James Isilay is the co-founder and CEO of Cognism, a B2B SaaS company recently voted one of the Top 25 UK Startups by LinkedIn.
We sat down with James at Velocity² to discuss Cognism, a company with a $72m valuation, and what he’s learned about creating a finely-tuned sales team.
BF: What would you say was at the core of Cognism’s rapid growth?
JI: We’ve built a very good inside sales team, we’re very good at hiring graduates and training them up, getting them fully ramped quickly and selling the product.
I really believe that if you solve the sales question, and you’re measuring sales metrics right down to the number of dials on a weekly basis and responding when things are slightly going wrong, then you can get the product in the right place over time. Sales is the heart of the company.
And because we’re building sales tools, we understand the sales process very well. Initially, it was just me doing the sales, and mostly through my contacts. Since then I’ve learned a lot and how to build a modern sales process. All of that has gone into the main core of Cognism.
BF: Going from the founder selling in a non-professional way to hiring a professional sales team is often a big leap. What did sales engine v1 look like?
JI: Luckily, I read that you should always hire in twos, so I hired somebody senior, in what I thought was going to be our main market and somebody more junior who had worked in SaaS sales.
For whatever reason, the senior person didn’t work out and we parted ways. The junior person worked out really well and has now become my CRO.
BF: Given what you’ve learnt, how do you know what good looks like before hiring and how quickly do you know they’re good enough once they’ve started?
JI: As an engineer, I always focus on benchmarking.
I had two great resources in the beginning. One was from the VC, Insight Partners, in New York. They provide a periodic table of SaaS metrics, for both sales and marketing. That was a very useful resource.
The second one was Chris Beall, from ConnectAndSell, who used to regularly share the actual number of dials and conversations his team was having. That was very useful to measure things like how many calls a Sales Development Representative should be making. I think we typically say now it’s about 60 calls a day, but someone may come in and do five. If you have no experience in sales you might find that normal.
Generally, we find a law of averages plays out across a Sales team. If you’re hitting your numbers, you will get a certain amount converting at each separate stage. Then it’s possible to see where we’re falling down.
BF: That’s perfect for a sales team but presumably, if an individual salesperson is not hitting those metrics you know there’s a problem. What would you do in that situation?
JI: In the beginning, we were clueless and then we evolved to where we are right now with a very tight hiring process. We spend the time training them and have a good peer-to-peer system where we match senior staff with junior people.
It could be that someone who is performing one month has a dip the next, and who knows, they might have personal things going on. But at least if you are recording the metrics you can have a sit-down and you can help them if they need help.
BF: In my experience of sales, the problem with that initial metric is that it’s relatively easy to make people hit their 60 calls a day but it’s the quality that matters. Do you only call qualified leads or is it pure, cold outbound?
JI: We started off with the latter, because how do you know what quality is until you’ve got a certain amount of people through the pipeline and can work out what makes a good customer?
Now we’ve moved to sales-qualified leads as the actual measure and changed the compensation structure for our sales team to reflect that. That’s the way it has to evolve because it’s unfair to try and set out what a qualified lead is without any data.
But our current philosophy is that people should do what is natural to them, rather than force everybody into the same pigeonhole.
We have minimums in terms of numbers of qualified leads an individual is expected to deliver, but giving them the flexibility to figure out how they can best do that is part of empowering them.
BF: Can you tell me a little bit more about your training process?
JI: There’s structured training when people arrive and then a lot of mentoring on the desk. As you get larger it has to be more structured and formal because we need to spend the right amount of time with everybody and we want to ensure the base standard is in place.
We use software such as chorus.io and gong.io in order to measure calls and provide feedback. We’ve also created more of a peer-to-peer education system rather than implementing an online training course, as there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for that kind of approach.
It’s really about digging into the detail that helps you build a great sales engine. You can’t just put people on a desk, give them scripts and leave them alone, and then just measure the numbers at the end of every month. That’s a recipe for a poorly performing business.
BF: What about repeat business, is that dealt with by a separate team?
JI: Right now, repeat business and upselling is held by the Customer Success function, which has been a very good decision. It’s an area we’re getting better in and it’s been an important component of building a successful company, treating Customer Success with the respect it deserves.
One of the things I read was an article by Paul Graham, from Y Combinator, about building things that don’t scale. I just love the idea and I agree, and that’s how you have to look at the Customer Success function. Then you automate over time rather than going for no automation.
Thanks so much for chatting with me, James.
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We caught up with James when he spoke at Velocity² back in January.