketing can be a complicated one, like the level of the Jealous Girlfriend meme, but I think we started to crack that code here at Domo. So I’m excited to tell you about some of our learnings and talk you through those today.

Let’s start with the basics. So you are all familiar with the five love languages? The concept for those of you that still live with your parents in their basement, is that we each express and feel love in different ways. And we tend to prefer certain ways of communicating love so one person might feel loved when they hear the words, I love you or another person might feel loved when they’re getting a hug. So, the real question is, how do sales and marketing feel love?

In my opinion marketing is all about words of affirmation. Marketing wants to be told that they are amazing. When they produce a lead they want the world to know about that. They want credit for that. They want to be recognized for that. Sales on the other hand, is all about the money or anything that they can convert into money. In this case, we’re talking leads. Great so we know marketing’s love language, and we know sales’ love language. So how do we bring those two things together to drive business success? In my experience the answer is data. Now, there is an age-old story. That is, the marketing side says hey, we’re giving you great leads. Why aren’t you working on them? They say were giving you all this collateral and you’re not using it. Or look, the leads are great. It’s you that’s not owning accountability for your conversion rates. The other side of sales is saying these leads are crap. They’re saying you’re starving me, my family and my dog. Or they might say, Hey, I know that you built this website. But if you could just change it to be like this, I think we’d have a lot more success.

So you can start to sense where that tension comes from right? So, we know that that’s the age-old fight.

So how do we get past it? Like I said, my experience is with data. And we’ve taken data from Domo, and we’ve done these three things that I think have driven success overall. Number one, set expectations for lead production, making sure that everybody knows what is expected. And we’ll dive into each of these a little bit deeper. Second again, create a unified view of the sales and marketing funnel that everybody can look at and kind of align to. And then the last thing is inspect those metrics, look at those metrics regularly. Let’s jump into each one of those things. So, the first is setting expectations. We do this through an exercise that we call the plan of record, on an annual basis and then refine it quarterly. You could do it however you want. But the real exercise is one in which revenue targets are pretty big. So you want to make $100 million in revenue. Great. set that as your target. And the second step is to take all of your contributors for all those that are going to contribute. All the groups that are given can contribute direct revenue, distributed out that 100 million dollars by each of those groups, so that each knows their percentage and their overall revenue target.

And what we do is we take and use a reverse waterfall exercise to identify volumes of leads volume, which then and conversion rates which then ultimately turn into dollars. That’s the way that we kind of complete this accountability cycle. I like to think of this as like the business DTR talk. If you still live in your parents’ basement you might not know what that means, but for the rest of you, right. All right. Second, create a unified view of performance. So really, this is about creating metrics to measure those targets that you set in your plan of record exercise. Really about driving accountability, and we do that internally with meetings. And we call those meetings to run the business meetings. And we have a specific data dashboard that we use to run those meetings on. And I thought it might be good for me to give you a view of that dashboard and maybe give you some idea of some metrics that you could use to run a similar meeting.

So, this page is, I should first mention that this is all fake data. So before you buy that share, keep this in mind. Go ahead and stop my video so that you can see the full screen here. So this first card is our overall pipeline. And this page is really it’s about pipeline and it’s about conversion rates for those opportunities that we have in pipe. So we only look at this overall but we also have the ability to filter down by region. And we do this when we have these meetings with the individual groups. So if we’re going to meet with the West sales group, then we filter this page down and look only at the West metrics. So, the first card gives us a view of open sales opportunities, both in dollars as well as deal counts. So, all in one view so we can see how our pipeline is trending over week by week now.

Maybe this is a captain obvious statement, but the line goes up here and the pipe and the bars go down, then that means that we have a deal size issue, and we can see that right away. If the bars go down, then we know that we’ve got a pipeline issue or if the line goes down, we know it’s a pipeline issue.

Then the next chart is probably one of my favorites and it’s because it helps me quickly see how we’re burning down the open pipe this quarter in comparison to previous quarters. So, I can see that this quarter, we look pretty good in comparison to where we were this time last year, or this time last quarter. If that starts to dip below previous quarters, I know that we need to do something about it. We have broken it down into tables so we can consume that easily when we don’t have this filter down and also by the source here as well. The next section of this page is focused on opportunity sources. And what this allows us to do is see as you remember, we have those four contributing groups that are contributing revenue to Domo we’re able to see their contribution to pipeline at any given time. week over week and can see whether they’re performing the way that we think they should. Also, you can see that by how it looks for the last 12 months and trends by month as well.

