Scale with Strive Podcast
Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast - the place where you come to listen to some of the worlds most influential leaders in the SaaS industry!
Scale with Strive Podcast
From Pre-Sales to President’s Club: Transforming Solutions Teams into Revenue Engines
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Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast, the place where you come to listen to some of the world’s most influential leaders of the SaaS industry. 🚀
I am your host, Adam Richardson and on today’s episode, I am excited to welcome Laura Garvey, who was most recently VP of Solutions Consulting at Sprinklr!
Beginning her role as an IC, she worked at Sprinklr for over 8 years, with some of her Key Achievements being:
- Scaling the EMEA solutions team while improving win rates.
- Leading organisational restructure driving 53% YoY growth in product revenue.
- Developing globally adopted sales methodologies and training programs
Some of my key takeaways from our conversation were:
💡 The what, why and how of Forecasting - and its importance for identifying sales opportunities that might otherwise have been missed.
💡 How to use Solutions Consultants effectively as your 'ARR weapons' by linking their technical expertise to business outcomes effectively.
💡 How to structure your SC team as the business grows to ensure optimal ratios - and how to onboard and train these team members efficiently and effectively.
Let’s Dive in!
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Connect with Laura here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraannegarvey/
Connect with Adam here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/saasheadhunter/
Learn more about Strive here - https://scalewithstrive.com/
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4:20 Transforming Solutions Teams into Revenue Engines
8:26 The Importance of Forecasting
21:42 Linking Technical Expertise to Business Outcomes
33:51 Organizational Change and Growth
Welcome to Scale with Strive
Speaker 1Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast , the place where you come to listen to some of the world's most influential leaders in the SaaS industry . So welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast . Today , I'm joined with Laura Garvey , so some of you may know Laura as the Vice President of Solutions Consulting for EMEA at Sprinklr . So before we get into the conversation , I'm just going to highlight some of your successes , laura . Now you are going to have to forgive me because I'm going to have to read off the screen because my memory is not that good and there were so many , so let's have a look . So you spent the best part of nine years at Sprinklr , joined as an individual contributor in 2015 . You progressed through the ranks quickly and finished your tenure as the leader of the EMEA Solutions Consulting Org . You scaled your team from five to over 50 people . You helped grow revenue from 50 to over 250 million in EMEA . You significantly improved technical win rates up to 86% , and drove consistent year-on-year growth .
Speaker 1You're responsible for SummerSpringler's largest and most strategic customers and you got to achieve what so many people in our industry set out to do so , and you were part of the IPO in 2021 . You've got an incredible track record when it comes to hiring and developing some of the best talent in our industry , and a lot of your team went on to be promoted to become leaders themselves . You're a master of medic , a multiple President's Club winner , passionate writer , huge advocate for D&I and , from my experience , an all-round great human being . So I could keep going on , laurie , but I don't want to embarrass you and so let's get straight into the conversation . So yeah , firstly , thanks for you , and so let's get straight into the conversation . So yeah , like , firstly , thanks for joining , and how are you Doing really well .
Speaker 2Thank you so much for having me on . It's been such a pleasure to meet you , adam , and to understand how you work and how you have built your collective around go-to-market teams . So delighted to be here , happy that we're doing this in the new year and I'm coming in fresh off the back of a year off career break , so full of energy and excited to get into it .
Speaker 1Nice , yeah , you were telling me about that , so where have you been ?
Speaker 2again , remind me , yeah sure , so I was in South Korea , australia , vietnam , indonesia , italy , switzerland and France , so a bit of a world tour , which has been something I was planning and I'm so excited . I never got to do the backtracking thing when I was younger , so I decided to do it in my mid-30s .
Speaker 1Well , I'm sure it was well-earned after your time at Sprinklr . So let's get into the conversation then . So today's conversation is all geared around transforming solutions teams into revenue engines , so we want to get into that . But before we sort of get into the main topic of the conversation , do you want to just tell us , like , what initially attracted you to solutions consulting ? How did you get into the world of SaaS ?
Speaker 2So I always say that solutions consulting is the best job I had never heard of . I had trained in fashion journalism ultimately , so I studied journalism . I moved to Australia to work at Harper's Bazaar after college and I was convinced I was going to be an editor of an amazing magazine . And I ended up moving to London after Sydney and I started to work for the Net-A-Porter group in production and sub-editing and I loved it .
