Name: Motivate with Data-Driven Incentives: How to Align Teams and Crush Quotas
Uploaded: 2025-03-06T20:30:53.764Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min
Description: Motivate with Data-Driven Incentives: How to Align Teams and Crush Quotas

Transcript for "Motivate with Data-Driven Incentives: How to Align Teams and Crush Quotas": Welcome and thank you for joining us at Argano today. Before we dive in, let's cover a few housekeeping items. Number one, this webinar is being recorded and will be made available to review afterwards. Two, please keep your microphones muted throughout the session. And finally, if you have any questions, feel free to submit them using the q and a function. We'll make sure to address them at the end of the session. Now let's get started. Over to you, Dave. Alright. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Ola, for, the introduction. Okay. Let's jump into it. Yeah. Thanks everybody for joining us today for our session on how to motivate with data driven incentives and crush quotas. Just some some quick introductions. I'm Dave Kohari. I run customer success here at Argano. I've been in the sales performance management space for about twenty five years now, helping organizations, focus on how to build high performing, revenue operations. And I'll let our fearless leader, Sri, introduce himself as well. Excellent. Thank you, Dave. I'm looking forward to doing this, webinar with you. My name is Sri Ayyeppen. I'm the president of Argano. I oversee all our commercial success in how we make our clients successful in a lot of different ways, bringing our solutions together, and also building strategies for growth and and creating success within Argano. Alright. Welcome, Sri. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while, so, let's jump into it. Okay. In terms of what we're gonna cover today, we're gonna look through the rear view mirror, if you will, a little bit and take a look at what go to market performance look like, sort of at the end of twenty twenty three and now at the end of twenty twenty four as we head into 2025. So we'll take a look at that. And then, a little bit of a, you know, perspective going forward. So what are some of the challenges and themes that we're seeing emerge, from from a go to market strategy and operational perspective? What are some of the focus areas? And then what do we see from a sales and revenue operations perspective, and how do we bring all of that together? And finally sort of round things out with some case studies and and, results. And one of the reasons I'm very excited to have Sri joining us too is we're not just gonna talk about some of the conversations that we typically have with clients. We're actually gonna give you some insight, and Sri she's gonna share some insight into some of the things that we've been doing inside of Bargainaut, that I think align very well with some of the, data points that we wanna share with you today. And, of course, as Ola said, we'll leave some time at the end for questions. Alright. That sounds great. Let's, let's jump into it. So where do we go for go to market data and insights? And I I wanted to make sure that, I give credit to, Pavilion, who provide a lot of great benchmarking data around go to go to market strategy and operations. And so I really wanted to thank them today as well as some of their partners for providing the inform you know, some of the information that we're gonna be leveraging for today's discussion. We'll provide some some links to the specific reports, but I highly encourage anyone that's out there that's looking for go to market data and insights, go out, check out Pavilion's website, check out some of their great content that they're putting on LinkedIn. They're also doing a number of really great regional conferences, including one in my hometown, which is Washington DC, later this year. So, as we go through the presentation today, you'll see us talk talk about and source some of the information that's coming out of, the great benchmarking reports that Pavillion is providing, to a lot of organizations like ourselves who are looking for those sorts of insights. Alright. With that in place, let's jump into it. So let's get in our time machine. Let's go back, a year or maybe a little bit more than a year to the end of twenty twenty three and, what things were looking like as we started 2024. So if you recall, it's probably not a pleasant memory, but we have to go through it regardless. It was a tough place to be, right, for a lot of go to market organizations. Lower win rates year over year, so down, you know, 20% year over year, from a win win rate perspective. Longer sales cycles, so taking a lot longer to close deals, up almost, 16% year over year. In addition, the deal sizes were shrinking. Right? So down 20% year over year. But I think that the most telling and perhaps, frightening, data point was seller attainment. Right? Only 30% of sellers achieving quota. And so if there was kind of a punchline or a headline for the end of twenty twenty three, I think we could all agree, it's a real it was a really tough environment for most organizations, and their go to market teams. So let's look at 2024. Right? How do we end up at the end of this year? Well, I think there's some good news that's starting to emerge, and this is borne out by some of the observations, that that came through in in the research that Pavillion did. So win rates improving year over year, so that's that's good to see. Enterprise sales cycles continuing to extend, so getting a little bit longer, but definitely not not as dramatic an increase year over year as as perhaps the prior year. Deal size starting to stabilize, especially at that enterprise level with some mid market even showing some, you know, some increases. But I think, again, the main headline here is seller attainment. Right? We saw that rebound from 30% at the end of twenty twenty three to 54%, achieving quota. Now, again, if you think about traditionally where do we want organizations to be, somewhere in the 70% range of attainment, but at least we're starting to see stable signs of stabilization and generally, you know, better seller attainment. And these, I would say, are all positive trends that, that align with what we're seeing in our client you know, across our client base as well. I guess I'll pause there, Sri. I'd love to get your thoughts, your insights. You know, how how are you feeling as we, round out 2024, and and what's your sense for for for how we performed? Well, I would say I mean, start with the market trend is, you know, telling of certain, you know, facts that we all have to deal with. You know, twelve months ago, you know, you could see that the the wind rates were challenges. Sales cycle were extended. It was it was hard to, like, plan. I mean, the business wasn't predictable, and we could see that with our clients. And and analysts don't, you know, share a different perspective. Right? It's it's very aligned. And you could see a little bit of trend change in the last twelve months. I mean, when rates are getting better, I would say better optimism in terms of the market. The deal sizes are stabilizing, so you don't have to, like, shrink. And at the same time, you know, when you start to split between kinda how, like, the mid market's functioning in terms of their ecosystem and the dynamics of the variables that's impacting them to, like, what enterprises are doing with a little bit of globalization that happened and kinda what's what's happening to that marketplace. And, you know, there is larger deals that you have to think about, larger opportunities that takes multiple stakeholders to get involved and, you know, getting through the approval cycle versus smaller opportunities, you know, reformation projects where we're just kinda reforming and tweaking a few things. The sales cycle, it's a