Insights

A Growth Mindset is Not Enough

A Growth Mindset is Not Enough

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:...

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The Mutual Success Plan

The Mutual Success Plan

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...

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Consulting as the New Selling with Monica Gout

Consulting as the New Selling with Monica Gout

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...

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What We Can Do About Those Recession Blues

What We Can Do About Those Recession Blues

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...

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Agile is the New Sales Methodology

Agile is the New Sales Methodology

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,...

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Improve Deal Velocity with a Buyer Success Statement

Improve Deal Velocity with a Buyer Success Statement

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...

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Using the “10-Second Commercial” to Engage Your Buyers

Using the “10-Second Commercial” to Engage Your Buyers

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...

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Everyone Owns Top of Funnel

Everyone Owns Top of Funnel

“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...

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The Old Way vs. New Way Play

The Old Way vs. New Way Play

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...

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Buyer Personalization Starts on Your Website

Buyer Personalization Starts on Your Website

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...

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Creating Buyer Personalization at Scale

Creating Buyer Personalization at Scale

“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...

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Ditch the Pitch, Focus on Your Customer’s Why

Ditch the Pitch, Focus on Your Customer’s Why

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 --...

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Laurie Schrager is a COO and a CEO Revenue Partner

Laurie Schrager is a COO and a CEO Revenue Partner

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...

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50 Reviews in 50 Days ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

50 Reviews in 50 Days ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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...

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Coaching Sales Teams to Success with the Three-Part Meeting

Coaching Sales Teams to Success with the Three-Part Meeting

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...

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Start with Your Buyer’s Why

Start with Your Buyer’s Why

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....

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Be a Buyer Guide to Succeed in the New World of Selling

Be a Buyer Guide to Succeed in the New World of Selling

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...

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Improve Close Rates and Forecasting with a Path to Partnership

Improve Close Rates and Forecasting with a Path to Partnership

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...

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Start with your why.

Start with your why.

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...

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Make It a Conversation

Make It a Conversation

“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...

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Get the Incentives Right to Land and Expand Faster

Get the Incentives Right to Land and Expand Faster

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...

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Ask for Referrals. Sell More.

Ask for Referrals. Sell More.

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...

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Reference Selling for Faster Growth

Reference Selling for Faster Growth

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...

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Be Authentic. Close Faster.

Be Authentic. Close Faster.

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,...

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Be Human. People Buy from People.

Be Human. People Buy from People.

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...

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Personalizing Authentic Prospecting Outreach

Personalizing Authentic Prospecting Outreach

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...

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Recap Often to Close More Deals Faster

Recap Often to Close More Deals Faster

Recap often. It is that simple. If you recap often in your buyer and customer calls, you will close more deals faster. I have been asked a lot lately on podcasts: “What’s the easiest way my listeners can start having the authentic conversations you recommend? What one...

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Using Programmatic Prospecting to Set More Meetings

Using Programmatic Prospecting to Set More Meetings

Brent and Christina Yu of NovoEd discuss prospecting as a way of gathering market intelligence and getting smarter about your value prop. Every prospecting campaign is an opportunity to test your value messaging against different buyer personas. “Obviously a key goal...

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The Power of Small Wins

The Power of Small Wins

Great buyer discovery is really just a series of “small wins.” Brent was honored to be the first male guest on Lori Richardson's Women in Sales Podcast.   Listen to Lori and Brent and talk about the “give and take” of good buyer discovery.   Rather than have the buyer...

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Accelerating Deal Velocity with a Platform Value Prop

Accelerating Deal Velocity with a Platform Value Prop

“You build the most momentum in buyer conversations by engaging individual buyers with a message specific to them while also connecting all buyers to shared goals” That is how Sujay Darji, Regional Sales Manager for Anthology, a provider of enterprise higher education...

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