Smooth Scaling: Revenue Leader Interviews from Insight Partners

Podcast: Smooth Scaling: Interviews With Revenue Leaders

Episode: Marcus Holm

Welcome to Smooth Scaling, the podcast from Inside Partners that helps revenue leaders scale their softwares at every stage of growth. Today, host Jeremy Donovan speaks with guest Marcus Holm, Chief Revenue Office at Forter, a trust platform for digital commerce protecting mergings during every stage of the customer lifecycle.

To begin, Marcus shares his best advice for CEOs of hyper growth companies building out their sales for the first time. During the early stages, Marcus believes it is imperative to hire a hands-on sales leader who is comfortable being a player and coach. Ideally, this would be someone who is in early-mid career, knows how to run a sales cycle and maybe even has demonstrated management experience so they could grow the team. This person should have enough technical aptitude to learn your product, because they will be influential in ongoing enablements and engaging with buyers. He also highlights the significance for employees to be able to regurgitate the anecdotes told by the company’s founder during pitches when they are not around. This strategy is most effective during the hiring process.

Next, hear how solutions consultants and sales executives can help the CEO step away from being the major talking head for the company in order to scale the organization. What makes founders unique is that they have the audacity to create something unique from scratch and disrupt the status quo. Many founders come from engineering backgrounds and find the day to day of sales as too monotonous. Finding ways to still leverage the CEO in key customer pursuits is still imperative, but sales teams should defer to them on thief comfort level and desire for how to engage. It all comes down to a mutual understanding between sales reps and founders to find the best common ground.

Marcus believes that the sales account team is who ultimately owns the sales meetings and the company’s relationship with customers. The role of an account executive in a meeting is to frame the interview, do introductions, ask any initial relevant questions and then defer to the founder or EO to get involved. The expectation is that the sales team continues to take notes so that they can easily summarize the meeting after it is over. In closing, he reinforces to sales executives that if you are doing the right activities and have a leadership team that can coach you and inspire you to hang in there during these confusing times, goodness can come. Don’t let the insecurity make you want to give up or believe that the grass is greener somewhere ele.

Links:

Connect with Marcus Holm and learn more about Forter.

Learn more about Insight Partners.

Connect with Jeremy Donovan.