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Our investor content is focused on helping you gain insight into what may be hindering sales growth in your companies. We provide thought leadership around ways you can continue to help your portfolio companies accelerate revenue growth.
Categories: Scaling Sales
Product-led growth (PLG) can propel emerging portfolio companies forward. The right PLG approach enables companies to scale success and significantly reduce time to realization. It's important to understand what successful CROs do to achieve these critical company outcomes. While every organization is different, there are often complex challenges that can arise as companies work to scale product-led growth. John Kaplan discussed PLG opportunities and challenges with Segment’s Former Chief Revenue Officer Joe Morrissey. For background, Segment enables customer-focused growth with good data by giving their customers a single API to collect, clean, activate and orchestrate all of their customer data. In late 2020 Segment was acquired by industry leader Twilio for $3.2 billion, adding intelligence to Twilio’s digital engagement channels, which currently power one trillion interactions per year.
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Categories: Scaling Sales
When prioritizing initiatives to scale the business, successful executive leaders look to their portfolio company’s board early on in their process to capture buy-in and support. Getting this early commitment from the board, supported Segment’s leaders in driving critical company outcomes from their transformation initiative.
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Stay up to date. Don’t miss our content focused on improving sales performance in growing companies.
Categories: Scaling Sales
With each stage of growth, investors have the unique opportunity to help their portfolio company leaders navigate complex challenges to decrease their time to realization. We’ve outlined examples of what successful companies address, in each phase of growth, to scale revenue. Consider how you can help your portfolio company partners assess these areas and provide support as they look to address what's critically needed to scale the business.
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Categories: Scaling Sales
Help your portfolio company leaders enable their sales organization to overcome the complex challenges of operating in a competitive B2B market. Your portfolio company partners may be looking for strategic ways to solve existing challenges, while in the flurry to hit growth benchmarks. Their CRO may know what is working well and what is not but is challenged with how to move forward effectively. Consider how you can help your partners navigate these obstacles to ensure their organization can survive and thrive in a competitive market.
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Categories: Sales Messaging | Scaling Sales
Startup portfolio companies have a unique challenge that you are likely all too familiar with; selling a solution that is so new and innovative that it isn’t a line item in buyer budgets. Selling a product that represents a new way of doing business, demands that the sales organization is equipped to be relevant to their buyers’ business-level challenges. When you’re looking to scale sales success in groundbreaking companies, consider how you can help their customer-facing organization solidify alignment with their buyer and close premium deals repeatedly.
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Categories: Sales Qualification | Scaling Sales
Part of the beauty of a revenue-driving sales process is its simplicity. Can your portfolio company leaders explain their sales process to you simply? Help your partners ensure their sales process provides the rigor and support that sales teams need to accurately predict their numbers.
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Categories: Scaling Sales
As an experienced investor, you understand that aligning a portfolio company's sales organization around go-to-market (GTM) shifts is critical. Most strategic changes aimed at improving a portfolio company’s competitive position in the market will likely demand alignment with their sales organization. Consider a buyer-focused framework that’s proven to help portfolio companies align their sales organization behind company goals in a way that supports front-line sales success. Assess the four essential questions everyone in your portfolio company should have consistent answers to. Leverage these questions to help your portfolio company leaders streamline the process of equipping sales with what’s needed to execute on the front line.
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Categories: Scaling Sales
The fastest route to business predictability starts with a healthy sales pipeline and a consistent deal qualification process. When implemented correctly, MEDDICC enables company leaders and investors to have an accurate view of forecasted revenue, on any given day. Consider how you and your portfolio company leaders may be able to implement MEDDICC to sharpen your strategic decision making process and improve your ability to accurately forecast the business. As you guide your portfolio company leaders on next steps, share these insights with them to help them identify if a MEDDICC initiative is the right approach to their revenue predictability challenges.
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Categories: Private Equity Resources
Force Management has become a member of the RightStar Alliance. If you or your private-equity-backed portfolio companies are looking for a broader approach or need to address several initiatives simultaneously, without overlap or wasted resources — we can leverage the RightStar Alliance to simplify the process. The RightStar Alliance help us provide a multi-phased approach to our solutions and processes including: brand development, GTM models, technology integrations, and defining and operationalizing sales execution solutions. Understand how this alliance enables us to further support private-equity-baked portfolio companies and their investor partners in accelerating growth.
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Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Productivity | Scaling Sales
Experienced investor partners have an opportunity to help portfolio companies generate consistent alignment on their buyer-focused messaging. Generating a value-driven sales message can have a strong impact in helping sales organizations align to support rapid growth. Establishing and implementing a value-selling approach to the sales message has supported NS1’s sales organization in driving revenue growth. Their Chief Operating Officer, Brian Zeman, said, "If you’re going to hire people, grow your business, spend millions of dollars on talent, it’s simply not worth it if you don’t have a solid methodology in place to make them productive."
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Categories: Sales Productivity
Improving overall sales productivity, average deal size and customer retention, requires your portfolio company’s sales organization to be able to instill value in their conversations with buyers. For private equity firms, operational alignment within each portfolio company is critical. The capital investment and performance expectations for these companies are high. Not only do these companies need to execute on their vision, but they also need to ensure that their message is right and that there is alignment cross functionally, to enable the company to profitably grow.
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Categories: Sales Talent
Investor firms have an opportunity to provide guidance to portfolio company leaders, throughout every stage of company growth. Rapid revenue growth requires a strong sales organization and a sales leader focused on motivating and coaching them. Finding the right sales leader and hiring a high-growth sales team is critical to success. A success profile is a great tool for helping portfolio leaders define and hire the right CRO. We've outlined how building a robust success profile for your critical sales roles can help your partnership build a strong foundation for revenue growth.
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Categories: CRO Best Practices | Sales Talent | Talent Management
While there are many things that contribute to the decision behind the hiring of a CRO, (company growth goals, time left in the investment period, etc.) there are a few key characteristics by growth stage that are pivotal for the CRO to succeed. Investor firms can help guide portfolio leadership teams in recruiting and hiring the right CRO by ensuring they match specific portfolio growth goals with the leadership characteristics needed to achieve them. We’ve outlined some key characteristics companies should consider in selecting a CRO at each stage of revenue growth in our Guide: How Investors Help Portfolio Companies Hire the Right CRO. Download the full guide here, and get a preview of what you'll find in the guide below.
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Categories: Scaling Sales
For investors, helping portfolio company leaders quickly define their biggest opportunities to improve sales execution and accelerate growth, may be one of your first priorities. The challenge often lies in guiding your portfolio company leaders to develop the processes, training and tools necessary to execute a sales transformation initiative that truly moves the needle. In my experience working with investor firms and their portfolio company leaders, investing early in scalable, value messaging framework has enabled them to increase revenue per rep and time-to-productivity (of new hires) dramatically. If your portfolio company is pursuing a sales messaging transformation, this framework approach may help them equip their sales teams with an easy-to-use tool that enables them to execute at the buyer level repeatedly.
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