The sales team had no strong understanding as to why certain prospects commanded higher discounting versus others. As such, they could not be proactive about leveraging strategies to prevent high discounting.

This workstream was intended to understand drivers of discounting as a way to better price going forward and understand Rubrik’s core product.

Prior sales enablement resources had been light and only shared during large sales huddle meetings. Furthermore, there was no team explicitly dedicated to competitive intelligence.

This workstream was intended to create new sales enablement resources that would help sales teams specifically against the top 3 competitors.

One of the company’s largest customers had been up for contract renewal. Rubrik had launched a new subscription-based SKU and was prioritizing converting customers onto this new SKU.

This workstream was intended to provide a clear suite of scenarios to the customer on what the legacy versus new subscription would be priced at. It also gave the account executive a base, low, and high scenario for how much discounting would impact net sales.

✔️ Championed the analysis from start to finish, with continual mentorship from manager

✔️ Conducted data analysis across SKUs of past won and lost deals in Salesforce; identified initial trends / insights

✔️ Created discussion guide topics for Account Executives in 1:1 interviews to double-click on Salesforce data insights

✔️ Built readout deck, presented to sales, marketing teams, CMO, highlighting the trends and actionable recommendations for sales teams

✔️ Built competitive pricing calculator for 2 main competitors (with guidance from manager)

✔️ Created 3 tearsheets & made updates to battlecards through desk research on competitor SKUs

✔️ Constructed initial Excel draft of scenario analysis - template eventually was leveraged for multiple customers

✔️ Sales teams were equipped to proactively understand “what to expect” when going against certain prospects / archetypes who were already in proposal process with competitors

✔️ Outputs were leveraged by sales, marketing, and product teams to inform specific strategies and future cross-functional partnership opportunities

✔️ Sales teams could more accurately understand competitors’ quotes to their prospects; avoided arbitrary high discounting

✔️ Tearsheets increased overall knowledge of current state of competitors’ products

✔️ Quote was directly used in customer call to provide enterprise legacy customer with options for renewal strategy / transfer from perpetual to subscription-based licensing

You can bring structure to anything. What, as a student still in college, initially I found daunting but later began to love about this project, was the level of ambiguity that this problem was presented to me. “Build out an analysis that helps us better understand the drivers of discounting” was the official scope.

Once I was able to think about where I could gather insights, what types of insights would be useful, and what I could achieve in 2 months, I was able to draft a few proposed “project structures.” I also defined the key objectives and use cases for the outputs of my project. I made sure to keep the structures flexible and to let my insights drive the next steps.

This level of autonomy, combined with the right level of guidance from my managers when I would get stuck, was integral to my success on this project. Once able to establish objectives and assumptions, it is easier to define what approaches will work well - and subsequently, what actions I need to then take on a daily and weekly basis.

I now prefer unstructured projects as they allow me to think critically about how to do something effectively. It fosters creativity and collaboration, and allows for a customized process rather than a standardized one that may not always be “one size fits all”.

Ask as many questions as possible. During a 2-3 month internship, it at times seems like an impossible task to truly deliver lasting value to multiple stakeholders. A big driver of this was simply not initially understanding product nuances and what the “current state of knowledge” is.

Through this experience and my subsequent experience with project management in consulting, I have learned the importance of keeping a running questions list and having touchpoints with the relevant stakeholders. For instance, even asking the questions, “What is the current state of competitive intelligence? How much does the average account executive know about competitor SKUs?” were highly valuable in having a baseline to start.

Acknowledge your weaknesses if it means being team-first. If I’m being honest, I struggled with this deliverable having had limited experience on something like this (and a limited timeframe for completion). What was important to the success on this workstream was my ability to acknowledge my lack of knowledge early on so that I could properly scope out how to support my manager. I took a first pass on the Excel draft but got stuck fairly quickly. Once I acknowledged this, it allowed me to take more of a shadow role during the structural setup and then contribute more tactically by being shown what to do.