Optimizing Sales Teams: The Power of Specialization at Discover Org (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. My name's Steve Briarton, VP and co-head of sales here at Discover Org, and today we're going to talk about structuring your sales team and why specialization is extremely important. So when we think about building a sales team, we spend all of this time hiring for those A players. Once we get them on board, we train them to be A players. However, and this is something that we ran into as well, what I often hear is that we ask those same A players to do two or three very different roles across the sales team. And so naturally, what we've done is we've taken our A players and we've turned them into B and C players. So here's a glimpse into the Discover Org sales team on how we overcame those issues. We always had our account executives and our customer success managers. Our AEs were our closers. They passed those deals onto the CSMs. But as we started to grow, we realized that we needed to get more leads into the top of the funnel. So we asked our closers, those account executives, to prospect and find net new opportunities. Now that was a poor choice for the resources. They were great closers. They weren't great prospectors. We had a couple that were great prospectors. They weren't very good closers. So naturally, the biggest lever we could pull was to scale our SDR team. Now the mistake we made once we brought on our SDRs is that again, we asked them to field both inbound leads and outbound. Now those are two very different goals. Inbound team, you should be converting really, really quickly. Outbound team, you should be very strategic, focused, and personalized. So we translated that SDR team into an inbound team as well as an outbound team. Now our inbound takes those leads, round robins them out to our account executives. So in the account executive team, we've got our ramp team, our mid team, and our major team. Now our ramp team focuses on all the prospects with 25 or fewer employees. The major team handles those top 150 accounts. And then everything else is split across the mid team and the major team. Now anytime we're lucky enough to bring on a new prospect and turn them into a customer, they then get passed over to that customer success team. So what are our takeaways here? Number one, by creating specialization, we should expect to see better results because now we've taken those A players, we've let them focus on one very specific role. The other nice piece about this that we've learned is that it gives the team members a natural career path. They start on the inbound team, they work their way to the outbound, eventually become a ramp account executive, hopefully into the mid and major accounts. And by the time they get there, they've seen everything a Discover Org prospect can throw at them. So if you enjoyed today's content, be sure to like it, comment below and subscribe to our YouTube channel.