Speaker 2But we at the Net-A-Porter group had actually procured Sprinklr for our social media management platform and a very good friend of mine , who was our editorial assistant at the time , got poached by one of the success managers at Sprinklr and then she suggested I go for this solution consulting role . So I had never heard of it , but I interviewed , I loved the people , I love the energy and I just got such a great feeling from the company and its journey and where it was headed and it was something I hadn't done before and my gut feeling just said go for it , jump into it , let's do it . And that was how I found my way in and within a very short period of time I had some amazing mentors , people like Kelsey Natras , people like Justin Fulkerson from my first month , who really helped me , and let me accelerate into the world of sales and technical revenue generation .
Speaker 1Nice and I suppose you were sort of spoiled for choice at Sprinklr Nice . I suppose you were sort of spoiled for choice at Sprinklr . You know the talent that they had there completely across the board is , you know , some of the best leaders in the industry . So yeah , no it's great to hear the story , so let's talk about , you know , turning solutions teams into revenue engines . I think , like just to set the scene , like why this topic ? Why do you think our listeners are going to want to hear about this ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so I think solutions consulting is often seen as a support function .
Speaker 2We know that it's usually rolling up under the CRO , but I think for me , when solutions consultants are positioned correctly in a go-to-market function , they are such a revenue multiplier .
Speaker 2Really they're a sales weapon .
Speaker 2And at Sprinklr we really were involved from the beginning of our deals all the way through to close .
Speaker 2We worked so closely with ourselves , peers and partners , as well as our success managers , to make sure that we were working so hard toward the win , that we were accountable to the win and that we were able to see toward the win , that we were accountable to the win and that we were able to see a lot of personal growth and development for it . And also making sure that you see your team on stage at sales kickoff going and being announced as either Solutions Consultant of the Year , manager of the Year or people who are being awarded with President's Club nominations . It's just such a fantastic feeling , it's such an exciting marker of success and I think it really makes people have that bug for sales to make sure that they know that they're involved in that go-to-market and revenue generating function , and for me I think it was such an exciting part of how we spoke about benefits and what you could aim toward as a solutions consultant at Sprinklr . I really wanted to hone in on it and spend a bit of time talking about it .
Speaker 1Nice , you mentioned in our previous conversation about the representation of solutions consultants , or SEs , at President's Club , which is a bit of an eye-opener for me . So I suppose , for the listeners' benefit , do you want to give us a bit of a like ? Yeah , absolutely , what that looks like absolutely so .
Speaker 2President club ultimately was originally designed for sellers in order to make sure that they were really getting the benefits of the hard work that they put in .
Speaker 2So people who achieve their number , as we know , they most likely get to see a kind of bump .
Speaker 2But for solutions consultants it's a little bit more of a gray area when it comes to being nominated for a club .
Speaker 2So , for example , at some huge platforms I know at Adobe we're looking at about a 1% of the solutions consulting team who get to go to President's Club . At Sprinklr we push really hard to get to between 10 and 12% of our solutions consulting org there because we knew that they were so involved from the offset of our deals all the way through to close . Their sales partners wanted them there and I think in some cases PhilMessy don't feel as closely linked to the targets as their AE peers and we wanted to make sure that that lack of accountability or that lack of feeling of an ownership towards monthly , quarterly or yearly number can actually result sometimes in a bit of friction between AE and SC teams and potentially even sometimes a little bit of a lack of engagement in QBRs from the SCs and maybe in some cases an overall loss in momentum in forecast deals because SDs are so busy they're sometimes just in demo after demo after demo and that consultative nature is lost .
Speaker 2So it was something we really really worked on and we wanted to shift that mindset from a support team ultimately to a technical hunter . That's how we really looked at this and we wanted that to lead to , you know , the understanding that you had an additional team within the go-to-market function running at full speed toward your sales targets and in my experience it also created a huge sense of purpose and a sense of fulfillment among the SE teams . I realigned the business goals to their personal goals and it was such a beacon of fun and excitement and support when we got to Cisco .
Speaker 1It's good to hear . So there was three key sort of areas that you wanted to focus on . So I think the first one that we talked about was forecasting . So I suppose , yeah , let's dig into that .
