 Hello. So it's so nice to be here at Slush. It's my first time, but it's been a great event so far. I'm Osa. I'm the CEO at Pitch and today I'm going to be walking you through a playbook of how to build the winning go-to-market teams and At Pitch, we really believe in the power of visual communication We believe that there's much more delightful ways of creating presentations than you can do today and therefore, we're building a product that should be very easy and very like a very nice experience to create a deck like this and There's so many important decisions made each day Which are really based on how how the information is communicated to take them. So presentations as a medium to share knowledge or Present ideas is really the way forward So before I go into this presentation, I'll tell you just super short about me as COO at Pitch I'm in charge of building up the organization and thinking about how we work cross-functionally as well as driving our company strategy I've I'm actually have a background in engineering and product. I worked As they said in Spotify and natural cycles in different engineering release management and leadership positions and I Really have a passion actually for thinking about how do you drive collaboration across? departments across projects or companies and how you really can develop that I We created this presentation me and my colleague Nick. He is the president at Pitch he has more than 20 years of experience of building sales and go-to-market teams and we we Really sat down and thought about like how can we give you a playbook for for with best practices for creating winning go-to-market teams and That is what I'm gonna dive into now But first it's we believe it's really time for a new playbook the recent Years has shown us that old practices as team building in the office and a lot of face-to-face meetings are Being questioned and we I mean in all honesty, we haven't been able to do it due to the pandemic Remote remote is a new norm for some companies but we're also seeing a lot of companies going back to the to the office and We think that Or like one theme actually in this conference What we what I've heard a lot about is that more and more companies talking about going back back to the office And there is this debate should it be hybrid teams? Should it be office should it be fully remote? But I think in the end the question that we really need to ask ourselves is kind of how do we empower teams to work regardless So I'm gonna go through Seven practices and we hope that these are practices that you can take back with you and look at your Organization or your company and see if this is something that you want to apply or want to challenge your current way of working with First a little bit about Hiring so hiring for discovery Then I'm gonna go into self-guided onboarding and how to how to create an onboarding flow that is That is adapted to different learning styles We're gonna talk about developing a collaborative strategy and goals Having a commitment to tools for go-to-market teams and a process oriented approach How you can work with products and how you can really make sure to align to get the best results we're also gonna talk about how to use team rituals to really enhance the culture you want to build and Last but not least navigating by principle and we think all of these Addressed different challenges that all of us face when we're building up our go-to-market go-to-market teams So first hire for discovery So when you launch a product, it's a major major milestone for every founder or every person who's been in a new in a new company and While this is an amazing and fun experience that is also a lot of pressure involved you You want to launch your product you want to see how it's received by the customers you have investors to think about and And and but maybe most of all you have your own pressure on or your own expectations on yourself that can be quite intense and I've both seen and talked with several startup founders for at this point You hardly breathe until you say and now I have to build up my go-to-market team Here our recommendation is to actually just take some time and take that pause Think about who is it that we really need to get into our team and who do we need to get to be part of building up the company at this stage and Nick and I talked about two traps that is there are super easy to fall into when you think about building up your go-to-market team One is to hire Deal closer You know that kind of amazing person that can convince you to buy anything can have a great track record of closing deals and Selling products and of course this is a person you always want to have in the company But is it the right one in the beginning? The second one is to hire and a networker a person who in an event like this knows everyone and can really just serve you with dozens and dozens of leads of potential customers But you also have to have the capacity to take care of those leads So what we talked about instead is to hire for discovery really trying to find people With the qualities of the two above But a person who is really have an open-minded learner mindset Who is maybe more more interested in talking to the customer and understanding their problems and before they start to suggest solutions and Someone who's really strong at taking those insights from the customer and bring them back to the product team or to the Leadership team and see how how they can be used to to further deepen your product market fit So I think I mean you're I won't tell you Who to hire because you'll go to market team will depend so much about what project if it's a beat or what product you have if it's a B2B B2C if it's going you know the customer or Enterprises or individuals and that has to guide the profile But what you should look for is a person with a discovery open-minded learning mindset So you're starting to hire up your team. How do you onboard them? I? Mean it I think many of us here has been at boot camps Previous jobs or previous companies. They're super fun It can be one or two weeks where you have a lot of information sharing a lot of networking events It's a little bit like being in this kind of conference. It's Extremely fun. It can also be a bit overwhelming and sometimes it's hard to know what did I actually learn? It was meeting the people that was the important part So at pitch we're remote first So we really focused on actually showing that or I mean we hire Intentionally remote people who wants to work remote and we're building up our processes equally and when I go to market Like when I are people in the go-to-market team join We really set them up for a self-guided onboarding and we do that by making sure we document our strategy Our ways of working in all of these things that normally people just present to you in an onboarding boot camp In a way so they can consume it as synchronously We use notion for long-form content. We use pitch with recordings for content that is more Benefits from visual on visual the communication and we use slack and a very intentional way of using slash slack to Make sure that they know where to ask questions and how