For instance, SaaS companies everywhere are enamored with Product-Led Growth (PLG), where the product itself drives the business growth, attracting, converting, and retaining customers.

PLG is more about better UX and reducing friction in the buying process than about building trust and credibility.

PLG companies end up playing the numbers game of traffic, leads, followers, and subscribers. They think the key to success is building a huge audience—because the more traffic they get, the more sign ups they get, right?

With an audience, communication goes in one direction, from the brand to the consumers. It feels authoritative.

The fact is that people are reluctant to sign up for yet another SaaS tool, even if it’s free and it promises to solve their problems overnight. They’ve been duped too many times and they’re skeptical of hyped landing page copy.

You have to build trust and credibility—and not just with logos and customer testimonials. Those can only get you so far in the trust scale.

What you need is to engage with your audience in real conversations within a community. PLG is great for getting new customers, but community is what creates loyalty and leads to retention.

That’s why Community-Led Growth is the last hope for SaaS. In an economic downturn with tightening budgets, it’s not enough to make it easy for people to swipe their credit cards. You need to create massive value.

Sales-led and product-led companies can leverage communities to provide even more value to their customers. The brave companies that bet on community-led growth are growing fast (Notion) and even being acquired (Figma).

The good news is that more and more companies are realizing this.

Research by Peersignal found that 58% of the top SaaS businesses have dedicated brand communities.

“Brand communities have become a key business focus in B2B SaaS, according to PeerSignal research, especially among product-led growth companies. 40% of B2B and 55% of PLG SaaS companies have dedicated brand communities. Unicorn companies certainly got the message. On top of 58% of Cloud 100s already owning a brand community, 26% were actively hiring for community roles in Q4 of 2022, despite the tech downturn.”
— Carl Thomen

Those are encouraging numbers, but let’s define what we mean by community first.

WTF is Community-Led Growth?

“Community is a trusted space between like minded individuals with a shared commonality or goal,” says Jared Robin, CEO at RevGenius. “They bind together and help one another in working towards that. And the results often far exceed what one could do alone, which is so amazing!”

Although “community” is becoming a buzz word these days, the concept is as old as humanity. B2B companies didn’t invent community, they’re just trying to monetize it. It’s not a bad thing to make money, but your north star metric needs to start and stay with the people.

Jason Hubbard, COO at RevGenius, says there’s almost always a tension between monetizing a community and serving the interests of that community so that it flourishes. “You can absolutely do both but it’s damn hard to do it well,” he says. “So it takes both an internal culture and values aligned around ‘community first’ as well as the tracking and metrics to achieve that goal.”

Sumeru Chatterjee, Founder and Head of Community at CustomerEducation.Org, says that community is the sum total of all conversations among people who care about the problem a company solves. These conversations can happen in an owned community (a space where the company participates and controls the conversation) or in other places (dark social).

Peersignal calls it “Brand Community ” and defines it as a place where helpful interactions happen between people united by common interests and administered by a business with a stake in those interests.

This definition is what leads us to the concept of Community-Led Growth (CLG), the new hot trend in SaaS. And when talking about CLG, it’s hard not to mention Notion and Figma.

Camille Ricketts, the first marketing hire at Notion says that community-led growth happens when your community helps you achieve such ubiquity and such name recognition that it actually allows you to start moving upmarket into the enterprise market.

Word-of-mouth is what makes CLG so powerful. The brand reputation reaches decision-makers way before sales reps can.

“All the traditional demand gen channels are tanking in ROI,” says Chatterjee. “If you look at ROI for ad spend, for example, demand marketing is not working anymore or at least the costs are prohibitive.”

Despite what attribution software says, most people today buy software because they heard about it on social media or in a private community from someone they trust.

Chris Walker recently showed that 98% of Refine Labs’ customers came through their podcast or social media (self-attribution data).

So a lot of the buying decisions are starting with good word-of-mouth.

Figma relied on community to enter a market (design software) with an already clear category king (Adobe). These were Figma’s 5 phases of CLG:

1. Planting seeds
2. Building credibility
3. Turning power users into early evangelists
4. Empowering users to monetize
5. Scaling to enterprise

In both cases, community allowed these companies to scale to enterprise.

• The communities began as forums to answer questions and solve problems.
• Then they evolved into spaces where dedicated community managers drove engagement and provided value.
• And customers became evangelists/ambassadors for the brand.