Speaker 2Yeah , let's do it . So forecasting is something that I really enjoyed when it came to learning much more about the sales process , and at Sprinklr we didn't have individual contributors in our forecast meetings , so they usually ran for the majority of Friday across EMEA and it would be solutions , success and sales leaders in those meetings talking to their deals , as it is in many places . But what I found in some cases was that myself as a leader , and in some cases my SE leaders , may not have the right information that they needed to , and I wanted us to really take our place as leaders in that go-to-market function who could contribute , who could drive revenue , who could push things forward , who could identify risk , who could pull deals forward if another one dropped out . And so our forecast was distinct from the sales forecast . They took place once per week at each level of leadership in the SE team , and it was rolled up to me from my leaders on a Thursday evening , and for us then what we did is see that sort of clear alignment between ourselves and the sales leaders working together to work through problems and to make huge leaps in all of our forecasts toward closing our deals in each forecast . So we developed a format that was in line with Medpick , and what we started to do was to encourage all of our solutions consultants to think about the use cases that they were selling , distinct from the products themselves , and what product then would support those use cases and those business value outcomes . We also encouraged them to build technical champions and to spot red flags .
Speaker 2We also really needed to understand what the competition looked like , whether that was an incumbent or even just do nothing , and then we wanted to know what the next steps were , and this was all pushing us towards technical win . So a technical win is when you are nominated as the vendor of choice . Ultimately , whether or not that deal closes , that technical win award by the customer to the sales team is really important , and what we felt as a solutions org was most in our control . So that really helped us be far more aware of the gaps in our forecasts and it helped us use our knowledge as a technical selling team to identify quick wins and to fill in the gap where we needed to . So our technical win rate overall improved from 54% to 79% in the first year of us completing these solutions consulting forecasts and that was again when your name was VOC , and it also helped us to identify millions of dollars in opportunities that weren't on the sales radar but that could be pulled forward , like I said , into the forecast in case of a deal dropping out .
Speaker 2And this is what happened with one of our customers in the Nordics . So one of our top FCs , teresa Sandoval , based in London . She had built such a strong relationship with this customer that when we had a 400K deal drop out of our forecast , she had already identified a pressing need for our advocacy platform , which we then were able to sell in at 350k that very quarter . So it worked out very well for us for our Cs to be clearly honed in on what the targets were , how they could bring in deals in quarter , how they could upsell them or potentially grow them even in the same quarter and give them that deep satisfaction of seeing that immediate sort of cause and effect from their actions into tangible value for the business so one of the things I wanted to ask so obviously , like with forecasting , you know it's quite common with regards to , like the qbr , it can sometimes stretch over a number of days to be doing that , like every week on a friday how , how did you approach that ?
Speaker 1so you know you've got so many deals going on across so many different um themes across the mirror . Would you like cherry pick specific deals and then try and
Introducing Laura Garvey
Speaker 1break them apart ? Would you look at them at a high level , sort of bird's eye perspective ? How would you actually do that and run those meetings ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so great question . So ultimately , we were a very data led team . We always were and I always will be . I was a leader and a lot of that training thing from Christina Weir , a former leader of ours , as well as Justin Fulkerson , who's currently the SVP of pollution globally at Sprinklr . So we had a really great set of data . But these SC forecasts we really encouraged the team to be much more meticulous with how they were logging data .
Speaker 2Now , no one loves logging data or filling out timesheets , but this was something that was really important for us to understand the lay of the land , what was going on . How do we absolutely and distinctly clearly , you know , associate all of our FC activities to revenue ? That was something that was extremely important to me and to my leaders . So how we did it was a lot of our data was logged in Salesforce , but we also had these beautiful visualizations in Tableau where we could assess our in-my-number deals , and then we were also looking at strong backfill . So we were looking at in-my-number deals and then we were also looking at strong backfill .
Speaker 2So we were looking at in-my-number and strong backfill deals for the quarter and that's how we were running through these different topics like use cases , products , technical champion , et cetera per deal to make sure that we were bringing in these numbers and supporting the strength of our forecast and our forecasting accuracy by really chasing down that technical win , and so that information was rolled up from the individual SE to their leader and their leader would then roll it up to me on Thursday afternoons . So we would try and keep it very snappy , very short , 30-minute meetings . We don't want to drown our teams in meetings , they already have enough of them . But once we really got excited about this is directly linked to arr and to the success of this team and to the importance of our place here and our partnership with our sales team . It works really really well and very smoothly and luckily as well for the business . It spread across different regions as well , so teams across america adopted it . Some of the teams in APAC adopted it as well .
