ICYMI: Your ICP is the Foundation of Your Sales Process — Lessons from Splunk’s $10B IPO
Our GTM ACCELERATION Series offers a 12-step guide outlining how to turn a go-to-market motion into an engine. As a continuation of the series, Venture Guides has invited sales leaders to join us in sharing the real stories of what building go-to-market engines looks like in practice. Joining us for this installment is Tom Schodorf, a member of the Venture Guides family and former CRO of Splunk. This comes on the heels of our recent conversation with DILA Capital’s Alejandro Diez Barroso on building teams and investing with conviction, another example of the operator-led thinking we consistently feature.
Tom joined Splunk when the company was generating $30M in annual revenue and remained the CRO through $1B in bookings. After being part of one of the most iconic IPOs in infrastructure software history, Tom began advising C-suites and GTM teams on how to do the same while achieving their full potential. Today, he shares his five most important pieces of advice for companies focused on accelerating their go-to-market strategy:
Don’t chase everything; it will cause confusion and inefficiency.
Reach a unified and aligned messaging strategy.
Act intentionally when documenting sales processes and allow those processes to evolve over time.
Think long-term when hiring; build a team that can grow with the company.
Take advantage of every unfair advantage you have exposure to.
The Unseen Costs of Chasing Everything
In Tom’s Words:
"The mistake that many companies make early on is that they chase everything. Any shiny penny, any logo, any partnership. The problem with that? You end up trying to turn your product into something it isn't, burning cycles on deals that will never close cleanly, and confusing your team and the marketplace in the process."
An ill-defined ICP doesn't just slow the team down; it creates chaos. Without consistency in who the team targets:
Sales can't iterate or carry what works from one prospect to the next.
Engineering spreads thin, producing high-level features to satisfy too many industries or use cases with little incremental benefit.
The pace of organizational learning grinds to a crawl.
Tom's advice: start with the basics. Figure out who you're targeting and what they truly value, then craft a message built on their strategies, goals and initiatives, not yours. Teaching your entire organization to focus on the problems that the customer faces, in the words the customer uses, is critical. The only way to do that is to understand who the customer really experiencing problems is, how their problems connect to company initiatives and strategies, and how your product, solution, or platform addresses them.
Messaging Alignment is Crucial to Breaking Through
Once you know what resonates, the entire organization needs to convey the same message in all channels, meetings, and events. Young companies can't afford to present ten different messages. Their voice simply gets drowned out by larger competitors with deeper pockets. The fix is repetition: one message with strong value points to key personas, said by everyone, at all times.
In Tom’s Words:
“Get product, sales, and marketing together and figure out the words that you’re using when you talk about what you do. Make sure those words are the same, and that everyone is saying them... whether it’s an SE, a rep, an executive, and so on. Cover core things like the typical problems of your ICP by persona. Throw that up on the board for a couple hours. What is the compelling value prop to address them? What are the differentiators and moats that we have, or that we can put in place to outflank our competitors? What are the use cases we have where people are going to get big value?”
This is not merely an exercise for alignment's sake. The goal of the exercise is to amplify your organization’s brand in a way that everybody in the company can rally behind and find a reason to believe they are a part of something great.
Tom's advice: put the customer’s perspective and buying journey at the center of your efforts. Focus on the core use cases and value propositions that speed up your sales process. Organize the value props into clear and concise messages that your team can repeat. Constantly review and revisit the core messaging to make sure your team maintains alignment while still adopting market feedback as your product’s use cases evolve. Always keep in mind how your client will be delighted by the value your solution will provide.
A Documented Sales Process is Not Optional
The third mistake that sales teams make is the lack of a sales process. Tom addressed this early in his time at Splunk:
“I took the three best sellers...and brought them into a room with three whiteboards...and said, ‘Each of you draw how you sell on the board. What is your process getting from a lead to a closed deal? What are the assets you use...What activities are needed to get forward motion on a decision? What are the different kinds of calls?’ Then, I left the room and gave them a task over the next 3–4 hours: Come up with something you can agree on, that you will move forward with and not deviate from unless we all decide on a different one... They came up with something, and we put it into our CRM...It was a start, and it helped us scale.”
That process, which became refined year after year, served as the foundation of a sales organization that scaled to over $1 billion in bookings in just five years.
Tom’s advice: you don’t need to design a sales process from scratch. Take your best sellers who each have their processes that work. Pull out the best strategies from each one and design one unified process that is made up of the winning ideas across the team. Document that, use that as your starting point, and continue to evolve from there. This forces the team and the whole company to focus on what is most important, creating downstream and cross-stream efficiencies that allow for more creativity around the edges. You maximize the science so that everyone can spend more time on the art of the sale.
Hiring for the Long Game
For a scaling organization, the first thought is to hire fast. Fill seats, grab anyone who's available, close deals, and grow your business. We have seen this trap time and time again.
In Tom’s Words:
"They tend to hire Mini Me's. Then you get people who want to please the manager rather than the customer, leading to a degradation of skills and innovation."
Tom’s advice: In almost every case, hire for the long term. It's a combination of attitude and experience. It's great to have someone who's been there and can see around the corner on account planning, sales strategy, and deal execution; and they often are worth the higher salary. It's also okay to have less experience if there is a strong will to adapt to a culture of coaching and deferred gratification.
Regardless of a company's stage, Tom views a few characteristics as essential for successful sales leaders:
Humble and hungry
Coachable, and coaches others
No victim mentality
Ability to translate the message
Sales organizations must constantly evolve and grow. Groupthink can kill a startup’s pace of learning because it limits the new ideas being introduced into the processes. Building a diverse team with long-term potential who will grow with the organization sets everyone up for success.
Take Advantage of Every Unfair Advantage
Capturing the full market opportunity requires building a great product, designing a strong go-to-market, team-oriented function, and being ready to get lucky in a few key moments that will inevitably come your way. Finding strong, unentitled, customer-focused doers with strong will can contribute to your success by discovering and executing on those gems more quickly.
In Tom’s Words:
"Selling is a team sport, and it requires the team’s full range of skills and roles to get deals over the line and have a delighted customer."
Venture Guides built VG SALES for companies to gain a competitive edge in the market. VG SALES helps sales leaders identify and align their ICP and messaging, recruit and train a diverse team of sales leaders for rapid growth and innovate quickly on sales campaigns.
Tom also joined VG Partner Sage Nye on Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast to discuss many of these ideas and share even more of his stories live. Tune in to hear how his family motivated him, lessons from Splunk, and an early experience that taught him about the type of manager he did not want to be. If you're building a startup and want real guidance on scaling your go-to-market, learn more at ventureguides.com.
And if you're a sales leader looking to build a rapid-growth, high-performance sales culture, check out Tom's book, The Success Cadence, co-authored with Dave Mattson and Bart Fanelli.