constant learning. But the good news is from '23 to '24, good market pickup, which is awesome. Right? So we're in '25. And as we look ahead, like, we have to learn from what we did in '23 and '24. We have to look at what the market did in '23 and '24. And it's typically it's not just about how we sell, and it's not about what we sell. It's a mixture of both. It's, like, better tracking what we do and how we do and where is the best outcomes. What are we doing internally, kind of an inside out perspective? What are we doing from outside in, getting market, sentiments and what what clients are thinking? I think we gotta get better. Right? I mean, the tools are getting better. The systems are getting better. The data is getting better. So data tells you the truth. Data tells you things that you can watch and and and make changes and tweaks to the behavior, both inside teams, outside teams. Ultimately, it comes down to, like, people doing business with people. So we have to, like, learn, and we have to learn and align. And, you know, all this data just provides better fodder for us to have better strategies and better things to come ahead. You know, think of, you know, better systems and better technologies, better insights with AI. There's a bunch of things we can talk about, and and that's the the discussion that I would love to get into in terms of what we're doing to kinda adjust to the future. Yeah. No. I, obviously, I agree hardly with with everything you said. I think, you know, a couple of things for me is I can feel it. I know you can feel it when we have conversations with clients. There is this sort of cautious optimism now that's coming back, which is great to see, and I think it's generating momentum. I also you know, like, to your point around data, I've always felt like data, the more that we have access to data, the more that we can make decisions based on data, the greater confidence level and the greater optimism we generally have. Right? Because one of two things is going to happen. Either the data is going to support our suppositions or allow us to, you know, sort of point orient ourselves and point ourselves in the right direction, or it's going to tell us we're not. Right? And and that's good information to have too because that allows us to then change and flex, and adjust ourselves, accordingly. So alright. Well, along those lines, if you if you look at the reporting, in, the 2024 pulse report that the pavilion just published, I think there there were a lot of, sort of anecdotal feedback that was provided by go to market leaders around what drove success. So if you'd sort of double click into, like, what's driving that optimism, what's what's driving those improved results, a few things jumped out. Of course, AI adoption in your go to market motion, we're all talking about it. We're not gonna talk about it that much probably in this conversation today, but stay tuned. I'm sure we're all gonna you know, we'll have a much deeper conversation, around that, as the year progresses. I I think you're never going to it's always time well spent making sure you have a clear ICP. You know, you know what your ideal client profile is, focusing on big open opportunities, you know, reducing or or monitoring client churn. But I think three things really stood out that that we're gonna drill into later on in the conversation today. And one is new leadership. Right? Better alignment around, bringing in the right leaders, making sure they're aligned, making sure we're focused on sales execution, leveraging our partners. So how do we make make better, sort of joint decisions and go to market motions with our partners? And then finally, probably the thing that's nearest and dearest to my heart is performance management, sales performance management, revenue performance management, change management. How do we focus on those things that are going to drive improvement, for our organizations over time? So, with that as sort of our report card and what's happened, in the past, let's talk a little bit about what what, you know, what's coming ahead and what what are we concerned with. So what I'd like to do is actually introduce a little bit of, audience participation here. So I'm going to provide a poll, and I'll give you, you know, a little bit of time to answer. But we're gonna ask you, what's your number one concern as a go to market leader, or, you know, or as a seller? As you go into 2025, choose from, you know, a handful of options, and I'm gonna open up the poll right now. Alright. We'll give you a just a a few more seconds to respond. K. I see some votes coming in. Alright. I'll give you a I'll give you just a little bit more time. I see a lot a bunch of votes popping in now. Okay. Alright. So let's take a look at the results. Oh, okay. So what do we got? Okay. You know, kind of a mixed bag, honestly. Some folks, you know, obviously focus on unrealistic targets, maybe less concerns with lead generation, sales and revenue operational gaps, macroeconomic conditions, probably less, you know, less focus at this point on AI efficiency. So okay. Good. Alright. Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at sort of where your head is at, from an audience perspective and what, you know, sort of what transpired in terms of of what we're seeing in the marketplace. I think let's see here. How should I get to the next slide? Sorry. Hold on. Hold, please. There we go. Okay. So here's, you know, like, here's where we ended up, in terms of the serve the actual results and and some of the research that Pavilion's publishing. So number one, longer sales cycles. So continuing sort of anxiety about the the lengthening and the amount of time that it takes for, probably, particularly enterprise, organizations to reach a decision, and purchase. Two was actually difficulties with lead generation. So it looked like that was maybe a little bit less on folks' mind, on on the call today, but definitely lots of concerns about how how do we fill the top of the funnel? How do we fill that funnel with a a lot of, actionable, leads that can turn into real opportunities? And then third, of course, unrealistic targets, some continuing anxiety around that. I guess, Sri, based on what the audience, has said and and your perspective on on some of these, items, I'd love to, you know, get your insight into how how are you feeling as our, you know, primary go to market leader? Does some of this resonate with you or are there things missing from here? Yeah. I mean, I always kinda think about this in kind of two call it trends and perspectives. One is, what is inside out? Like, what do we know, and what are we trying to tell the market? And then what's outside in? What does the market know, and how do we educate internally? And both have to really align. And if that alignment doesn't exist, right, so we make some assumptions, and it doesn't kinda gel with how the market sees it. So when you think about the outside in perspective, I always say, look, are are the the marketplace, the clients, and our clients' clients, like, when we kinda create opportunities to help our clients, like, build a better revenue management or a revenue life cycle management kinda story, the buyers are getting smarter. Right? I mean, just like there is a whole shift in, like, the buyer's kinda basic foundation understanding of what they need, what they're trying to solve for, and what they're looking for. And the that's great because the buyers are way more smarter in terms of what systems and and what processes that kinda enables them to go do it. So we gotta align our approach to, like, how our teams think about, like, serving a smarter ecosystem that's, like, well equipped with good data, well equipped with good decisions. And they're looking for good, you know, smart kind of mindsets to, like, come in and say, how do you distill with with good KPIs and good analytics