How to Optimize Talent, Maintain Revenue Growth Beyond $1B, and Serve the World’s Largest Companies

In today’s interconnected world, international markets and digital connectivity have revolutionized the way companies interact with customers. In pursuit of our global growth, we share a commitment to understanding diverse cultures, meeting unique market needs, and building bridges that transcend distance, both internally and externally. I recently had the opportunity to spend time with Smartsheet customers, partners and team members in Japan and Australia to continue investing in our globalization.

At Smartsheet, we empower people to drive meaningful change, and this starts with meaningful connection through collaboration, near and far. The highlights of my career have always been marked by experiencing the work accomplished by our teams around the globe, and learning more about our customers and their innovation. When I think about why these experiences are meaningful to me, it’s all about accelerating relationships, trust, and empathy worldwide. Here are my thoughts from my most recent visits.

Running global teams effectively is imperative to optimize talent in today’s marketplace. Diverse talent pools, evolving business models, and technology evolving at break-neck speed makes it hard to keep up. Successfully harnessing the potential of global teams requires more than coordination, it demands a nuanced understanding of cultural intricacies, communication, and leadership strategies. I tend to deploy three motions when visiting teams to help foster the feedback and relationships needed to effectively lead globally. 

First, work side by side, second, have fun through competition and breaking bread, and third, create a safe space for discussion.

Working side by side means giving front line leaders and high potential staff the gift of practice. How often do we provide guidance and coaching outside of the actual delivery of customer meetings? It’s crucial to model this to your front line leaders, and it’s hugely rewarding to see the results of a proper dry run presentation or customer conversation, and its impact on higher performance for game day. Similarly, we often build a new market team (sales, presales, postsales, operations, etc.) in quick parallelization of hiring. Therefore, modeling your own experience and knowledge in customer meetings is a gift to the local team, when most have limited tenure and a high degree of overlap in experience.

Next, it’s important to show your “whole self” beyond your work persona, and in doing so, give your teams the opportunity to reciprocate in sharing themselves more fully. Team building through local events, like karaoke, cooking classes, participating in charity events, ax throwing – you name it –  while enjoying a regional meal really accelerates relationships and trust. 

And finally, creating three types of in-office dialogue round out my best visits. First, the one-on-ones with leaders and high potential talent to hear their candid feedback on what’s working and what’s not. This sometimes reveals “watermelon metrics,” which happens when service metrics appear to be green and on target, but beneath the surface, it’s all red, indicating the opposite. Second, “group think” roundtables for feedback by function, which are always insightful. Assembling my Success team, then Support, then Services, and so on, to reiterate each one’s impact, how they contribute to corporate results, what our larger strategy is asking of their role, and all the feedback this frame unlocks. And third, breaking down those functional silos, by getting high potentials from each function into a roundtable discussion about culture, market opportunity, and GTM priorities. For best results, I structure these conversations in this sequence whenever possible. 

Running global teams effectively is imperative to maintain growth beyond $1B. Global customers bring unique perspectives. By understanding them, we nurture a sense of shared purpose in emerging markets with the mature learnings of primary markets. Trust is the foundation for harnessing this potential, and when leadership spends time in-person, it builds trust – especially when your brand is new in region. Notably, according to Harvard Business Review, customers who trust a brand are 88% more likely to buy again, and 79% of employees who trust their employer are more motivated to work and less likely to leave.

Japan in particular is an emerging market for Smartsheet, and we have the opportunity to stake claim in the landscape and build our brand there. Given the amount of experience and success we’ve had in our original markets, these emerging market teams are blessed with far too many vectors of opportunity – we serve most industries, most customer sizes, and many buyer personas. With this in mind, the most crucial conversations I have in emerging markets are strategy alignment on answering two questions: where will we play, and why will we win?   

When we are reductive in answering these two questions, we drive maturity and scale faster, and lessen the time in which the market investment outpaces the returns. We hit the flywheel of >100% growth with reasonable operating efficiencies. To do so, we play our second-mover advantage of what’s proven at home – customer outcomes, references, and best practices mined from actual customer usage, while adjusting to regional needs (often new partners, price points, and business value levers). Regional customer variants must be navigated thoughtfully.  Despite decades of globalization, consumers’ mindsets remain highly localized. Challenges lie not only in spanning geographical boundaries but also in bridging the gaps of time, language, and the cultural nuances that influence buying decisions, customer interactions, and brand perceptions.

Navigating regional customer variants is necessary for both emerging and established markets. In contrast to Japan, Australia is several years into Smartsheet’s maturation journey.  As we grow with our customers, there is a spectrum of market stages, from emerging and youthful to established and mature. Each market type warrants an approach to go-to-market (GTM), customer experience, and talent that considers this.. In Australia, it’s important to begin showing our customers – and our team – that the maturity of our primary markets is arriving in region.  In this context, maturity refers to the completeness of GTM, post sales and support offerings, and in-region and timezone people-led experiences.  

Running global teams effectively is imperative for staying relevant to the world’s largest companies. While much of the opportunity in an emerging market strategy is about new customers, it’s also a chance to “finish the play” within the far flung divisions of the customers already won in your primary markets. This presents several questions for regional and “corporate” teams at Smartsheet, given our representation in more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies. How will we address global account ownership, and how will we manage a customer corporate champion’s desire to retain control vs. the regional departments' drive for pace and independence? How will we balance focus on where the decisions are made vs. where the users thrive? What about regional differences in partner strategy? How will all our internal systems account for these new demands? 

Spending time in region greatly improves the chance that we find the right balance in answering these questions, and earns the credibility for regional customers and employees to trust our decisions.

At the end of the day, I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to connect with our amazing global ecosystem and learn how we can work better together to create meaningful change. These in-person connection points are what keep me fulfilled – not just serving our customers and coaching our employees but working together as people. Next on this topic, I look forward to sharing learnings as my leadership team visits our 100+ Customer Excellence team members in Costa Rica this November. Stay tuned!