Betting on community-led growth has even more benefits:

• Testing: You have an existing audience/user base to launch/test new products or offerings.
• Retention: People have an incentive to keep using your product if they get value from the community.
• Activation and peer customer support: Existing users helping new users, creating templates, playbooks and answering questions.
• Customer success: You get customer insights and feedback almost in real time.
• Thought leadership: You can position yourself as a thought leader by giving your community access to your unique POV.

Getting Started with Community-Led Growth

Building a community requires investing in tools and people to run the community, create valuable content, and engage members.

So what if you don’t want (or don’t have the resources) to  build your own community?

In that case, you have two options:

1. Start by becoming active in an existing community where your ICP hangs out. Notion, for instance, began by engaging in existing Facebook groups; Figma did the same in Twitter.

2. Leverage existing communities through partnerships or sponsorships. Many SaaS companies are doing this, getting their brand in front of their target audience without the huge investments of running their own community.

Remember, community is all about people helping people.

At RevGenius, we’ve created an open space for people to join (for free) and help other people. And although it’s an industry-specific community (30k+ revenue pros), we encourage members to bring their whole person into the community, to grow and learn.

Join the movement at revgenius.com or learn about partnering with us.

The post Why Community-Led Growth is SaaS’ Last Hope appeared first on RevGenius.

Immersa’s vision is to democratize the use of data intelligence for all users in the business. To better understand how employees consume data intelligence, we turned to users considered some of the most voracious consumers of data – sales teams at B2B companies.

We started by asking sales executives how they can access the data they need to run their business. While several sales executives explained that they depend on teams across the company – data analysts, data engineers, business intelligence teams – nearly every sales leader called out their Revenue Operations (Revops) team as the most dependable source of data intelligence.

To learn more about the role of the RevOps team we interviewed over 50 sales executives, sales professionals, and revenue operations specialists at companies that are engaged in business-facing sales. We started by asking what do sales reps need from their revenue operations team. We then asked the revenue operations teams how they spend their time in various functional areas, supporting their sales team and the company leadership with their data needs. We also identified the frequently desired use cases that Revops must enable for their sales teams.

The difference between expectations of sales leaders from the revenue operations team and where the RevOps team invested their time was illuminating. Here is what we learned.

What is Revenue Operations?

Simply put, revenue operations make the revenue producing teams more efficient and create a system for selling. Revops is a broad and data-heavy role that provides accurate forecasting, accelerates growth, improves cross-departmental alignment, and enables sales teams to scale efficiently.

While most leadership teams expect revenue operations to provide them with sales forecasts, customer data for quarterly business reviews, or data to support quarterly and annual performance and planning cycles. It seldom recognizes that revenue operations teams are on the hook for a lot more.

Image Credit: Mikael Blomkvist provided by Pexels
Traditionally, this role has been conducted by different teams across sales operations, customer service ops, finance ops or marketing ops. However, as companies move towards providing a more integrated experience across all customer touch points, revenue operations is rapidly evolving to represent operations capabilities across sales, service, marketing and finance as an integrated function.

In fact, the rapid growth of communities like RevGenius and AdaptivOps in bringing together like minded operations professionals exemplifies this accelerating trend.

What do Sales Reps need from Revenue Operations?

Sales reps and revenue operations teams both have the same goal – to increase revenue for the company. However, expectations between sales teams and revops on how they bring in revenue goals differ.

Image Credit: RODNAE Productions provided by Pexels

We found that what sales reps want most from their sales operations team is to provide them with more qualified leads. This, of course, is a no-brainer! However, in a further discussion, we also learned that sales teams also need the following from their revops team:

• Define the Ideal Account Profile: One of the critical reasons sales teams fail to meet their targets is that their sales efforts are targeted at a customer that their product is not designed for. Defining the ideal account profile is no trivial task. It requires gathering information from various internal and external data sources about your accounts, determining which of these data points are relevant to identify target accounts, and experimenting with account segmentation strategies to map the right value proposition, product, and pricing to these accounts segments.
• Map Customers’ Role to Your Target Persona. The process of selling to businesses usually requires a group of users, budget owners, and decision-makers to align around a standard solution. Understanding the role and objective of each person in the decision process, having ‘access to power,’ and leveraging the right resources and relationships at the right time in the sales process are critical to the success of closing any B2B deal.
• Qualify Customers Based on Their Requirements: Customer needs differ significantly from one to another. Often, customers struggle to articulate their business requirements clearly. The ability to ask meaningful qualifying questions, understand customers’ value points, and design a solution at a price point that meets their needs is as much art as it is science. The process is just as often informed by experience as it is by data. Art and science meet in the revenue operations process by distilling these requirements to create a repeatable sales process where art and science meet the revenue operations process.
• Position and Differentiate Products and Services: At most B2B selling organizations, product marketing or product management teams spend significant time positioning and competitively differentiate their products compared to others in the market. However, this content must be packaged and delivered as enablement programs by operations teams to briefly provide the sales reps the information they need to be successful.

