064: Cracking the Code to High Level Sales Teams with Ramin Ettehad

Ramind Ettehad is the co-founder of Oomnitza, a SaaS platform that helps businesses manage and automate their IT workflows.

As an upstart company in 2013, Oomnitza landed its first accounts with lower-middle market companies before scaling to larger enterprise accounts. Today, Oomnitza has around 120 employees and $30M in subscription revenue.

In today’s episode, Ramin joins me to talk about how he meticulously builds and develops his sales teams to keep employees fresh, motivated and efficient through the full sales cycle.

You’ll also hear Ramin talk about his hyper-specific parameters for interviewing new sales employees, how co-innovation helped ramp Oomnitza in its early stages, and why the “challenger sale” can be especially effective in the technology field.

Ramind Ettehad Inspiring Quotes

• “You can build a really cool sales intelligence internally. You can have great marketing. All that stuff matters, but if the product isn’t excellent, it will not get adopted.” – Ramin Ettehad

• “As soon as you get to a point of comfort with something, you run the risk of being complacent.” – Brad Weimert

• “[Account Executives] should have three to five days a week of at least two-hour blocks on their calendars where they’re doing prospecting activities. It’s the only way to write your own destiny.” – Ramin Ettehad

• “With any new technology that you’re trying to take into the market and sell into enterprise, you have to justify the need for change.” – Ramin Ettehad

✔️ How Oomnitza used the concept of co-innovation to land its first handful of customers on its way to $30M in annual subscription revenue.

✔️ How do you know when a product is ready to be launched?

✔️ Building a lead score to help sales teams prioritize their outreach.

✔️ The step-by-step sales framework Oomnitza uses to close new accounts.

✔️ One of the best tools in sales leadership.

✔️ Why growth companies should consider paying up to 35% of total deal value to sales leadership.

✔️ How a rising interest environment has led to companies shifting their focus from growth to efficiency.

✔️ Who to target if you’re trying to start a mid-market or enterprise SaaS company.

✔️ The area where enterprise SaaS AEs often fall out of practice — and how to solve for it.

✔️ Why does it make sense to use the “challenger sale” framework in the technology space?

✔️ Metric-based outreach strategies to keep a full pipeline.

✔️ The “easy way” to get marketing-qualified leads.

✔️ The importance of macro-optimizing your health and business before micro-optimizing.