Speaker 1And just so for my own understanding , you mentioned about strong use cases and backfills . What do you mean by that ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so we had well , the in my number deals were the deals that were most likely to close , and the strong backfill deals were our second , let's say , tier of deals that were likely to close in the quarter , and so that was what we focused on , and the youth cases and the business outcomes within those deals was where we spent our time and our work .
Speaker 1Okay , and did you tier them or grade the opportunities in ?
Speaker 2terms of like .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2Yeah , so they were tiered in terms of annual recurring revenue , right . So the size of the deal was key . And then the second grading came in the form of its complexity . So how many of our architects needed to be involved ? Did our specialist team need to be involved ? Was it a CCAS deal ? Was it advertising ? What were the different layers that were required ? Did we need our CTO's support ? Did we need our product team support ?
Speaker 1And so all of that was discussed in our forecast meetings to make sure we were running as quickly as we could at that time Cool and like if I'm listening to this now I'm thinking , oh , this sounds like a great idea , like how you mentioned about how this improved technical win rates . It was rolled across the business . What about from like a forecast in accuracy , if you think about the QBRs and where you end up at the end of the quarter ? Can you give any sort of meaningful data of how that impacted the sort of wider business org and how those forecasters helped accuracy from a forecasting perspective ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so very luckily in EMEA , our forecast accuracy was very strong right , so our sales leaders were excellent at it , but what we were able to see was just that marginal increase I should say between 2% to 5% forecasting accuracy as a direct result of this , and in some cases that could be absolutely a huge percentage in a forecast . So , yeah , that was a really great number for us to see and to see that continue to stabilize over time since we started the forecast all the way through to when I left .
Speaker 1So what I take from that is you know it's cascading upwards , frontline ic's rolling up to their leaders , ultimately rolling up to yourself regular but short punching , snappy meetings with clear like outcomes and actions off the back of it , and a lot of it comes back down to data quality . You know if you're not leading with data , it's just another opinion kind of thing , and you know you're ultimately , you know , going into it blind . So I think data quality is something that can make these kind of forecasting meetings really productive and time efficient without , you know , having to be overly , like , labor intensive to get the information you need .
Speaker 2Exactly . Yeah , to avoid that labor intensity is you're so right , because there's some instances in a forecast where everybody could be kind of asking each other what's going on . Do you know , do you know ? And that's completely natural . But to have that extra contact context within our data reporting was huge for us . That also meant that we had a really clear leaderboard uh out to whichs were coming first in the ARR rankings for the year , and that was another sort of big aspect of why SEs were chasing down those higher deals and wanted to spend their time on more strategic opportunities , because they really wanted to see the President's Club as well .
Speaker 1Yeah , I know we've only got limited time , but there's one more thing I wanted to ask on this . So , data data quality , crm usage is probably like the the probably the oldest story in sales team to get into getting sellers to be , you know , bulletproof with their admin , and I can I can attest to that in recruitment I'm always banging that drum . Um , you know , given the importance of data in this forecasting , like , what did you do in terms of like to try and create that kind of culture of accountability for data , making sure that people saw the CRM as as an asset rather than just a job you do at the end of the week , on a Friday ? Like how if I'm listening to this as a lady trying to get my team to be better in terms of like data quality , is there anything , any advice you'd give on that ?
Speaker 2yeah , and I'm always laughing a little bit because I'm I'm not here to say that that's an easy job . You know that that it's not . People don't want to do that on fridays . They don't want that , they're tired , they're busy and it's not the most exciting activity that somebody in a sales team can do in comparison to meeting what customers are being at events . Yeah , we did that . It took time . Right , it took a little bit of time . I think it took the first half year of the financial year that we started it in .
Speaker 2I had worked with my leaders first , so I had my leaders buy in . They committed that they would do it . They were excited to do it . They saw the personal value in it and the personal value for our solutions . Consulting leaders also was their own OTE attainment right . So a lot of this activity in terms of reporting accuracy , arr attainment and other behaviors that the SCs were able to demonstrate by logging this in the CRM , that directly impacted my SC leaders bonuses . So they were brought in . But they also understood that they would then potentially have this opportunity to get to club , to have global notoriety , to really be seen as a best-in-class team at Sprinklr .
