☠️ Belal Batrawy

B2B SaaS investors... For your last handful of *seed* deals... What was MRR, rough growth trajectory, pre-money and total size of the round? Where do you feel like seed is at the moment? Either comment, or if you wanna DM me, I'll aggregate them into an average...

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Stop letting junior SDRs reach out to your C-Suites. Buyers don’t want to talk to salespeople anymore. They want trusted advisors. Domain experts.  Yet, for some reason, 99% of sales teams completely ignore this fact and let their junior SDRs reach out to C-suites — then they sit back and wonder why their outbound doesn’t work. The WHO factor is more important today than ever before. Here’s what it means moving forward: 1. Trusted Advisors vs. SDRs: Would you take medical advice from a first-year med student? Probably not. In the same vein, expecting a junior SDR to convince a C-suite executive is a flawed strategy. Buyers today want insights from those seeped in the industry, not those reading off a script. 2. The New-Age SDR: These SDRs have authority in their field and are the ultimate subject matter experts. They possess a highly relevant audience of ICP and excel in content creation and audience engagement. They understand the nuances and pains of the prospects and create value-driven conversations, not just touchpoints. 3. Team-Selling is a Necessity: If a CFO checked your website, why in the world would you let your SDR reach out? Facilitate outbound requests to your CFO and ask them to personally connect with the prospect from their profile. It’s about leveraging the right person at the right time to build trust and relevance. 4. Signal-Based Selling: Your outreach should be driven by real-time data and intent signals. Spot the triggers: website visits, content downloads, recent funding, etc. Engage with the right person, when the timing is perfect, with the right message from the right person. This isn’t about volume; it’s about precision. TAKEAWAY: In this new era, it's not about how many emails you send, but WHO is sending them and WHY. In 2024, the most successful companies will have GTM teams that look more like consulting firms than old-school sales orgs. The next-gen of successful sales orgs will be the ones that evolve beyond the old playbooks and focus on trust, relevance, and the power of human connection. The future isn’t just lean. It’s personal.

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$500, the cost of an SDR booking a meeting YET STILL, SDRs are told to follow up on all event leads? We need to focus our SDRs on booking high-quality meetings, right? Here's the solution. You know the drill, marketing wants every lead to be followed up from an event. But why? Each meeting an SDR creates costs around $500; that's the total cost, including salaries, tech stack, etc. So why waste that $500 on calling a prospect that will never buy? It's because businesses don't think about revenue enough; they think about the individual aspects that make up the funnel. This siloed process makes siloed thinking, where kingdoms are protected and not thinking about outcomes. We need to change this thinking. The solution: All teams will be measured on pipeline generated and revenue closed. Nothing else should matter to the Executive teams. Each department can have KPIs around leads, meetings, etc, but those are internal department metrics, nothing to do with the bottom line As you build your GTM motion, stop thinking about individual metrics that don't matter outside of your team. Focus on revenue-generating metrics, that you're all aligned to What do you think? Drop it in the comments #salesdevelopment #growth #sdr #GTM #sales #coldcalling 🇬🇧 living in 🇳🇱 | Get more content like this ➡️ Follow David Wilkins 🔥 hit the 🔔 for updates on new posts | Fix your outbound TODAY: Saleswise: Top of Funnel Consultancy

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SDR’s, if you’re trying to become AE’s, read this. Your strongly detailed notes that you think are being ignored. Your thousands of cold calls that don’t always convert. Your strategic emails & linkedin outreach. It all ties into become a full cycle AE. Sometimes as SDR’s, its easy to get lost in the booked meetings quotas. And forget how valuable the skills you’re training day in and day out. It’s all going to be worth it, don’t give up. The only reason I was able to surpass my quotas as an AE. Was because I really honed into those SDR skills first. I know I needed a message like this many times as an SDR. So I hope this motivates you to keep going 🙌🏽

