How Christian Smith Has Focused His Revenue Team on Accelerating Cloud Revenue Growth
Our team of experts from the Revenue Enablement Institute studies how leading organizations are transforming their commercial models to accelerate revenue growth. We profile growth leaders – CXOs – who are at the forefront of defining, enabling, and leading the execution of the 21st Century Commercial Model.
Christian Smith is Chief Revenue Officer at Splunk, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK) a software business with $2.8 B Annual Recurring Revenues (ARR) that turns data into doing with a leading data platform for security and observability that turns data into doing with the Data-to-Everything Platform. Splunk’s technology is designed to investigate, monitor, analyze, and act on data at any scale. Christian has a broad span of control over client facing resources at Splunk, including field sales, channel management, digital channels, industry specialists, and business value consulting. He also manages digital channels and demand generation as the sales team generates 80% of pipeline opportunities at Splunk.
Splunk is one of the fastest growing companies in the history of enterprise software. Three years ago, the company embarked on a transformation from an on premises business to a SaaS model. Christian talked with us about the challenge of simultaneously sustaining a high rate of growth against a very large revenue base.
Leading a business transformation at scale at one of the highest growth companies in the SaaS software space is a high degree of difficulty task. Only a few elite companies – like Adobe and Autodesk – have done it successfully. In that regard, Splunk has set its goals high and is benchmarking against the best.
Splunk is one of the fastest growing companies in the history of enterprise software. Three years ago, the company embarked on a transformation from an on premises business to a SaaS model. Christian talked with us about the challenge of simultaneously sustaining a high rate of growth against a very large revenue base while transforming into a cloud company.
Leading a business transformation at scale at one of the highest growth companies in the SaaS software space is a high degree of difficulty task. Only a few elite companies – like Adobe and Autodesk – have done it successfully. In that regard, Splunk has set its goals high and is benchmarking against the best.
“We are an innovative, high growth company with a significant total addressable market,” says Smith. “Top line growth is a key pillar in our business transformation and it’s critical to maintaining market momentum and building a durable company that continues to deliver exceptional innovation. It’s vital to produce the right kind of profit that shareholders appreciate. That specifically manifests itself in recurring revenue growth, which we consider our North Star. That said, it’s also important to measure success based on peer SaaS companies of a similar size and scale. For example, Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow. Overall, our recurring revenue is increasing in a similar manner and our growth is exceeding those organizations when they were our size.”
Whatever Smith’s team is doing must be working. Splunk grew cloud ARR by 75% in its recently announced fiscal third quarter 2022 results to achieve its first billion-dollar cloud ARR quarter, and projected cloud ARR will reach $2 billion by the end of the next fiscal year. I asked him how his revenue team is able to do it.
According to Smith, their success at growing while transforming stemmed from a variety of factors:
- Establishing a strong common purpose across sales, marketing, and customer support organizations.
- Incentivizing high levels of teamwork and collaboration across the revenue team.
- Generating superior returns on their investments in sales insights and enablement.
“Our transformation success is based on three essential elements that are aligned to our corporate growth priorities. Most importantly, we have a strong common purpose across sales, marketing, and customer support organizations. Our revenue team is also incentivized for high levels of teamwork and collaboration. And we are deeply committed to investing in continued innovation, sales insights, and enablement.”
At the top of the list is the ability of the leadership to instill a common purpose across all customer-facing employees by aligning the engagement model, incentive system, and measurements with corporate growth priorities.
“Our common purpose has enabled our success throughout our transformation”, says Smith. “ Splunk’s executive team is very, very specific about what I call our big rocks – that is, the three or four things that we must do as a team to execute on the strategy and be successful. I try to keep it to three to four priorities that allow us to be very focused, very connected, and very aligned.”
“We try to connect those big priorities to what we call our noble purpose, which is the impact that we can have on our customers and on their employees, their customers, and their constituents,” he continues. “It’s important our revenue team is in agreement and aligned. We are all in the boat together and we have to believe what we’re doing matters. I think that shared mission has been a cornerstone of the success we’ve achieved so far. It makes us a much more aligned and higher performing organization.”
Christian’s big “rocks” for this year include a clear focus on being cloud first, targeting the three core personas within accounts that will unlock opportunity, and scaling the business at a rapid pace.
