BC Startup Sales Podcast – Aligning Sales Teams Through SLAs with Sean Kester (SalesLoft)

Sean Kester from SalesLoft joined us in the Bowery Capital studio this week to walk us through his strategy for “Aligning Sales Teams Through SLAs”. The modern startup sales team includes a variety of roles, each of which has a different but critical part to play in the sales process. And this doesn’t just include core members of the sales team like Account Executives and SDRs. It’s also imperative that Marketing and even Customer Success are aligned with sales and understand how their responsibilities fit in. Without clear delineation of exactly who owns which parts of the process when, a sales team can become confused, lose deals from a pure lack of communication, and in the worst of cases, turn teams adversarial. This is where the Service-Level Agreement (SLA) can work wonders. Though it doesn’t have to be long or even over-complicated, a well-structured SLA is a core document that makes clear exactly who owns what in a sales process. As we talk about in today’s podcast, a good SLA can even can ensure a healthy and collaborative startup sales culture.

Our guest today, Sean Kester, has seen the sales process at SalesLoft evolve from a number of angles. He joined SalesLoft as their first-ever sales development rep and led the Company’s efforts to build the highly specialized and effective sales organization that is driving its impressive growth today. As the Head of Sales Development, he quickly built, implemented, and scaled a process for the sales development team that is now the largest group inside the company. He’s engineered processes at the Company for both inbound and outbound sales, and as he explains in our podcast, built the SLA that defines how those processes are executed on the ground. Sean has also authored several playbooks around sales development and related best practices, and has made many of the documents publicly available (including SalesLoft’s full SLA, which you can check out here).

We are big believers in early and in-depth sales alignment. We see it on a daily basis working with our founders. An SLA will not only help you ensure your team is a well-oiled machine, but also force you as a founder or sales leader to think deeply through your sales funnel and the resources it requires to scale. From pre-Seed to growth stage, if you are struggling with managing or building a high-growth sales organization, we think you’ll find this podcast as insightful as we did.

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