Insights

Last week, I was in a closing call with a new enterprise client. At one point, the Director of North American Sales, who was part of the buying group, broke into this huge smile. “I love that you just did a ‘trial’ close,” he said. “It was awesome the way you stepped...

If we build it, they will come… This is the PLG (product-led growth) story. Here’s a little secret: the PLG model is more human-led growth (HLG) than product-led growth. PLG works when product, success, and marketing teams work together, effectively with an agile...

“Sooner or later, everything old is new again” was the saying running through my mind as I interviewed Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO at Casted, about amplified marketing. “An amplified marketing strategy starts with having great conversations,” says Lindsay. “The more human...

Relationship-first leaders set their teams up to underperform. Sounds callous, but it’s true. Strong leadership begins with setting clear, actionable goals and then leveraging relationships to enable each team member to achieve their top potential. I am thinking about...

If your experience is like mine, “breaking through the noise” to reach buyers is getting harder and harder. We are seeing companies produce great content and still feel like they are struggling to capture mindshare. It is for this reason that I was thrilled to learn...

Growth mindset is not enough. Because one alone cannot achieve business excellence. This is a lesson I was introduced to early in my career. But it took me years to figure it out. Six months into my very first revenue leadership role, my CEO sat me down and said:...

Your ego has many costs.   For sales and customer success teams, the biggest cost is revenue. The more you make your conversations about you, your company, and your product, the more you will lose new logo deals, renewals, and expansion opportunities. The more you...

From her first sales job to a CRO role for a Series D, B2B SAAS company in four years. How did that happen? How did that happen in such a male-dominated field? “As a consultant, I was trained to always begin a client conversation with how I can help them solve a...

We are on the cusp of recession -- if we are not already in one -- so what is a sales leader to do? We have to stay focused on what we can control. A recent survey from Jimney revealed that 65% of us are worried about a recession. In fact, it’s one of the top concerns...

The temptation to sell on ROI is understandable. Upwards of 60% of sales end with a “no” decision because buyers don’t see enough value in making a change. The status quota is a formidable obstacle. But, here’s the thing, selling on ROI actually hurts your chances of...

Buying is now a team sport. Selling needs to be as well. “To engage and convert more ideal customers, align your sales and marketing teams around an ‘always be helping’ philosophy,” says Johan Abadie, Chief Marketing Officer at ProcessMaker. “It is no longer sales or...

Agile is the new sales methodology. Go-to-market (GTM) teams can learn a lot from software developers. Many of us know that modern software development is all about designing, developing, testing, and iterating based on systematic feedback loops. When executed well,...

The simplest way to improve your deal velocity? Get to a buyer success statement. Think of the success statement as your buyer’s why. It recaps in two or three sentences what will motivate your buyer to purchase from you. A success statement leads to higher deal...

Top business leaders drive growth with a mix of ambition and humility. That’s a hard balance, but according to Amer Kaissi the author of Humbitious: The Power of Low Ego, High Drive Leadership, it is exactly what sets great leaders apart. “Humility plus ambition is a...

If you are on a sales or GTM team, like it or not, buyers are now in charge! To create engagement and deal momentum, you have to put your buyers and their goals first. So, how do you put Buyers First? I talked recently with Carole Mahoney at Unbound Growth to answer...

A hyper-personalized buyer experience is typically associated with B2C companies and the consumer journey. No longer. It has become equally important for strong B2B growth. I recently spoke to Pouyan Salehi, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Scratchpad,...

Yes, you can really engage your buyers in 10 seconds. But it requires preparation and practice! Create four different “10-Second Commercials” on “Why” buyers should talk to you.   The big market problem you solve for buyers Your brand promise or unique value claim...

“It’s not my job to prospect. It’s my job to work deals.” Really?! I have heard that from way too many AEs as well as sales consultants. There’s been quite a bit of chatter debating whether AE’s should be accountable to top of funnel activities, otherwise known as...

Keeping leadership teams aligned on growth goals and priorities has become a lot harder.  The pace of competition, virtual work, and geographically dispersed teams all create friction. I recently spoke to Gary Fortier, Chief Executive Officer at Ready Education, about...

Product-driving selling is an incredible annoyance to buyers, but appears to be alive and well. That is, at least judging from several recent vendor experiences. At Winalytics, like so many of you, we have been doubling-down on our outbound and demand generation...

There is one simple reason more of your buyers and customers do not engage. The content and stories you share do not speak to their personal needs and goals. Content too often is developed as individual assets and does not tell a story about personalized value. Sarah...

Many B2B companies miss the opportunity to start buyer personalization right on their website.  Karol Hernandez is solving this problem for SEAM Group. She knows, per Salesforce research, that 72% of B2B buyers expect a similar website experience as on a consumer...

“We can't do personalization at scale.” I hear that all the time. And at first blush, it feels like it makes sense.   It’s hard to “personalize” sequences when an SDR touches hundreds of prospects every week. It’s hard to “personalize” our website when we have no way...

Great virtual selling means running great conversations. Hear Gabrielle Dabi-Schwebel and Brent talk about how to create great virtual conversations that will lead to greater success on the Virtual Selling podcast. Virtual selling is not going away. A McKinsey study...

Product pitching hurts when selling, but it is more common and more damaging in customer success.  When Jeremy Kelly was at Burning Glass, he saw customer success teams were not often getting beyond their product -- product onboarding, training, and implementation --...