and good you know, finding ways to inform them on the right decisions they can make. Right? So from a customer advocacy standpoint, kinda what you do with your team, which is, like, phenomenal because there are things that we are bringing into the forefront that allows us to, like, sit together and make some joint decision. The second thing, the outside in perspective is just kind of this really expectation of, like, a hyper personalization in the market. Right? So nobody's buy in. You know, there is need for understanding their marketplace, understanding their industry process, understanding what they're doing with the specific solution with the with the reformation technique of, like, how do I change this on now and kinda watch the impact it's creating. So hyper personalization, working with really kind of well educated and and a and a well equipped, ecosystem. At the same time, the complexities around their processes and their approvals. Right? That's kind of the outside in perspective. But also, like, inside out. Like, you gotta think about the teams, and every every every company goes through it. Right? There there is the shift in that buyer's journey, shift in understanding what what they know, what they understand. Like, how do you match to that? How do you make sure you're building your processes and systems to support, the teams kinda meeting them? Right? So sometimes it could be a productivity issue or it's a burnout issue, like, internally. So how do you, like, help them in real time kinda coaching? Could be a skill gap. Could be an understanding of, like, how do you shift to that buyer's journey on a consistent basis. And then finally, it also comes down to, like, how do you make sure the the the internal processes and understanding what's a quality pipeline. Like, what does that pipeline mean to you? Like, how do you take that quality pipeline and kinda help convert from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel? So there is internal, call it, sets of issues that you have to look at, understand how the team's operating, understand how the team's processing it. And with the education enablement, how do you make sure that you're meeting your clients at the right spot in terms of it's a smarter client ecosystem that they're already well equipped with good data and good systems. It is a it's a changing landscape, and it's a consistent team that we have seen over the last two years that's building up. But those are the the concerns. Like, how do you manage the internal team to kinda understand that, like, those unrealistic targets can become realistic? If you just kinda create a different way of approaching your clients, at the same time, you know, you can reduce the longer sales cycle, but, like, really kinda finding out where they are and meeting them there to, like, compress the decision making process. So it's like a it's it's a it's a process. It's an evolution. It's an education, you know, system. But once you've mastered it, it just becomes better and better, and that's where you see the success that you wanna see. Yeah. I I a couple of things that I would, you know, sort of reemphasize from from what you've described. You know, one is, and certainly my experience too, the the enterprise buyer is smarter. Right? They're better educated now. They have access to so much more information. So they're coming into the dialogue often armed with a lot of just like great foundational knowledge. So so it requires all of us to level up our game. Right? We can't we can't just show up anymore with a canned demo or some, you know, canned sort of responses. I also think that that personalization is becoming much more important. Right? It's again, you know, if you think about along those lines, I wanna know not just what what you've done in my vertical, but, like, what have you done at scale of similar size and scale and complexity? So that, you know, so so it really and I think that's driving some of that longer sales cycle. Right? It's like, okay. Well, now we have to really, really get personal personalization and introduce that into the discussion. I also think it's a team buying world now. Right? Like, it's you're not you're not just selling to one person anymore. Often at their enterprise level, there's multiple stakeholders that you have to bring to the table. And part of that is driven by the capabilities sort of expansion of our of our, you know, software partners as well. Right? Like, they have so many different things they can bring to the table. And so that conversation by nature is becoming more complicated, which is driving sort of an extension, in terms of who we have to bring to the table, who we have to bring along in that sales process. And added to that, I mean, the the world is evolving into this concept of multithreaded selling. Right? So it's not just one person selling to a team. It's a team selling to a team. So there is multiple parallel things that have to go well to, like, converge at a point where decisions can be made, and you can start measure the outcomes and the impact that you're gonna create through that. Yeah. %. I I think, you know, if we think about sort of thematically what what we're seeing, it it brings me back to, and I'll make a little bit of a shameless plug here for some work that we did last year with World at Work, where we talked about sort of aligning go to market strategy and aligning compensation and capacity. And actually, one of our partners, RevenueShift, walked us through this model. I think it's a really great framework because if you think about changing go to market strategy, what those objectives are, you really need to think about all of these areas as part of that conversation, particularly if you tie this back to our overarching theme, which is how do we make better decisions using data? Right? And how do we drive better outcomes using data? So back to your point about what does that customer journey look like. Right, Sri? Like, what are the customer interactions? What does that sales process look like? What roles and competencies do I need to support that? To your point about, like, it's a team selling world. Well, you know, like, hunter, farmer, hybrid. You know, these are after years and years, I think of, like, specialization, we're now seeing sort of a a return to a conversation of, like, do I need a hybrid role? Do I need just a sales engineer? Do I need someone that can do you know, that can wear a bunch of hats? From there, now that I know, like, the people and the roles and the things that I want them to be doing and focused on, do I have the right incentive plans in place? Am I measuring the right things? Is it aligned with my strategy? Do I have the right pay mix? You know, like, what's my sort of threshold or or decision point between upside and revenue predictability and sort of the tension between those two? Of course, absolutely, quota achievement. Right? A lot of what we talked about, and this is anxiety at at the seller level, which rolls all the way up the food chain to the very top of the organization. If our sellers aren't hitting quota, you know, how are we gonna hit our overall targets as a business? And and how do you wrap governance around this whole thing too? Right? So if you think about making sure that you're staying close to your sellers, you're staying close to your your sales team, understanding what their sentiment is on an ongoing basis. And so when we talk to customers around making better data driven decisions, it's each of these areas and the things that you wanna measure. You know, the usual suspects that you wanna go after, days to close, pipeline health, ramp time, you know, quota achievement, of course. And if you think about the things that you wanna benchmark yourself against other organizations, you definitely wanna have strategy for how you're gonna go after and capture these pieces of information. I