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SDRs have no business doing manual research Respect their time Instead use a mixture of make.com, google sheets, GPT To automatically research your prospects website and LinkedIn profile Prompt the GPT as a sales prospects research assistant and make sure it’s aware of the solution you pitch Now you will have a custom field in your sheet that can be used to personalise your outreach At a glance, when on the phone your SDR will have everything they need to have a productive conversation AI in the backend 🤝 Humans in the front end

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Stop over complicating your sales process. Suspects Exit Criteria - Your ICP Prospects Exit Criteria - Those who engage. Qualifying Exit Criteria - Confirm ICP, understand their use case, and they accept 2nd meeting. They have told you who the skeptics are Discovery Exit Criteria - Understand Economic Impact of their use case(s) and they are willing to bring others into the conversation Selection Exit Criteria - You are speaking with a real decision maker. You have been short-listed. Know competitors, Start to understand approval process and players. Commercials discussion Negotiation Exit Criteria - Confirm commercials and redlines begin. Cannot move to closing unless all redlines and commercials are confirmed. Closing Exit Criteria - No more commercial conversations, Send contract for signature, know when you will get signed contract back

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Easy deliverability win for your sales team: Don't use your SEP's (SalesLoft, Outreach, etc.) default link tracking. Set up custom link tracking & use your domain. Link tracking works like this. Click link ➡️ Sends you to a tracking page ➡️ Redirects to real page If that tracking page has a mismatched domain... straight to spam Why? Spam filters think you're phishing. A spam filter doesn't know where you're redirecting towards. + If a bunch of cruddy emailers are using the same link, you're going to be viewed in that same company. TL;DR... USE THE FEATURE!!!

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PSA for your 2025 plan: it's not an ICP-focused go-to-market if you don't have a list of target accounts in your ICP. It's tempting to spend 99% of your time on *engaging* accounts and only 1% of your time on *picking* accounts in the first place. I think that's a mistake. What it leads to: -- Generic & stale account lists -- Over-indexing on industry & company size for selecting accounts (don't get me started on off-the-shelf industry classification data...) -- Missing 1st/3rd party signals (ex: hiring activity, champion movement) that would allow you to run relevant campaigns to these accounts -- Little/no back-testing on whether these accounts are predictive of where you have the best chance to win & retain -- No buy-in between marketing, product, sales, sales dev and CS -- Garbage in, garbage out My (unsolicited) advice: dedicate (more) time/resources to your target account program. Bonus points if you: 1. Treat it like a program, not a one-off 2. Align the team 3. Validate with back-testing -- 🎁 See how Mutiny got it right via Growth Unhinged: https://lnkd.in/eM6r2q5Z #marketing #icp

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Never ask these 5 Questions on a cold call. Wondering what to ask instead? Check out our newsletter for a guide on asking better questions, Link in the comments( 3300+ Sales Pros read it every Monday at 11 am) Practice asking better questions on Blue, your AI powered sales communication for instant feedback #sales #outbound #sdr

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Unlocking chatGPT as an SDR or AE has never been easier. Here’s how to do it in under 2 minutes: 1. Use voice prompts for instant GTM advice. No more waiting for your Sales Manager. Ask 75+ GTM experts anytime. With the latest updates from chatGPT, you can now talk to your AI agent and get advice from 4,000+ GTM LinkedIn posts and 300+ GTM podcasts, collected over the last 2.5 years. Here are three prompts to get you started: 1. "Tomorrow my champion has a management meeting where obviously I'm not part because it's an internal meeting. Is there any last moment async tactic which I can apply just to give this extra piece of confidence towards my champion? So I really want to make sure obviously that this project is going to get accepted by the management team and the board." 2. "Can you turn this into a blueprint so I can share with the team?" 3. "Can you give me 5 additional tips and turn them into concise email templates? Please include the link to the LinkedIn page and the Notion page." I am constantly amazed at how chatGPT boosts my GTM expertise. Since July 2022, I have archived over 4,000+ relevant GTM posts and 300+ GTM podcast episodes from inspiring GTM leaders. So much GTM knowledge is shared daily by these Subject Matter Experts. But how to bring all this information together and make it practical and consumable? This was the challenge I faced for the last 2.5 years. Then, almost two years ago, AI and chatGPT came to the market, and it started to dawn on me. What if I could connect the Notion database with relevant LinkedIn posts on strategic, tactical, and operational GTM content and link it to a private Large Language Model (LLM)? One of my key learnings over the past 24 months is that you don't have to figure it all out by yourself. I follow over 75 amazing GTM subject matter experts to fuel my brain with the latest strategic and tactical advice on GTM. I got to know Simon Orlob after a recommendation by Sören Mannschitz. After some simple LinkedIn DMing back and forth, Simon connected my Notion library to a customGPT. After months of testing, I'm happy with the latest V2 release of the GTM knowledge database. What will you ask your 24/7 AI agent today? --- PS. Comment '𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧' and test out your new AI GTM Agent, that is much more accurate with latest GTM tactics AND way faster than your Sales Manager ever can be (sorry managers 😎).

