SalesTechStar Interview with Carly Crittenden, Head of Sales at Black Crow AI

Carly Crittenden, Head of Sales at Black Crow AI shares a few proven GTM tips and best practices in this Q&A with SalesTechStar:

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Hi Carly, take us through your technology sales journey through the years and what key learnings you’ve come away with.

Hi Paroma, thanks so much for having me on! I’ve done a number of things throughout my sales career, but started during Google’s early days in 2007. Like many, my first job at Google was answering the customer service line: anyone could call Google about anything related to their search or advertising experience in those days. It was the best primer for a career in sales, emphasizing the importance of deep product understanding & customer empathy.

I got early career advice that “your 20’s are for breadth and your 30’s are for depth” and so over the next 7 years I worked across multiple global offices and organizations at Google. My time spent at the adtech behemoth was by far the best professional training I would get and laid the foundation for learning how to be thoughtful and creative in influential leadership and delivering business outcomes.

The next 4 years were dedicated to developing businesses across emerging markets, starting with building Google’s first inside sales team in Latin America then growing Universum’s GTM team across 8 new countries. After that experience I knew I had a real knack for understanding the people around me: my teams and my territory.

My time at Moat was a similar growth story, but from a much earlier stage. I got to witness rocketship growth to 100M, an acquisition by Oracle, and the true scaling of a SaaS business.

Those formative experiences shaped my approach to sales – focusing on structuring programs for success, while deeply understanding my team, the products we sold and the customer. All of that brought me to Black Crow, where I’ve led Sales for more than two and a half years. We’re building products in response to a whole new challenge – identifying true product market fit. It’s a real dream getting to work with such bright and inventive product and development professionals, but even better to get to work with amazing humans who take care of themselves outside of work so that we take care of each other at work.

When it comes to modern GTM practices in SaaS: What do you think most sales and marketing leaders are missing?

Alignment on the business objectives and a “first team” mentality. First it is critical for sales and marketing to get aligned on the revenue objectives and what pipeline and funnel metrics are realistic and required to get there. Then all of the work that we do together is in service of that. This collaborative approach ensures that both teams are focused on the same goals, driving consistent and measurable results.

First team mentality means a leader’s primary responsibility is to the team they are part of, not the team they lead. That means the business objectives are paramount and lead the strategies and priorities for the business.

At Black Crow, that means being in lockstep with our product team – at all times. I think that’s another area where salespeople get lost. So often sales folks might get frustrated with product teams and delivery schedules – but seeing product as the “end” of your sales deal instead of the origin point for that customer engagement is a setup for disaster. Because at the end of the day the product and team are your best assets.

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We’d love to hear about some of the core GTM and sales strategies you’ve used to drive growth goals

Absolutely! I’ve done a ton of motions throughout my career, but one of the challenges that’s been most fun for me is leading sales for Black Crow. Previously I’ve worked for pretty large companies, either establishing sales in certain verticals or geographies. With Black Crow, I look after the whole division. That’s meant a lot of really interesting experimentation with approach. Is a BDR program the right move for us? How about partnerships and referrals? How do we talk about new tools that have never been built before to a prospective buyer? It’s a ton of new approaches all at once, but we’ve found that letting the product speak for itself has been the biggest growth driver. We offer a myriad of product packages and offer about 30-50% of each package’s functionality via free trial. After the trial period is over, we see a really remarkable 78% conversion from trial to purchase. That’s a significant rate for a market where many are seeing a very different trendline. That product-first approach, I’m really proud to say, has been a massive success.

Can you dive into the type of salestech / revtech you’ve often relied on to boost outcomes?

I’ve relied on a variety of tools across my career, but two of the best ones I’ve found are Gong, and Coefficient. Gong allows you to automate repetitive sales tasks and capture customer information, and Coefficient ports real-time data into your workflows and spreadsheets.

