Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
Our guest for Episode 72 is Karan Singh, VP GTM Strategy, Revenue Operations & Enablement, LaunchDarkly. Before joining LaunchDarkly, Karan held senior leadership positions at Sapphire Ventures, Procore Technologies, and SalesSource, where he spearheaded major product rollouts and guided organizational growth.
In this episode, Ross and Karan discuss the importance of establishing consistent rituals and cadences, break down how to set and track SMART goals, and examine how technology can act as a force multiplier
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Setting Rituals & Cadences
Drawing on his years of experience, Karan shares rituals and cadences that work well to drive execution excellence across revenue teams. He recommends all B2B SaaS leaders ask themselves: Is there a cadence in place where you’re looking at data, reviewing it with leadership, and pinpointing what’s working and not working with respect to how you’re executing in the business?
“Sellers and leaders always start with the qualitative,” says Karan. “But what happens if you start with the quantitative? Start with the numbers and then marry in the qualitative feedback that the sales leadership and CS leadership is offering.” He says this process makes a profound difference in how you set the bar high (and keep it high) from an execution standpoint.
“I will always prioritize customers first,” he stresses. “The number one meeting that I think matters is our ‘no customer left behind initiative,’ which is a weekly meeting where our CS and sales teams come together and review all of our customers, when we’ve last met with them, their renewal dates, level of product adoption, and the next best action with them.”
To get a grasp on your current rituals, ask yourself the following questions:
- How are you making sure you’re constantly reviewing how your sellers are executing on pipeline generation?
- What have they learned?
- What does the data say about their conversion rates?
- Where can they improve?
- Who’s doing well, who’s not, and how can you pair them together to learn from one another?
- What targeted initiatives can you introduce to help everyone reach (and sustain) the same high standards?
By carefully examining these questions and combining quantitative insights with qualitative feedback you’ll build alignment across your GTM teams.
Using Technology as a Force Multiplier
When it comes to using technology as a force multiplier, Karan highlights two major benefits: time savings and increased seller productivity. “It’s all math to me. If I can give each seller an hour back in their day per week, that’s a lot of time back — especially at scale,” he explains. “And every hour you return to a seller each week or month translates directly into more productivity.”
This raises an important question: How can organizations deploy technology so it acts as a force multiplier, rather than becoming an underused tool that adds cost without delivering value?
The right technology should help sellers prioritize their tasks and know what to do first, second, and last, as well as which accounts to go after. This creates visibility into the actions they should take with a customer or prospect, leading to more strategic engagement.
To put this into practice, Karan recommends selecting two or three key vendors, standardizing them, and making sure that when you select them you know the root variable you’re solving for which is seller productivity and time back for the sellers. “If you can give those things back to your sales organization,” he explains, “they’ll adopt the tools you’re offering and will be better off as a result.”
Once you’ve identified the tools you’ll adopt, the next step is setting clear expectations. Show your team how these tools fit into your rituals and cadences, which questions they should help answer, and exactly where to find those answers. Then, leave it at that. “Don’t add a bunch of layers of complexity on top of that,” says Karan. “Most sellers are hyper-intelligent about these things.”
Setting SMART Goals
“The job of revenue leadership is to continually iterate on the current state and status quo through intentional initiatives,” explains Karan. “We owe it to ourselves to have at least a quarterly assessment to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve.”
One effective way to do this is by using SMART goals — objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Begin by asking: What is the one thing our department cares about that needs a step-function improvement this quarter to move the business forward?
From there, set clear departmental objectives each quarter, define the initiatives that support them, and apply SMART goals to measure success. Doing so quickly reveals which routine activities truly add value and which aren’t working. “Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a quarter and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year,” Karan points out. Over the course of a year, you can look back and see how you’ve broken away from established norms in favor of bigger, bolder approaches.
The key is to build organizational “muscle memory” by consistently challenging entrenched ideas, then turning those insights into action with well-defined initiatives that address core issues and drive forward progress.
“The job of revenue leadership operators is to constantly iterate on what is current state and status quo through intentional initiatives,” explains Karan. “We owe it to ourselves to have a quarterly assessment at minimum to determine what’s working, what’s not working, and figure out how to make it better.”
About Karan
Before joining LaunchDarkly in 2023 as VP of GTM Strategy and Revenue Operations, Karan served as Revenue Excellence Partner at Sapphire Ventures, VP of Revenue Operations at Procore Technologies, and COO at SalesSource. To learn more or connect with Karan directly, follow him on LinkedIn.
