Expansion and Acquisition: Introducing Our New and Improved Sales Teams!
You may remember our previous sales teams. We’ve highlighted them on our blog before, and we spoke a lot about our enterprise and commercial sales models.
TL;DR: We had a team focused on selling to larger businesses and another team focused on small and medium businesses. Our sales representatives fell into either team, and their role was to gain net new business, upsell, and cross-sell to one of those segments.
However, we found that many of our sales representatives were self-selecting to focus where their strengths are. Some leaned towards finding new business, while others favoured upselling and cross-selling to existing accounts.
We saw this as an opportunity to restructure our teams to ensure that there was a more focused approach, and to enable us to deliver more customer value. With this in mind, we transitioned to an expansion and acquisition model that allows our sales representatives to pick the role they enjoy and play to their strengths.
We wanted to learn more from our Owls about these changes, so we started by talking to Edward Hunter, our Senior Sales Strategy Director.
What was the reason for this change?
Edward: We have very ambitious growth plans — hyper growth! To achieve that, we made some changes to our organization which supported our key strategies.
- Deliver customer value: By creating a relationship management and expansion organization, our sales representatives are able to focus on a specific set of accounts to help them maximize their current Hootsuite investment while helping them evaluate other solutions that can add value to their business.
- Accelerate inbound: We have a phenomenal inbound engine that we wanted to continue to invest in and scale. By separating out this sales motion, in partnership with marketing we were able to increase our conversions of sales-approved leads to opportunities, launch a flywheel team which engages with our 200,000 self-serve customers, and build a trial assistance team which will support the thousands of companies that sign up to trial Hootsuite.
- Capture whitespace: We know there are thousands of companies that can get value from Hootsuite that either just don’t know about us or don’t know they have a business challenge we can solve. We wanted to get proactive in bringing Hootsuite value to these, so we stood up an outbound sales organization.
- Think global: This switch helped to accelerate international growth by empowering regions to innovate. We increased our territory coverage and are now able to better support our customers in a variety of regions.
What was your overall vision when implementing this?
Edward: The overall vision was to build a sustainable, predictable sales machine where every single sales representative matters and has an impact on our business outcome. It was simple: We wanted to hire top talent, develop them and retain them, creating a sales organization where 100% of sales representatives can hit quota! After all, when our people win, so do we.
I’m sure this wasn’t easy, overhauling the entire sales organization. How has Hootsuite faced challenges while managing this transition?
Edward: Good question! We have moved very fast — we transitioned through December 2021, while still having a record Q4. Many of the challenges were in making sure our business infrastructure was there to support the new sales organization.
When moving so quickly, communication is often a challenge. We took a “share early, share often” approach to ensure our Owls were fully informed. This meant that sometimes, we shared information before decisions were fully made, but ultimate transparency was the goal.
Another challenge was within data. We made changes to the core operations of the sales organization, we moved to a new way of segmenting our customers, territories, and building quota. All this has a heavy reliance on accurate data, and as with many companies, we encountered some data integrity challenges we had to work through.
We also wanted to learn about how changes to the sales organization affected our teams on an individual level, especially from the inbound and outbound perspectives. We spoke to a few of our Owls to find out more.
Transitioning from a mostly inbound role to a fully outbound role came with a lot of changes for Abraham Pablo, an Outbound Account Executive.
“It is a much more strategic sales process when you are in charge of sourcing your own leads,” explains Abraham. “I have since changed the way I approach these accounts, positioning Hootsuite as a value resource and not just a platform.”
Jumping into a new type of role within the sales organization taught him a lot, both from a sales and personal development standpoint. “I’ve learned a lot of things, whether that’s in cold prospecting, guiding the way I think to show value to those I’m trying to reach, to refining my product presentations to new accounts,” says Abraham.
Meanwhile, Joe De Groot, an Inbound Account Executive, found opportunities to advance his personal and career growth, despite remaining in a similar area of the business.
“I now have the opportunity to work on mid-market and enterprise-level leads and accounts and work in a more strategic way compared to the previous transactional model,” he explains.
Other Owls transitioned from acquiring new business to now building long-term relationships with clients. For Teodora Ivovic, an Account Manager in Sydney, this was the case. She spends her time understanding the business goals and challenges of clients, and helps them increase their social media presence through recommendations and additional platform capabilities.
“I find that in my new role, there is more opportunity for internal collaboration and project management with internal stakeholders like Customer Success Managers,” she tells us.
Our Owls got to play to their strengths and find new ways to grow, no matter where they were in the business. It’s an exciting time to join our sales team, and we asked our Owls for their tips on how to thrive:
Be Customer Obsessed.
“Understand your client’s business and needs through active listening and showing you care. Build trust, be reliable, and be proactive.” — Teodora
Step Up.
“Focus on your territory. Structure it and prioritize accounts. Always deliver something that is valuable for clients in each communication that you have with them. Enable our customers’ businesses to grow and thrive, and you’ll accelerate the growth of our business.” — Abraham
Go Fast, Be Agile.
“Have lots of enthusiasm. Have a real willingness to learn, be curious, and adopt a growth mindset. By doing this, you’ll no doubt be successful.” — Joe
If you’re looking for a place where your voice can be heard, opportunities to grow, and the ability to develop relationships with customers, we’ve got roles for you!
Jump into the world of Expansion and Acquisition Sales at Hootsuite — check out our open roles here.