to be guided further And it's not that we underestimate the value of FaceTime. It's it's wonderful to meet people But when we do that since we are distributed We make it very intentional. So when we set up a zoom meeting or an onboarding call we focus on on meeting and exchanging meaningful Meaningful conversations instead of just me presenting the company strategy to the team That they can do in their own time Depending on which time zone they are in when it suits them during the day and how intense they want this process to be So then how about setting strategy? So it's not uncommon that top that leaders that setting strategy and setting goals is a very top-down top-down way and or it's done top-down and it's not uncommon that the the CFO or chief revenue officer sets these goals and then push them down the Organization maybe get them signed off by the board first and then they ask that then they ask to go to market teams to Deliver on it and if you compare product and engineering teams would go to market I would say that go to market teams that it's so easy to monitor the results So it's very tempting to just set them and just ask like hit these targets Whereas in product and engineering. It's always been the harder part of saying kind of trying to quantify this pros and cons with both both But we really believe in that if you do this together with your team There is the likelihood of the results being good is so much higher So I'm just gonna share a story that Nick told me he was head of EMEA for Circle CI a US-based business super successful, but that was going to scale up in Europe and The way he did this was that he he really started to hire local a local team of course local sales representatives customer support that new local but local patterns and and the way the customers use the product and He really focused on building trust within the team Before moving on making them collaborate making sure that they actually exchanged all the knowledge they had about the space before setting the strategy and before committing to goals and They could leverage what had worked with a US sales strategy, but then really think about EMEA and Europe It's a different region we Customers have different different demands and different ways of working and They could adapt it and evolve it to to these needs set the goals together and it became super successful So they grew from seven percent to twenty five percent of company revenue in less than three years Okay, so tools doesn't sound super fun, but it is really really valuable So productivity efficiency and creativity Things we all use in all kinds of different discussion forums What we really think is important here is to have a process oriented approach when you set up your go-to-market team Think about from when the user hears about your brand at the first instance To they become a returning user. Hopefully a paying user and And as an example top performing sales professionals are twice as likely to use tools in their sales process Then underperforming counterparts. So there's something magic if you get your tools right and What you really what you really want to do here is to look at the whole stack and see Or look out for maybe two things one is in this process that you're running Where are there many manual or where is it a lot of manual work and the other thing like during this process? Where where do you have like two little insights to really have an impactful result? When it comes to the manual work, there's quite a lot of tools out there already like signing tools or Transcript Transcript tools called transcript tools They can really help you to get the very boring time-consuming manual work done and When you talk about for example life-cycle marketing marketing There's a lot of tools that can really help you to make sure that you give the customer the right message at the right time and For those I mean So tools is actually also a really good way of avoiding having to build up a big team to try to keep it very lean and to try to not make sure that you have a big organization that also gets very vulnerable and And I think in the end When you look at your when you look at your tool stack It is or when you look at what you would like to have It is important to not think that you have to build everything at the same time at pitch It's still not it's it's not ideal in any way But we have mapped out what we would like to have and how it should work together so we don't put ourselves into a corner for a certain for a certain thing and Last for those of you who already built companies would go to market tools and so on it's easy to think that what worked five years ago Is still the best solution? There's been an immense Development within tools for marketing in the last years so we are advice there is really to Don't shy away of looking up new and upcoming tools that can give you Much better insights than the tools that we had some years ago so pairing up with product maybe my my What's there is to my heart in this? So I think there's so much value if you get your go-to-market teams to pair up with your product teams a Close connection between the two is just a winning concept of staying efficient I've been in several companies where sales or customer supports either wanted to give Wanted us to build features for for making their deal go through or to promise features because the They were asking for it from the customer support team or success team And it often came back as a very urgent request to product And maybe then you just build like not the most pragmatic solution not the most innovative solution And in worst case you build things that actually made your product strategy diverge diverge So I'm gonna tell a story about Spotify when I was there and how we worked with it So we were building a new client or a new Spotify client on a big platform and this entailed All departments more or less we had legal involved business development sales Marketing engineering and so on And I was thinking early on how can we make sure that the decisions we take Now and in these different groups are the best for the end result so to do that, I mean trust I talked about it a lot, but trust is a key key ingredients and So I did set up a Friday lunch meeting where I asked the the sales representative the lead head of legal and The marketing representative product and engineering to sit around the table and just give an update What are you working on and what is kind of blocking you or what is challenging for you right now? and To be honest in the beginning it was quite awkward you had a sales guy there who really didn't want to be in that on That table you had product and engineering that thought that I'm doing this I've done this scrum of scrums a million times. Why is this useful again? But I insisted that we try it out also to kind of bridge these Bridge the knowledge and the trust between and After a while you started to see these great things happen. So suddenly The guy from legal brought up. Well, you know, they want this into the contract Is this an easy thing or do or is it a hard thing to do and within five minutes? You got that product feedback. Actually, this is