The Tool Kit for your Revenue Team, According to Chargebee CRO

The role of a CRO is rapidly changing in the hyper-digital world of buying and selling.  While in the past, CROs made their number with 30% of reps who hit the quota. They believed that sales were art, relied on just new business, and used sales operations as salesforce administration. Well, modern CROs are built differently.

Modern CROs care about front-line productivity, efficiency of selling, enablement of their managers and their reps. They use data to drive predictability in forecasting and partner with sales operations as their strategic co-pilot in creating institutional repeatability and consistency as they scale.

Hyper-Growth and Associated Complexity.

The good news is that you are growing really fast. The bad news is you are growing fast. So how do successful hypergrowth companies manage their growth? First, the starting point is to look at your data, processes, tools, enablement, and training.  

Hypergrowth introduces new complexities, including launching new products, entering new verticals and markets, and initiating new GTM motions. All of these things require lots of change management, process control, and enablement through training and tools.

Amid this change, it’s critical to re-evaluate your tech stack to ensure you have the right tools for success. For example, it’s time to look at sales tech consolidation, and it’s absolutely critical you get adoption across your sales stack, leading to increasing forecasting accuracy.

A Strategic Focus on Enablement.

As your organization gets more complex and with the onset of digital selling, organizations must start looking at enablement as a more strategic function and must-have for high-growth companies. With more tooling, more complex buying motions, a focus on renewal and expansion comes a need to build an enablement function for sales and associated teams. In addition, sales onboarding is a critical success metric as you look to shorten the ramp time.

Adam shares his point of view and provides three specific examples as to why enablement is so important for them at Chargebee.

Better Together. Enablement and Revenue Operations. 

Enablement and Revenue Operations are the yin and yang. Enablement is harvesting new learnings and using that to onboard reps and constantly enable them for success. Revenue Operations is building systems, developing processes, cadences, and inspection.

How do you manage the change in sales processes? For Adam, it is super important for him and it is a huge piece of the enablement puzzle. He says it is important to map out those processes with the buyer’s journey as this varies by organization and then overlay that with the sales methodology you use.

Both of those are different depending on your GTM motion. And then you need to understand the onboarding and post-sell side of things and how all that data is being used to inform your customer success, enablement and sales team. They then have a holistic view of the customer, they understand the health status and you can do that if you have the right tool, like BoostUp, that can bring all those insights together to inform the team.

This allows you to get ahead of any churn and understand risk at both the opportunity and account level.

The Use of Data in Sales.

The number of tools used today in sales is crazy. Data is everywhere. We use over 30 tools in our revenue organization alone. Adam says,

“That’s where a tool like BoostUp comes in. You need a tool that can bring all data together, make sense of it, and turn it into actionable insights. Leading indicators and signals are crucial in sales. You must catch the problem early on to save the deal or coach the rep."

Adam Tesan, CRO, Chargebee

BoostUp’s vision is to combine all the data into one Revenue Operations and Intelligence (RO&I) platform and make that data consumable, intelligent, and actionable.

Interoperability and Forecast Accuracy.

The need for interoperability is critical. You need to be able to digest and consume all the valuable information being collected, wherever the data resides.

This data could reside as product data, usage data, data warehouses, in applications, CRMs, emails, calendar, calls, and many other places - and that’s where BoostUp comes in to make the data consumable and actionable for the revenue team to make better, more informed decisions that lead to increased win-rates, higher forecast accuracy among many other things.

It's not the only thing, but it's an important thing (laughing). That's how Adam thinks about the value of being able to be accurate and confident in his forecast accuracy.  Adam thinks of a couple of metrics on this topic and that's: +/- 5% forecast accuracy, establishing a framework and management operating rhythm across the teams, what tools and assets are being used in that process. 

Adam indicates:

"We are looking at a tool like BoostUp to really help us get more consistent in our process but also layers on actionable intelligence that helps every level of the organization get better at forecasting - from the rep, to the sales leaders, customer success and operations."

Adam Tesan, CRO, Chargebee

To get the full recording of Sharad’s conversation with Adam Tesan, click on the image below. If you'd like to get a demo of BoostUp, you can do so by visiting us at www.boostup.ai/get-a-demo.