What Miro’s global head of sales has learned from an experimentation approach

When done well, leadership requires a lot. At its core, leadership is about elevating others and driving results with purpose — and every leader has a unique approach. That’s why on each episode of Reveal, I work with revenue chiefs from around the world to dig into the specifics of how they turn their teams into high-performing sales juggernauts.

I recently spoke to Adam Carr, the head of global sales at Miro, an innovation workspace built for teams building out the future. Adam believes great leaders serve their teams, not the other way around. “At the end of the day, you’re in the people business,” he said during our conversation. “Building a thriving team is one of the most important pillars of the business.”

For Adam, who acknowledged he’s a hands-on leader, that means removing obstacles and offering creative solutions when the team feels stuck. He also emphasized the importance of creating a safe environment where employees can freely express their ideas, while simultaneously challenging the team in a supportive way.

But what does that process look like in practice?

Drawing from his own experience, Adam discussed how to effectively lead teams by encouraging a culture of experimentation. In a company culture that prioritizes trial and error, everyone can feel a sense of freedom around the work they do. 

Here are the three main actions you can take to build that culture in your sales org:

No matter how you do things today, there may always be a better way to do it that you haven’t tried yet. So, you must constantly challenge the way you’re currently doing things. If you don’t, a competitor will try it before you do and beat you to the punch.

“Building that cross-functional team and the relationships where there’s the trust to challenge one another and disagree is mission critical,” Adam adds. “That’s going to shape the future of the business and ensure that you’re setting the team up for success when it comes to building a repeatable, predictable, scalable business motion.”

With buy-in from his CEO, early on Miro adopted a mindset of testing. “We take a lot of what works well in a product org — the alpha to beta to GA framework — and we’ve brought that to our go-to-market motion,” Adam says. “We are constantly running tests — whether it’s plays, messaging, or technology — and we follow a process.”

This way, when Miro’s team takes a strategy or a sales play and scales it up, they already have evidence that it works. That allows them to create effective outcomes more often and at a regular cadence because that implementation has already been vetted and proven.

“How do we get to the meeting in a more efficient way?” Adam asks.

That’s the “science of sales,” as he puts it — and this is where AI comes in. The most time-consuming part of the process is prospecting and building pipeline. By streamlining SDR workflows using technology, that allows the business to nail the science and gives sellers more time to do what they do best: focus on the “art” of selling.

“We’re going to make them way more productive so we can get to the meeting faster,” Adam says. And then reps “can focus their time on how to run better meetings” — the stuff at which humans are uniquely skilled.

It’s easy to say “adopt a testing mindset,” but how can leaders make sure everyone’s on board? For Adam, it’s all about engaging with different perspectives, from ICs to front-line managers and beyond. “Those different points of view are so critical because they’re thinking about it from a totally different perspective,” he says. “And 99 percent of the time, we find out something we missed.”

Finally, he also recommends getting leaders to buy in as project owners. This allows leadership to feel accountable for the initiative, and it allows teams to better understand leaders’ motivations and processes.

For more essential tips and strategies like these, listen to episodes of Reveal and subscribe to The Edge for the latest revenue insights.