Insights

Stop the insanity. It is time to rethink lead generation. We have all read the headlines: 80% of B2B Sales Interactions Between Suppliers and Buyers Will Occur in Digital Channels by 2025 B2B buyers are nearly 70% through their buyer journey before ever contacting...

“Everyone is evolving and consistently getting better thanks to the playbooks developed with Winalytics,” explains Karen Hundley, VP of Legal Partnerships at CeriFi, a prominent player in the professional CE industry.  In the pursuit of their FY 2023 sales goals,...

There’s a content tsunami out there. 91% of companies are producing more content, but only 30% have a defined buyer journey that motivates this content.   The result is that a ridiculous amount of content is being produced that does not engage, but instead overwhelms...

“Sure we could have done it ourselves, but it would have taken us two years. And, that would have resulted in a lot of lost revenue. You guys got it done in six months.”  That’s how Russ Jackson, Vice President of Growth Sales at NECI, explained the decision to...

“Video is the most effective content media available,” says Theo Hildyard, VP, Global Demand Generation Marketing at Brightcove. “Brightcove’s research shows 81% of buyers prefer video over written content. It has to be in every part of your buyer journey and sales...

In this last installment of our “So, you're a new sales leader” series, we will share more insights from our esteemed colleagues as well as a few of our own.  We hope those of you that have moved into a leadership role for the first time have found this series...

“We had a very strong set of client stories and testimonials. Winalytics helped us bring these stories alive in the sales process by building success story slides with talk tracks and then training the sales team on how to sell with stories,” explains Agnes O'Connell,...

“There has been a sea change in how companies go-to-market,” observes Ren Chin, Chief Marketing Officer at GoFormz. “Just 8 or 9 years ago, many companies could be successful with an enterprise, outbound motion. But now, things aren’t quite so simple.” GoFormz,...

Your website is your tool to capture buyer demand. But, too often buyers show up at your website only to be confused. The result? Higher bounce rates and lower content engagement. Think about it: Your website is only the second step of your demand generation...

In our first installment of our “So, you're a new sales leader” series, we shared 8 tips for getting a strong start. In this second installment, we’re sharing perspectives on 3 of those tips from some of our esteemed colleagues. Understand what works. First, focus on...

“Your website is really bad,” commented a key board member in a client’s recent board. Words that would make any revenue leader’s heart stop.  Your website is at the founding of the buyer personalization experience. It’s typically the first point of contact and...

“Winalytics has provided more of a boost to revenue growth plans than I could have ever envisioned,” says Sheila Sarem, CEO and Founder of BASTA. That’s high praise from a leader who has created a game-changing career readiness solution for first-gen students and...

“Once you have the foundation of a shared sales playbook, now your work on deal strategy gets a lot more pinpointed,” explains Damian Jones, Sr. Dir. of Sales and Account Management at BESLER. “Each deal is a little bit different, but if you have built strong skills...

Sales coaching raises rep performance by 19% on average…but only if you have clear coaching plans at both the individual and team level. It’s not just about working harder; it’s about working smarter.  Here is an essential coaching tip. We are all individuals. You...

Congratulations on stepping into a new leadership role!  Remember that great onboarding experience as a new rep? Yeah, that’s not happening for you as a new manager.  Remember all those playbooks, coaching, and super consumable learning journeys you got? Yeah, well,...

“With the help of Winalytics, we’ve personalized our district strategy and refined our Superintendent messaging with active A/B tests,” explains Kimberly Moore, CEO, Go Together. Across the country, K-12 schools have been grappling with ongoing funding challenges and...

Effectively selling depends on continuous skills reinforcement. Why? Because, the human brain is wired to forget. Research on the “forgetting curve” suggests we forget 50% of new information in a day and 90% within a week. And, the amount of “new information” sales...

It’s an old saw - sales and marketing just don't get along.   Sales is filled with “transactional” types who only care about money while the marketing “brainiacs” can turn a clever phrase but are often too abstract - so the stereotypes go. Charlie Chung, VP of Sales...

Winalytics is a funny name. But it captures perfectly what makes a top sales team different.    Top teams find and act on their “win” or success patterns a lot faster than middling teams. And, they use playbooks to make these win patterns repeatable. We all live...

Sales coaching raises rep performance by 19% on average...but only if you also enable the marketing and customer success teams who feed your sales team! In the first of our 3-part series on “sales coaching to improve performance,” we have shared some whys and hows...

Top performing sales teams are different. They use playbooks to accelerate performance. Think about it. A sports team would never take the field without regularly practicing their playbooks. But many sales teams have no shared plays to guide buyer conversations. Just...

Cringe-worthy moment. I watched a role play recently where the rep called his boss, who was playing the buyer, by the wrong name. And then he did it again.  The discomfort, even over a recorded Zoom, was palatable, like watching the most uncomfortable episode of The...

“Intent data” is all the rage right now. But intent data can be misleading. To accurately surface buyer’s intent, focus first on self-solutioning content. A Google search on the benefits of intent data offers promises about finding “the heartbeat of modern marketing,”...

“Our success in moving from a freemium offering to department selling to enterprise selling all came from getting really good at personalizing value for individual partners,” says Jeremy Dean, Vice President and a founding executive, at Hypothesis.   Hypothesis offers...

Content is king is a common refrain, but not all content is created equal. For your buyer and customer journey, content that personalizes value is all that matters! Sarah MacKinnon, in a recent article aptly titled a “A Content Tsunami,” shows 91% of companies...

