Empower Your Team to Maximize Every Opportunity

Speaker 1: I'm excited to be here today. Spoiler alert, both me and Kelly, we are raving fans at Upwork and we were thrilled to get the opportunity to spend some time with everybody today and share our journey. As Danny mentioned, we have been on this, I would say walk from tactical usage to total team transformation over the last three to four years. And Gong has been an incredible partner in helping us achieve a lot of those goals. As Danny shared an earlier story, I think back in 1999, I'm not going to go back that far, I was a lot older than 11 at that time, but I do want to go back to a time where Kelly mentioned in 2009. And at that point I had just taken on my first sales leadership role. I just achieved a vice president position in the organization, my previous company CareerBuilder, and I was incredibly excited about taking that next step in my career. At the same time, as many of you will remember and experienced that was an incredibly difficult time to be in sales leadership. The US economy was shedding anywhere from 800 to 900,000 jobs a month. And I was in the jobs business. Our CSO at the time had said, " Look, we're going to have to dig deep, we're going to have to really focus. We're going to have to find new ways to win. We're going to have to unlock more customer value faster than ever before. But how?" Our CEO at the time always said, " Eric, if you run your business like you're always in a downturn, you never will be." But at that time, we didn't have all of the reality based tools that we have today to be able to navigate those headwinds. And as you can imagine, the next 12 to 18 months were incredibly difficult. We had to fight, we had to fight really hard, we had to be closer to our customers because we knew that maybe there's a vendor consolidation play that we would be able to do. If we could stay plugged in, we would accelerate faster as the market rebounds like it always does. And as Kelly mentioned, we're faced with that same uncertainty today. The stock market continues to reward bottom line growth faster than ever before. We still have massive supply chain issues with the pandemic as well as the war in Ukraine. We hear that large technology organizations are not only reducing their staff, but they're also making different decisions about spend in the future. I don't think anyone that can tell you exactly how this is going to play out. I know that I can't, but I know that I'll be in a better position come 2023 and 2024 based on the partnership that we've been able to build with Gong. As we're thinking about next year, it's not necessarily just about grit. It'll definitely take grit. In fact, it'll probably take a lot of it. But a lot of the insights that we've been able to develop through this partnership are going to allow us to lean into that smarter, not harder and how do we actually increase productivity across the team? Because we are going to have less at bats. We are going to have less opportunities to win, but I'm more confident in it than ever based on all the things we've been able to achieve. For context, let me give you a little bit about Upwork because I think it's relevant to our journey. And today we're the world's largest work marketplace. We've got close to 20 million contractors on our platform around the world. Over 900, 000 customers that are leveraging our platform to help get work done faster than ever before. Last year we did a little over three and a half billion in total sales across our platform, helping some of the world's most iconic brands think about work differently. I'm really excited about adding the Gong logo to this slide next time. Just a hint. But as a part of that, we've been aggressively building our go- to- market sales engine. If you think about our marketplace today, we're still honored to have some hundreds of thousands of small businesses are leveraging our platform. But we also knew that that magic of high quality talent faster than ever before with meaningful cost savings would be relevant to large organizations. But we knew we'd have to build a different engine and we'd have to build a different go- to- market machine. We'd have to build different product and services and capabilities to unlock that. And over the last seven years we've been investing aggressively against that. And we launched what we called Upwork Enterprise in 2016. The following year we began adding go- to market resources. In 2018, we took the company public that allowed us to continue to increase brand awareness and invest more in this go- to market, achieving 150 sellers in 2019. We all got shocked with Covid. I would tell you if you were in the remote workspace, yes, I would argue we would've liked to have gotten there in a different way, but we absolutely did not waste it. That became a massive tailwind as organizations had knew that they were going to have to work differently in order to achieve their goals. And ever since we've been continuing to invest in the team partnering with Gong and all of its new initiatives. I will call out that I have both saved money and made money since I've been here today, with all of the new things that you're launching that hopefully we're in the beta side, we are a big Snowflake customer as well. My team at home, let's turn that on because I feel that obviously it's just rewarding to be here for so many reasons. But if you think about our team today, we have this very much an assembly line approach, a team- based sale. We've got over 400 individuals around the world that are leveraging our platform, meaning our go- to- market teams, and we're constantly trying to figure out how do we reinvest? How do we leverage more technology? How do we critically prioritize the resources that we do have so that we can increase our win rates next year? Which gets us to the story of Gong. And as I mentioned, we kicked off the team in 2017. We had Salesforce and some other tools, but we were a very small team, less than 50 people at the time. And I remember Gong was actually the only tool that we acquired in 2018. And actually remember it like it was yesterday, Thomas Gore- Schreck, the SDR of SDRs, I think he's still with Gong today and he's probably hopefully doing something else. But he just killed personalization. He took it to a whole new level. We could actually spend a lot of time talking about personalization and some of the challenges we have today, but I don't want to regress. But it was one of the best connects that we had. And he understood our customer pain, he understood scaling our organization. We needed to get leverage. We needed to show productivity fast because we were trying to break through, we were trying to achieve product market fit and we didn't necessarily have the insights for us to be able to communicate not only just with the sales team on coaching and getting better, but how do we communicate with marketing? How do we communicate with our product engineering partners so that we're basically being as agile as possible as we're trying to grow this market? We started with a small pilot in our SDR team. By 2019 we had signed over a hundred enterprise customers. We had achieved what we believed was product market fit to reinvest and we started specializing the team. We went from full stack reps to land and expand and we've obviously elongated that a lot more as we've matured. But then we started scaling more of that coaching and development across both our land teams and our expand teams. In 2020, understanding Covid was a big opportunity for us, but also, we had to work smarter. There was everyone had this deer in headlights moment with the shutdown and that we knew that in order to win that we would have to connect with customers that needed us the most. Meaning that we had to look at all the different pattern data, not only on results on our platform, but the conversations, the win rates, the acceleration and the messaging that was working with our customers. And we brought our marketing team into the Gong party and they started helping us not only with voice of the customer and collecting information to share our product marketing so that we could increase our go- to- market, but really helping us understand the sentiment and tone around our product and around remote work. It really helped us launch new thought leadership. A lot of research studies that we put in the market. Marketing became a really big partner. If you fast forward to 2022, we now have the product team that is using our platform. And it's not necessarily just for your traditional voice of the customer product feedback. We actually create a lot of different trackers to look for new tools as we build our own collective or integration stack as we're looking for other new partners in our ecosystem, which is on the HR technology side that we could be able to integrate. It's actually been a big part of our planning process. I believe someone mentioned the economic tracker. We're using this as a leadership team as we're thinking about 2023 planning and where we want to make continued investments. As I mentioned, Upwork is the two- sided marketplace. We've been doing a lot of things on the client side, which you have to also remember, we've got 20 million contractors that are engaging with hundreds of agents at Upwork every day. There's a ton of rich insight that we haven't been able to unlock for that side of the business yet because we monetize both sides. Gretchen, your quota might be going up, just throwing that out there. But there's just a massive opportunity for us to continue to invest and leverage this platform across all of our go- to- market teams, all of the different groups that continue to touch our customers and help them win. As I mentioned, we had this team based selling process. We were really clunky early on. As you can imagine, handoffs are really hard and especially when we're selling something new. Contract work isn't necessarily new, but the delivery model continues to evolve. And people haven't purchased labor this way. And by enabling Gong across all of our customer facing teams, we've been able to reduce customer friction in a meaningful way. People are able to gain insights about their customer without even having to talk to them. We're not necessarily having lost in translation or major challenges on connecting information as this handoff takes place. We've integrated with Salesforce, we've integrated with Slack, interested in figuring out how we can do more with the collective as it is, but it's reduced a ton of customer friction that's allowed them to have more speed to value even faster. I talked about activity and productivity. I want to talk about some of the other things that we're leveraging, which I think are super relevant right now, especially around the strategic initiatives and some of the things we're doing with forecasting. I would also tell you that if you get invited to take part in a beta, I would encourage you to do so because I feel like we have a first mover advantage in this space as we've being able to partner with Gong as they've obviously accelerated their map as well. The first one I'll talk about is gaining executive alignment. And I mentioned that as soon as we started seeing uncertainty in the market and we knew that customers may be looking for leverage, especially on the talent supply chain, we started paying attention really quickly and we started using the macroeconomic and the economic trackers and then we could see based on sentiment on our side versus the customer side, we could see it by industry, we could see it by side of the funnel, we could see it based on land and expand. We got a really big realtime information to allow us to be able to pivot and be agile on how we shifted our top of the funnel work as well as how we leaned into certain users and industries. We have a very cross- functional sale here at Upwork. Lots of different teams within the companies use us. And it allows us to pinpoint that. It allows us to track it every single day. And I mentioned as we're going through budget planning for next year, we're using a lot of these insights to make sure where we're going to place our bets of where we're going to spend our resources as an organization. At the same time, we also know that executive alignment is critically important for success at Upwork. Our average enterprise customer spends over a million dollars a year. And in order for us to drive change and challenges status quo within organizations, having relationships at the C- level are incredibly important. In fact, our win rates on the land side almost double to 41% when we have C- levels engaged. And we knew that with the economic headwinds it could present an opportunity for us because we'd provide leverage for our customers. Also, we'd have to retrain the teams and we'd have to understand that we got to double down on that executive level conversation that you're not going to necessarily be able to drive director level or even BP level deals right now. We're going to have to be at the C- level. And we got in touch with our sales enablement team led by Emily Hyde, and we started building what we called our gaining executive alignment playbook. And as you can imagine, everyone's seen this movie before where you have this awesome training. You invest significantly in all the assets, you take people off the floor, off the Zoom, off the whatever for a really long time and you spend a lot of time enabling and training these initiatives. What you'll also remember is that you probably don't have a way to measure impact. You have no idea of where it actually sticks and who the best adopters are. And then ironically, you find yourself 12 months later redoing the exact same playbook, just in a different way hoping to get a different result. What we found with the strategic initiatives and by building our own playbook, we were able to inspect what we expected from our team and to be able to make course corrections really early on. This graph shows that as soon as we started the playbook, we were able to pull those trackers out and see that 44% of our team were already adopting these things. You'll notice that we had a loss in altitude moving to the next month, but we were able to drill down and find out which teams were winning. And as you can imagine the people that were using these playbooks at a higher win rate, our teams trusted the data because it was our own and that we were able to go back and actually pinpoint and be surgical in where we needed to continue to increase this enablement. And we were able to obviously increase adoption for the team. Before we had this insight that could have gone on for months. We talk a lot about leading indicators versus outcomes at Upwork, and I feel like Gong has been a super human power for us to understand what those leading inputs that will build future outcomes for our business. Another thing I'll talk about is forecasting accuracy. And I'm sure everybody has been in this scenario prior to having a forecasting tool, but ours was done in the really long Google spreadsheet and it was all based on rep sentiment. There wasn't a lot of insights around it and it was frankly taking a lot of time. We probably had five to six different forecasting calls every single week and we weren't necessarily accurate. We had probably half hit rate of what we thought we had would hit based on our own commits things. And when Gong approached us in May around the beta for forecast, we were already in the market for the tool, but we also knew that we had a trusted partnership with the team and they already had access to a lot of our information. And we decided to lean in there and learn. I'm excited to share that through October we've already increased our success rate or just confidence rating and to predict when something's going to happen to a 90% confidence rating. And for me as a leader in a publicly traded company, the ability for me to see around corners and be able to predict good or bad, what is going to happen is incredibly important. And as we've continued to invest in leveraging the tool and providing feedback and partnering with the team, not only have we increased our confidence rating, but we've also reduced our time associated with this by almost 50%. And similar to the stats that you saw earlier, not only are we getting more value and return on time and more I would say reality of what the future holds, we're also putting a lot more time back in the hands of our sellers so that they can connect with customers, which is most important today as all of our organizations and part customers we partner with have that uncertainty forefront. And excited about where that goes in the future. I feel like there was a couple things that we've added today that will continue to tighten that predictability of what we have in our organization, but top of the funnel and as we expand customers. The other thing I'll talk about is once you have accurate forecasting and confidence in what's going to happen, it allows you to give that time back to get really deep to investigate other things that are going on with your customers. We had a big hypothesis that multithreading was a really big thing. We had read The Challenger Sale and we'd read all the stats about buyer behavior and how many people are involved in the process and how many calls it would take. And we were just like, " Leap of faith, that's the same for Upwork," but we had no insights that would really actually validate that. And as we turned on not only just the forecasting piece, but using the deal tracker, we've been able to inspect what we expect and actually learn and derive a lot of learning that have allowed us to continue to pivot. And as I mentioned before, our win rate goes up significantly higher when we have a C- level involved, usually head of marketing, head of engineering, head of support. Those are our typical use cases of talent. We also found out that if we involve four to five additional use cases, our win rate goes up even four to five times more over that, as well as just the number of calls that are associated with that. And by leveraging not only the insights of where we get our best return on time and the fact that we get daily real time insights of what is at risk and what isn't, our coaching and development and performance management of our teams is so much more crisp because we can zoom to exactly where the biggest opportunities are for the business as well as the biggest opportunities for them as a professional to continue to get better at growing their crafts as a go- to- market professional. And if you layer in just the coaching and training that we started with to a lot of the strategic initiatives that we've been able to launch and the ability to inspect what we expect with all these new features, I'm less concerned about what the future holds. I'm excited about embrace change and how we can continue to be a learning organization as a result of that. And our partnership with Gong has been incredibly important for us. It's something that we talk about not only within our sales teams, we talk about with our customers, we talk about it even internally across all of our different functions. And we're just obviously pleased to be here. And hopefully I've given you a little bit of insight around our journey of how we've evolved with the organization, how we've moved from just coaching and I would say tactical call recording to true meaningful intelligence that allows us to embrace reality as a meet said earlier, good or bad, but at least I feel like we want to have that scenario where if you don't necessarily don't have a map, don't get shocked when you don't get there. And I feel like we're help navigating a map of how we're going to continue to accelerate our go- to- market motion as we grow our business. And we are raving fans and we appreciate the partnership and support very much. And thank you Gretchen and the entire team that works with our organization. I know many of them are watching and our success is firmly tied to yours and we appreciate the partnership. Thank you.