This post is the next in our series chatting with people at Octopus about their role, what they’re working on to improve the product for our customers, and more.
Here we talk to Harsh Sabikhi, Senior Vice President, Revenue.
You have an impressive track record working at DevOps companies. Can you tell us a little about your career before Octopus?
Prior to joining Octopus, I spent my career following the evolution of software development from waterfall to agile to DevOps. I worked at PTC, Rally Software, GitHub, and HashiCorp.
Why did you join Octopus Deploy?
Throughout my career, I've spent a lot of time in the development phase. At HashiCorp, I was exposed to the operations side but from an infrastructure perspective. One common theme I noticed was deploying to production was never trivial. Operations teams would and still have release windows at 6pm on a Saturday. Octopus Deploy is helping organizations remove that friction by allowing teams to deploy whenever and wherever.
What are your responsibilities as Senior Vice President, Revenue?
I'm responsible for our entire go-to-market (GTM) strategy from a revenue perspective. My team includes Sales, Solutions Engineering, Sales Development, Customer Success, Professional Services, and Technical Account Management.
Ultimately, we're responsible for ensuring our customers have a great experience when they interact with Octopus, either pre-sales or post-sales.
How are you delivering value and improving the sales experience for our customers?
First, we're structuring the organization into a named account model for the Enterprise segment (>2500 employees) where each customer has a dedicated Account Executive (AE). The AE is the main point of contact during the pre-sales stage. If it's an existing account, customers also have a Customer Success Manager (CSM) as a post-sales contact.
The next thing we're doing is helping to improve the self-service experience with free trials and the ability to purchase Octopus directly from octopus.com.
Finally, we're investing in our channel partners and allowing them to resell Octopus. We're also partnering with Amazon and Microsoft so our customers can purchase Octopus directly from their respective marketplaces.
How do you motivate your team?
I try to lead by example and lead from the front. For example, I just returned from 3 weeks on the road visiting numerous customers and partners. I love going on calls with my team and it doesn’t matter where the customer is in the sales cycle, I try to get involved.
What’s something surprising people might not know about you?
I'm actually an electrical engineer by education, and I was a software developer for 6 years before moving into sales!
