Sales Development meets Demand Generation and Enablement- with Kyle Coleman, VP Revenue Growth and Enablement at Clari

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Kyle Coleman, the Vice President of Revenue Growth and Enablement at Clari. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Kyle. First, the vision behind a revenue growth and enablement function. Second, Kyle's perspective on career pathing for sales development representatives. And third, the measurements of success, SDR, and beyond across the entire customer acquisition lifecycle. Hey, Kyle, can you take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Kyle Coleman** (1:12)
Hey, yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Ray. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to the conversation. So I've been in B2B tech for about eight or nine years now. Started as the sixth employee at a company called Looker based in Santa Cruz, California. Grew the SDR team up from just myself to about 65 people globally. As the company grew to about 800 people globally, and then was acquired by Google for $2.5 billion in 2019 That was the same year that I jumped over to Clari to lead both SDR as well as enablement. Then soon thereafter, we thought that there was a really interesting and useful marriage between the teams that I manage now, which is SDR, enablement, demand generation, as well as value engineering. I'm sure we're going to talk a lot more about that here momentarily.

**Ray Rike** (1:57)
It's a very interesting combination. But Kyle, I didn't know you were employee number six at Looker.

**Kyle Coleman** (2:03)
I was.

**Ray Rike** (2:04)
Congratulations. That had to be an incredible ride.

**Kyle Coleman** (2:06)
It was pretty wild. I'm very pleased to say that there are a lot of symmetries between the success at Looker and the success now at Clari. I'm equally excited to be on this roller coaster at Clari.

**Ray Rike** (2:18)
Real quick, just for the listening audience, because we're going to get into a lot of depth today. What was your evolution at Looker? Did you start as a sales development rep or in another role?

**Kyle Coleman** (2:27)
It's sort of yes and no, Ray. As starting when I did at that size company, I was just doing everything that I could. I was the first individual contributor on both the sales and marketing team. I was managing the website and managing trade shows and following up with leads, and managing the early deal cycles, and pretty much anything and everything that was asked of me. I gravitated toward SDR, and that's where I've stuck ever since.

**Ray Rike** (2:51)
We're going to double-click a little bit later on that cross-functional experience you had at Looker because I think it's so valuable to see the type of growth. In fact, that's the natural transition for my first question is, I saw your title, and it's the head of revenue growth and enablement. Can you tell me a little bit about what the callous was for having this integrated team and approach to customer acquisition at Clari?

**Kyle Coleman** (3:13)
Absolutely. So when I started at Clari, as I mentioned, it was to lead both SDR and enablement. I had experience obviously doing a lot of SDR work. I had experience doing a lot of training and sales training specifically at the top of the funnel.
And so both of those charges, I was relatively comfortable with. In the summer of the year that I joined Clari, however, there was turnover with our most senior DemandGen person. And because I had worked so closely with DemandGen in my previous company, I sort of informally filled the vacuum that existed. And that was when we realized, well, well, this makes a lot of sense, not just for SDR and growth marketing to be together. So growth marketing is DemandGen and field marketing and account-based marketing, marketing operations. Of course, there's a lot of synergy between those two groups, SDR and growth marketing, but it's really useful to also have enablement here, because now we can make sure that everything that the marketing team is doing from a DemandGen and campaign and event standpoint is really truly making its way to the field in the right channels, the right time, the way they need it, so that the field is enabled on all of the go-to-market strategies that the marketing team is pursuing. And so we found this really natural synergy between all these teams, and that's been the case at Clari for the last two years. It's been treating us very well.