think along those lines, if you think about sort of alignment as a theme, and we're gonna hit on this, quite a bit more, in the rest of the conversation. You know, there there's there's sort of the positive things of alignment, but, you know, if you look at it from a misalignment perspective, you know, three themes came out of, the future revenue report that Pavilion and Crossbeam, just published. And they were insufficient leadership support, lack of cross functional strategy and communication, and siloed metrics and KPIs. And so, you know, I think, Sri, I'm very curious to hear. Knowing, of course, where this conversation is going, what are some of your thoughts as as you look at these these sort of usual suspects from a misalignment perspective? Well, I mean, this is something you can be we have internally try to solve for, as well as, helping our clients to kinda achieve success. Right? I think these are, I would say, top, you know, three that always comes to mind where, you know, first of all, you know, you gotta make sure that there is a strong there is this new world of, you know, that we we think of this role as CRO. There is this revenue revenue leadership that it's a cross functional set of team members. Right? It's not just, you know, gone are the days. It's just like one sales team. It's like, you know, sales combined with, like, your supply chain, kinda how it's kinda supporting sales, the financial teams, how it's supporting sales. It's a joint team between, like, sales and marketing and finance and customer service, like, all coming together to create this revenue leadership. That is critical, and you gotta establish it with certain set of alignment and and rules and policies to make sure, like, everybody's operating on the same set of principles, which, you know, of course, solves the the the execution gap. And everybody's kinda seen the same set of dashboards. But when we think of this insights and dashboards, I think some of the things that we always try and see and we we solve with our clients as well is this understanding of what a KPI means. Right? So I know one of the things that you talk about, number three is, like, the KPI. We don't think of KPI's, like, in silos. Right? You can't just think, well, let's just kinda look at sales KPI's and what they're doing. Like, they cannot achieve their KPIs with other KPIs somewhere interacting with it or somewhere coexisting with it or somewhere creating some sort of an interrelationship. Right? So we always think of this cross functional KPI. Like, couple examples come to mind that we have solved for is, you know, finance want to, like, hold margins, hold hold pricing, and there is always this ask of, like, this is how we wanna operate. But sometimes it causes sales challenges, and there is always this whole world of the discounting process and what you wanna go through. And sometimes when you sell through your your your channel partners, I mean, there is, like, multi tier discounting that you have to go through. And there is this balancing act in terms of how do you marry those KPIs. You are do and achieve a certain outcome yet, you know, achieving another outcome that's internally as well. So this is internal versus external, you know, manage of how things happen, which is very critical. And the same thing with, like, think of, you know, sales and your supply chain. If if your supply chain, your products don't show up on time, you don't have just in time inventory that's available, or just in time ask of how you can solve for a delivery challenge, sales can figure out a way to kinda meet that revenue. Right? So revenue almost kinda becomes this intersection of I can keep booking my sales. I can keep discounting. I can do what I want. But at the same time, if you don't have your delivery kinda support the way you want it, whether it's products and shipping products, your lead times, and availability of all these products in your in your manufacturing cycle to go support it becomes a challenge. So these KPIs are kinda starting to evolve into this cross functional KPIs. That's why you put this in in in sort of a KPI hub and say, how do I measure this to make sure there is a good balance in that between sales and finance, between finance and marketing, between marketing and and IT that kind of pulls all the data together? There is this constant challenge that we see because, you know, two things. One is, you know, people are educating themselves. They're just just starting to kinda learn this better. At the same time, the systems and the tools are evolving. Data is kinda split into multiple systems, and it's kinda siloed in a lot of ways. You gotta solve both sides. And and and and finally, I think having this idea of, like, what this one set of KPIs you're gonna monitor that's gonna become become the kind of the epicenter of the business. That becomes an interesting idea for most businesses to really kinda advance the business forward, which, you know, over the course of the next few slides, we'll share some of the things we have done internally to kinda make sure that everybody kinda aligns to that same set of data that we can look at, same set of numbers we can look at. And we can explain to the company what success means and which is very critical that everybody sees it the same way. Yeah. I, this is super important. Right? I think this idea and to your point, it's it's something that, I've felt passionate about for a long time. Right? This idea of sort of the interconnectedness of all of these functions. And, you know, it's funny because I think, you know, as I've seen everyone sort of level up and evolve, you you have this sort of historic perspective of like, oh, I'm the CFO and I care about this. And it's like, I'm the, you know, the salesperson and I care about this. And the reality is, to your point, if I push down over here, something pops up over here. Right? Like, there is no isolated decision making that you can do in a vacuum. It's all connected. And once you start to understand that, then you aren't just you start to understand the importance of having a CRO, having someone that's in charge of revenue that also understands the finance impact, and having a CFO that understands it's not just about cost of sale because that has real implications on how our go to market strategy gets executed. And all of that is, you know, like sort of the foundation of when we go in to switch gears a little bit. When we go in and talk to customers about what is sales performance management, how do I set up, you know, stronger, better revenue, you know, sales and revenue operations, we we talk about these things, more or less holistically, right, to your point. So for us, it's really three primary areas, that factor into SPM as a program. And the first is planning. Right? This is sales planning. This is how do I make sure if I look at my go to market strategy and what my objectives are, how do I make sure, like, I have the right coverage model, I have right territories, I'm setting right targets, I'm designing my plans correctly, I'm planning from a finance perspective of how much I should anticipate paying out, and commission expense and commission cost of sale. All of that is foundational to be able to communicate to my go to market team. Here's what you were responsible for. Here's how here's how you get paid. And here's what I want here's the here's the why. Right? Like, here's what's in it for you and why it aligns with the rest of the organization strategy. Then it's execution. Right? Now it's the brass tacks of I've gotta make sure that I have clean data. I can pull that in. The right people, the right teams are getting credit, for the, you know, the outcomes that they're producing. I'm paying you ultimately. Right? You know, like, there is some degree of of coin operated mentality that we have to acknowledge that, you know, someone somewhere, somehow, I'm getting money into a checking account. But I'm also giving you, like, really good visibility into why. Right? Like, here's the activity. Here's your contributions. Here's the math behind it. And what does that ongoing data maintenance look like? But only when you have both planning and execution in place together systematically can you really take advantage of this analysis? Right? Now I have all of this data sitting in one place. Now I really can more powerfully layer on analytics, you know, plan, seller effectiveness, team effectiveness, plan effectiveness, modeling, really starting to leverage this information and this data, ultimately to make better decisions around how we're performing as a business, but also to use it to drive the quota setting process, to drive the territory, you know, sort of management process, and you and and operate as a continuous model for improvement over time. I think, you know, once you have that sort of perspective and you realize, like, all of this is an interconnected universe of things that we need to consider, then you can start to think about, well, how do I drive value out of these investments that I'm making? And, really, ultimately, for us, there is a kind of natural progression that organizations go through as they start to invest in, you know, in in these pieces. And not to, you know, not to spoil the not not as a spoiler alert, but we're gonna talk about, like, how Sri Ayyeppen gonna talk about, like, how we personally here at Argano have gone through some of this investment cycle. But it starts with execution. Right? Ultimately, at the end of the day, we've got to make sure we're paying people on time, giving them accurate insights into why they're getting paid, and how, and give them some mechanisms to communicate with us from an operations team. Right? So that they can say, like, hey. This doesn't look right or this you know, I I need credit for for this activity. And that foundation, if you wanna think about it, like, what why do I do that? What's the return? The return is efficiency. The return is, you know, generally efficiency. Instead of doing this in a bunch of different places, on a bunch of different systems, I start to consolidate this into a centralized location. And also preventing overpayments. Right? Preventing mistakes in a what generally is a highly manual process if you don't have automation and you don't have tools and governance around it. From there, you can move into planning. Right? Like, now I can say, okay. Now that I have that that problem solved, how do I make sure I'm setting territories up, I'm managing quotas better, I'm managing capacity, I'm thinking about, like, how many how much headcount do I need in these roles, in these specific areas? And that's going to drive kind of better performance from a sales organization perspective, better results around quota attainment. And finally, as I mentioned, analysis. Right now I have all this data. Ultimately, when we think about it, both internally and when we communicate with customers, it's it's a it boils down to ultimately kind of a simple ratio. Right? Like, sales is at the top. That's the numerator. Cost of sales is the denominator. And everything that I'm doing is in service of one or both of these outcomes. I need to need to make that numerator bigger. Right? So I need to generate more sales out of my sales organization, higher quota attainment, better achievement, or I need to lower the cost that it takes to achieve that revenue. Right? So I can I can improve myself in either dimension or both, but, ultimately, that's what these conversations are in service of? And so I guess with that as sort of the backdrop, Sri, I'd love to turn the mic over to you and, for you to share some of the things we've been talking about, honestly, over the last couple years at Argano as well. Excellent. So one thing we always kinda believe in, let's start with kinda three prongs of things you have to do. One is you gotta align your your people, your leadership to a certain set of ideas that's that's driving kinda what data you're all marching towards. Right? So it start at the leadership level to be able to communicate to the teams, kinda drive the results that you're looking for. So it starts there. And then how do you ground everybody to a certain set of KPIs and data that you look and look at, which becomes your key dashboard you're looking at. That's your cockpit of operations. That's your that's your that's your data that you're looking at on a consistent basis, weekly, biweekly. I mean, you gotta know what happens daily, what happens weekly, what happens monthly to make sure those set of data and we have these amazing our operations team kinda delivers this weekly sets of information that we are constantly looking at and say, is it kinda helping, hurting? Like, what what is happening? So we can actually judge and be able to, like, make the levers and pull the levers and make the adjustments. And thirdly, it's the the IT, the systems, the platform. Right? So it kinda takes into account leadership alignment, process alignment, your systems alignment. That's how we approach solving our problems with our clients as well. So what we have done internally is to, like, start with this whole idea of power centers. Center. So what power centers mean is this idea of three or four big things that you can align the company towards, the leadership towards, and it starts with power sales. What power sales is, like, how are we driving the which set a set of KPIs driving our sales success forward? Like, how do you make sure our clients are happy? How do you make sure sure our our brand is, like, upholding? There's a lot of themes underneath that, but let's kinda focus on power sales of the key area. There are sets of KPIs underneath that to make sure that is our sales team, you know, aligned to, like, a certain success metric? Is our sales team aligned to certain set of goals and alignment to the solutions team, alignment to the the the the delivery team to make sure everybody's kinda thinking about the same set of metrics, same set of numbers that we are we are we are working towards and marching towards. And finally, it comes down to system. You know, we implemented our internal sales performance management that's connected with our CRM. So we actually see in real time, in terms of the opportunities coming through. And and, you know, sales managers in this kind of new age needs to be, you know, part court coach coaching the sales team, part motivators. Like, they gotta know, like, where they can kinda motivate the team and part, you know, real performance, incentive managers. They look at the data and making sure that they understand what they're looking at. So what this does from a system standpoint, the leaders understand what's going on. The data tells you the truth, and the sales managers are equipped with good data to kinda look at. And, again, this is an evolving platform, evolving systems. It's gonna take some good good data intelligence that's gonna be more predictive, sprinkling in, you know, AI concepts underneath that to make sure it's constantly working. Like, the we live in this world of AI agents where agents needs to be working at night when we are sleeping. Like, they're chunk you know, chunk it through all this data and make sure that there is idea of, like, what is actually happening and how do you feed the right sets of people with the right sets of information, with the right sets of coaching, as well as, like, things to motivate with. So SPM as a as an idea, as a tool connected to our CRM is, like, super helpful to kinda give that ability and capability to control both. Right? Are we hitting kinda our bookings target, our booking numbers at the same time? Are we doing that without compromising our financial goals without compromising our people and incentive goals. I mean so you don't want