As a sales leader, my main objective is to drive new business, and both tools have been essential in doing that successfully. With Gong, we’re able to automate low-level tasks that free our team up to build customer relationships, find new leads, or build go-to-market strategies for new products. We’ve seen a noticeable uptick in pitch to trial conversion rates by shifting our team’s efforts to the high-touch, human communications AI can’t replicate, made possible by the things it can.

The other way we’ve optimized at Black Crow is by implementing Coefficient. You can’t drive business effectively unless you know how your team is performing. Coefficient and other monitoring tools have been super effective for me as a manager to understand where my team is performing best – is it with certain customer profiles? Is it in certain product categories? Using that data, I can talk with my team to understand where we need to correct a process or discuss product messaging with the larger team.

How are you seeing AI change and impact sales and GTM processes today?

It’s really taken the busy work out of the way, and is allowing people to unleash their creativity. We live in a fast-paced world, and prior to AI so many of us had to fine-tune approaches to our work. If you’re a copywriter, you would have to write and then A/B test three versions of the same loyalty program email. If you’re a graphic designer, you’d have to do the same thing with a new ad campaign. That’s an incredibly inefficient way of working, and now we’re able to use AI to generate those “starting place” iterations. A human will still be the one thinking through next steps and strategy, but it’s a significant change in the way we work.

That’s absolutely affected sales as well. You can have AI write your starter copy for a pitch deck, have an email drafted, or even analyze who’s recently raised funds and might need a tool to support their growth. All of that means you can turn your staff to more enriching work – for themselves and the business. But that influx of AI functionality has also led to a lot of low-quality content. So hand in hand with that time-freedom comes an increasingly message-resistant buying audience. That’s where I’d caution salespeople to only use AI as a means to the first step vs the final product. That’s really the way to get the best improvements to efficiency and team allocation, while prioritizing the buyer experience.

What I’ll end with, is that this is only the beginning. Full credit to our product and development teams here when I say one of the reasons I joined Black Crow is because we’re genuinely building products that will change how entire companies craft their GTM strategies. All I can say is there’s a lot coming, and AI will be a different game when we’re done.

Five tips you’d leave for everyone in B2B tech sales before we wrap up?

Your team is everything – but not just your sales team. To be truly great at this role you need to understand everyone else’s perspectives. It enriches your storytelling, and it helps you understand the point of view of any buyer you come across. In short, it makes you a better salesperson.

You’ve got to understand your customer above all else. When I was with Google and Universum, I had to understand exactly what buyers in Argentina vs. Bolivia vs. Peru needed, and what messages they’d respond to. I had to know that across millions of people in very different cultures. I challenge salespeople to know their various customer profiles that well, and to truly understand those needs; if you do, quota attainment will follow.

No grand vision can make up for a flawed process and execution. When looking for a new opportunity, or even in your current role, take note of the ecosystem around you. Do you have what you need to learn about your product? Are there systems in place to facilitate constant feedback between product, marketing, sales, and CX? Are you serving the right messages to the right people? And does your current GTM strategy match the answers to those questions? All of these are key pieces to a healthy and repeatable sales motion.

Speak up! There’s a sad but sometimes true stereotype of salespeople that we always want to be the loudest one in the room, but have nothing of substance to say. For the folks for whom that’s true, my advice is to step back and listen! But for the folks who listen to understand, there’s real room for you to step in and share. You know your customer best. You know the features they’re asking for. You know the best way to package your products to get customers and the business their best value. You know how to give the market what it wants. So speak up! Advocate for your customer with your team – the business and your customers will thank you.

What I’ll end on is this: every business is different, and every business will require something new from you. So feel free to experiment! Try different approaches, different strategies, and see what works! Learn from industry peers about how they’re building their go-to-market strategy, and do a targeted run of that partnership program. Devote that small percentage to actually exploring the tactics available to you instead of relying on the same-old motion you learned in your last role. There’s so much room to invent, and I hope you will!

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