Tennant: Enterprise land-and-expand deals require upfront executive alignment on expansion metrics
AJ Tennant · AJ Tennant: How to Build a Sales Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | E2118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 23, 2024 · at 18:08
AJ Tennant is VP of Sales & Success at Glean and former sales leader at Slack. He outlines the strategy required to scale initial enterprise pilot contracts into major deals.
0:00 / 0:30exact quote · 30.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think you need to be very willing to do that. Now, the key thing that we've learned, and I, you know, learned this at Slack as well, but at Glean, You've got to have success criteria. You've got to have, okay, we're going to do, let's say for Fortune, 100 company, we're going to do a 100,000, a 150,000 land deal, but you have commercial alignment and executive alignment on what are the success criteria that we need to hit to get to that seven figure contract.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from AJ Tennant
Many enterprise customers say Microsoft Copilot is falling flat
“Look at like Microsoft Copilot, I mean, Many customers are saying it's falling flat. Like, it's just not delivering the value that was advertised.”
Early-stage sales teams should not segment or rush upmarket too early
“I think the worst thing you can do early stage as a sales organization and a go to company is segment too early and move way up market and just like, let's say we rewind the clock. If I all of a sudden moved all my sellers to just focus on the Fortune 50 or Fo…”
Enterprise AI tools without clear ROI will churn within two years
“AI budgets that are based on just, hey, we need to quickly enable our employees to be AI-centric that aren't tying it back to business outcomes, impact, Top line, bottom line. A year from now, two years from now, we're going to churn.”
Enterprise AI implementation takes 6-12 months or $5M in services
“Everyone is being sold A bag of goods and a dream of this sort of AI enabled workforce or Automation, top line, bottom line, and then when it comes to implementation, it's taking six, nine, 12 months, or it comes attached with a five million dollar services bu…”