any compromises. Like, how do you make sure the data gives you what you need? And then, ultimately, the data is produced consistently with a set of, you know, confidence you can look at on a weekly basis and say, we believe in this data. We believe in what's telling us predictably what's what's coming ahead, and how do you allow it to help you make some adjustments, to the team and and help support. And, ultimately, the whole idea of this vision of of what we do for our clients is high performance operations. And how do you deliver that high performance? And it starts with us. You know, making sure we have a system that we can believe we are watching this high performance happen on a weekly, daily, monthly basis, and you translate that same idea. We have a chief performance officer on our staff. I mean, it's a c suite role to say, how are we performing as a business? Very unique in the market. This is something we we are we're we're taking to our client marketplace and say, everybody needs a chief performance officer. Like, how do you equip them with a good set of data? I mean, you have a chief data officer. That's great. You can produce all this data. But with the insights, what are you gonna do about it? Right? What is the action plan look like? What are the adjustments you're making? What are the reformations you're making? What are the transformations you're making? So we think about our approach, like, thinking you once you know something, do you reform? Do you transform? And do you perform? And, like, there are forks in the road you can take. But this is, like, good smart way of thinking how do you run these businesses to always stay in the high performance quarter. So, our SPM journey has been fantastic to kinda drive that vision for our company, and it's the best is yet to come. Right? Always. Yeah. No. I mean well, obviously, I am excited about it because, you know, we're gone. Whether you wanna call it eating our own dog food, I prefer drinking our own champagne, you know, we're taking to heart the same conversations we have with clients and applying those principles. I love the idea of having, you know, someone at a c level that owns performance that's, you know, I've I've always thought, like, date not all data is created equally either. Right? So, you know, like, having someone that actually is responsible for making sure that what we're looking at is consistent, is, is unified, is actionable too. Right? Like, you know, like, it it's no good to look at a dashboard with 58 dials on it if there's not some that comes out that says, like, hey. We need to go to yeah. What do we do with this information? And so having someone internally that's focused on that, I think is fantastic. And to your point, it's something that, just like the you know, the conversation, I think, two or three years ago was about how everyone needs a chief revenue officer, someone that's not just focused on sales, but is revenue and finance minded. I have a feeling this is also the next sort of wave of this. Right? Now that we have all this information, how do we make sense? When you speak of this interconnectedness of KPIs, and if you start thinking about everything as a business kinda sits in this KPI hub, The the performance management is is fundamentally managing the interconnectedness, which Right. Is the nerve center of, you know, any business, you know, if you think about it. If you if you could, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I know we obviously, it's part and parcel of our business. We are hugely integrated with our partners, you know, with our partner ecosystem. If you feel comfortable sharing some insights. Yeah. Like, what what are some of the things that we've been doing around just leveraging our partners, focusing on existing customers? I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, very important kind of, ramifications to that in terms of some of the other things that we've been seeing. Well, generally, again, you know, extending that idea of power centers. Right? I mean, we think about making sure our existing customers that we are consistently delivering the impact and the value continues to stay engaged and, and making sure we're driving larger impacts. Right? As a company, like, we have, you know, multiple superpowers, and we gotta kinda bring those superpowers to bear and and making sure that we can look at this as a business as a whole. You know, every business kinda goes to the same thing. You don't wanna be pigeonholed or something like you just do that you know, you're never a one trick pony. But how do you think about bringing all the capabilities together and deliver continuous improvement, continuous results, and continuous engagement to, like, driving that business impact? So in that in the thing of what I was talking about, like, once you know the fundamental state of where the process is, the businesses, you know, you have multiple forks. Right? I mean, you can kinda do some quick fixes from a reformation standpoint all the way down to, like, it's a continuous growth. Right? We never think of, you know, the world of managed services as just, like, you know, break fix. Right? It's a continuous improvement journey where we are constantly innovating, constantly automating, constantly doing things to make sure that it has true business impact and there is a way to measure it. Because the measurement never act happens if you don't understand the world of the KPI hubs and what kinda sits in it and say, did what I do make that change? Whether it's an existing existing client or relationship we have that we have grown it or or somebody we just engaged, a quarter ago. You know, everybody kinda sees this the same way, whether there is an opportunity, kinda participate in their life cycle and the journey of, you know, in this broad category of, you know, business performance and governance. Right? Yeah. And and you can put high performance in there. You say, well, I gotta get to that high performance. A lot of teams of things you can execute on. But, fundamentally, it's like, how do you understand? How is your leadership aligned to that same set of activities that you wanna do that everybody's singing from the same songbook, right, which is very critical. And we're we're neck deep into it, and we have systems and process. And we just don't self consume. We also take it back to our clients that can leverage it better. Yeah. I it's obviously the the language you're using is near and dear to my heart. Right? It's very customer success type, like value outcomes, value realization. How do we measure value? I love the fact that for years and years, I feel like that conversation was really quite often the domain of some of our partners. Right? You know, like software vendors very focused on making sure, like, hey. We're getting value. From a SaaS, you know, renewal perspective, we gotta make sure. But I love the fact that we're talking about that in the same sort of language, the same outcomes when especially even from a managed services perspective where we have that ongoing relationship. How do we measure and make sure that we hit the outcomes and the objectives? Because that just makes us better partners with our clients, and jointly produce better outcomes. I think the other thing that that you and the leadership team did that I think is very important, not to stress like the incentive compensation sort of lever of this, but you actually built into people's comp plans rewards for cross selling across different parts of the business, which I think is critical. Right? Like if you think about it's very easy for me to stay siloed in my world and focus on just the value that I can bring, as an individual or even, you know, as a group to a client. It's much bigger thing to say, how do I bring a team around us and all go in and serve up a better vision that's cross functional? And how do I put