The Top 5 Skills Of Our Most Successful Sales Reps

News

16 Feb 2022 • Written by Simon Dawlat

Our sales culture

At Batch, we pride ourselves in having a pretty special sales culture that is both collaborative and demanding, and focuses on letting people grow and be successful through continuous feedback and peer coaching.

At its core, our culture differs dramatically from the typical individualistic sales team as it focuses on leading with context and working as a team to create long lasting relationships with clients.

While our market is huge, we know it consists of just a few thousand stakeholders per country that make all the decisions and communicate a lot between them. Hence, word of mouth is critical and our reputation is paramount.

Over the years, our reps have been described as « professional and humble » (our client’s words—not ours) thanks to our consultant mindset and long-term approach to creating win-win relationships: two prerequisites to being able to help clients operate a successful mobile-first engagement strategy while accelerating their digital transformation (our mission) and to operating a successful land & expand model (our go-to market strategy).

This strategy has been serving us well so far with more than 300 blue chip clients across Europe and a net revenue retention rate of 135% for our large accounts in 2021.

Now, as we enter a new phase of growth with almost 90 new hires expected in 2022—including 35 in the Sales & Marketing teams alone—I wanted to elaborate a little bit on this culture to give potential applicants a better sense of what they’re stepping into.

But first, a little bit of history

In the early days of Batch, my technical co-founder Antoine and I would be strongly involved in Sales with the help of our sales veteran, Thierry.

Despite his technical profile, Antoine proved to be a master at reading power maps and navigating complex organizations, acting as our very first Solutions engineer on steroids, helping us understand and maneuver his technical counterparts and infosec teams.

On that front, it didn’t hurt either that some of our founding engineers such as Arnaud and Baptiste also loved getting their hands dirty and assisting clients to expedite integrations.

Our current Solutions engineering team was later built on this strong technical pre-sales DNA.

Thierry, on the other hand, proved to be a relentless sales tactician and a passionate closer gifted with a discouragingly good memory. He brought us this ability to create those long lasting relationships to our culture and has evolved as a natural mentor to the current sales team.

Between 2015 and 2018 we roamed Europe to meet with hundreds of CMOs and CRM managers. We exhibited at all the tradeshows from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to DMEXCO in Germany, App Days in London and the great Mobile One conference in Paris. (Mobile One never recovered from the Covid blow sadly, but it gave us the chance to hire its co-founder, the amazing Pierre).

As our Customer Engagement Platform became more and more mature, and with mobile increasingly becoming the centerpiece of the digital experience, we forayed deeply into the Enterprise. Something none of us had real experience with.

In retrospect, I sincerely believe this relative obliviousness—alongside strong tailwinds— had us try things we would have never attempted otherwise, and somewhat enabled us to brute-force our way to our first few millions of ARR.

In 2019, we were lucky to hire our Chief Revenue Officer, Clotilde.

A true sales maniac and Salesforce zealot, she took over our entire go-to-market function (40+ people today) and started bringing order to chaos.

She reorg-ed everything, hired all the people, built the Ops & Data function, promoted the great Laure into a Head of Business Development role to lead our quickly expanding BDR team, turned Batch into an upselling machine with her obsession for land & expand and introduced us to new proven methodologies such as our Account-Based Marketing framework, Command of the Message and MEDDPPICC.

All of this led Batch to switch gradually from a demo-based to more of a value-based approach. And the results were quickly visible.

Our share of ARR coming from large accounts went from less than 20% in 2018 to more than 50% in 2020 and is still growing while NRR surpassed 135%. Lead time was divided in two, we created our 5 Go-to Market Pillars (join us to know more 😇) and we became very effective at assembling cross-functional pods to win complex RFPs.

What happened in 2021 and our plans for the future are best told in our Series B fundraising announcement blog post but since this post is getting quite long I’ll get to the crux of what we believe are the 5 top skills of our most successful sales reps.

