Arnaud Lagarde, VP of Sales at ABBYY shares a few proven SaaS sales pointers and tips for B2B tech teams in this SalesTechStar interview:
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Hi Arnaud, welcome to this SalesTechStar Interview Series, tell us about your Sales journey in SaaS so far?
My sales career has been fast-paced, disruptive and immensely fulfilling. I come from rural France, where I grew up with very few digital amenities, yet I am now advising organizations on how to make the best use of new technology and how to create lasting business outcomes. So, it’s definitely been a transformational journey!
I have seen many disruptions and market changes such as the year 2000 bugs, the internet bubble, the financial crisis of 2008 and the new technological revolution where AI has been transforming whole industries and value chains. Since 2016, AI has created great opportunities but has also become a big distraction to organizations and vendors alike.
Our buyer persona has also changed significantly during these last 20 years, so my team and I have had to learn to sell ‘outcome’ versus ‘capability’. We now sell to buyers with limited technical knowledge who use technology in their everyday personal life, and expect the same ease of use, efficiency and speed of outcome in tools that they use at work. This introduces a lot of risk in the sales process as organizations focusing on ease of use may not necessarily prioritize security, scalability and long-term results.
What are some of the everyday pain points that plague VP of Sales in SaaS, in your view?
There are always pain points, but many can turn to opportunities! Like many professionals, I prefer to make data driven decisions. I always try to look at insights, research and trends that can help me be more efficient and optimize the cost of sales and the sales process across different markets, industries and geographies. With AI and analytics, it is important to have the right data preparation – ensuring that your data is accessible, accurate and complete. CRM is still a big part of this, and many will be aware that there are never-ending CRM projects that are trying to get the right balance between accurate reporting and ease of use to ensure that data is captured. Harnessing the power of data is key to direct marketing and sales effort.
Deal value maximization is another important topic. It’s about truly understanding the impact of what we sell and maximizing value for both ourselves and our customers. Many technologies are sold once and underused by customers. They might understand how it solves their original pain points, but do they understand the hidden capabilities and how it could transform their business and customer service? We need to be concerned about effort versus reward. We must understand the customer’s problem fast, build the right champions that can instigate transformational change and quantify value for the customers in order to justify investment and budget.
At ABBYY, we are a global company, so knowledge sharing is critical to guarantee success and best in class processes. It also brings its own challenges in terms of alignment and account planning. Could we win more through better collaboration? How can we encourage collaboration while at the same time encourage salespeople to be strategists with strong tactical instincts to win fast and big? It involves good governance, enablement and compliance to support the team’s success. This leads me to sales productivity. We want the team to win, but not at any cost. It requires a lot of planning in terms of organization, resources and segmentation of customers and markets to ensure that our team remains productive. At ABBYY, we have an enterprise team, an ISV team, and a mid-market team and we expect different sales activities and deal velocity. It means we need to automate a lot of the sales activity from our transactional business whilst ensuring account management excellence in the enterprise segment.
The last pain point I can think of is cutting through the AI noise. Customers are being told that everything is easier, faster and better with AI. Organizations themselves want to be seen as early adopters of AI, and in particular GenAI. Business leaders often believe that they need to use Gen-AI and large language models (LLMs) to be at the forefront of innovation and solve their business problems, but this is not the case. It is more likely that a purpose-built model will be a better solution such as a small language model (SLM) that is specifically designed or trained for an explicit purpose with efficiency, security and sustainability as part of the design principle.
Can you share a little about the priorities that should be top of mind for SaaS Sales VPs today, given current dynamics, from better marketing-sales alignment to ensuring better use of SalesTech, RevTech platforms and more?
First of all, collaboration with marketing is essential. Product marketing is in charge of feedback to the product team to establish a good fit and ensure that the features we build answer customer demands. My team in presales and account management has an important role to play in ensuring that we get customer centricity from the product team. Earlier we talked about sales productivity and automation – effective collaboration/planning with demand gen and marketing is key when it comes to directing campaigns and SDR activities. If we get the wrong ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) this is not just wasted resources for marketing, but it also affects sales team productivity. When it doesn’t work, both teams become frustrated, trust is lost, and collaboration becomes difficult.
AT ABBYY, we have invested in technology for capturing buyers’ insight, helping with account segmentation, and information that enables us to target the right customers at the right time. We also designed / configured our own systems to ensure that we can capture the data that we need in terms of consumption and use case classification, to get more insight into our customers and how they use our solutions. This helps us with product market fit and removes friction in the end user journey. Our aim is to provide a continuous feedback loop for continuous process improvement.
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How can VP Sales roles in SaaS be more proficient in building unified sales-marketing processes, data and visions towards growth?
I think it starts with the alignment of objectives and key results. If we have a common goal across the teams, the right KPIs and the right measurement in place, things tend to run smoothly naturally. This is the most important aspect of collaboration. But we should always bear in mind that situations can change. Are we in need of new goals and OKR to keep the team focused on desired outcomes? If we have a common goal like a qualified pipeline, it helps. If it is simply the number of leads, then you may see a lot of activity in marketing but then frustrations as it might not translate into qualified opportunities.
Lead rating and lead flow is always an interesting topic, especially in a global organization with multiple product and sales teams. Different teams are interested in different types of leads so based on the type of lead that you receive, there should have a specific routing for that lead. Technology today has matured to support more complex routing, but it starts with marketing and sales professionals sitting down to look at all the different cases in order to set up lead scoring and workflow based on scoring.
Can you take us through some of the SalesTech and RevTech you’ve often relied on in your journey to drive sales?
I have worked with many CRM and marketing operation management tools. Earlier in my career, I used Siebel, Act and Microsoft dynamics which were good tools to start digitizing information from your customer, but processes and automation were limited. In the technology sector, the two most common CRM systems are probably Salesforce and Hubspot. If you are a small/medium size business, you can definitely benefit from the integrated nature of Hubspot with its flexibility and automation of the marketing process and its analysis of bottle necks in your process of pipeline flow.
For larger companies requiring better customization, Salesforce seems to be the preferred solution for the enterprise. Other new technologies are transforming customer experience and the sales journey. There are too many to list, but each recognizes your sales platform and has an ecosystem that can add value to the core system. If you are a LinkedIn and Sales Navigator user, you can use campaign/outreach management tools that will increase the productivity of your Sales Development Representative or Business Development Representative. At ABBYY we have new customer experience management tools that enable us to understand engagement and the satisfaction of existing customers.
While there are plenty of tools that support sales and marketing today, sales excellence is the right equation between people, processes and technology
Five takeaways and tips you’d leave everyone in Sales with, before we wrap up?
Remember that sales involve a great deal of psychology so don’t forget to train your team in the art of selling and what motivates the buying act.
If you are afraid of new technology like GenAI (ChatGPT and other LLMS), try to use them in your day job (with approval of your infosec team!) so you better understand them and can educate your customers on the benefits and risks of using them at scale.
Align and plan first! Sales, Marketing, and Product teams need to have a common goal and shared/agreed OKRs in order to share success and failures and build long-term value for the customer.
Leverage technology and automation but first understand your processes and data! We spend considerable time doing this at ABBYY and I am very excited about our new up-and-coming Salesforce implementation!
And finally, think about your people! Companies with great technology and culture win. As the Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer said, “Success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success.”
ABBYY helps enterprises and organizations transform their data into intelligent, actionable outcomes, so they can make smart decisions faster and drive better results.
Arnaud Lagarde is VP of Sales for global intelligent automation company ABBYY. He leads sales efforts and go-to-market initiatives across the EMEA region, leveraging his expertise in AI, automation, and SaaS solutions.