Sales at Verkada: Thoughtful Onboarding During Your First Month
Whether you come from one end of the spectrum as a seasoned enterprise rep who knows the physical security space inside and out or are new to sales altogether, building your career at Verkada will be unique because of both the pace that you will grow with us and the nature of our company mission: integrating an organization’s commercial building and other physical spaces in order to provide a safer and more efficient environment. Understandably, it may not be immediately obvious why you should be making the jump from your current job situation but we encourage you to reach out to actual people on our sales team (profiled on our career web page or LinkedIn), to hear first hand about their journey at Verkada so far. Additionally, we hope these guides give you a sense of the different phases of the first year at Verkada and will help you visualize how you can come in and embark on a wonderful career here.
In this post, Nate Lipps, our head of Sales Enablement, talks about our thoughtful and thorough sales onboarding program, which we have tailored and invested significant resources into to ensure that a new sales rep is successful in their first few quarters of selling.
Foreword - What is Good Enablement?
“We help reps learn how to sell at Verkada - always finding ways to do better and do more than the average salesperson. Good enablement is when reps and managers have all the tools and resources they need and feel that they are in full control of their level of success.”
Enablement Timeline
First Week - Reporting to Training Camp
“Once you meet and greet your manager and team you’ll be working with, and getting set up with the basics of joining a company (health benefits, IT, tools/software, etc.), we get right to it. Our first week is focused on learning the product demo and it amazes me how quickly reps learn the platform. That’s a part of what makes selling Verkada so fun. The product isn’t a complex SaaS system that takes you hours to explain. It’s simple security and video surveillance and oftentimes, we’re replacing out-dated systems built on Windows XP. The use cases for simpler, more intuitive ways of surveilling one’s own business or community in the name of safety and integrated building security are really common sense in most situations and reps can easily relate to these scenarios in their lives.”
Syllabus Items
Meeting and greeting your manager and team
Getting set up with HR, Tools/Software, IT
Learning the product demo
Learning about the industry space
Second Week - Learning How to Acquire New Customers
“The second week is focused on how to find new customers. Again, what makes Verkada unique is that we have such a big market to reach out to because almost every building needs security nowadays. Prospecting in any sales role is almost the most mentally challenging part of the process. The reps who consistently double quota are the best prospectors. They don’t do anything special when it comes to prospecting besides showing up and doing the work. When 80% of end users have out-dated server based systems and you as a sales rep have the right product market fit, it becomes a simple numbers game.”
Syllabus Items
Training sessions with top prospecting reps and managers
Case studies of proven examples of successful strategies
Learning how to use our prospecting tools
Continued learning about the industry space
Continued 1:1 sessions with manager to align on your personal goals
Third and Fourth Weeks - Free Trial Competitions
“The third and fourth weeks consist of an activities-based competition around sending free trial cameras. We send free trials so that potential customers can experience Verkada in a direct, tangible way. We also like competitions because developing winning habits is a big part of our culture. The feedback we commonly hear from our customers is that they end up buying the trial cameras because their experience with our platform is so positive. Then, over time they usually replace their antiquated systems and in many cases come back to replace everything when incidents take place and their cameras underperform. The great thing about our sales motion is how much upside there is in selling additional products to our customers even after the first purchase - because with Verkada, it really is about a long-term partnership with customers as the world transitions into the future in areas like building security."
Syllabus Items
Learning how to manage the trials process
Competing with fellow new Verkada teammates
Continued learning about the industry space
Continued 1:1 sessions with manager to align on your personal goals
Beyond Onboarding Month - Weekly Training Sessions
“After your first month, new hire onboarding is formally complete, and those of you anxious to start selling can get right after it, but our work as an enablement team to support you is just beginning. Every week, we have 4 dedicated training sessions - 2 geared towards new hires and 2 geared towards tenured reps. These are typically led by reps and managers and our NPS (Net Promoter Score) for these training has been over 90% quarter over quarter. We are growing so fast and what works one quarter doesn’t work the next so we are always adapting so that we rise above the noise and stand out with new customers who have pain and problems we can solve. In a lot of ways, it’s like being back in a school environment, where we have weekly classes where we are internally knowledge-sharing our findings and learnings as we grow together as a company. Additionally, reps have access to a digital library with hundreds of best practice documents.”
A Note on Resources and Tools
“What amazed me when I joined Verkada to set up the enablement program is just how serious that leadership was about investing the time and resources allocated to making reps successful. We give reps modern day selling tools like Outreach and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, virtually unlimited Zoominfo credits to find new prospects, and allocate hundreds of dollars a month in Sendoso credits to send customers materials. I’ve seen reps hand out over 25 trial cameras at conferences and weeks later they have brought on new customers.”
Our Enablement Team - Who are we?
Nate Lipps
I love sales. A highlight of my early direct selling career was the coaching I received from mentors. First with David Redmond at Rightscale who leveled me up from the SDR role to an AE role and then with Eric Gordon as I stepped into a sales leadership role at DeVero. The mentorship I received is a big part of what led me towards sales enablement and Verkada. There’s nothing that drives me more than providing that same mentorship to sales reps as well as learning from the sales leaders here. Elon Musk recently highlighted the statement “evolve or die” which really resonated with me when thinking about how I approach good enablement at Verkada. What got us here, won’t get to the next milestone so we become irrelevant or we adapt.
I went to Westmont College in Santa Barbara where I met Allison - my insanely cool partner. We have 4 kids now and get out to the beach as much as we can.
Caroline Jacquet
I joined Verkada because I was looking for a change of pace. Not only did I find that, but I found a team that works incessantly towards the growth of a sales team that has an unmatched passion for the company’s success. The highlight of my time here has been watching the sales reps that I help onboard close their first deals, and celebrating their post-Verkademy wins together. As Verkada continues to scale, building a top notch training program and tools suite has been a dynamic challenge. When I’m not riffing off new enablement ideas with Nate, I can be found planning weekend trips to Lake Tahoe, making crepes, or walking my dog Napa. You’ll also find that I am notorious for bad puns.
Our Sales Philosophy
In the second part of our 'Sales at Verkada' blog series, we cover what your first six months at Verkada is like, after you’ve completed orientation but are still ramping up as a rep both in terms of your quota and your skillsets. In it, we go in some length into how we think about selling and how we think about each sales rep as the CEO of their own territory with full autonomy.