real dollars behind that to encourage that behavior? Right? Right. I mean, I, you know, I kind of talked about this multithreaded selling, right, which is the way of the future because, you know, no companies at scale that we deal with have, like, one thing to sell. I mean, they're selling, you know, multiple multidisciplinary kinda understanding of, like, how this all kinda meets in terms of the business outcome. So yeah. I mean, glad you pointed that. There is there is this whole idea of how do you enable through a good SPM system, a good systemic approach to, like, designing incentive comp, which has all the science behind it, which is great. But you also have the artistic approach to, like, marrying the right sets of people, the teams to make sure you know, it's a good balancing act between science and art. To come together. It's designed in a way that everybody feels they're part of it. They're motivated. They come together. And if they see an opportunity, they bring together the teams. And, ultimately, in the multithreaded selling, it's like teams sell to teams. And there is an idea of, like, how do you make sure everybody's, like, you know, rewarded as part of that. Everybody can come together. There is aspects of, like, coaching and enablement to go support it, with our with our approach to, like, how we kinda manage that process. And we have done lots of good work in the past years. And like I said, the best is always yet to come because we always learn through it and put some new things in there and just it just gets things better and better. And every business, you know, think about, you know, cross selling is, like, always a key aspect of growth and scale. And, you know, every business leader, you know, sleeps and wakes up thinking about it. Yeah. I I I'm obviously, I know you're passionate about it. I'm passionate about it. It's been great to be able to collaborate with you and other leaders inside the organization, and and actually, again, bring some of the the things that we've been talking about for for years and years with our clients into our own, you know, sort of universe, and apply those those, you know, those best practices as well. I think to turn the table a little bit or, to turn the page a little bit and talk a little bit more about, like, some of our client facing conversations and and what we see from industry trend and insights. You know, I'll go back and sort of reiterate Sri's, primary pillars because I think it's important. You know, if you're talking about aligning go to market strategy, your go to market organization, their goals with revenue operations and sales performance management, you know, five sort of key things is getting and establishing the right leadership team. Right? Make sure making sure that you have the right folks in place. Maybe bringing in that that chief performance officer if you need that person in order to make sure that, you're looking at things correctly. Building that cross functional strategy. You know, talking about teams, selling to teams. You know, how do we make sure that all those teams are collaborating? Measuring the right metrics and KPIs. Right? There's a lot of data out there. Are we looking at the right things? Are we looking at them consistently? Are we looking them at them collaboratively? Using that information to make sure you have the right coverage model and the right terror you know, you're setting up the right territories, setting up the right targets, thinking intelligently to Sri point about, like, how do we service our existing customers correctly? And then finally, incentivizing the right behaviors. Right? Like, for what gets a hunter up in up in the morning and excited is probably a little different than what gets a farmer up in the morning and excited. Right? Which is different than what a hybrid role needs. So making sure that you understand all of these things and how does that lead to designing the right plans. And if you think about the conversations we've been having, and I'm just gonna pick on three, for today's discussion. You know, some of the things we've been talking about with some of our larger insurance and financial, services customers, these are large, you know, some national, sometimes international, multiple business unit banks and insurance firms. A lot of our conversations this year around focusing a sales performance management, center of excellence. Right? So bringing all of this sales and revenue operations under a single umbrella. Of course, if you think about why you know, what's an important outcome of that, it's that data strategy. How do we put all of this information into one place so that we can have better analytics, better data informed decision making to drive improvements in both that new grader that we're talking about. So everyone wants more sales. But, also, I think you're gonna hear a lot of talk this year, particularly in financial services, like that denominator. How do we how do we control compensation cost of sale or cost of sale? We're also seeing kind of this interesting shift towards more of, like, a team based selling approach, and compensation models that that that support that, in areas that maybe were more like individual attribution and and focus. So all of those changes necessitate having all of these pieces in place so that you can effectively make that that sort of strategic shift. I think luxury retail is another interesting conversation. Some, you know, ongoing investment in brick and mortar, which is sort of interesting when you think about the broader retail trends. You know, they're they're still continuing to expand. All of that means they need better governance, better tools around how do we intelligently sort of leverage our sales organization and our retail organizations. Also just this ongoing shift to multichannel selling and support. When you think about what it takes to actually do attribution in a multichannel sales cycle where, you know, someone comes into a contact center that then goes into a retail location, and I need to be able to tie all of that information together appropriately on that customer journey so I can track it but also pay on it, you have to have sales performance management solutions and governance in place in order to do that. And then finally, a little bit near and dear to my heart, high-tech. I've spent a lot of time in sales performance management. I've also spent some time managing customer success teams inside, high, high-tech organizations. It's impossible to get away from this idea of consumption based pricing. You're we're seeing it everywhere. That plus to Shree earlier point about this idea of AI disruption, you know, these these sort of agent based, sales and service functions. It's really shining a light on sales and revenue operations, trying to get better leverage out of your partner ecosystem, being more specific, and and tailored in your approach to how you approach, you know, sort of account based marketing or account based selling. All of these are tying you know, these conversations that we're having with clients are tying back to these things. Right? Like, how do we approach all of these areas in a way that makes sense, with the foundation being high performance operations? I think, you know, you might be, wondering, like, does any of this stuff work? Right? Like, what is you know, like, if we do all this and we make a bunch of investments, what what are what are the actual outcomes? And I'll I'll highlight two that came out of, the future of revenue report that Pavilion and Crossbeam, just, just published. And one is ecosystem led growth. So you heard Shree talk about this. How do we leverage our partner ecosystem? It's very important. Here's, you know, here's a stat for you. Almost 82 of sales teams that are financially incentivized, so they have comp plans that are incentivized to run ELG plays, report better tracking towards their meeting their KPIs. So pretty clear, if you financially incentivize your sales team to include partners, you're gonna hit your targets more often, and you're gonna increase quota attainment. You know, the other one was around account based marketing and account based selling. Increased conversion rates as a result of not using you know, getting away from sort of a one size fits all approach to how you approach selling into your existing count, customers or or even new customers. 