Speaker 2The next layer down then was the individual contributors . So often we would have team members who had a legitimately very busy week . They didn't get time to do it and they would come to the forecast without their data logging and a lot of sort of you know information that maybe wasn't quite as relevant . You could tell that they hadn't quite sat down and thought about what are the use cases , the products , the competitors etc . And they hadn't thought about it in a MedPick framework and how that applied to their technical expertise and their work framework and how that applied to their technical expertise and their work . So we encouraged all of them , essentially by helping them see that not every team at Sprinklr on the SC org had access to these targets , had this purview and overview on how the sales teams were working and how it immediately benefited them because they could understand where to spend their time , what the opportunity cost was of spending their time on deals that weren't as impactful as they could be , and it also gave them a direct route and a path to sort of maturing their deals , in a sense to apply those MedPick guardrails to it , to help their sales team and their sales partners understand what was possible technically in order to get this overall deal closed and so then people started to show up with more and more of their data completed .
Speaker 2We had some amazing early adopters , people like a guy who used to be on my team called Lucas Fredrickson immaculate data reporting , and then sometimes we got to a point where we had reiterated this so many times that if people were still showing up without their data , the rule was you know the deal . Unfortunately , you guys , you're not allowed to stay for this meeting , so I'm just going to ask you to leave . Go finish your data reporting and you can come back at the end . And ultimately it really worked . People bought into it . It was an exciting point for us in a team to really understand what the other SEs were getting into and what they were achieving in their deal cycles . So often solutions consultants that are part of one team . They never really work together . They work in parallel with one another on separate deals , so it was a great way to bring everyone together and and share ideas as well .
Speaker 1I'm just struggling to get my head around the thought of you like marching someone out of a meeting because they've not done the data , and all right . So let's , let's move on then , laura , that's all right . So the next thing that we spoke about leading into today's conversation was around linking political expertise to business outcomes . Um , and you hear that that sort of language thrown about a lot within our industry , so it'd be really good to understand exactly what it is that you mean by that and and , ultimately , how you think that's going to help create that revenue engine within the solutions teams .
Speaker 2Yeah . So what we did to really hone in on this and it sort of happened at the same time as we were bringing in our forecasting methodology across EMEA so what we did was using our CRM data and using all of the data logging that our team had done we were able to assess , firstly , that we were spending 44% of our time on the bottom 20% of deals in our forecast , and that was a percentage none of us were happy with , right , and we weren't fully aware of that . We could tell that our team felt busy and quite stressed and , in some cases , a little bit burned out , but that was a percentage that really helped us understand why . Then , the second thing we did was we looked at how our team were spending time on RFPs , and so we realized that , based on our specific data at the time , we had a 6% chance of winning a blind RFP but a 75% chance of winning an influenced RFP . So that was a huge . Those two data points were huge game changers for us , in that we realized what do you mean by influence ?
Speaker 1Sorry to cut you off there .
Speaker 2Yeah , sure , no , of course . An influenced RFP is one where you've been working alongside your champion to input specific aspects of the sprinkler or other your own platforms , technology within , embedded into the RFP that your customer is creating , so you can link that to your strength .
Speaker 2Yes , yeah , so you can see unique identifiers that are directly influenced by your product in that RFP that you know other platforms are not going to be able to respond to in the same way as you can , and so John talks about this a lot in his book the qualified sales lead precisely , yes , exactly , he does , he does um , and so this was huge for us and we had massive support at the time from Chris Wood , who was the SVP of sales across EMEA um , and we really , he and I spent a lot of time educating not just the sales leaders ourselves , our SC leaders , but also the entire team that came across implementation as well , because a lot of our team were spending a huge amount of time on RFPs , even if they weren't in a pre-sales capacity . When it came to scoping , when it came to assessing the depth of the integrations that would be required . All of our work on RFPs , whether we won them or whether we didn't , they took the same amount of time from us . That 75% chance of winning an influencer RFP it's just too tantalizing , right , and it can be difficult and it takes great support across sales and others to really make sure that that's what we're chasing down and really influencing these RFPs . But once you see that impact and you really see that tangible change in your deals , you're responding to RFPs and winning them . It's sort of a no , no going back , really .
