5. Scaling with Operational and Organization Discipline
- Krish Subramanian Co-Founder & CEO, Chargebee
On scaling new GTM roles and teams
As you scale your sales function, many new roles are introduced at different levels of operating. That requires the setting of clear rules of engagement.
Sales development becomes more complex. You’d need a coach. Someone who can prepare collateral. Someone who can ensure that the frontline salespeople use the right collateral. All those roles form a sales enablement team.
Technical architects, who guide the implementation team, and have a strong point of view can help accelerate fast a customer can go live.
At some point, you have to start building a legal team. I never thought that we’d actually have a five-member legal team that also continues to leverage external practitioners.
It’s crazy.
But legal work eventually becomes your biggest blocker in closing deals as you move up market. These are good champagne problems to have, but founders should know them well. You can start by tapping into an external resource as a consultant for this. Then, over time, you can build the function internally.
On the point of setting up a completely new role/function, a breakthrough lesson for us has been finding non-fungible generalists within the team who have great context of the organization and also enjoy exploring new challenges and solving different things at once.
On measuring GTM
When it comes to measuring the performance of your Sales and GTM teams, develop the discipline to separate your input and output metrics, your leading and lagging indicators of success.
We have metrics for everyone. From enablement teams that track sales collateral being created and whether it’s being used, to BDRs and AEs, who track opportunities closed, pipeline generated, and so on.
We always ensure that we incentivize input metrics separately from output metrics.
For example, it might be good to say that you have a certain amount of pipeline, but that’s not a good success metric for Account Executives. It’s only an input. Ultimately, you want the AE to close.
If AEs are measuring their success by pipeline generated, who’s going to celebrate closing?
In the case of pipeline generation, it’s the BDR who should celebrate it as an output goal.
Creating healthy overlaps across functions when defining these metrics to track is a good way to develop deliberate friction and resist silos. People will resist. But they will work through it, and the communication will be more useful in the long-term.
Another key thing to track are your deal stages. Don’t let your CRM leads skip or jump stages. You don’t have to go overboard, but CRM auditing as a job is a good discipline to start building internally.
You can also automate this with some CRMs, where you can track field completion by stage and set controls for an appropriate number of fields filled to qualify for different stages.
You can go into any level of tracking that you want, but the most important takeaway that I want all of you to think about is being very particular about every single audit.
At some point, you have to give this job to a Revenue Ops person or somebody in your finance team to report on and build an MIS report to share with everyone.
This is something that saved us really. The level of visibility that all us founders received on — feature signups, SEO traffic, blog traffic, conversion rate, like the entire funnel that's on one side of the sales and marketing MIS. Then a finance MIS cash flow with everything.
We just broke everything down into MIS reports. It doesn’t matter if it’s crappy or isn’t automated. This builds the discipline of looking at everything in spreadsheets.
Make sure to get someone else to do it. It becomes a habit for you to at least be able to look at the report when somebody else is preparing it for you. If that job is on us founders, we won’t do it; we’ll find excuses on why we are busy.
Ultimately, nobody will look at these things with rigor.
Avoid this and build transparency in the organization from the start, where one person's job is to deliver all of these reports while a bunch of you review them consistently.
Building that habit is super helpful and underrated.