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As I keep saying Business Development isn’t entry level. It is the connective tissue between Sales & Marketing alignment. It is the connective tissue between Sales & Customer Success. To understand how far we have strayed off this path, let’s look under the hood. Prior to the over specialisation and split outs 2011, which some commenced in 2008. Business development was a senior role you had to be promoted into. You were an A player You were able to speak to C Suites at their level. How they got there was their development track coming from two years working accounts at CS You dazzled on the phone You worked accounts in site visits You knew the commercial pack inside out, the legal clause process, the financial requirements and approvals. You knew what would work in the written communication plans and what wouldn’t. You then, got a chance to be promoted to BD. You already had familiarity with your name across industry, everything just ran and worked better. It gobsmacks me micro niches and verticals that either ; Aren’t old enough to remember this Or haven’t seen it. The skillset and fundamentals that also went along with that said person, were drastically different from what we see today. What were the actions of that seasoned professional? I guarantee you this, it wasn’t ‘selling the meeting’. The components of what the role WAS is the secret sauce across industry sector. George Coudounaris The B2B Playbook and I, have spent the better part of this year creating the guardrails on HOW to navigate back every channel, via action, via department. And the result Chief Revenue School The curriculum on Marketing, Sales & Customer success. We aren’t talking in fluffy circles. We outline and show you the actions that matter and your C Suites should be lead coaching and inspiring your level 4 management teams of said departments. Backwards to go forwards. #B2B

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67% of Sales Reps don't expect to make quota in 2024. 2/3rds of sales pros are expecting to miss their targets. (According to Salesforce's recent State of Sales Report) But why? 😱 The way that people buy has changed.😱 B2B buyers are now -Doing their own research on platforms like G2 -Expecting a personalized buying experience -Inundated with automated marketing emails "59% of business buyers say reps fail to grasp the unique goals they aim to achieve. Reps aren’t doing enough to personalize their communications and show they understand their prospects’ unique perspectives." Sales is now a data driven battle and the right tools and execution are vital. Good thing we can help with that. 😉 I built Zinnia to automate all the things I did manually while at Salesforce. How are you personalizing your B2B buyers experience? Do you agree that 9% of your time is spent just doing research on prospects? Is your inbox full of spam emails? (Check out the report in comments!)

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Stop overcomplicating outbound. Let me give you a simple, 3-step framework for outbound prospecting. Step 1: Get a list of your buyers with verified phone numbers. Step 2: Call that list and talk to your buyers. Step 3: Repeat step 2. Pfew... that was hard.

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Forget using discovery calls as a lead magnet. Do this instead, and raise your conversion %: Remember - the best lead magnets are: 1. One solution to one problem. 2. A smaller part of your main offer. 3. Easily digestible/not complicated. And they're built to make the prospect want MORE. P.S. What is your ideal lead magnet type?

