SaaStr 201: How To Prioritise Your Sales Pipeline, Why You Should Spend Your Time on the 10% Least Likely Leads & Why The Secret To Success In Sales Is "Calls Between The Calls" with Hannah Willson, VP Sales @ Rainforest QA

Hannah Willson is the VP of Sales @ Rainforest QA, the on-demand QA solution that allows companies to discover problems that affect the customer experience before the code hits production. To date, Rainforest have raised over $40m in funding from some of the very best in SaaS including the legendary Byron Deeter @ Bessemer, Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr, Marc Benioff himself, Andreesen Horowitz and YC. As for Hannah, she has over 10 years of experience leading sales and customer teams at both startups and publicly traded companies including seeing the first hand hyper-growth of Zenefits in their heyday and being VP of BD, Sales and Customer Renewals for the western half of the US at HelloWallet, prior to their acquisition by Morningstar.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Hannah made her way into the world of SaaS and enterprise sales, came to join Zenefits in their heyday and how that led to her move to VP of Sales @ Rainforest?
• How does Hannah think about time allocation and prioritisation of time across leads and the sales pipeline? WHat can AEs do in terms of optimising their win rate of opportunities? How important a role should discounting play in winning potential leads? Does Hannah optimise for quality or quantity of logos in the early days?
• What does Hannah mean when she says the secret to success is “the calls between the calls”? How do these vary both in content and tone to traditional sales calls? Why must AEs be willing to open up and be vulnerable with leads? What can managers do to engender this? What is the optimal relationship for AEs and product team?
• What does Hannah believe is the right mechanism for feedback delivery? What has worked well for her in the past? Where does Hannah see many today going wrong? What guidelines need to be put in place to ensure this candid and transparent feedback is effective?

Hannah’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Hannah know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
2. What does Hannah believe embodies good sales rep productivity?
3. What is Hannah’s fave SaaS reading material?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr