🦾 Shri Apte: Triplebyte, VP Revenue

Market-to-Revenue

23 minutes with Shri Apte, VP Revenue at Triplebyte. Starting from the outcome. MECE frameworks. Bias to action. Heavily dogfooding your product. Marketing from a position of expertise Overcoming barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. Understanding what drives renewals. Marketing two separate products. Consistent messaging and keeping cohesion. Driving cross-product upsells.

21 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.

Here’s what Patrick Coleman said about Shri:

Shri Apte. VP of Revenue at TripleByte. Great guy and TripleByte is a fantastic business. We’re big fans of really anybody operating in the space to make it easier for more people to get jobs in coding and realize the benefits of the internet economy. Big, big fans.
—Patrick Coleman, VP of Growth at Replit → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

1) Inbound traffic. The first way that constitutes a good portion of our revenue is inbound traffic. Inbound traffic is an interesting challenge for Triplebyte because we have two products that serve the same customer base, but two very different needs of our customers. Our first product, which is free, Triplebyte Screen, is a self-serve, product-led-growth go-to-market, that enables technical recruiters to incorporate assessments into their hiring pipeline. Our other paid product, which is a pure sales-driven go-to-market strategy, enables technical recruiters to source qualified engineers, who have already taken technical assessments, onto their teams and into their hiring pipeline. Being really clear about messaging, about the needs of the person that is coming inbound and routing them to the right motion, is one of the key ways that we convert our market into revenue.

2) Outbound. The other way would be outbound. Our outbound strategy is fortunate enough to be targeted towards companies who very clearly telegraph their needs for software engineers. We can drive a lot of our outbound strategy by listening to software engineer job postings on ATS, on public job boards, on a variety of data sources, and make sure that our outbound strategy is timely to when the volume of roles that a company has open for software engineers experiences a substantial increase. We can be having those key conversations right when recruiters are feeling the need for increased pipeline most acutely.

3) Making the recruiters that work on our platform champions of our product. We want every single recruiter that interacts with our product that may move onto another company, to want to bring Triple Byte’s hiring and sourcing tools into their new organization and grow the number of champions that we have out there in the market by delivering a great experience to our customers.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

1) Finding expectations for the average performance of account executives. The first difficult problem on the go-to-market side would be finding expectations for the average performance of account executives. We were seeing very much a barbell distribution in the performance of different account executives. We weren't sure what we could expect average performance to be, that we could set goals around that were motivating to both performers that we would want to keep, performers who were going to blow the goals out of the water, and effectively manage away people who are going to consistently miss those goals. It took a lot of digging into the specific processes of the AEs, how quickly they were responding to different components and messaging in their sales cycle, listening to a lot of Gong calls, that led us to recalibrate our training programs and produce more and more account executives that were performing at the top end of the barbell, and eventually, move up the average performance of the team, and set reasonable goals for all of the individual AEs.

2) Scaling our BDR team. The second hard problem, which actually dovetails well with the first one was scaling our BDR team. A big component to scaling our BDR team that was challenging, was maintaining win rates on outbound opportunities and ensuring that AEs were treating outbound opportunities with an effective strategy that gave customers more care and attention than the average inbound account may need. Obviously, we want to care and be attentive to all the customers in the sales process, but in terms of prioritization and where incremental efforts might lead to incremental wins, we wanted to make sure that time was being allocated there.

3) Understanding what drives renewals. Our final problem that we recently overcame was understanding what drives renewals. So after a customer has been sold, what exactly are the success metrics that we need to look at, and have our customers achieve, in order for them to have a very, very high probability of renewing. Looking at all the data across our lapsed subscriptions on a normalized basis, which was quite a challenge for our data team, and marrying that with anecdotal and qualitative information provided by our account management team, led us to a really, really clear understanding of exactly the results we need to deliver through our product for our customers, in order for them to continue to see value and renew with us for their continued recruiting success.

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What are 3 roadblocks that you’re working on right now?

1) Marketing two separate products. The two products that we have, Triplebyte Screen and Triplebyte Hire, have two completely different go-to-market motions. While that's been an effective strategy for growing revenue, it does make the marketing of those two products, both on our website, as well as content marketing, as well as lifecycle marketing, extremely challenging.

2) A subchallenge of that is developing consistent messaging and keeping cohesion across the products. So that we're not pitching value propositions to one group of customers that they may get more leverage out of in another product. We don't want to tell screening customers that we're helping increase their hiring pipeline, when in reality, that's the main value prop of our hire product. That dovetails really well with the third problem:

3) Driving cross-product upsells and having customers use both of our products. Because they have two different sales motions, the type of customers that come into both of the products, and become users and adopters, very often have completely divergent profiles, and narrowing into the subset of customers that have needs for both of our products, identifying them in a scalable way, and assigning tasks to our account managers, or to our customer support team, to drive that double product adoption, is something we're still working on and refining.

What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?

1) Starting from the outcome. One of the mental models I find most effective when thinking through how we want to approach our users, how we want to approach decisions ...