A comprehensive sales playbook spans customer, team, and market levels
Zhenya Loginov · Mire CRO Zhenya Loginov: Hiring Tips for Sales; Why Dropbox Lost Enterprise | 20VC #900 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 22, 2022 · at 9:10
Zhenya Loginov, CRO at Miro and former COO at Segment, outlines his framework for how founders and sales leaders should define a sales playbook across different operational time horizons.
0:00 / 0:52exact quote · 52.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I feel like I think about sales playbook on three different levels. The customer level, team level, and market level. So customer level for me is all about the problem and the solution. So the question is like, what problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for? And how are you solving this problem with your product? And the timeframe for this is somewhere between one single meeting and one deal cycle. The team level for me is about organizing the team to solve how many, as many those customer level problems as possible in a period of time effectively, right? So it's about hiring profiles. It's about how do you ramp and train salespeople. It's about the leaders that you hired into the team. What is the coverage model and who does what on the sales team and customer success team. And the timeframe here is maybe six to 12 months. And then the last level is the market level which I think is all about your plan to be in the larger market in the long run.”
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 Zhenya Loginov
Building sales teams too early makes adding PLG later extremely difficult
“If your PLG motion is figured out, but the PLG, if you miss it, and if you build the sales teams too early, it's very hard to build later.”
Startups should reject enterprise deals that distract engineering from core products
“If you know that you're gonna need to build a lot for this particular customer that is outside of your normal product roadmap, and that would detract your engineering product resources from building the core product, I wouldn't do it. It's very hard to say no …”
Dropbox failed in enterprise due to a lack of top-down commitment
“And I think this lack of that level of commitment early on, I think at Dropbox was what plagued us. You know, we had wonderful, fantastic go-to-market leaders at the company, but we just had them, like each one came for, you know, a couple of years and then le…”
Asana and Dropbox were too late adopting enterprise sales over PLG
“I would argue actually that companies like Asana or Dropbox were a little too late into enabling the enterprise motion on top of PLG.”
Self-serve revenue teams belong in product engineering, not sales
“I think that the self-serve team is fundamentally a product team first and foremost, and it needs to be a product engineering team and sit within the product organization to be actually able to build the experiences for the customers on that enable PLG.”
Startups should expand internationally at $20M-$30M ARR, not $100M
“I think at Dropbox we launched the first region outside of the US when we were over a hundred million in ERR, and I think that frankly was too late. I think you can start doing this when you are at about 20, thirty million because it just takes a very long tim…”