SalesTechStar Interview with Kristen Habacht, Chief Revenue Officer at Typeform

What makes for a good RevOps motion? And how can it lead to a more optimized sales process? Kristen Habacht, Chief Revenue Officer at Typeform discusses a few latest revtech and salestech processes and trends in this short chat with SalesTechStar:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Kristen, tell us about yourself and your new role as CRO at Typeform.

I’m so excited to chat about Typeform with SalesTechStar! I have been in the SAAS tech startup space for almost 20 years and I have ended up really focusing on and specializing in product lead growth companies, specifically around helping them grow and scale their revenue organizations. Joining Typeform to create a unified revenue lens across sales, marketing, success, support, and community really ties together my passion for intelligent PLG growth. I previously served as President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer at Shogun helping them raise their series C. Prior to Shogun, I held leadership positions at Atlassian, running the Americas and APAC enterprise sales team and later building out a new global team. I had joined Atlassian from the acquisition of Trello where I was the VP of Sales and first revenue hire, which was such an amazing opportunity as well.

What made me so excited to join Typeform was the fact that I just see unlimited potential in Typeform, as well as how passionate Typeform customers are about the value that it delivers to their businesses – we have over 500m interactions per year which is impressive – we are so happy to help them deliver a premium and personalized experience for their own customers.

What do you feel B2B revenue leaders need to do today to drive impact in a tough market?

The game has changed for sure and I think revenue leaders that have historically scaled sales and marketing teams with a PLG approach will be ahead of the curve.

Great sales assisted PLG is really about having your processes nailed down, making sure that your resources are aligned to specific go to market motions and are efficient for scaled growth. That concept of efficient growth is really what the market is looking for right now. Buyers have a lot of folks vying for their attention right now so making sure that they have a really thoughtful, personalized experience is more important than ever. Every lead, prospect, customer really needs to be treated like a VIP right now.

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We’d love to hear about some of the revops processes and revtech-salestech you’ve relied on over the years to drive change and ROI?

A good revops motion is so important when you are building out an efficient team. Making sure the team has access to the right data in order to even ask the right questions is critical. Really analyzing each step of the funnel, having conversion goals, or IC metric at each point is just table stakes now. Making sure you have tooling to look at that funnel health, then call recording software to listen to the game tape of your team, analyzing the CSM health metrics and so much more really helps push for ROI. The rev tech landscape is always changing and I think there are a bunch of tools that are pushing to take the lead especially in a world where AI and automated insights are going to be easier and more accessible for revenue leaders.

What are some of the top challenges that keep CROs up at night in today’s economic climate and what tips would you share?

There is a lot of pressure on a revenue team in the best of times, so when the economy turns, that pressure doesn’t exactly ease up. Sales and revenue teams are at the forefront of making sure the company maintains its growth rate but does it in an efficient way that doesn’t increase the burn. All that plus your competition is doing the exact same thing, and buyers are getting more critical of where their more limited budgets are being spent. We need to be creative to acquire customers (ie. targeted through marketing and sales motions) as well as focus on keeping current customers. All that while customers are demanding and expecting a frictionless experience – that is true to your brand  (ie. authentic, transparent, empathetic and open). It’s enough to keep anyone up at night!

When it comes to the future role of the typical B2B CRO, how do you see it changing?

There was a time I think you could become a great sales leader especially without being analytical. You could just be someone with a lot of grit and hustle who knew how to talk to customers. I think now to be a truly great CRO it is going to be someone who looks at the entire revenue/ go to market cycle for customers and prospects end to end. Someone who can be analytical and understand the data but then understands how to personalize the experience to our ideal customer profile. It has to be someone who understands and appreciates how the whole funnel works from awareness all the way to customer support and health scores. CRO is definitely moving away from just being the ‘senior sales person’ and truly someone who understands how the entire revenue engine works.

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