Speaker 2And so what we did in order to sort of link again , continue to link that technical expertise to business outcomes . We again had to consider the opportunity cost of where the SE spent their time . Right . There are finite resources in terms of how many people we could hire , how many hours of the day , etc . And that meant that , for example , for CCATS deals on my architecture and specialist teams , we had customer service specialists . They would only proactively engage on deals that were $500,000 and above and anything beyond that would require tickets . So we created a ticketing system where sales and FC leaders could review these requests for engagements when deals were at a sort of a lower ARR size and that was on our specialist team . But when it came to our generalists , our solutions consultants , they would engage proactively from deals that were $150,000 and above .
Speaker 2And that , ultimately , was just so that we could change the mindset again . It wasn't that we would never work on deals that were smaller , but we wanted to shift our time and spend far much more of that with our technical expertise linking to the business outcomes of these larger scale deals that we were working on . And I've said this before right SCs are our weapons . So it was that mindset that we really had to help our SCs change in relation to how they acted . It had to change from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset , and that mindset is talked about a lot in so many different spheres , not only business . But we really wanted them to consider that opportunity cost , like I said , or where they spent their time and those thresholds , as well as the forecast allowed us to do that and allowed their technical excellence to marry perfectly into those business outcomes that our customers were looking for . Um , and then every deal . Oh yeah , sorry , if you have a question , go for it no , no , you keep going okay .
Speaker 2So for every deal at uh 500k and above , we automatically ensured that there was a business place associated to it .
Speaker 2And then that forced a lot better alignments between the SCs , our business value consultants , to provide first-up clear information and benefits and value that our customer would see if they implemented the platform .
Speaker 2And so ultimately that caused far more robust price justifications and rock-solid implementation plans as well as a map for our customer success peers to really navigate their first couple of years with that customer , because that technical sort of expertise and due diligence was completed and it was clearly linked by our business value consultants as well as the SEs to those value-based outcomes .
Speaker 2And for us , ultimately , what that meant was that within by the second half of that year , where we had initially assessed where our SEs were spending time , it then changed to 80% of the solutions consultants' time being spent on the top 56% of our deals , which was really great for us . And we saw our overall win rates on all deals . In that financial year it increased from 41% to 63% in EMEA , which was something we were really , really proud of . That's a huge jump and quite a high close one percentage . And then , when it came to a concrete example of that that helped us secure a global telecom brand with 40,000 users across 12 different countries . Tied to that rock solid business case and linking again that technical prowess to those business outcomes yeah so .
Speaker 1So what I take from that is understanding where your se's are spending their time and that they're spending their time on the highest value and highest likelihood of closing is obviously increasing productivity . Making sure that you've got the right technical expertise working on the right deals and not just focusing on the technical aspects , ie the features and functions and capability of the platform , but linking that more so to the business outcome , so that when you get to the economic buyer , you're speaking their language , not just the technical champion , which increases your win rate and also reduces the chance of a customer trying to ship you on price , because you can justify it with a lot more than just the capability of the platform , but also what the future state will be within the customer .
Speaker 2Exactly , and it also increases the deal sizes themselves , like that global telecom brand that I referenced . You know , 40,000 users , 12 countries . And that really was just the beginning of the CCaaS sort of voyage . That Sprinklr was going on , and it was why those business cases were so necessary at the beginning . It was really , really important .
Speaker 1What would you say some of the early red flags that you can see then ? So , on reflection , when you said that SEs were spending too much of their time on low value and low chance of success deals , what are the leading indicators of that ? So , if I'm a leader now and I'm looking at one of my solutions consultants pipeline and I'm looking through the data , what yeah , what are some of the leading indicators that you identify straight away ?
Speaker 2Immediately it's the overall closed one rate and percentage right . So often what we were able to see was that sometimes , when solutions consultants weren't engaging in a strategic way with deals , they would not necessarily be seen as the most valuable engagement on the customer side , so they were more likely to fall out of our forecast . And we wanted to make that a rock solid data point that we had , that our win rate was influenced by the solutions consulting forecast and therefore the technical win percentage , and so that flows . One rate was the first um identifier . I suppose that first red flag , an area in the mind , whatever phrase you want to use .