easy. This is part of our product strategy put it in the contract That's great, or it could be hey this this thing over here It's super hard to build. It's much more complex that it seems Let's try to get that out of the contract and In the end I think like for me the the magic moment was super late in the project where the product team Had this really hard deadline and they had to prioritize their backlog and you know how that goes It is painful and people don't want to do it But what they did then was actually to turn to the marketing team and say hey out of these things from your point of view What is most important and that marketing team said well this kind of sign-up flow would would be amazing This is what we actually need to get our our product launch become successful from a marketing perspective an acquisition perspective and And in the end that was probably one of the the best Decisions we took because that really Generated great great results So including everyone in team rituals. I mean, I think there's been a lot of talking in this At slash here about culture and what that means and cultures is Communication collaboration decision-making and how you interact with each other at job What I want to talk about is how team rituals can help you to really enhance the culture that you want to build For example inclusiveness. I worked with this for many years It's so much easier said than done and everyone wants it, but how do you actually make it happen? And we have a super super small thing that we do that That is one example of how small things could actually mean a lot too many people so we have our quarterly plannings we do them quarterly as as it says and We gather a lot of people from different teams that may or may not know each other and Have this bigger bigger group coming together And we actually start that start that quarterly planning with asking all of them to avoid abbreviations avoid sarcasm don't tell in like avoiding internal jokes and Try to speak with an easy language. I mean, we're all from different countries I'm not a native English speaker. Most of my colleagues aren't either and Well, this can seem boring and this can seem like ah, but what's the joy? it is actually one of the the most efficient way efficient ways to To make sure that people don't stay quiet don't stay silent because that's what happens when it becomes too much Internal when you don't understand what's going on in the room You'd rather stay quiet even unconsciously to not to know that you're not doing something wrong and for me the the goal with these sessions is that we have Outcome where we get all the people's knowledge and thoughts onto the table and can really question The strategy are go-to-market strategy or product strategy moving forward There's another thing that is also Important and that is about how you celebrate success So it's easy now in slack that you get these automatic sales updates So we close the deal and you see this kind of automation of updates coming in But it's even more important to actually celebrate together So how do you do that in a remote setting or if you're in the office, but have remote sales teams? So at pitch we have something that we call the team bulletin It actually started with one of our developers when we were just still just 20 people who said I'm never creating a presentation How can I dog food our product and he came up with this concept of a team bulletin a Friday afternoon show and tell We still keep it. It's been live for now for your three four years and every Friday afternoon teams add some slides a couple of slides with just some Talking about or showing what they've been building. Maybe adding some new experiments showing off that they succeeded or sold something and It's just a way of being proud of what you did that week It's not about reporting on OCRs or KPIs or anything like that It's just a way of celebrating in a synchronous way what we achieve together and I personally start each Monday morning with a coffee and going through the team bulletin and it It actually gives so much energy going into the week when you see what the whole company has been working on So sticking to principles So Another theme of course this time at slush has been the tough financial environment It's we're in it and we all have to react. We have to pivot We have to make some painful changes and do some decision-making that is not the the decision-making of the fun sort and And we have to do it quite quickly to make sure that we actually emerge from this as a health healthy business and This is the time where you can really lean on your values and your principles and I think for us we've also had kind of had to take some difficult decisions this this fall and What we could see here is kind of we really let first principles guide us in the decision-making What do we need to do what is really crucial for our business? and we could lean on that and align and Then you come to the tricky part kind of how do we do this and that is when your values really play a part and We're eight founders at pitch. I'm not one of them But there's eight founders and there's four more in the leadership team. It's a quite big group Of course, we we don't on the daily basis work together But in these moments, it's super crucial for us that we all stand behind the decision We were making and the way we're doing it and this is really when your values and using first principles matters I think also like we we have this opportunity now to really dig into Are we working towards the right mission? Is our strategy bold enough? Are we going to use new channels and here is really an opportunity for teams to to think out of the box and really try to challenge the status quo and The plans you made up one year ago. You just have to redo them last but not least When they're going to get tough go to market and I think this is This is just a good opportunity to to really point out that while it's tough It can also be super super fun and it can also be the moment where you have the chance to really excel and First of all, like there's a lot of appetite out there for for having company solving problems I don't know if you saw Sanna Marine yesterday on the stage, but she I mean she really really asked for us all to continue to focus to problem-solving Then there's a lot of investors. We've had several investors Announcing new funds in the recent days. There's definitely money out there So there's still great opportunities to get your business back by investors and Then I think I mean all of us are still looking for new tools new way of consuming things and The consumer appetite for tech products is still really really big so What we really hope is that you Yeah, see this moment as a possibility to also challenge and make sure that you go to market with a good strategy that you believe in and that you think can work and Yeah, that was that was what I had I hope this These practices can help you. I hope you can get some some good advice from it and That you can really see how that can work for your teams or not work for your teams. It's totally up to you Yeah, thank you very much. I'm also try pitch and Thanks for having me