In most cases, the content for supporting sales reps with these issues sits in different teams – product marketing, pricing, competitive intelligence, to name a few. However, revenue operations play a critical role in bringing all of this information together and organizing it in a way that allows sales reps to access and consume this content when they need it.

While it may not be as apparent to a sales team, a well-structured and robust enablement program does improve the sales rep’s productivity. This level of support leads to increased conversion rates and greater upsells.

9 Essential Functions of Revenue Operations

Now that we understand what sales teams need from their operations team, let’s look at how they spend their time and resources.

• Data Management and Analytics: Revenue Operations is a data-driven function at its core. Data is the foundation of many of its functions, whether that be strategic or tactical. The Revops team collaborates with data analysts, BI teams, and IT organizations to integrate and access the correct data. Through analytics, revenue operations can shape successful sales strategies and turn sales and customer data insights into action. These actionable, quantifiable insights drive growth and increase sales rep productivity.
• Develop Sales Strategy: Sales strategy outlines how the business is going to sell the product or service. Sales operations collaborate with leadership, finance, product, and marketing teams to create a sales strategy and a set target revenue that is ambitious but still attainable. The sales forecasting, territory structuring, compensation planning, processes optimization, technology implementation, and reporting carried out by RevOps directly shapes and executes the organization’s overall strategy.
• Sales Forecasting: This is both a science and an art. It requires both descriptive and predictive analytics. Descriptive analytics gives insight into historical trends but falls short of providing the bigger picture. It is critical to examine why there was or lack of growth and how those factors may change moving forward. Accurate sales forecasting is essential as it affects the entire business. It impacts the budget, hiring, and production planning. Without it, there is a risk of a supply-demand imbalance which can be incredibly costly to a business.
• Structure Sales Territories: Sales territory planning and management optimize sales resources geographically to improve sales efficiency and sales performance. A substantial territory strategy increased sales, improved customer coverage, and reduced costs. It is critical to get it right early, as frequent changes can hinder productivity and hurt relationships.

Sales territory planning involves:

• Defining the market
• Assessing account quality
• Assessing territory quality
• Assessing sales reps to establish territory alignment

• Define Compensation Plans: Compensation plans are strategically designed to drive the right sales and behavior of sales reps in alignment with sales objectives. Sales compensation plans are one of the most significant financial investments of the organization, so they merit thoughtful construction. It’s critical to strike the right balance of incentives, and plans must be easy to understand. Each compensation plan needs to be tailored to each unique role and set of responsibilities. Revenue operations typically collaborate with finance and business teams to define compensation plans that account for budget constraints, business goals and incent the proper behavior among sales teams.
• Sales Process Optimization: Optimizing the sales process is a continuous effort to identify what is going well and correct what is not. Sales operations identify trends, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies to improve the hit rate and build and maintain a healthy sales pipeline. Sales process optimization involves pinpointing leaks and blockages in the pipeline; automating as much as possible; identifying opportunities to reduce churn rate; aligning sales and marketing goals; looking for ways to shorten the sales cycle; prioritizing the highest-earning sales opportunities; improving communications; upgrading technologies; monitoring essential metrics and KPIs.
• Technology Adoption and Implementation: Since sales teams are primarily responsible for driving revenue, new sales productivity tools pop up frequently to support them. Recent advancements in data warehousing, analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, natural language processing have led to an explosion in the tools available for sales reps to improve productivity and close rates. Revenue operations keep track of new sales technology and vets tools to identify which align with the organization’s needs and increase sales productivity. Once revenue operations have deemed a new technology is worth adopting, they are responsible for training the sales team on how to use it and ensuring the team is using it effectively.
• Reporting: Revenue operations is responsible for reporting on sales metrics across the organization. They create dashboards, metrics, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to provide updates and guide decision-making. Reports can be high-level or highly detailed, depending on the need. They are heavily used to form a sales strategy and assess whether the team is hitting established benchmarks and other KPIs.
• Lead Generation and Management: Revenue operations generate and manage sales leads so salespeople can focus on what they do best: sell! They ensure strong alignment between sales and marketing and ensure that the leads generated by the marketing team effectively routes to the correct sales team and rep. This may involve working with product marketing to establish clear value propositions and buyer personas. Leads must not only be routed effectively but also actioned quickly. The longer a lead ages, the less likely it is to close. Focusing on providing sales reps with quality leads versus quantity improves the chances of closing deals. Developing a strong sales strategy and accurate and actionable data results in quality lead generation.

The Untapped Potential of Revenue Operations at B2B SaaS Companies

Revenue operations teams may wear multiple hats to collaborate with several teams to ensure the correct information is available to their sales teams. However, at their heart, revenue operations teams are data gurus focused on driving growth. Data management and analytics are at the core of all functions that they support. We learned from our interviews that they spend a significant portion of their time building dashboards for forecasting meetings, management reviews, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs). These dashboards, metrics, and insights are tailored to the needs of executives and are rarely available to everyone on the sales team.

Image Credit: Karolina Grabowska provided by Pexels

There is a significant opportunity for revenue operations teams to provide live insights to sales reps that accelerate deal close and, at the same time, provide better service to customers. How can sales operations use data intelligence to improve the effectiveness of everyone on the sales team and not just the privileged few? There is an effective service to customers. By providing actionable insights to all users, revenue operations can increase rep productivity leading to higher conversion rates and greater upselling.

There is a Better Way

We learned that there is a huge opportunity to change the game and provide operations teams with tools to use data intelligence that drive growth for their business. BI tools go only so far in providing data intelligence for planning purposes. Immersa takes it a step further – providing data intelligence to every user to drive actions.

We’d love to talk to you about how Immersa can help accelerate your SaaS revenue!

The post The Essential Guide to How Revenue Operations Empowers a B2B Business appeared first on RevGenius.

If you’ve been in sales long enough, you’ve undoubtedly had a buyer tell you your price was too high. When this happens, the customer is not necessarily objecting to what you are charging for your product or service, but rather, they are failing to understand the value of it. In other words, the buyer is viewing the price as a cost or expense vs. an investment of tangible value. Let’s break this down further.

Differentiating Price and Cost

Price is the same for all customers— it’s the value determined by you, the provider of the goods or services for your particular offering. Price is influenced by a number of factors, including the cost of goods, competition in the market, and likely part of an organization’s positioning strategy, especially if your product or service is a higher quality than the alternatives.

Cost, on the other hand, varies by buyer and their use case situation. Cost represents an outflow of cash for the buyer, and it’s your job as a salesperson to demonstrate the value to be returned.

To illustrate, let’s say you’re out on vacation and break your sunglasses.

You go to a local store for a replacement pair, but the price for new glasses is $500. You feel it is too high, so you ask the clerk to see sunglasses that aren’t as expensive.

The clerk responds with a question, “May I ask, is it the price or the cost that’s of concern?” You give him a puzzled look so he probes further, “On average, how often do you lose or break your sunglasses?” You tell him at least once, maybe twice a year, but you generally pay about $350 for your shades. “Good to know,” says the clerk. “And where do you live?” You tell him Denver, and he proceeds to tell you they have 5 locations on the front range and 209 across the US. He then goes on to explain the significance. “We understand our customers better than any other retailer— we know sunglasses get lost and broken— life happens. That’s why we fully replace your lost or irreparably-damaged sunglasses once per purchase, as long as it’s redeemed within 3 years. All you need to do is walk into any location, they’ll look you up in our database, they’ll let you pick out another pair in the store, and you can walk out. Zero cost to you.”

And just like that, the $500 price turned into a $1,000 value.

The alternatives— continuing to buy $350 glasses twice per year— carried a $750 price tag, $250 higher than the shades you thought were too expensive. And going without is no good either, considering the glare and eye strain involved. You make the purchase, realizing spending $500 today to receive $1,000 in value was a much smarter decision than buying cheaper shades now and another pair down the road.

The moral of the story: the price today was small in comparison to the cost of the alternatives.

When to Discuss Price in Your Sales Conversation

Raising the price discussion is always a bit tricky. Bring it up too soon, and you can scare off a prospect. Leaving the price discussion to the very end of a call can leave you high and dry, if your prospect simply cannot afford your product.

According to research by Gong, the highest-performing sales reps discuss price 40-49 minutes into a sales conversation, whereas average performers tend to reference price throughout the call. Of course, look for the prospect’s buying signals and tailor your conversation to match.

“If you know a prospect is cost conscious or the competitors are considerably less expensive, then it’s important to discuss price early on,” commented Alex Buckles, Sales Executive and CEO of Forecastable. “Sales reps who can identify pricing objections early in the sales cycle are better positioned to proactively address product value sooner rather than later, improving their likelihood of closing the deal.”