Speaker 2Another very clear example uh , is team burnett right ? People spending a lot of time spinning their wheels , the velocity of deal so , so high , not being able to think strategically , not being able to take a break and sort of pull back and look at a helicopter view of the work that they're doing and trying to achieve was another . So they were huge and we had to really try to get to the bottom of . Okay , we need to increase these win rates and we also need to protect our team , because we're worried about attrition , we're worried about a lack of engagement and we also want to make sure that these people are doing their best work with us .
Speaker 1So some of those , those like indicators , would be like more like lagging indicators of it's closed , lost , it's done yeah is there anything like earlier on in the process where you can sort of have the foresight to say you know we don't have the right , we're not going the right champion or the right information here , or that you can do earlier on in the deal to say you know to say right . Say right if you're wanting to spend more time on this deal . These are some of the clear actions Like is there anything in that respect ?
Speaker 2Yeah , absolutely . So that would go back to the solutions consulting forecast . That's sort of where we would often see some of those leading indicators , like you say . So , when it came to understanding what use cases the customer was after , potentially it was a use case that our product just wasn't compatible with . It wasn't something that we would have been able to support them with , and we've seen and I'm sure many of us have seen different teams pursuing a deal where , ultimately , it wasn't the right time for us to be spending our time there .
Speaker 2So , understanding the use cases also deeply having a relationship with our technical campaigns , and being fed information , understanding what those red flags might be I mean that was a specific category in our solution forecasting meetings where we would say what are the red flags ? What do you see as a risk ? In some cases that could be an intervention that hadn't yet been built , that would have to be custom and therefore could take a long time and increase the length of the implementation . We could also understand from our technical champions who had a particular allegiance , potentially to an incumbent platform or to a different platform that they wanted to leverage , and so those were a lot of the sort of leading areas that we were looking at to understand how this would impact .
Speaker 2Another one would be mid-quarter , assessing the amount of time our solution architects were spending on deals , their energy and their time and their logging in Salesforce or whatever CRM you're leveraging . If that wasn't extremely high in a week by mid-quarter , it would start to get us very worried . That was always the time where I would say to our SVPO sales hey , the architects aren't busy enough . This means that our product won't be sticky enough , that we're not in conversations as soon as we need to be to make sure that all of our technical validation linking to value is completed , and so that would really be another area we would step in to look at . Leading into this .
Speaker 1I feel like I could go on about this all day , but I know I'm conscious of time , so the final topic that we were going to talk around was around , like , the organizational change . So , yeah , talk us through that and some of the things that you ran at , sprinklr .
Speaker 2Sure . So organizational change and how that were working in the best way possible to grow the business and to ensure that our teams would be a president of the club , would be getting promotions , would be getting spot bonuses . So one of the first things we did was in order to sort of pull that lever when it came to generating revenue more quickly was our onboarding process . We wanted to generate a quicker time to productivity and we wanted our team to become field-ready sooner , ultimately being in front of customers , demoing , answering their questions and progressing deals as quickly as possible . The traditional onboarding langues had always been three months .
Speaker 2Sprinklr was a broad platform . There was a lot to learn , but what we decided we needed to do was to refine that course material . So we wanted to assess what our new SEs and architects needed to absorb as quickly as possible . That meant we cleaned up our decks , we had a much tighter schedule of assessments , we had a much deeper immersion into the platform very quickly . We had a shadowing schedule and we also had 100 protected calendar time for those new solutions , consultants , architects and specialists , to ensure that they could really study , learn and be ready for their assessments when it came to different parts of the product now , just on that , one of the um , a client of ours , if he's listening .
Speaker 1Thanks again , yo tam . One of the things that he said to me that always stuck when it comes to training is like trying to avoid drinking from the fire hose . And in improving that kind of speed to productivity , yeah , having a philosophy around just in time and just in case . So giving people just enough information just in time for when they need it , but that little bit extra just in case . So giving people just enough information just in time for when they need it , but that little bit extra just in case it comes up . And then you know , continuously sort of focus on continuous development , but getting people ready as quickly as possible absolutely .