52% higher conversion rates. So if you're wondering, like, does any of this stuff work? It absolutely works. And here's, you know, sort of the proof in the pudding is, you know, some of the results that organizations are seeing, as a result of of of implementing and and focusing on these areas. I'll pause there, Sri. Any any sort of final thoughts as we, as as we start to enter into, sort of closing out our conversation today? No. I think we we shared a lot and just, you know, I just wanna take a couple minutes and summarize. Right? I mean, as we look ahead, the this is what I think about every day, from a from a leadership standpoint. It's just like, how do I align the teams on the same exact shared vision on a consistent basis with the the idea of, like, power centers we talked about and making sure everybody's focused on the same set of information that helps you guide and govern. Second is to break down silos. Right? I mean, there is, sigh you know, the silos between sales and marketing and delivery needs to be, like, broken down so that there is shared set of KPIs, interconnected KPIs that we are monitoring on a consistent basis. And then, of course, you know, leverage your data, leverage your insights, you know, leverage tools like AI. We're doing ton of work in that space where it becomes extremely important to kinda augment our day to day tasks with with the systems that are working when we are sleeping to, like, drive things that we can make decisions on. So focus on data driven decision making, cross functional, KPI integrated that that drives that continuous innovation, right, within within your business. So, you know, ultimately, I think if you think about SPM, and that's just one part of performance management. You think about your enterprise performance management with financial tools that can, you know, do what if analysis, and we do a bunch of that. You know, certainly, I think there is great systems, great processes, great, you know, theories that exist that, that can change business on a consistent basis. And we're, you know, exactly where we are and, you know, taking advantage of what's available, to make, things better. Right? It helps, you know, sales and the go to market strategy to get, you know, stronger every day. Well, I, as always, I always find it fascinating to be able to talk to you, to be able to hear your insights, Sri. I really appreciate you joining, me today on this sort of conversation around how do we make how do we leverage data to make better decisions? How do we help our go to market teams hit their targets? I think for the folks on the call today, you know, if if you're struggling or or you have some of these questions, right, like, I have questions about do we have are we aligned? Do we have the right leadership team and the right support? Are we looking at things, you know, holistically, or are we trapped in these silos? Do we have the right cross functional strategy? I would encourage you to reach out to us to connect with us. If you hit if you notice, there's a get assessment, button. You can click on that, and start a conversation with our team. We'll be happy to provide you with what we call a SPM operational assessment. We're really we just sit down. We look at that planning execution and analysis framework, look at your program, give you some benchmarks and insights into how you rate against what we would consider best practice, or market, as well as some opportunities and and recommendations around improvement. Alright. With that, we can take a couple of questions, perhaps. I think we have just a couple of minutes left. Maybe we have time for one question. So I'll look here. Okay. So, we're one of those organizations that is, continuing to struggle with lead generation, both from a quantity and quality perspective. Any advice on what you're recommending to clients or or actually what you're doing as well? So, not to put you on the spot, Sri, but I'll I'll ask you to to answer that. Well, again, you know, driving demand and, you know, growing our top of the funnel with, good, you know, techniques and and things that you can do both both, you know, system standpoint as well as, you know, strategic standpoint. We always kinda think about how do we always try to be innovative in the front lines and add more value. And and part of that is also you gotta add innovation with simplicity. Right? Complex sales cycles does not like complex answers to problems. You gotta get through some simple way of, like, connecting with with the decision makers, influencers, in the front line. So we constantly innovate to, like, how do you break things down into, like, simple, trends, connect with trends, be relevant to their problems, at the same time, have an answer to or at least couple options for answers to helping solve. And and our lead generation is is all about simple ways to explain, simple ways to find answers, simple ways to engage. We are constantly striving to, like, ways to find simplicity. And and I see customers who are who are doing really well in their front lines to kinda drive the top of the funnel, have a very, very, you know, broken down simple ways of, like, connecting the dots. Whether it's go to market with completely new clients and relationships that you wanna go find, through either an industry lens and say, I'm an expert in a certain industry segment, and I've got a better answer to the problem with products and services. Or using some sort of a super innovative idea that kinda plugs into, like, what you have in a reformation idea to go say, we're we're doing this, but, you know, it's almost like I think of it as, like, cutting a pipe in between, welding two pipes, and having a better gadget that sits in there to, like, drive better things that we can actually monitor and have better observability. There's a lot of ways to kinda think about it. It's, you know, driving demand is, you know, it's it's a consistent re innovation of, like, what you do. And, you know, we do a lot of a b testing. We cannot go to market, try this, and try different things. But, you know, leverage AI capability, break things down, keep it keep things simple that people can absorb, understand, and almost gonna elevate the value. Right? I mean, we all we always have to question when you go to market, what value is it creating and sell with that value? Everybody has pains. Right? Everybody send and you gotta know understand, like, you know, when you're trying to deliver a solution, is it a is it a vitamin or a painkiller? So I always ask that question to go say painkillers are short lived. Right? But but vitamins are long standing because you can create some sustained performance. So when you put that performance lens, you know, breaking simple things into simple ways to understand, helps to helps to connect. And, ultimately, the connect and the engagement is what delivers the results you're looking for for the top of the funnel. Love it. I, you know, and it's great timing because we I think we're at the top of the hour. But if anyone else has any other questions, feel free to send them to us. We'd be happy to answer them. Again, I'll I'll just say thanks again, Sri, for joining, me and and for providing such great insights. And with that, you know, I'll, I'll go ahead and wrap things up. Always enjoy talking to you, David, and thank you for having me on this call. Alright. Thanks everybody for joining.