Kevin Moore, Chief Revenue Officer at Abnormal Security, gives his masterclass on how to get your first customers and how to sell enterprise software at a startup. He covers everything from how to find the right person to contact within an account to how to convince companies to work with startups. Kevin is the Chief Revenue Officer of Abnormal Security, where he leads worldwide revenue generating activities. He brings strategic and operational experience with over 20 years of success leading global, high-performance sales teams at companies including Vectra AI and Proofpoint.
I personally am a go to market leader, for I'm attracted [00:16:00] to earlier stage companies because I like to build right.
Kevin Moore: And with that,once I personally determined that there's the right product market fit. And I feel like there's the opportunity for really us to, to lead a market. It starts with a framework that I've built that I called the six piece. It's not revolutionary. I think I took it from some marketing class in undergraduate calls, the three PS, whatever product placement, whatever.
But, but the bottom line is, the six P's really for me. And the framework that I have, is planning people, pipeline, process, and productivity. Okay. And the lion's share of this work is done in the planning stage. It starts with, Hey, what problem are you solving? And for whom, right? Who is the target market?
Are you an enterprise customer? Are you, are you focusing on enterprise customers? Are you focusing on the mid market? do you look at even small, medium enterprise? Are you looking at. is that who's going to be the buyer, your solution, then you say, Hey, do I do that? Then?
What type of people do I hire? Do [00:17:00] we hire enterprise or mid-market reps? what are the routes to market? All of this is part of the planning session. Are you direct? Are you channel, do you use OEM both? Do you roll into that? and then based off of the market and comparable data, what does the revenue number, the top line revenue number that you think you can hit based off of all of the market research and comparables that you've done and the maturity of the company at that stage.
And then based off of that, then what do you think the productivity per account executive can be? What do we think that they can achieve in a given year? You build what's called a capacity. in that capacity plan is how many people do you think we need? How much productivity you're going to see out of every individual rep to hit that particular target.
And then you build out, what's called your territories and territory plan and geographical expansion. And, like what your territory look like, all that is built in the planning section. So then you understand what your routes to market are, who your target market is. Then you understand what type of company and the problems that you're solving, the type of companies you're going to go after the personas, [00:18:00] then you hire people, right?
and when you're hiring people, you have to map who the ideal personnel is, and that starts with, what's an ideal candidate look like, are they hunters? Are they more account managers? again, are they more for the enterprise mid-market, but you have to document what the job descriptions are, what the ideal candidate is.
Kevin Moore: And then ultimately. When you go through the interview process, what are some of the signals that you want to pull out? That's something I think we do very well here at normal security. The other one that says the second one is people. I would say the third one is pipeline, right? So the idea is if you have a great product that you know is going to solve a real problem, it's then about giving all the iPads.
Now, how do you at scale, right? Get the at-bats you need get in front of the people that you need to get in front of, to help tell your story. Then ultimately, progress a sales. the, in the beginning, as we mentioned, it's usually founder led with their network, et cetera, but then you get beyond that.
And it's really about what I call the five pillars of pipeline generation, which includes typically a sales development [00:19:00] team. It's about the account executive and their own network and their ability to roll up their sleeves. It's marketing events, is the third one channel organization, right?
Value added resellers or OEM. it's also the, then your customer base, happy customers and referrals. And there's a balance of those five. And depending on the stage, you are in the company, that really determines what your pipeline generation's going to be. And it also depends on the geographical regions.
The last two is LOA. The fourth one would be processed. so you've got to map out early, what is the ideal process sales process, right? And again, using those tools like a CRM tool to track the progress of that sales process. As well as an addition to the sales process, it's your internal cadence, right?
Do you have forecasting called you had an all hands meeting. Do you have,big deal call, do you have, do you have training sessions along the way? so mapping that out and holding to that internal process is equally as important as you continue to round out best practices and the collaboration amongst the team, because the one thing that's going to be [00:20:00] constant is change as you get better and better.
And then lastly, it's productivity. It's one thing to have, this all-star rapid, New York city, that's killing it for you, but everybody else is at 40% of their target. That doesn't work. That doesn't, that's not, you build a sustainable machine. The way you build a sustainable machine is to at least get your reps, 70% of your reps over 70% of plan.
And we targeted much higher here at abnormal security, but the really reality is to get the level of productivity you need. You have to invest in enablement. So when someone joins the company, there has to be a curriculum, right of best practices and training that can get them one up to speed quickly, but then to,efficient and effective, what they doing everything from certifications to, cross communication, but really about how do you get them onboarded and building to get them productive as quickly as you possible at a consistent level to build this kind of high performing sales orders.
So that's the framework of strategy of building the, a go to market motion for earlier stage company.