CRO is a “hot” trending title, but some CEOs are choosing a COO as their revenue partner instead. I recently spoke to Laurie Schrager, COO of Element, to understand why. “Our CEO needs to be out in front, building the case for Element to the market and investors.  He...

A growth mindset is critical to any high-growth company, but how can a CEO build this mindset?   I recently spoke to Shiv Gaglani, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Osmosis, about his approach: “It is a super-power to find and develop people who have the...

A 2018 Gong study of recorded calls showed that calls with product discussions that are 9 minutes or less have a much higher likelihood of closing.  The attention span of the typical buyer has dropped since then, making the principle of focusing on short...

In a recent conversation on The Bacon Podcast, Brian Basilico and Brent discuss how the lack of ideal buyer alignment is the quickest way to kill funnel velocity.  Misalignment quickly results in buyer apathy during the sales process. Funnel velocity begins with...

Stories sell, so why don’t sales and marketing teams use stories more frequently?    Stories sell because unlike other forms of content -- blogs, white papers, sell sheets, capability talk tracks -- they create a subtle shift from “me and you” to “we.”  Rather than a...

I knew writing my first book would be hard…but marketing a first book is even harder! For that reason, I was very pleased to get 50 reviews for The Revenue Acceleration Playbook 50 days after the early April launch.   Thanks to those who took the time to share this...

Use a three-part meeting structure and your sales team will make the most of every single buyer meeting! John A. Hope at Ready Education talks to Brent about how using a three-part meeting structure helps his team better qualify prospects and move deals along more...

Selling is broken (Part 3) … because sales processes dominate buyer and customer processes Buyers and customers do not move through our “funnel” in a linear way anymore. They move around fluidly between our website and content, sales, success, and marketing teams....

Start with your buyer’s why…in every single conversation! Share your product capabilities through stories, because stories make your product actionable. These were key themes in Brent’s recent conversation with Wesleyne Greer on The Science of Selling STEM podcast....

The 2010s saw a dramatic decline in sales reps on quote, as well as sales VP tenures. And, the decline in sales performance during that time is no coincidence. Three-quarters of sales and go-to-market (GTM) teams are stuck in product pitching, convinced that sharing...

How do you keep your go-to-market team focused on a buyer’s business outcomes? Here is how Austin Kenny, Chief Revenue Officer at ETU, answers this question: “We need to be consultants to our buyers. Our platform is very configurable and if we start with a general...

The 2010s saw a very high level of so-called “innovation” in sales strategy and methodologies.    In 2011, there were only seven major methodologies. By 2019, the number of major sales methodologies tripled from seven to almost 20 different methodologies.   We got...

If you focus on making your buyer more successful, you will be more successful. Listen to Brent and Jay Tinkler discuss buyer success statements on The Remarkable Project podcast. Your customers don’t want to know about your product, they want to know how your product...

Listen to Brent and Ramzi Marjaba discuss this and other topics on Ramzi’s “We The Sales Engineers” podcast. In the old world of selling, buyers needed you to find out about your product. They were dependent upon you to share information critical to their purchase...

Sean Casey with eLumen talks to Brent about his “work backwards plan” or “path to partnership” for deals, which has improved his team’s close rates and deal forecasting across revenue leadership roles at eLumen, Burning Glass, and Campus Labs. With this approach, you...

Make your customers the hero. Celebrate their success, not your own. If you want to sell more and expand faster, don’t talk about your company or your product. Talk instead about how your current customers are using your product. It is a subtle but powerful shift. It...

Brent talks to Adam Ellingson, EVP of Sales at CeriFi, about how content can create a value-driven customer journey and drive 40%+ revenue growth even in a mature market. CeriFi is a provider of training for Series 6, Series 7, and CFP licensure exams, and there many...

If we’re not excited about our company and its products or services, why should our buyers or customers be excited? They shouldn’t be! Buyers and customers can sense right away if you aren’t passionate about your company and its offerings. They can also sense if you...

“What are you working on?” True story. That simple question helped Claudette, a new BDR 4-weeks into her role, to turn a “no” into a $200k opportunity.  Here is how the conversation went: Claudette: “Hi, good morning, I was following up on my email about safety...

Ben Robinson, SVP of Sales at Zeel@Work, talks to Brent about his innovative approach to connecting sales and account management to support faster account expansion and higher enterprise deal values with a team selling approach.    To encourage all of his sales team...

Are you missing out on getting business because you’re not asking your customers for referrals? The answer is probably, YES!  This is just one of the many topics Alice Heiman and Brent discussed recently on her Sales Talk for CEOs Podcast. Most happy customers are...

Brent talks to Beth Nelson at Plus Delta Partners about the power of reference selling as a business growth driver. Beth and the team at Plus Delta have figured out that they can grow much faster by learning their customers’ language and capturing their customer’s...

In a recent conversation on the Stories Of Selling Human podcast, Alex Smith and Brent discuss how to close deals faster by using an authentic approach to sales discovery. While it may seem counterintuitive to busy sales people, in reality, taking a more authentic,...

Be human. People buy from people they like, not from companies. Of course, building rapport will definitely not secure you a deal by itself. That’s more a function of the value you and your company can offer a buyer. On the other hand, NOT building rapport can lose...

Brent and Jason Pasquale of Activator Dealer Solutions discuss taking a very personalized approach to prospecting outreach and shifting your focus from your product to your buyer’s business objectives.  Authentic prospecting anchors on buyer goals and sharing social...