The last section I wanted to show you here is the driver section. So now that we’ve got overall revenue targets and we’re seeing how those are performing, and we’re looking at each of those groups and seeing how they’re performing, we now have the ability to look a little bit deeper at what they’re actually doing and how they’re getting those opportunities. So we have that by ADM, AE and marketing here.

Cool, so jumping back to the presentation, like I said, the key here is to create metrics that align everybody to the same story. And that’s what we do in that page that I just shared with you. The last thing that I wanted to talk about was just this continual inspection of the metrics. I had a colleague who used to say all the time, people respect what you inspect. He also said when he gets on a plane he only ever turns left. So you decide if you want to take this advice based on that other saying, but really, in my mind, it is a helpful exercise to inspect what you’re doing. If you do that. People know that that’s important to the organization, and they’ll pay attention to it. And they’ll take it seriously. At the end of the day, it’s really just about holding people accountable. So I wanted to take the time and just show another page that we use to drive this accountability and to align our executive team, on how we’re doing from a sales and marketing perspective.

So, jump over here to this other page. So, this page is our exact pipeline review page. This first section is focused on prediction. So we built several predictive models that are predicting how we’ll do for the quarter. We got these pretty dialed in and are now at a place where predicting within about 5% at the beginning of the quarter will be at the end of the quarter which is pretty cool. And we’re just doing that all with default Domo functionality. It is a really cool offering within our product.

The next card is our overall ACV pacing card. This is probably the most viewed metric at Domo. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. Not only are we at right now, it also gives us at any point in the quarter a comparative metrics in comparison to where we were at this time, last quarter at this time last year. So it gives us a real good idea. If our red line here is dropping below the other lines. We’ve got work to do. We’ve got to make it up. But if we’ve got a healthy margin in between this line and the other lines we know we’re doing we’re doing a good job.

The next section of this page is really about diving into the details, doing deeper inspection at a deal level. And it calls out deals that seem to be at risk. And it brings up deals that are requiring executive attention. So, this first card just is a week over week change that allows us to see deals being pushed, if they’re new deals and pipes and then this next card, this inspection section gets to it to read deals of risk. So, for example, if a rep is saying that this deal is going to close for $640,000, but it’s been aged for 209 days over our average sales cycle. We know that there’s a chance that maybe that’s a deal at risk and we can have conversations around it. Same thing here. This is just deals that are in early stages, but the rep is saying that they’ll close. Something doesn’t add up there. It should be in a later stage. And so, we can have conversations around those.

We also have a section here that talks about deals that maybe we could try to accelerate and pull into current quarter and or allows us to then have a conversation about next quarter, which is where the rest of this page is focused. And these metrics are the same as what you’ve seen above but they’re driving towards the current quarter plus, plus the next quarter so we can get a view of the future quarter as well. Jumping back into the presentation. So, like I said the third thing, continual inspection, right? People respect what you inspect.

So, summary. First, set expectations for lead production and get aligned across the organization for who’s going to produce what and do that through some sort of plan of record exercise. Second, build a view that sales and marketing can go to, and everyone knows how they’re performing. And there’s no question around what the truth is. I suggest that you leverage tactics like I showed things like daily pacing, trending, being able to drill by group, things like that we found are very, very helpful. And then lastly, continually inspect your pipe and your metrics, review top deals, review high risk skills, and set alerts within Domo.

We have functionality that allows us to set alerts on any metric, and we use that a ton. It’s great because we can do what we call manage by exception, where we’ll set an alert and not have to worry about that metric until the alert pings us and we get a text message saying that there’s something wrong and then we have the ability to jump in and do further analysis and make changes within the organization.

All right. So, I’m not sure if we’re going to have q&a here. But if we don’t feel free to hit me up on one of these channels, email mark.maughan@domo.com or LinkedIn Twitter. Lastly, if you want to try Domo, you could do so for free. Just go to domo.com/start/free or you can go to our homepage and click on the try Free button.

I hope that this has been helpful and hope that everybody stays safe out there, thanks so much.