Content amplification. It’s a fancy way of saying let your buyer decide. It means put the same content in multiple places so your buyers can choose where and how they want to engage. The great majority of top of the funnel (TOFU) content used to be consumed through...

It’s an old saw. Sales people get lots of training and coaching…and then they get promoted to sales manager and, suddenly, it stops.  Why? We don't assume sales people know everything they need to know the minute after they get hired. So, why do we assume that...

Companies are investing ever greater amounts in personalizing the buyer and customer journey. Too many fail to recognize that personalization starts on your website. Gartner, McKinsey & Company, and Forrester have all done research showing companies proficient in...

“Your customers are the source of all truth,” says Raul Ochoa, Founder at DoGoodWork. “Great company growth stories start with that simple principle.” Raul's firm specializes in helping clients develop their demand generation and growth marketing strategies. He firmly...

We are failing in demand gen efforts. Personalization at scale offers a solution.   For too many organizations, personalization means using generic, or AI generated, content in ham-handed and increasingly ineffective ways.  The work around building and executing...

The right sales meeting prep can dramatically increase your deal velocity. And, the good news? You can do it in about 15 minutes. That is why skill #4 in our Sales 3.0 Series is building your skills for a quick, targeted prep session before each sales call to make...

Securing next commitments in each sales meeting is your #1 driver of deal velocity. That is why skill #3 in our Sales 3.0 Series is building your skills to use the last 10 minutes of each sales conversation to agree on the next committed actions from both buyer and...

Leveraging trusted relationships through channel partnerships is one of the easiest ways to break through to buyers who are being bombarded with information from social, digital, and traditional media.  “Channel partnerships have become more important than ever,” says...

No one really cares about your product. That is, unless it solves an important problem for them. That is why skill #2 in our Sales 3.0 Series is building your expertise with micro-presentations highly tailored to each buyer’s goal to replace a product pitch. The sales...

AI has sparked both excitement and apprehension. With its ability to automate tasks, process vast amounts of data, and mimic some human characteristics, AI has already started to transform business and will continue to do so. As far as the sales profession, I have...

Land and Expand is a key growth strategy for any multi-product company. Less obvious is that the #1 driver of land-expand success is the go-to-market leadership team’s mindset. “There are lots of things that have to be well aligned for land and expand to work,” says...

Sales 3.0 Series, Skill #1: Start every sales conversation with discovery, rediscovery, or confirmation on your buyer’s why. Why are they talking to you? The sales profession is still recovering from the disaster of the Sales 2.0 period (2011 to 2019).   Sellers were...

Creating faster account expansion is always a priority, particularly in a challenging economy. The key to expansion is continual discovery across your entire go-to-market (GTM) team. “Rather than being siloed focusing on a single product, you have to always connect to...

We are in a Sales 3.0 world. Your mindset drives your performance. But, there is a catch.   Almost all your sales training has created the wrong mindset -- a mindset in which the seller journey dominates the buyer journey.   Below I share four sales practices that...

Customer Success (CS) has become vital to sustainable sales growth. Recent headlines tell the story: "Why Customer Success is the Future of Revenue Growth" and "Why Customer Success is Vital to the Future of Sales."  So why is this? This strategic role of customer...

For growth-driven businesses, the buyer journey needs to take priority over the seller journey. “We have to think about accountability to the buyer for each go-to-market team,” says Roderick Jefferson, author of Sales Enablement 3.0. “It cannot be about sales above...

Curiosity is an important skill for all of us, but not so much in our sales conversations. Great selling is based a lot more on consistency than it is on curiosity or creativity. I am thinking about this because a CRO recently shared his view that improving curiosity...

“What’s the one thing that will make you more successful?” Mastering that simple question in your buyer conversations will make the difference between top and mediocre sales performance. All sales and deal velocity comes from helping a buyer see a path to a more...

Customer success teams are in an ideal position to orchestrate expansion sales. And, staying anchored on customer value makes expansions a role-aligned activity.  “Our first focus always is providing value to our customers,” says Leslie Ortego, VP of Customer Success...

I am back in Latin America with my family. It is a place I love. It is a place of so many formative experiences stretching back several decades. It was in Latin America that I learned what it meant to be the “other.”   As an eight year old, I was one of two white kids...

You have probably heard of a Total Addressable Market (TAM), but how about the less commonly discussed Total Reachable Market (TRM)? It’s an important concept that will have big implications on how GTM teams ‘do more with less’ in this economic cycle that requires...

An account-based marketing strategy (ABM) is a “people-based process.” You have to ensure your whole internal field team is educated first before you can effectively educate buyers. That’s how Zora Senat, Chief Commercial Officer at Verisk Marketing Solutions (VMS),...

I used to think I was naturally empathetic, then a family member’s crisis showed otherwise. I have always been curious about other people, what makes them tick, and what they need. I listen actively, recap often, and make sure everyone is included in the conversation....

Account expansion is hard, right? Maybe not. Hilary Riley, VP of Partner Success at Mainstay, has a more strategic approach to account expansion – it is all about working a mutual success plan. “You have to make sure you regularly go back up to the balcony and take a...

It’s been a long, often lonely, journey. But I’ve found my tribe. I started my professional career as a Ph.D. social scientist doing qualitative research for a decade at Stanford and the RAND Corporation. I loved the focus in the Academy on learning, evidence-based...