From my experience working with and scaling up leadership teams across the tech space, it’s clear when the sales team is achieving their goals as an air of positivity floods the meeting rooms. The opposite can be said when the sales team hasn’t been reaching targets.
This is what Salesloft, the leading and premiere sales engagement platform, helps to resolve.
Having just secured their Series D round of $75 million, the Salesloft team is eager to scale into the Enterprise space with Jessica Klek, VP of Enterprise Sales, at the head of the table. I was lucky enough to get to speak with her. During our conversation in the ScaleUp Valley podcast, I learned about her experience scaling up the Enterprise market.
Each episode gives us an opportunity to take in crucial learnings from the top tech leaders about scaling up businesses. From Salesforce to LinkedIn to her current role at Salesloft, Klek has a lot of experience with growing a successful team and was happy to impart her learnings to us. Read on for my highlights or tune in to the whole episode here.
Building a base of experience
Klek has spent her entire career in the HR Tech and SaSS space. She moved from Salesforce to LinkedIn and quickly being promoted to leadership from there. Getting in contact with Salesloft, she was very inspired by the CEO’s mission of filling the gaps in the sales space – something that, as a sales rep, you are quick to recognize the technological setbacks that stand in the way of success.
Thus, their technology enables sales reps to get back to what they love to do, which is actually making connections with clients. I was excited to see that their whole product is in line with what ScaleUp Valley promotes. Yes, a complete alignment and accountability within the organization.
It’s not surprising then that the Salesloft teams puts a keen focus on their performance measurement strategy, which Klek was happy to clue us in on.
Scaling up by aligning the team to an OKR strategy
According to Klek, the entire organization is expected to include their OKRs within a web page. That web page is available to be viewed by their close to 430 employees.
She finds this to be an incredible advantage to the sales team. “We make our OKRs public – every single person on the team puts their OKRs on the floor. That essentially makes it much easier for us as sales leaders to align our OKRs to the broader business goals.”
Klek then follows her own OKR process. This OKR process includes, what she calls, three facets within it: talent, strategy and process. Though admittedly talent is her top priority.
Within this facet, she uses strategies like the ‘Plant the flag exercise’ where the team gets to ask themselves, “What do we want to be known for this quarter?” This ensures that each team member is connected to the OKRs on a more personal level.
Her three steps process for developing OKRs that get her team aligned is truly inspiring. To know it you’ll have to listen to the whole episode of the ScaleUp Valley podcast. If you are craving for more subscribe our weekly newsletter and get exclusive access to our contents, initiatives and calendar.