Speaker 2I love that phrasing , um , and you know , for us I remember my one of my first ever meetings I had at sprinkler , a sales leader . As I was walking out the door I completed all of my onboarding . We just said , remember , you know more than the customer does , and that made me feel so much better and that was often something I often repeated to people we just mentioned talked about as opposed to drinking totally from that fire hose giving them the right amount of information in as clean a sort of a format as possible . We reduced our onboarding time by 24% and that was a saving of 150k per newly onboarded SE and it allowed them to start generating revenue a lot faster . And you know , what we were seeing was SE closing deals within their first two months , within their first month and a half , even if they were small . It gave them a taste , it made them really hungry and , yeah , it was something that was really important to us . So that was one of the first things we did when it came to training and onboarding for the SE team specifically . And then the second thing we did was a quite large scale restructure when it came to our specialist organization . So we always had solutions consultants at Sprinklr and they were consultative product generalists . We had always had architects who were extremely special individuals at Sprinklr . They spent a lot of time on a plane and they worked really really hard with us on a plane and they worked really , really hard with us .
Speaker 2And then when we knew we were moving into the CCAS space again highly commoditized market different brands and companies have been working in that space for decades before Sprinklr had we knew that we needed a more robust team to be able to handle that information , to enable the SEs , the sales team , and to really go sort of toe-to-toe with CIOs , ctos of these large-scale companies who are running huge call centers , for example . And so for us what we did was we separated out solutions , consultants , architecture , and then we built a specialist team and in that we had CCAS specialists , ai specialists and advertising specialists . So for us that really was a big game changer . Those specialists adhered to that 500k and above threshold For CCAS . For example , they were led by an amazing person called Sebastian Salou who came from Fuse and Cisco . In his time we hired quite a lot of people from Genesis , from TalkDev . We really upskilledilled the team and that had a huge impact on our SCs as well as architects and sales teams .
Speaker 2And for us , you know we looked at the direct cost impact right . Each SC represents significant costs salary benefits , tools , training and we really wanted to make sure that we were creating the right type of ratio there with this team . And so a wrong ratio , we know it's either , you know it's underutilized or expensive resources just potentially not doing enough , you know , when it comes to generating revenue , or it means you missed revenue opportunities entirely . And then we wanted to look at that optimal ratio which would maximize revenue per SC headcount . So then the next thing we led into having created that organizational change , was deal economics Insufficiency . Sc coverage meant lower deal values and longer sales cycles , and too many SCs reduced our profit margins on deals . So the right ratio essentially ensures that deals are technically qualified without over-engineering .
Speaker 2The solution , my opinion , is that when you're looking at , let's say , a Series B , so like a 50 to 200 employees , you can start with a three to one ratio , and the why there is you're still building product market fit , you've got fewer complex enterprise deals and you can adjust as deal complexity increases . But then when you get to Series C and beyond , you're more looking at a 2.5 to 1 or a2 to 1 ratio , because you're increasing enterprise deals and they require more technical involvement and you also really need to consider deal size and when you're ratio planning , for example , and that was what we did when we created this specialist team and we at Sprinklr decided on a two to one ratio and that was a blended ratio , so that involved our solution consultants , who are more the product generalists , our specialists , our architects and our demo engineers . And then in my last two years at Sprinklr , we focused so much on enhancing knowledge and sharing the knowledge between these teams and really making us feel like a team one .
Speaker 1It sounds really obvious when you spell it out Hire great people , give them a really good onboarding and focus on developing them , set them up in the right way , where they set within and play into their strengths within their own specialisms , and make sure you're focusing on productivity . It all seems really obvious , but it's so surprising how many businesses get it wrong . It's hard I know I mean , even in my business it's the same knowing where to place people , where to have them focus in different countries , so on and so forth . So , yeah , well , listen , laura'm , I'd say we're at time , um , but this has been , like , really insightful . I've thoroughly enjoyed it . I feel like I could um , I could talk for days , so I just wanted to sort of take a moment to . You know , thank you for , for sharing all of your experience , the insights around the topics that we've discussed today , and I'm sure people listening are going to get a huge amount of value from it . So so , yeah , thanks again and , um , yeah , well done , I think you did a great job so thank you .
Speaker 2Thank you so much , adam , a great chat .
Speaker 1Thanks for listening , I hope you enjoyed today's episode , don't forget to subscribe . And if you want more information about the podcast , head over to our website . Scale with Strive .
