It's inevitable that a company will make mistakes or under-invest in certain areas when growing at our pace. You can't throw money at everything at the same time. When working at a company that is growing this quickly, it does take patience as we have to make tradeoffs in our investments in order to be fiscally responsible (and we are that, which I truly appreciate). We've had some bad luck in certain areas along the way too. We are now making the right investments business operations, product development, and user growth. In my opinion, key areas we now need to work on are:
1. Modeling. We still need to improve in how we financially model and measure our business. I think we have a solid understanding of what drives growth. We need to ensure that all areas of the business are delivering on the inputs needed to realize the growth we want. Much of this is in the form of product deliverables, user growth, more operational and enablement support for sales, and excellent product performance that commands a higher price point. It's unrealistic to put expectations of large productivity and efficiency gains on the shoulders of our sales reps without other things materially changing to support that. They are working hard, and they are an amazing team who can get more productive with the right investments - but many of those investments have not been made. We also need to fuel our growth in a more balanced way where we are contributing to the growth from many different areas. We lack the basic visibility to understand the key levers in the model and where we are/aren't delivering. We're too big for that - we've just got to fix this.
2. Sales Operations/Sales Tech. We all know we are short-handed here and are hiring as fast as we can, but it's starting to have a real impact on the business. It's becoming painful and it's becoming a frustration and causing a morale problem because we want to move quickly and efficiently and we can't. Our operational structure was built when we were small, and has not scaled well with our growth. It's not just technology, it's also business processes. Breakages of both are occurring more and more frequently and are starting to have a real impact on the business. We've got to get serious about this and put the right structure in that can accommodate the current business and grow and scale over time.
3. Investment in our Sales Team. We've grown this team to the point where it's not about just getting it done out of sheer will and scrappiness. We need to shift gears and realize that we have a large, global sales team and we are under-invested in many areas needed to support this team. Our leaders have such aggressive hiring to do that they don't get to spend enough time with their teams. They need help. They also do not have the reporting or playbooks they need at their fingertips to manage their businesses efficiently because no one has had time to build those things. And many business and sales processes have not been clearly defined. Finally, our sales enablement is very light for the amount of catchup that we have to do. We need more investment here. We have no way to know if the training is sticking - and in a lot of cases it is not. This is nothing against the sales enablement team - they just do not have the resources to get the job done properly and they do not have enough input from leadership as to what the proper sales/business processes should be in the first place. Sales reps, SDRs, and Sales Managers are overloaded with so much information and so many constant changes that many of them do not know how to effectively utilize our latest system and processes, which makes it difficult for them to succeed. We are leaving a lot of money on the table due to the lack of investment here.