The pricing discussion is also a tactical discussion, and one that should be rehearsed in advance.

Preparing for the Price Discussion

Price is part of all sales conversations, and how you approach it matters. Many sales reps fear talking about price as the pushback is uncomfortable and feel pressured to offer a discount. But be careful. While discounting has a place and value, discounting can also lower the perception of your product or service, not to mention drop your margins.

“Practice the price discussion over and over in your head, so it feels natural and you can talk about it with confidence,” advises Buckles. “And remember, ‘real’ deals aren’t fragile; both the buyer and seller should be willing to talk openly and transparently about the difference of price and cost.

Discussing price also gives you purchasing insight, enabling you to verify budget availability, and opening the discussion about the approval process plus other influencers involved in the buying decision.

Discussing Cost and Demonstrating ROI

Equally essential to a sales rep’s success, is the ability to shift the conversation to discussing the prospect’s options— if they don’t buy your product or service, what will they do instead? Then, dig into the price of the alternatives to arrive at the true cost of their decision.

According to Qwilr’s Buyer Experience Study, buyers want sellers to partner with them to assist in making the best purchasing decision possible. Additionally, 28% of buyers look for clear, achievable ROI. ROI, of course, is a value discussion, and is the comparison of a buyer’s potential return in relation to the price paid.

Questions to ask to help uncover the value:

1. If you could overcome the challenges you’ve identified, how would that impact your company’s financial situation?
2. If you were to move forward with this purchase, what would it mean for you?
3. How would implementing these changes affect your competitiveness in the market?
4. What won’t happen if you choose not to move forward with this?
5. How will you evaluate the success of this initiative?
6. If you don’t solve [insert the challenge here], what kind of difficulties will you face going forward?

Once you have this information, ROI can be calculated manually, (although is a bit of a chore) or an ROI calculator tool can be used to save time and add flair to your sales proposals. Be sure though, that you’re illustrating an outcome that’s meaningful to your prospect, whether that be time savings, additional revenue, or cost reductions. Any time you can demonstrate ROI and it’s provable, you build buyer confidence and accelerate the purchasing decision.

Closing the Deal

To be successful in sales, you need to demonstrate to your buyers how working with you is going to improve their situation, both personally and professionally. The most successful sales reps are strategic and intentional in their pricing discussions, actively listening for buyer pricing cues. Proactively discussing the value of your product or service can help ease the concerns of price-sensitive buyers and build a stronger case for choosing you over your competitor. Delaying or avoiding the cost conversation, or even jumping too soon to discounting, is a sure way to lose a deal. Because price, without the context of value, is expensive no matter who you’re asking.

The post Overcoming Objections: Difference between Price vs. Cost appeared first on RevGenius.

So, you got a new job. You’re about a month in. So far, so good. You like the role’s day-to-day. You consider your pay to be fair and you have some pretty decent benefits.

By month two, you’re dealing with misogyny, homophobia, racism, and/or bigotry. It’s driving you mad. You may even be getting frustrated with yourself and asking, “How did I not see this before signing on the dotted line?”

All Too Relatable

Many queer people relate to the above in some form or another. There have been times where this has even led to individuals losing their jobs because they’re gay or transgender; despite the 2020 Supreme Court ruling.

There is a lot of reconstruction of society yet to be had to end this systemic issue of LGBTQIA+ targeted hate and discrimination in the workplace.

However, there are some steps you can take as a professional in sales, marketing, or other roles, to help vet out potential employers and minimize the chances of these obstacles ever existing for you in the workplace.

Read This Disclaimer Before We Continue, Okay?

I’m not a hiring expert. Additionally, I do not claim to be an expert on all-things LGBTQIA+ related. I also acknowledge that my own life experiences, identity (in various contexts in and out of being part of the LGBTQIA+ community), and upbringing mold my perspective as does everyone else’s. The purpose of this article is to suggest strategies that I have benefited from given my personal and work life experiences as well as my opinion(s) on how to navigate the above challenges. Do what you wish with this information: but keep it productive and constructive. Let’s get into it:

Consider The Company’s Firmographics

Listen, not all of us want to work for a large enterprise like Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Equally, there are many people that would dread the thought of working in a small business with less than 50 employees or a hyper-growth, early stage startup with a small team and limited funding.

