BC Startup Sales Podcast – Pipeline, Pricing, Product, and Presentation with Loren Alhadeff (DocuSign)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Loren Alhadeff, Senior Vice President of North American Sales at DocuSign, to discuss “Pipeline, Pricing, Product, and Presentation.” DocuSign is changing how business gets done by empowering more than 300,000 companies and 200 million users in 188 countries to sign, send, and manage documents anytime, anywhere, on any device, with confidence.

Loren Alhadeff is the Senior Vice President of North American Sales at DocuSign. Loren joined the DocuSign team in 2008 bringing with him a breadth of executive sales leadership and operations experience. During his time at DocuSign, Loren has designed and built the company’s direct sales team. He is widely credited for growing the sales organization into one of the most respected teams in the industry today. Loren brings almost ten years of perspective from his time at DocuSign to the Podcast, and we are excited to get pick his brain on “Pipeline, Pricing, Product, and Presentation.”

During this week’s episode, Loren shares anecdotes and best practices from his almost ten years of sales experience across multiple stages of growth at DocuSign. We start our conversation by talking through early pipeline strategy and the mechanics of revising a strategy to meet the needs of a scaling business, from early-growth onwards. Loren walks us through how to think about top of the funnel efforts from year 1 to year 10, specifically mentioning the importance of tools in managing higher volume pipeline activity. Loren then shares his views on connectivity between sales and marketing and how that line of communication requires different degrees of attention (from both sides) throughout the evolution of a business. Second, we move on to a discussion around pricing. Loren walks through how to build an effective pricing roadmap, addressing tactics for maintaining a healthy balance between land grab (and the possibility of reducing price) vs. static pricing (and the risk of churning customers). From our seed stage perspective at Bowery, early pricing is mainly a derivative of a lean product that is still being built out, and a prudent pricing strategy for v1 products must account for future price increases and negotiations. Loren offers ways to manage through a fluid pricing strategy in a company’s early days. Particularly, he emphasizes the importance of cultivating an acute focus on communication between product and sales teams as a critical organizational framework for effective dialogue between these two functions as the business navigates more complex hypergrowth phases. Next, we cover a fundamental startup question “what drives decision making: product or sales and marketing?” Loren illuminates again on the requisite symbiosis between the two functions and its significance in keeping inertia in the marketplace. We conclude our conversation by zooming out and considering the broader stakeholders at play throughout a company’s growth. Specifically, Loren shares how to properly manage expectations across the management team and Board with regard to pipeline, pricing and product.

If you liked “Pipeline, Pricing, Product, and Presentation” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!