Insights

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...

Too often, go-to-market teams focus account expansion efforts on “selling into the white space” of the product capabilities that their customer has not yet purchased.  In other words, they view the area of open opportunity in terms of their own product.   White space...

To do prospecting right, you must build a prospecting narrative that connects landing the first deal to account expansion. “Land with your endgame in mind” is how Ro Saccone, Chief Marketing Officer at Planet, put it in a recent call I had with her. “We try to build...

Buyers tune out and lose interest when they hear a generic product discussion that is not aligned to their goal and priorities.   On the other hand, a product presentation can delight and engage buyers when it shows we listened and understood their goals. Rachael...

A product pitch is the single fastest way to alienate a buyer and kill deal momentum. Andy Raskin in a great post on The Shift In How CEOs Communicate Strategy shows how business strategy has shifted from “It’s About Us” to “It’s About You." “It’s About Us” is our...

One of the biggest gaps in buyer discovery is getting a buyer to co-own and co-develop the payoff that would get them really excited about working with a new vendor.   When they identify a specific desired gain, a buyer is acknowledging value and building a vision of...

The strongest growth trajectory comes not from marketing or sales but from customer success. Mark Roberge, HubSpot’s CRO during the company's ride from $0 to $100M, put it this way: “We started with our ideal customer outcome in mind." In a recent conversation, Mark...

There is nothing that will grab a buyer’s attention quicker than telling them that you have been successful with a customer who is just like them.   However, for most companies, customer wins are captured in case studies that sit on a company website or live in highly...

The absolute #1 question in any buyer's hierarchy of trust is this:  Has this company had success working with my peers? In a recent call with a hospital in the Northeast, I heard Randi-Sue Deckard at BESLER nail the call opening with this simple line:  “We are...

Good discovery takes the guesswork out of sales and customer success work.  It lets a new buyer tell us exactly why they are talking to us and what might motivate a purchase.  It lets an existing customer tell us what could lead to an account expansion.  The best...

The heart of an authentic buyer journey lies in guided buyer discovery. The reality, however, is that good buyer discovery is a broken skill. Sales conversations should be about conducting GREAT buyer discovery. Ask the right questions, in the right order and you will...

CEOs and revenue leaders often ask me “What is the most important thing I can do to drive sales revenue more consistently?”  My response is always the same: train your sales team to start and end every sales conversation on buyer goals and payoffs.  If you stop...

The most important part of any sales meeting is the last ten minutes.  Many sales meetings overload on product discussions or demos and then end abruptly with “Good meeting, thanks for your time, I will email you next week to follow-up.”  The best sales meetings, in...

Customer Success, like Customer Service, sits in the post-sale phase of the buyer journey, but the two teams engage customers in very different ways.   Some companies make the mistake of blurring the lines of responsibility between Customer Service and Customer...

While they are all revenue-oriented teams, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success each have their own personality and culture.  Sales is stereotypically “coin-operated,” focused on putting points on the board and earning more incentive comp.  Marketing is filled with...

The current B2B selling environment is information rich, but buying insight poor.  Potential buyers have access to almost unlimited amounts of information about vendors and their competitors from websites, peer review sites, and social media sites.  More information,...

In the current noisy, competitive market environment with very busy buyers, sales teams need to shift from a focus on individual sales transactions to a focus on continuously deepening and expanding value across a series of connected conversations.  The best tool to...

Content marketing, in all its many forms, plays a critical role these days in supporting purchasing decisions. However, despite increasing volumes of content being produced for use in sales, marketing and customer success, the great majority of content is missing the...

CEOs and revenue leaders often ask me “What is the most important thing I can do to drive sales revenue more consistently?”  My response is always the same:  “Train your sales team to start and end every sales conversation on buyer goals and payoffs.”  If you anchor...

People in sales and business know instinctively that trust is key to selling.  LinkedIn’s annual State of Sales report reinforces this with its survey data, calling the need for building trust building skills “an enduring trend.” In the 2018 report 49% of sales...

In the fall of 2019, I was on a video call with Christina Yu, Mursion's Vice President of Marketing, strategizing on how the marketing team could do more to support the company’s rapid sales growth.   In 2015 Mursion had started the market for immersive, virtual...

When AdmitHub was emerging as the premiere AI-based conversational messaging platform to help colleges with new student enrollments and higher student retention rates, most of its new prospect leads were inbound from director-level or manager-level staff in admissions...

The current selling environment is complex.  As Gartner has shown there are often 7+ buyers in the B2B sales process and vendors participate in less than 20% of the entire buying process. All of this means less opportunity for quality conversation and more potential...

Sellers do not close deals, buyers close deals.  The role of the seller is to guide the buyer to a close with the right questions - questions that surface a prospects’ pain and turn them into potential value.  This sales truth was impeccably documented1 by Neil...

The majority of sales meetings miss the mark for both the buyer and seller.   A few years back Forrester did research showing that 80% of executives do not find meetings with sales representatives valuable. Recent research from Xant (formerly InsideSales) on more than...

Sales teams make two big mistakes in their prospecting work.  First, in their messaging they rely too heavily on product pitching, content and attention grabbers that lead to an information blur and cause prospects to check out.   Second, in their outreach approach,...

Most sales and marketing teams spend too much time leading with their product and product functionality. Product pitching typically causes buyer disengagement. A few years back Forrester found that 80% of executives believe meetings with sellers are a waste of time...

​Deal Drift Most mid-stage deals are poorly qualified . Recent research from Xant (formerly InsideSales.com) on more than a quarter million sales deals shows that only 28% of closed deals are predicted accurately 90 days out, and the actual close amounts differ by 31%...

Cold Calling is Dead When the Internet, then email, then social media came along to transform the way people and businesses communicate, the “death of the sales representative” was widely and broadly predicted. Even Neil Rackham, creator of SPIN Selling asserted in...