🍷 Darren Sharpe: SuiteSpot, Chief Revenue Officer

15 minutes with Meet Darren Sharpe, Chief Revenue Officer at SuiteSpot. Be maniacal about what’s working. Doing great homework. Connecting inbound and outbound channels. Prospect discovery. Client feedback loops to drive product innovation. Shifting a pricing model from features to platform. Pareto principal. Opportunity costs. A culture of coaching allows your team to collaborate in all things. Talk within your client's own words. Asking: What's important to you? What drives you? Is there a connection here where I can help solve?

21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.

Here’s what Katy McFee said about Darren:

Darren Sharpe. I met him in a sales leader peer group that was put together by The Lazaridis Institute which is an organization where hyper-growth companies are selected to be part of this program. He has just a super impressive, smart, long-time sales leader who gets it. Goes into a company, figures it out, deep dives, and like creates this huge growth for whatever company he touches. So, he's a CRO right now at SuiteSpot, but has been a revenue leader for many years, and has lots of great value that he can share.
—Katy McFee, Founder and Principal of Insights to Action → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

We're fairly traditional. We have an inbound channel, and outbound channel, and a partner channel. I think it might be more and more interesting is how do we uniquely leverage those channels for our success?

1) Outbound channel. So one, if we look at our traditional outbound sales channel, I’m incredibly proud of our BDR team's ability to profile, research, and connect with the prospects. So we look at it as value-based sequencing plus hyper-personalization, and I'm really proud of the outcomes that are coming there.

2) Inbound channel. Then, we tie that with our inbound PPC strategy, looking at the exact same personas and trying to hit the same people so that our outbound and inbound are connected. So you're connecting with the LinkedIn ad as we've we've sent you that message really trying to drive, “Hey, can we understand you as a prospect's problem? Could you see value in a quick connect or a quick conversation with us?” So really, on those inbound and outbound channels, how are we creating new conversations?

3) Partner channel. The partner model is interesting from a startup perspective. Anytime you're developing a partner channel, the key is timing. How do you not be everything to everyone, but create highly valuable bilateral partnerships. So for that one, I'm really proud of the work we've done of defining the right type of partner and being able to service them. And as we scale, we expect to see that partner channel becoming a bigger piece of our business. But today, we're dominantly led by the inbound and outbound channels.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

As a startup, we are constantly in the path of positive change. So I'm going to mention three things that we are constantly working on, but I'm really proud of the work we've done to position us for success.

1) Prospect discovery. This is a tough balance between interrogation and value-based discussion. And we've recently really flipped our scripts and really tried to shift the discovery goal to making sure the prospect understands our interpretation of their problem and how it's affecting them individually. And, that's shift has been, instead of going to the standard, “Hey, are you experiencing this industry problem?”—”What is the personal impact of this problem, and how is it affecting you guys?” It's a small change, but that shift in discovery has really shifted our sales model. Where now, and like, we're not original here, but we're really focusing on client pain, focusing in on the impact to each individual prospect.

2) Client feedback loops. Before I came on board at sweet spot, we hadn't done a great job yet. So, we've introduced the customer advisory board. We've introduced a quarterly business review process. And, we’re greatly mining a lot of great data from our existing clients, and really trying to twofold: increase the dialogue between existing client and SuiteSpot, “How do we build a better foundation?” But, also learn from them. Learn from them, from product, not only how we've deployed, but product innovation, and we're now seeing great innovation come out of that feedback loop. We’re really excited about where that takes us.

3) Shift in our pricing model