I joined DigitalOcean ($DOCN) at multi-inflection-but-related points. The first inflection point was that the company had just announced IPO. The second related point was that the company had reached IPO-stage without a sales team and was looking to build that up.

What an amazing company! It went from 0 to ~$400mn by building a great product and building a great community around this product. Some of the best engineers, product managers and marketers had brought the company to this stage. But as they were about to get listed, they had to find the formula to grow from $400mn to $4bn and beyond.

From my perspective, I had worked at multi-billion dollar giant organizations such as Infosys, TechMahindra and Salesforce and had gradually moved up from an IC salesguy to a sales manager. I believed I had gathered enough experience to deploy my learnings at a much smaller organization. Little did I know that my stint at DigitalOcean would be the seeds of 021Playbook.

When I joined DO, I was the first sales hire in EMEA – coming from Heroku, the idea of the VP, Sales was to start the sales-led motion at DO and set up a playbook for DO. The first step was the build out a sales strategy for EMEA – The good thing was that we already had a user base (mind you, not customers, but users) in EMEA. The not-so-good thing was that these users were spending little on the platform – the ARPU was in double digits/month. I combined the current user data with 3rd party data of cloud spend per country/region within EMEA to figure out where should the sales team focus upon.

Prabhakar Jayakumar

VP Sales EMEA, Payoneer (ex-DigitalOcean)

“Kejal joined DO at a time when we were looking to scale our Sales Led motion, to complement our Product-Led Growth motion. He used his experience to not only help build the EMEA sales team but also used his first-principles approach to decode the target customer segment, their needs and create an effective sales playbook for the market.”

The EMEA Playbook

I enjoyed the initial sales while building up the sales team in EMEA and assigning them the regions to focus upon and having each of them come up with their own individual sales plans. We initially focused on mining the the existing user base and increasing our share of wallet. We were essentially looking for customers that had a big to huge overall cloud spend but were spending very less on DO. This was of course the best way to increase the ARPU and hence revenue. In parallel, we were sowing seeds of a net-new outbound motion.

The Outbound Playbook

Now that the mining motion was running like a well-oiled machine, in 2022, we decided to make net new motion the area of focus – this needed a BDR/SDR team, a stack of tools and most importantly a mindshift change from field sales team to investors to our colleagues in marketing, customer success and even IT. I got all of this together in the Outbound Playbook. I took the revenue goal set as our north star and devised the trio of People-Process-Tools required to meet that goal. The rev goal was broken down into MRR, the MRR into number of signed customers, this number into opportunities, opportunities to leads and leads to activities for the BDR/SDR team. Of course along the way we were making assumptions that needed to be validated as we moved along.

It took time to bring on the tools required and integrating them with our CRM which was in Salesforce. The team did a great job in evaluating each tool, providing feedback and finally executing on the playbook. If you have great people in the team, they can deliver wonders – the tools and the process are just enablers. By 2023-24 we were well on our way to bring in net new customers to the platform, excite them and hand them over to the account management/CSM teams.

These 2 playbooks laid the foundation for 021Playbook.

Jeff Lattomus

Global DGX Cloud Sales Leader, NVIDIA (ex-DigitalOcean)

“At DigitalOcean, we made a major push for focusing on net new business. This needed a fresh approach, a new playbook. Kejal built out his team and ran with the playbook to bring in new logos and new revenue.”