1 — A Consultant Mindset

With a proven platform ROI of +600%, what our Sales reps are really selling to clients are not really features—but:

Strong incremental business,
A whole new approach to Customer Engagement,

To be successful here, a consultant mindset is required and it means understanding the client.

Its revenue strategy, client personas, internal team structure, data model, legacy stack, ideal use-cases.

And then, working hand in hand with him to put together a complete customer engagement recommendation plan and revenue forecast plan.

As Laure puts it best:

« For me, the most exciting part of the job is the value-based approach: working with the client and putting together a global strategic proposition that is strong enough to win the CMO’s and the entire team’s buy-in, and then following-up regularly as the project is being rolled out and we reach this « A-ha moment » where the clients sees the actual revenue being generated from the platform. This is where I feel the most stimulated and challenged as a sales person, but also where winning is intensely rewarding both for me and the client ».

2 — Functional Expertise

At Batch, reps must lead with expertise, which means being ready to elevate oneself to a strong understanding of our product.

There are, in fact, many highly sophisticated technological components to the Batch platform, enabling hundreds of possible use-cases across our key verticals: from e-commerce to media, finance, mobility, luxury, travel et al.

Such a versatile platform comes with the responsibility to educate clients on two things:

what they can do with the product (aka. mastering use-cases) ;
how the product will integrate with their existing stack (both internally & externally with other MarTech solutions).

This is usually achieved through strong functional expertise and a solid understanding of our core differentiators (such as the platform’s real-time and hybrid data-model, our mobile-first DNA, our vertically-integrated approach to building the platform from data ingestion to data activation and the specificities of our product intertwining deeply with the end-user experiences through push notifications, in-app messaging and web push).

Of course, we’ve put together very thorough on-boarding processes to make sure our reps can grow into highly effective product specialists, which takes a bit of time—we'll train you on all of this, making you an expert.

For more on this, visit our Differentiators page.

3 — Martech Knowledge

We know our Enterprise clients use on average 6 different MarTech solutions.

They range from storage CDPs, to behavioral analytics suites, data enrichment partners (such as geolocation or AI-built segments), ESPs and/or SMS marketing.

While we tend to build packaged integrations with most of the leading suites out there, our reps should thrive to become familiar with all these solutions to be able to advise clients on the best way to plug Batch within their existing stack.

Working at Batch will be the opportunity to grow from being a platform specialist to being a a true industry expert.

For more on this, visit our Partners page.

4 — Enterprise Sales Acumen

At Batch, we deliver a product that is fully Enterprise-ready.

What it means is that our reps will have to deal with many non-functional concepts such as SLAs and support, legal negotiation, product security, data exports, integrations and GDPR/privacy.

Internally, it means we'll train you to master proven methodologies designed to deal with the intricacies of strategic opportunity management and complex sales process orchestration such as our Account-Based Marketing framework, Command of the Message and MEDDPPICC.

There’s nothing quite like selling to the Enterprise and it requires a lot of commitment.

But on the flip side, it'll turn you into better leaders, solid sales tacticians and top closers.

5 — Cross-functional leadership

Ultimately, as we like to say « landing an enterprise account requires the coordinated effort of a small village » and there’s no winning alone at Batch.

What it means is that most won deals will be a team effort—that reps will usually coordonate.

It requires being able to lead with context, be outstanding at communication but also showing humbleness and empathy to master cross-functional coordination with the many other Batchers who will be key to landing the deal such as Customer Success Managers, Solutions Engineers, Ops, Marketers but also Privacy & Legal teams.

Simply put, being a lone wolf just won't cut it at Batch and that're were our core collorative DNA comes from.

And that’s it for the 5 top skills of our most successful sales reps!

Now if that sounds like the friendly and collaborative but also bordering on perfectionnism and challenging place where you'd like to grow, have fun and work hand-in-hand with Europe's most prestigious clients, we’d obviously love to hear from you 🤓

Below is an an overview of currently open positions and here are the people you'd be working with: