🍷 Darren Sharpe: SuiteSpot, Chief Revenue Officer

15 minutes with Meet Darren Sharpe, Chief Revenue Officer at SuiteSpot. Be maniacal about what’s working. Doing great homework. Connecting inbound and outbound channels. Prospect discovery. Client feedback loops to drive product innovation. Shifting a pricing model from features to platform. Pareto principal. Opportunity costs. A culture of coaching allows your team to collaborate in all things. Talk within your client's own words. Asking: What's important to you? What drives you? Is there a connection here where I can help solve?

21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.

Here’s what Katy McFee said about Darren:

Darren Sharpe. I met him in a sales leader peer group that was put together by The Lazaridis Institute which is an organization where hyper-growth companies are selected to be part of this program. He has just a super impressive, smart, long-time sales leader who gets it. Goes into a company, figures it out, deep dives, and like creates this huge growth for whatever company he touches. So, he's a CRO right now at SuiteSpot, but has been a revenue leader for many years, and has lots of great value that he can share.
—Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

We're fairly traditional. We have an inbound channel, and outbound channel, and a partner channel. I think it might be more and more interesting is how do we uniquely leverage those channels for our success? 

1) Outbound channel. So one, if we look at our traditional outbound sales channel, I’m incredibly proud of our BDR team's ability to profile, research, and connect with the prospects. So we look at it as value-based sequencing plus hyper-personalization, and I'm really proud of the outcomes that are coming there. 

2) Inbound channel. Then, we tie that with our inbound PPC strategy, looking at the exact same personas and trying to hit the same people so that our outbound and inbound are connected. So you're connecting with the LinkedIn ad as we've we've sent you that message really trying to drive, “Hey, can we understand you as a prospect's problem? Could you see value in a quick connect or a quick conversation with us?” So really, on those inbound and outbound channels, how are we creating new conversations? 

3) Partner channel. The partner model is interesting from a startup perspective. Anytime you're developing a partner channel, the key is timing. How do you not be everything to everyone, but create highly valuable bilateral partnerships. So for that one, I'm really proud of the work we've done of defining the right type of partner and being able to service them. And as we scale, we expect to see that partner channel becoming a bigger piece of our business. But today, we're dominantly led by the inbound and outbound channels.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

As a startup, we are constantly in the path of positive change. So I'm going to mention three things that we are constantly working on, but I'm really proud of the work we've done to position us for success.

1) Prospect discovery. This is a tough balance between interrogation and value-based discussion. And we've recently really flipped our scripts and really tried to shift the discovery goal to making sure the prospect understands our interpretation of their problem and how it's affecting them individually. And, that's shift has been, instead of going to the standard, “Hey, are you experiencing this industry problem?”—”What is the personal impact of this problem, and how is it affecting you guys?” It's a small change, but that shift in discovery has really shifted our sales model. Where now, and like, we're not original here, but we're really focusing on client pain, focusing in on the impact to each individual prospect.

2) Client feedback loops. Before I came on board at sweet spot, we hadn't done a great job yet. So, we've introduced the customer advisory board. We've introduced a quarterly business review process. And, we’re greatly mining a lot of great data from our existing clients, and really trying to twofold: increase the dialogue between existing client and SuiteSpot, “How do we build a better foundation?” But, also learn from them. Learn from them, from product, not only how we've deployed, but product innovation, and we're now seeing great innovation come out of that feedback loop. We’re really excited about where that takes us. 

3) Shift in our pricing model. The last thing, and this is a change that many SaaS companies go through, is a shift in our pricing model from a feature, or a modular-based, model to platform. Our value to our clients was greatly in the entirety of our platform. Because of some legacy pieces and how have we grown up, we had clients buying different modules and not buying the entirety of the platform. So, we made a difficult business decision to make this as a shift. We're going to shift our existing clients from a feature-based to platform and we're going to present, in a new way, the product as a platform. So it's a great success on that front. That's a big change both from our CS teams and sales teams of how we are telling clients what they are purchasing and what we're delivering. So, really proud of those changes.

What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on now?

Got it. Well, as I said to you earlier, I'm not interesting. So this is probably the things that a lot of folks are currently going through. 

1) Really hyper growth scale dashboards. How do we get as much actionable data as we scale? So I run inside sales, outside sales, client success, and marketing. Having the right growth dashboards and caring about the real indicators that we need, that's something that I'm working on with my peer group, with our executive leadership, because in a world of so much data, how do you really come down to actionable evidence data? How do we look at those dashboards and say, “This is the right leading indicators for X or for Y.” I think it's one of those things that, roadblock may be a harsh term, but it's an evolutionary piece. It's a piece that we're really developing right now. 

2) How you quantify value. In any way, in a sales cycle, you want to show your value. How you quantify value, especially from the midpoint of the sales cycle to the end, through that negotiation stage. So we're looking at the decision link, but also more trying to internalize, and how do we quantify, the specific value that this client is going to take, or this prospect is going to take, from leveraging SuiteSpot. And part of that leads into the last roadblock… 

3) How do you speed up your sales cycle? I don't know any revenue leader who wouldn't say, “Hey, if I could take 30 days out of my sales cycle, or if I could take X out of my sales cycle…” Again, not original, but can we create more urgency within that sales cycle? And the way that we're trying to do that is I mentioned earlier, “Hey, how do we better understand prospect challenge? How do we quantify our solution?” Those two things together are really trying to allow us to earn the right t...