There are massive differences in the day-to-day experiences at these types of companies that make significant impacts on your career paths. With that said, it should be clear that the definition of how an organization thinks about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their company’s culture and processes is going to vary. There is more than one “right way” for companies to go about doing this. Before you start applying: Ask yourself which “right way(s)” is most important to you and your comfort level joining a new environment.

I work at a Series A software technology startup named Reprise that happens to have less than 75 employees at the time of writing this article. If I asked Jeffrey Hall, a recruiter at Reprise, questions about DEI and culture at Reprise and expected the same answer I would expect from Google: I’m setting us both up for failure.

Is Reprise going to have an incredibly large DEI budget compared to companies like Google, JP Morgan Chase, Facebook, Amazon, etc? Not anytime soon. Maybe one day. But, not now, for sure.

If I were applying at a larger company (like Google): best believe I would expect to hear a potentially more “scripted” or “process-oriented” response with references to internal resources groups and similar initiatives in contrast to the response I would expect to hear from Reprise.

Quick Comparison: Small vs Big

At a small company, as a gay man, all it takes is one homophobic coworker or leader to create a massive problem for me. However, if the company is small enough, statistically there’s a good chance I can dodge bigotry all together. With the stakes being so high on either end of this (it could go amazingly well or completely awful) — I have to care a lot about the experiences of current employees as well as the reputation of the company’s leaders. I’ll even make an effort to do more digging online and request additional interview steps with current employees, if any.

At a big company, as a gay man, statistically there’s going to be some bigotry, unfortunately. We’re not yet at a place in society where a company with 1,000+ employees can say with confidence that all of their employees are not homophobic. With that said, however, there should be a reasonable expectation that the majority of leadership (if not all) and of my coworkers would be allies of the LGBTQ+ community. So, one homophobe is potentially less of an impact due to the sheer size of the internal support that a big company can provide. With this in mind, at a big company, I expect to hear a lot about DEI processes, initiatives, and track records of successful initiatives, both internally and externally. Also, if it feels scripted: it’s probably because they get asked the question even more often: so, I’ll let that slide a little.

Interviewing with Smaller Companies Is Tricky

Let’s say you’re interested in working at a smaller company or an early stage tech startup. You’ve gone through the self-discovery motion mentioned in the disclaimer. What does this practice look or sound like in reality?

In my experience, being direct and vague will often provide the best test of the employer’s true authenticity and prioritization on anything DEI related. In every single interview, I would ask the same question, nearly verbatim.

“As an openly gay, polyamorous man with PTSD and a strong care for all things anti-racism, DEI is incredibly important to me in any employer-employee dynamic. Can you speak to me about DEI at your company?”

I have some friends that totally changed that first sentence; which is fine. They prefer to be a bit more discreet about their gender identity at first. Here’s a talk path a friend of mine uses to source similar information.

“I care greatly about all things anti-racism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and overall equality and equity. With that said, DEI is incredibly important to me in any employer-employee dynamic. Can you speak to me about DEI at your company?”

With smaller companies, I expect answers about the mission of the company as well as its history with DEI. I also expect candidness about their limitations with DEI: such as DEI-specific budget or concrete figures about the number of resources they have. (i.e. groups, dollars, initiatives, events, action items, previously, ongoing, and planned) I also hope to hear these things in the form of a story and not a script.

Big Companies: What To Do & Expect

Reader. You’re not me. So there’s a good chance that you want to work at a larger company, for whatever reason.

You’re in luck! Big companies have budgets for DEI Initiatives that enable them to make a lot of this information readily available online. Check and see if they have a person that specializes in DEI via their company website or LinkedIn page. Additionally, I recommend you ask a similar question above while being prepared to hear a more “scripted” answer with plenty of numbers to back it up.

I Repeat: There’s More Than One Way

It goes without saying that there are plenty of caveats left uncovered here: being part of multiple marginalized identity groups, industry, education, abilities, skills, talents, passions, self-awareness, life experiences, goals, and even the obvious need to pay the bills.

I encourage readers to leverage peer-to-peer communities like RevGenius. There are various DEI-related resource groups (such as RevGenius’s #pride channel in Slack) where you can network and pick-the-brains of other LGBTQIA+ members about their experiences assessing employers. Don’t be afraid to ask for advice and leverage the experiences of people who have been in your shoes.
Additionally, I recommend you follow folks like Madison Butler and myself, Evan Patterson, on LinkedIn for more conversations and resources  surrounding being LGTQIA+ in the workplace.

The post Tactics for Revenue Driving Professionals to Vet for DEI Initiatives appeared first on RevGenius.