CrowdStrike

Challenges:

With an expanding global footprint, CrowdStrike wanted to rapidly build out a high-powered inside sales team of Sales Development Representatives and Account Executives. The goal was to identify A-player hires whilst lowering early tenure turnover, accelerating performance ramp, raising quota performance and reducing the frustration of liability hires on the sales leadership team.

Industry & Roles:

Cybersecurity Technology, Software, SaaS, Enterprise Selling.
SDR/BDR, Account Executive, Account Manager, Sales Engineer, Services Consultant, Sales Leader.

The Solution:

Perception undertook proprietary research with corporate sales teams in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific that measured 60 psychographic traits and collected 12 months of sales performance data from 100 lead-generating SDRs and 120 AEs. The performance and psychographic data was statistically analysed to build KPI prediction models called Performance Fingerprints.

Account Executive Performance Fingerprint: 11 psychographic traits in combination displayed a strong correlation of 0.76 with quaterly sales revenue performance. Predictive traits included Interpersonal Versatility, Feed-Backing Seeking and Self-Awareness. AE candidate completion time is 19 minutes.

Sales Development Representative Performance Fingerprint: SDR is an entry level sales role. Subject to performance, employees are promoted to AE after~12 months so CrowdStrike wanted to identify candidates who could be successful in both roles by simultaneously predicting actual KPI performance. 23 psychographic traits in combination displayed a strong correlation of0.77 with how many qualified meetings a candidate would book as an SDR; and the amount of quarterly sales revenue they could generate as an AE. Predictive traits included Professionalism, Work Ethic, Sociability and Optimism. SDR candidate completion time is 22 minutes.

Perception selection algorithms are evidence-based and learn continuously. They're subjected to successive recalibration every 6-12 months to grow their predictive accuracy. Each recalibration ingests new performance data from both existing and new hires.

The Results:

Perception’s work since 2017 has helped build out a global inside sales organization, creating a powerful competitive advantage that helped CrowdStrike IPO on Nasdaq in June 2019. CrowdStrike’s executive team are equipped with the data and intelligence to make better, faster and less biased hiring decisions. This has led to lower early tenure turnover and a higher number of candidates transitioning from SDR to AE.