When should you introduce formal mechanisms to govern sales processes and what are those mechanisms?

Kevin is the Chief Revenue Officer of Abnormal Security, where he leads worldwide revenue generating activities. In this class, Kevin lays out the steps required for building a best-in-class sales organization, starting from early sales hires all the way to expanding to a larger team. He brings strategic and operational experience with over 20 years of success leading global, high-performance sales teams at companies including Vectra AI and Proofpoint.

So from the point you actually have, I would say, a beta product, that can sell you, should, you should at least buy some Salesforce.com licenses at that point.

 the bottom line is I would actually say even earlier than that, when you're in stealth. So remember as founders, or as part of the early staff, you're having lots of [00:11:00] conversations, those conversations, you should be again, writing down all the information you possibly can, then you've got to store that.

I think the advice I would give is start with a couple of Salesforce.com licenses, where you can populate, the account and the context and have that target list that we talked about, or the, the target list, not only accounts, but the target list of contacts. And then in there you actually can build a framework of how to, store the data that you've collected.

Kevin Moore: And then, and then ultimately allows for you to when you're going back into conversations. And, even later in the evolution of the company, you can refer back to those initial conversations. But, but the reality is when the founders and early sales personnel now are taking these scrupulous notes and talking to these prospective customers or design POS, customers, they're taking all that information.

They're storing in salesforce.com. And then when they evolve, you have this document that then you can ultimately formalize as an ideal sales process, right? As you start to evolve, then you have this [00:12:00] data. Some companies have gone from design partners to now testing the product or then ultimately buying the product.

then ultimately you can formalize that based off of, some of the tools and processes that you put in place. I think as you evolve, document them, formulize the process, what an ideal sales process is, who the target audience is, who the target personas are. and then in the best practices of each stage, which, are recorded in Salesforce or, or some type of CRM tool, right?

Kevin Moore: So you document that and you're documenting that typically you can have PowerPoint as you evolve your, what, your understanding all of these best practices, but now you also have this framework, right? and this framework of best practice can now be replicated in the system that will help you, track, track the progress and the best practices that you have typically in the form of a CRM like salesforce.com.

so then you set it up, you can track you track the metrics, then you can also track the metrics that you feel are. Are very important, right? It's things like once you have those [00:13:00] stages, what are the sales durations, right? What is the, what are some of the key metrics that you wanna, that you want to track and manage, right?

Kevin Moore: And you should things like close rates to durations in between stages of the sales process, to close percentages, to deal sizes, et cetera. But you should be Dylan about that. We should be diligent about its accuracy and salesforce.com or whatever tool you're going to use and track the progress every week as you scale and continue to work on getting better through time.

But again, it's a process and I firmly believe that you should set the foundation for tracking that progress, the systems and the discipline very early in the evolution of a company.

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