Insights

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

Have you ever heard Venus Williams or Tom Brady or Derek Jeter complain about practicing? For top performers, a commitment to practice is a given. So when asked to train or practice, why do so many salespeople respond with something like: “We don’t need to practice,...

“Nobody cares about your products except for you. They care about themselves” is how David Meerman Scott explains the key reason product pitching fails sales and marketing teams. In a recent conversation with David, I had the opportunity to explore why go-to-market...

“Arguably the single most important input for your prospecting motion is understanding why your existing customers chose you in the first place.” We live in a noisy world and it is difficult to stand out, but capturing your customer’s voice can help you break through....

“The follow up email doesn’t lie. You either learned these things in the meeting or not.” Listen to Bobby Coy of Activator Dealer Solutions explain why he finds follow-up emails such a powerful tool to review and coach on discovery calls. The best discovery meetings...

In traditional account planning, the focus on customer value can quickly get lost in the industry analysis, competitive positioning, product white space, and relationship mapping.  Carrie Straub at Mursion shows how to change this formula to grow account values...

 They focus on the seller. And sellers do not close deals, buyers close deals.  If you are a seller, all you can do is guide. You can guide the buyer to understand the value of partnering with you. You guide the buyer through their internal purchasing process. There...

During a recent conversation with @Kushal Saini Kakkar on the On The Flip Side podcast, Brent explained the Programmatic Prospecting Play. It means focusing every single prospecting campaign on creating new opportunities AND learning from your market. Each campaign...

How well do you leverage a diversity of backgrounds to build a high-performing sales team? “Building a diverse team is one of the keys I have found to consistent high-performance in sales,” says Christopher Sheppard, SVP of Higher Education at Vector Solutions....

How effectively do you use team-based learning to understand what your buyers value, so you can sell more and sell faster?    “We use a weekly ‘test and improve’ session to be more successful in our sales positioning and execution, “says Greg Carder, Vice President of...

How well do you harness your customers' voice to sell faster into target market segments?    “We sell to fundraising teams in four different markets,” says Beth Nelson, Chief Client Officer at Plus Delta Partners. “We work with research universities, small- to...

What matters most in building a top sales team - recruiting or skills training?    “Our sales success comes from recruiting for the right intrinsic characteristics,” says Josh Allen, Chief Revenue Officer at Owl Labs. “Sales process, messaging and negotiation are...

When is the right time to build vertical expertise?    “It is never too early!” says Rob Brewster, CEO at GoFormz. “Investing in verticalization helped jumpstart our growth.  It brought us closer to customers and let our sales teams speak with expertise by using the...

Are you leaving money on the table because you are perceived as a point solution rather than as a platform with broad enterprise value?    “We want our new logo team to look for quick wins on a single-use case, but it is our platform value that is the game-changer for...

Most go-to-market teams underperform their growth potential because they focus too heavily on team-level measures of success.  They say Marketing is good at identifying and engaging buyers, Sales is good at working deals, and Customer Success is good at customer care...

How do you get your marketing, sales, and customer success teams to prioritize the buyer journey over their own department-level goals? Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success each have their own personality and culture. Sales is stereotypically focused on earning...

A good mutual success plan shifts the buyer-seller relationship from “closing a deal” as an isolated transaction to relationship building that connects each buyer-seller conversation around the opportunity to “continually expand value."    Broad goal exploration...

Uncommon Opinion:  your account expansion really starts in the initial closed sale. Too many go-to-market teams view closing an initial deal with a new buyer as a separate activity from expanding account value after a buyer has turned into a customer.  Sales does the...