Lessons in Sales Excellence from New Relic

In the quick-moving world of today, creating fast transactions can help you leverage current relationships with clients and set the pace for your client’s response. As a sales leader, this is what you can do to drive fast transactions:

1. Qualify in and out quickly

Don’t clog up your pipeline with poorly qualified opportunities that have no explicit need and spin your wheels for months trying to sell to them. Be brutal and focus on deals you can win. If you’re selling in your sweet spot, deals will typically progress quicker.

2. Operate with urgency

In my first sales job I think the main reason I won more deals from my competitors was because I responded quickly. Set the pace for your customers. If you take days to respond they’ll think it’s ok to take days to respond back to you. Book in your next meeting on the same call, send out next steps or follow up emails immediately. It sets the tone for the relationship going forward. We’re big fans of setting up a slack channel with our customers. This gives us and our CA team a hotline to the customer. It’s been a game changer.

3. Get your software into the hands of your customers quickly

In our team, we try to make things as lightweight as possible for our customers. I personally try to avoid saying ‘POC’. This isn’t a proof of concept, since we do not need to prove that as a concept New Relic will work. I feel like that’s an outdated acronym that software companies used back in the day when their customers couldn’t actually get their hands on the software and  would have to rely on their imagination! 

New Relic works out of the box, there isn’t a complicated implementation process so I prefer to call it a pilot. Try and get them to deploy as quickly as possible and start seeing New Relic at work right away. That will help speed up your deals.

4. Be upfront with timelines and validate them regularly

Customers don’t like having unrealistic time frames forced on them. So it’s important to set expectations around timeframes, validate them and get your prospect’s buy in before you proceed. And keep validating as you go along. Nothing slows down a deal cycle like not being aligned on timeframes.

5. Ballpark price early

Now this one is a bit contentious. I’ve worked with salespeople and sales leaders who are adamant that you shouldn’t discuss price until you’ve built and proven value. I agree, I don’t think you should be providing a detailed quote upfront. 

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“But I do strongly believe that providing a ballpark range creates trust, ensures that you’re in the bargaining arena and saves you and your customer a lot of time in the long run.”

 

Often the requirements change and the ballpark changes, but be transparent. As a buyer I want to know what I’m up for before I start spending time evaluating things. We want to avoid sticker shock.

6. Identify roadblocks ahead of time

Remember that not all of our customers have experience buying software. Being able to spot icebergs such as lengthy legal or security reviews and being able to coach our customers through them helps speed up deals. 

7. Leverage existing champions

One of the single quickest ways to speed up a deal is to find a champion that has used your product before. They validate your product, endorse your company as people that are good to do business with and help move the needle for you. Find those people.

Bridie Kennedy, Senior Manager, ANZ Commercial Sales

Scaling acquisition of new logos is as crucial as driving growth. In this case, let’s define acquisition as filling the top of the funnel with future growth customers. It is crucial to ensure your pool of customers is never saturated.

There are two ways to approach acquisition: you could do it on your own, or leverage your partner ecosystem. If you did go about it on your own, chances are you’d need to rapidly expand your sales and support team, which would be viable only up to a certain degree. Partners on the other hand help achieve a multiplier effect.

If you engage the right partners, each partner could help you connect with many more customers than you otherwise could, thus effectively helping you to scale.

The big question is do you have the right partners, and do you have enough of them?

The reality in doing it on your own versus leveraging partners is not as binary as it seems. For a start, there is a certain amount of effort that you’ll need to take to expand your existing pool of customers, thus paving the way for partners to follow suit. Partners invest into the business when they see profits. To begin, you could focus on the few partners who have the competency and commitment to make them successful. Developing partners takes time. Build a strong pipeline of partners along the way to ensure your growth will be well supported in the future.

Co-investments are crucial in dealing with partners. After all, they are in business to make a profit. There are a few ways to think about co-investments:

1. Help with demand generation efforts such as marketing, making sure that they have enough support
2. Help them scale. For instance, you could look at a co-investment of headcounts, where they spend a dollar and effectively get two dollars in return (50:50 co-funding)
3. Channel incentives to increase their profitability and encourage the right behavior (for instance, drive growth or drive acquisition)

Eunice Ng, Senior Manager, ASEAN Commercial Sales

New Relic is unique in its culture, where there is a genuine effort, coupled with authenticity, to create a team that brings different experiences and perspectives to the table, ensuring diverse lenses to approach any new challenge. That said, there are certain values that we can look out for in sales leaders that are key to building great sales teams:

1. Be a strategic builder

Leaders need to be able to think big while also being hands-on to enable success. They need to have strong business acumen and be astute to the changes and development of the market, bringing this insight into their day-to-day leadership of the team. A good sales leader also needs to be able to collaborate, understand organizational structure, and influence across multiple teams.

2. Have a growth mindset and be bold

Take risks, fail fast and be solution oriented. A good leader acts quickly to tackle difficult problems, critically evaluates the situation and develops solutions that address the root cause of problems, takes the lead even when it’s uncomfortable, leads the team through change, and navigates conflict and tough conversations with ease.

3. Be a player’s coach

Leaders should be able to tailor their leadership style to the individual and the situation. They delegate work and encourage individual initiative, foster a learning environment and celebrate risk taking, offer constructive feedback and encouragement, and connect people to development opportunities. Overall, they build and foster a robust culture of support and empowerment in the team they’re leading.

4. Hire well

Interestingly, setting sales teams up for success is a cross-functional pursuit. Talent acquisition teams are key in building a diverse personal network and robust candidate pipeline. They’ll need to be open minded and have a strong introspection of what attributes are needed to do well. Hiring teams need to build a strong personal and company brand and value proposition during the hiring process to attract the best talent to join their team.

Yenny Wong, Head of Talent Acquisition