“Our big rocks are really straightforward,” according to Smith. “We are cloud first, while also targeting the three core personas within accounts that will unlock opportunity, and ultimately scaling the business at a rapid pace. Once a big rock is identified, it needs to be defined. For example, being cloud-first means we want to help every customer accelerate their transition to the cloud and ensure we are there as a partner to continuously create value. In practice, it means our entire company is oriented from the top down around cloud first including our product innovation, our strategy, the evolution of our metrics and how we’re going to communicate across our key audiences.”
Providing just-in-time best practices and coaching to our revenue teams on conversational intelligence must be part of any organization’s analytics evolution.
This last objective has led to significant changes in the commercial operations, enablement systems, and insights that support sales, marketing, and customer support at Splunk. “We’ve made significant enhancements in the commercial operations, enablement systems, and insights that support sales, marketing, and customer support at Splunk,” says Smith. “We also continue to build and focus our top talent to help our customers succeed.”
Splunk is placing a significant emphasis on improving teamwork and collaboration across the revenue team because experience has taught them that team selling is the easiest and most effective way to sell their complex portfolio of sophisticated solutions. The company recently brought in a new President and Chief Growth Officer, Teresa Carlson, to help get the sales, marketing, and customer success organizations working better together towards our common goals.
“We talk about the ‘Splunk Village’ because team selling leads to super successful sales activity and customers,” says Smith. “When we bring the right specialists and the right team members into an engagement, our win rates are higher, our average selling prices are higher, and the success of that customer is higher. I also believe leaders need essential insights to improve the readiness, ramp, and effectiveness of revenue teams.”
Smith is looking for higher returns on their investment in sales enablement and revenue intelligence to help them achieve a step function improvement in their ability to develop sellers and improve their effectiveness. “One of the first things I did when I took on global sales was to measure the impact of enablement,” says Smith. “I want to know that what we are doing is actually working. At the time it was controversial but understanding the ROI of our enablement investments has really helped us unlock more growth potential from our data and technology investments while optimizing our enablement philosophy. For example, understanding the importance of high impact goals like enabling just-in-time learning and specializing our enablement investments to make them more role based and goal oriented. Measuring the impact of enablement helps us understand if our productivity initiatives are paying off. We have already accelerated our new hire productivity and frequently measure the impact of investments on the productivity of existing reps as well.”
Splunk has access to a vast array of data sources that can better support selling. These range from telemetry and usage data from its products to customer engagement data from customer success systems and sales conversations to first party and third party buying signals. Smith sees big potential in turning that customer engagement data and seller activity data into insights that can prescriptively help sellers by giving them selling guidance, coaching, and best practices in real time.
“We have adopted just-in-time enablement as a philosophy for the bulk of our enablement over the last two years and it has had a huge positive impact,” says Smith. “Providing just-in-time best practices and coaching to our revenue teams on conversational intelligence is next on our roadmap. Conversational intelligence is an even more essential part of the equation especially in the wake of the pandemic and must be part of any organization’s analytics evolution.”
“Data-driven selling is a foundational element of Splunk’s culture,” he continues. “We are trusted by organizations worldwide to take massive amounts of unstructured data and turn it into actions and outcomes through AI and automation to help DevOps and security teams. We apply that same lens to our customer engagement and sales process. Data helps our sellers, and our people enhance their customer engagement and boosts productivity.”
Smith believes that anything that helps his sellers and the people that engage with customers be more informed, faster, and more relevant is going to help both the customers and help the business. He sees applying Artificial Intelligence to the commercial process as a big opportunity to be more prescriptive by giving his sellers greater access to selling advice in the moments that matter, and the speed to keep up with changing customer expectations and the cadence of modern selling.
“I see AI as an opportunity to be more prescriptive and provide Splunk sellers greater access to selling advice and speed,” says Smith. “AI enables reps to streamline their time and share best practices. My ultimate hope is AI will start to pattern match and accelerate seller suggestions and recommendations. In essence, we want the recommendation to show up like it does on your Netflix screen and prescriptively connect sales reps to the next best step such as the right people to get involved at the next stage.”
“As part of our transformation, we have built selling assets that enable our team to find what they need in our playbooks, which are all in our CRM system, and also in our knowledge portal, he continues. “However, it requires reps to locate assets, which is optional, self-service, and manual to some degree. We are committed to continuing our enhancements and enabling our sales teams worldwide to help organizations turn their data into doing.”
—————————————-
Christian Smith is Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Splunk Inc. You can learn more about the next generation of growth leaders and the state-of-the-art management tools, skills, capabilities, and practices they are using to accelerate revenue growth and adapt to the new buying reality at the Revenue Enablement Institute Web Site. You can nominate growth lea
