How can you bridge the gap between sales and tech to drive customer success? Sarah Polan, EMEA Field CTO at HashiCorp, and Louise Fellows, VP NEMEA at HashiCorp, explore the relationship between Field CTO and sales to help you understand why it exists and how you can leverage this relationship when you have a highly technical product.
The 3 Building Blocks
The three building blocks that bridge the gap between sales and Field CTOs are:
- Product knowledge
- Balance
- Trust
Building Block #1: Product Knowledge
Field CTOs must work closely with sales from a customer perspective. HashiCorp has a very deep technical solution for customers, and for sales, it’s not always easy to grasp that level of technical detail. That’s where the CTO comes in.
The Field CTO is essentially the translator of really complex stuff into regular human speak so that the people implementing these tools understand what’s going on. Both the Field CTO and sales are responsible for making sure people understand the business value behind your product, what you’re delivering, and its mechanics. That’s why it’s important to have a full-fledged sales cycle.
Building Block #2: Balance
Ensure there’s a balance between talking about deep technical product knowledge and how that translates to business value. That’s not always easy for all parts of the organization to translate. By having a balance, different levels within the organization can understand both sides, and the customer can articulate that value back.
Building Block #3: Trust
While trust might seem cliche, sales and Field CTOs must trust each other and build trust between each party and the customer. Not only do sales and Field CTOs need to trust each other, but you also need to have processes in place to ensure that information from sales and solutions engineers gets back to product.
Product is responding to a need in the market, and making sure there’s a feedback loop with trust at the center is critical.
How To Make These Relationships Work in Practice
It’s easy to talk about ideas like trust and balance, but what does that look like in practice? First, it’s an iterative process. If you look at HashiCorp, they have platform teams, developers, SREs, Ops teams, and many more people involved in making everything run smoothly.
You also have a technology decision maker whose job is strategy: ensuring the execution of the implementation is driven by strategy and that the CXO, risk and compliance, and the business owners know what’s going on. It’s more of a loop than a linear pattern. Why?
Because the implementers need to understand what’s going on in the business, why you’re doing what you’re doing, what the business outcome is you’re trying to achieve, and understanding the problem they’re trying to solve for.
A Sales-Driven Perspective
For sales to be effective with the customer, they work within “pods,” a bank of people who need to work together to make sales successful. Below, you’ll see examples of pods within HashiCorp.
They have a sales motion where they acquire customers, land and expand them, extend and renew them, and it goes on a cycle. For landing customers, they’ll have solutions engineers who can call the Field CTO to support conversations.
The expand and extend motions are for the more strategic customers HashiCorp is wanting to grow. They engage the Field CTO at a different level. The pod ensures everyone works together with the customers in a balanced and trusting way. It’s not just a sales motion. It’s a CTO motion. An SE motion. It’s a complete pod motion.
To get the customer’s voice heard and deliver the right solution, you need to understand the customer landscape, where you are in the sales cycle, and the right people to connect with the customer at the right time.
A Business-Driven Perspective
On the other side of the equation is the more business-driven side. This is typically where you see a Field CTO step in. At HashiCorp, it’s an office of six highly technical program makers from all different industries. They want to deliver something of value and act as a trusted advisor.
To be that, they need relationships, trust, and balance. They often come in at the CXO, Risk and Compliance, and technology decision-maker levels to be translators of these highly technical things happening on a minute level.
They figure out and communicate:
- What the business outcomes will be
- What problem the solution will solve
- How it relates to cost, speed, and risk
This enables bigger and broader conversations, builds trust, and leads to quicker adoption and faster renewal cycles.
When Should a Field CTO Engage?
Technical decision-makers have changed over the past decade. It’s no longer just CIOs or IT directors making buying decisions. It’s Heads of Platforms and Heads of Cloud. There’s no one-size-fits-all. Sales must understand this Field CTO engagement map to know when to engage the Field CTO and SEs.
One thing that works well for HashiCorp is being more programmatic. What does engagement look like from account to account? The typical order of engagement is:
- Initial engagement. Sales teams go in, see what’s happening, figure out potential use cases, and engage the Field CTO to dive deeper.
