My experience working for a startup

My experience working for a startup 

... & the creation of a predictable revenue stream

Over the last 4 years (almost), I've worked for DocuSign, and in April of this year the company went public (DOCU). This was an interesting event to witness and to be part of. Going public was much anticipated by everyone in the company.

To achieve this milestone, there are a few essential things that need to happen, some of the essentials are: continued growth of revenue, become profitable, and create predictable revenue streams across the organisation.

Considering I've spent nearly 20 years working in Sales, and close to 10 leading teams, my sales teams have a key role to play in this latter requirement. Certain elements within the organisation become more relevant than others to achieve these goals, and to develop the long-term future of the company. I'll outline some of them below.

Culture & Speed

Let's be crystal clear; not everyone is suited to work for a startup. When I joined DocuSign in Dublin as one of the first 10 people, everyone in our Regus office had "multiple hats" on all the time. I was responsible for the Sales team, Sales development, a bit of Sales Operations, helping people with their onboarding, getting stationary, doing some lead generation, and at times, getting someone organised to fix the coffee machine.

We had no clearly defined business processes specific to DocuSign, and yet we knew we needed to go to market both as fast as possible, and with the most specific focus. To give some more context on the company, DocuSign is the global leader in electronic signatures, and our System of Agreement platform can - from experience - address at the very least 4 core business issues in every customer I've ever spoken to: accelerate time to reach agreements (and therefore time to cash), reduce legal risk, remove compliance exposures, improve operational efficiencies. These conversations are generally led by either the Sales leadership, the Procurement team(s), the Legal teams, and / or the HR team.

This wealth of choice, and the breath of the opportunity for the company, meant the people that were looking to join the adventure that is DocuSign needed to have the ability to operate & execute at speed, despite all the distractions that come with building the train tracks whilst the train is already driving at 100km/h!

This created an amazing culture to work in.  Everyone lives the common goal to make the company, the teams, and themselves successful. This creates a fantastic energy that, from the first day of joining, has given me focus and drive!

Learning

Of course, not everything is rainbows and unicorns... and we made many a mistake. These learnings have however enabled us to scale the organisation to more than 250 people today. To illustrate, in the USA, DocuSign is a household name. And the market penetration on the other side of the ocean was well established, with a recognised brand name. This meant the sales engagement in the USA was in many ways a little "easier". There was not a lot of education of the customer & prospect left to do.

In EMEA, we realised very quickly this wasn't the case (yet), and we changed our sales approach to a more structured process, that took into account the need to give our prospects the time, and the resources to learn about DocuSign, but also about the added value we could bring.

One of the most common questions was, and still is in some emerging regions, if the electronic signature is legally binding. I'll write another piece on this topic later, however, in the meantime feel free to study our global legality guide. Here's a spoiler; the short answer is YES, DocuSign is legally binding, and is used in more than 180 countries.

We needed to add this education phase into every step of our customer interactions, from webinars, to sales development, to solution consulting and sales. Our account management teams took dual roles, both to work with the customer adoption, and to help teach other departments about the solution.

We also learnt about specific types of business processes that our customers found too complex to modernise, and we spent sometimes too much time trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. There are simply just organisations that prefer being "old fashioned" and prefer paper... It meant the sales teams needed to learn how to cut their losses... thankfully there is a lot of opportunity in every account we work with! To be fair, this has very much become the exception than the rule across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Digital transformation, and the modernisation of every company's system of agreement is a priority for most organisations globally today.

Building a Sales Organisation

It's different...

As I mentioned earlier, when you start from scratch in a startup, the sales organisation you're building is a little different than when you work for a large, well established company. When I look back at my career, the only reference point I'd have to compare the first few years at DocuSign with, was working for Dell in 2001 - 2003. There was a feeling of urgency and opportunity in that environment that was palpable in DocuSign as well.

If I have to use a few words to describe the first sales people we hired, I'd have to use words like "bright", "hungry", "scrappy", "entrepreneurial", "self starter", "creative", "flexible", "resilient", "renegade", "fearless" & "brave"... I'm aware that some of these are a little stereotypical, however, when you start with very little structure, marketing support, or regional customer references, you NEED all those attributes!

The consequence of this; the teams are amazingly headstrong, and vocal. Characteristics that I have come to love in sales people all along my career. I have always enjoyed working with people that were able to challenge status-quo, look at things in a different way, and help me reassess my perspectives at times.

One of the most interesting observations I found was that there was a total lack of "Groupthink" in the early stages. Well worth reading up on by the way, as many companies have failed dramatically as a consequence. This is a good article on Groupthink. The three main symptoms are particularly dangerous for the success of an organisation: Overestimations of the group, Closed-mindedness, and Pressures toward uniformity.

In the beginning of building the team, the structure and the processes, we reinvented the wheel every day, and everyone in the one room in the office contributed and helped shape the direction and the decisions. Some days, we just made it up as we went along...

All of this may sound a little crazy, and at times it probably was, I hope it gives some more context as to why working in an "early stage" startup isn't for everyone! My view: I love the energy and the excitement.

The creation of a predictable revenue stream

Do best practices work?

The simple answer; Yes they do. The nuanced answer; yes they do, however, they need to be tweaked per country, market segment, vertical, company size, customer use case, etc... What this really means, is you need to identify the "lowest common denominator" of every customer project, and make that the standard. And then, you adapt it to your prospect / customer's way of working. To illustrate, Dutch directness is different than the French way of working, the Financial Services' security focus is slightly different from a startup's, and SMB's speed of decision making is regularly faster than working in a large enterprise. This flexibility is needed to make sure every customer has the same positive experience working with the sales teams.

The other angle to consider is that every team isn't the same. For example, the sales development teams (who work to generate pipeline, and are often the first touch point for our prospects and customers) have different requirements than the senior sales professionals in the Enterprise sales teams. This means that every enablement best practice needs to be made relevant for the different "target audience". The one constant is always the focus on our customer's requirements and how we can assist in making the experience in working with the teams the most positive. 

Leverage what you have learnt

Bearing this in mind, if we wouldn't review what we've done on a regular basis, we wouldn't be able to be as efficient as we are today. Leveraging what we learnt in our customer conversations, what we collect from internal feedback, or what our partners tell us makes us a true learning organisation, and a great place to work!

References & Quoted sources:

• 16 things to get IPO-ready (or just build a really strong business); https://www.recode.net/2016/12/2/13813792/checklist-16-things-ipo-ready-public-company-andreessen-horowitz-a16z By Nicole Irvin
• Groupthink, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
• Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/communication-charts-around-the-world-2014-3?r=UK&IR=T
• DocuSign System of Agreement; https://www.docusign.com/products/system-of-agreement
• DocuSign as verb: https://techcrunch.com/video/docusign-ceo-were-becoming-a-verb-company-up-37-following-public-debut/

Images:

• http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-11-29-1448821418-4718017-startupglossary.jpg 
• http://compforce.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451df4569e20147e3c2d8eb970b-pi 
• https://www.businessinsider.com/communication-charts-around-the-world-2014-3?r=UK&IR=T