- Initial adoption comes next. Start with a use case and licenses at an Enterprise level, then come in for an executive briefing to say, “This is how I’d look at it.”
- Once in place, you move into more expanded adoption. The Field CTO can come in again on strategic advisory, which is more of a cadence determined by that particular business’ needs.
While not set in stone, this engagement map is a good guidance or framework that provides a programmatic approach. It can support your sales strategy so you don’t sit siloed from everyone else and enables the CTO to get in at the right time.
When you start to move into the Enterprise, Field CTO engagement at the right time in the right deal with the right customer is critical.
How to Leverage a Field CTO to Maximize Their Value
Field CTO engagement isn’t limited to one-on-one customer meetings. There are plenty of ways to leverage such a strategic role that would benefit you more than sitting down with a customer who isn’t technically mature and trying to force a relationship on them.
#1: Brand Evangelism
Events like SaaStr Annual are the perfect way to leverage a Field CTO’s expertise. Events and media meetings allow you to showcase your product suite and thought leadership.
#2: Executive Engagement
You can pick 5-10 accounts per quarter and see how to drive digital transformation and strategy for them, or maybe just offer a little extra care.
#3: Feedback and Advisory
Field CTOs hear a lot of what’s going on in the field, and their view is a little different than the solutions engineers or account managers. At a programmatic level, you can give that feedback to product managers and marketing teams so everyone knows what’s resonating within the industry and can adapt and move forward.
The faster this information goes in and out of different teams, the higher performing the team will be, and, ultimately, the more revenue you will make due to that feedback loop.
#4: Sponsorship and Mentoring
Field CTOs can educate, mentor, and upskill within the organization and outside of it. HashiCorp recently had a customer call and said, “Thanks for the mentorship.” Sales teams are also listening to Field CTOs speak with customers at the C-level, which means they’re also learning to talk to C-levels. Everyone is learning all the time.
The Challenges…
Bridging the gap between the Field CTO and sales is wonderful when it’s working, but it does come with challenges. Like any relationship, it’s a learning process to determine what does or doesn’t work. Let’s look at four key challenges.
Challenge #1: Learning As You Go
It takes time to figure out what is and isn’t working. Sometimes, things change dramatically on short notice, and often, you have to keep iterating as business needs change.
Challenge #2: Demonstrating Value
How do you prove the value of a Field CTO? It’s a tricky thing to measure. Field CTO engagement differs based on the customer and where they are in the sales cycle. How do you qualify that every day if it’s constantly changing? Sometimes, someone hears you speak at a conference and says that was a driving factor in their transformation. How do you measure that?
It’s hard to manage all of those touchpoints and demonstrate the value a Field CTO brings.
Challenge #3: Creating an Open Culture
When you’re growing, your sales team likely wants to be out there selling the whole time, but this isn’t a sales team-only show. They can’t just throw it back over the fence and expect the rest of the organization to pick up the mess.
Creating an open culture is critical because the relationship needs to be built on a broader perspective of people, which benefits the customer first. There are multiple touchpoints, with the Field CTO being critical in that. You also need multiple perspectives when making business decisions, so it’s a multi-way street of everyone learning from and communicating with everyone, so you don’t have siloed information.
Challenge #4: Building Something Programmatic
Building something programmatic means making efficient use of your time. You can do this by leveraging what you learned in one account into another. Knowledge transfers need to be programmatic, along with every other process.
This becomes even more critical when you’re a fully remote team like HashiCorp.
Top 3 Takeaways
- Mutual exchange. This is not a sales-led, Field CTO-led, or SE-led approach. It’s about being balanced and trustworthy and building internal and external relationships.
- Prioritize relationships. Don’t be afraid of someone having a different relationship with someone else than you do. And don’t be afraid to leverage that. Recognize those relationships’ value and their role in driving success.
- Embrace the value. The Field CTO and sales team can achieve a lot of value together. The sales cycle involves more than just sales.