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Heard a founder say that they have SDRs and AEs because it is too hard to prospect and close Asked him if he had ever seen a successful full cycle seller before He said no I grew up in the world of full cycle selling Back then, it was called sales SDR role had not been created yet Many people we listen to on LinkedIn today were successful full cycle sellers ❔ How can someone hire for a role they don’t believe is possible? ❔How can someone build a strategy if they don’t understand the roles to execute it ❔How can someone onboard, train and set expectations for a role they have never seen done before? The SDR and AE role separated make logical sense on the surface One does top of funnel, one closes… simple Until your metrics are whack Deals don’t close There is a ton of noise in the system You point blame at the wrong people Frustration boils and wild decisions are made The SDR <> AE does work Not for every company, in any industry, selling any type of product There are plenty of situations where it doesn’t Have a conversation with someone who understands the right models for the right businesses Someone who has seen what works in many models Full cycle selling is not back… it never left Same as wide leg jeans and chain wallets Takeaways: 1. Get a sales audit done when you aren’t sure of the sales model 2. Hiring is tough, bring in a former operator who has done it successfully and can help with training/onboarding to ensure the people, team, process, etc are set up to succeed

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4 tips for running better discovery calls +1 bonus tip +1 one give-away [last line] Discovery isn’t just a stage in the sales process. We've all heard this. Yet, too many reps walk away without truly understanding the pain or the cost of doing nothing. Here’s how to fix that: 1. Start with curiosity. Don’t dive in with generic questions. Instead, open with something thoughtful: → “What made you take this call?” → “When did this challenge first show up for you?” Simple, yet effective. 2. Go deeper. Surface problems aren’t enough. Your job is to dig into the why. → “What’s causing this issue?” → “Who else is impacted?” → “What happens if it doesn’t get fixed?” Get them talking about the ripple effects. 3. Tie pain to metrics. No impacted metrics = no urgency. Find out what matters most to their business: → “Is this impacting win rates, pipeline coverage, or forecast accuracy?” → “What’s the cost of missing those targets?” You’re not just finding pain. You’re quantifying it. 4. Call out the cost of inaction. Paint the picture of staying as is. → “If this isn’t fixed in 6 months, what does that mean for your team?” → “How does this impact hitting revenue goals for the year?” They need to feel the pain now. Bonus tip... 5. Know when to walk away. Not every problem is urgent. If the impact isn’t big enough, qualify out. Save your time. And theirs. Great discovery isn’t about pitching. It’s about listening, digging, and connecting the dots. Get it right, and you’ll build urgency without ever needing to offer a discount. Which number could you be doing more of? ------------------------------------------------------- 🔔 Follow me for more on sales James Bissell ♻️ Repost and I'll send you a Discovery Call talk track.

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Speed to lead - really enjoyed having Mor Assouline share his wisdom on our Podcast If you’re not following Mor - you should be Full episode in the comments below #salesplayers #podcast

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Most sellers do referral prospecting backwards. Smart referral prospecting is NOT asking your warm network "Is there anyone in your network who might find value in taking a look at our Legal Time Tracking software?" You're almost always going to hear "Hm, nobody immediately comes to mind, but let me think about it." (They're not gonna think about it) Asking someone to scan through their entire mental rolodex of every single person they know isn't going to get you good referrals. You're asking for too much of the referrer.  -- Here's how I do outbound referral prospecting: 1. Start with the end in mind. Identify the prospect you want to talk to. (If you don't start with the end in mind, you're going to get a bunch of random non-ICP or out of territory intros, if you get any at all) - 2. Find mutual connections who actually know your target prospect. I like mutuals who have shared work history (you can find this in Sales Nav). If that fails, I'll look for shared membership in trade association groups or folks who have spoken on a panel/event together. - 3. Ask your shared contact for permission to make the introduction. Here's what I send: 𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌, 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩? 𝘐 𝘢𝘮 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 30 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵'𝘴 𝘊𝘭𝘶𝘣 𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 𝘢𝘵 𝘈𝘊𝘔𝘌. 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵, 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘐 𝘥𝘳𝘢𝘧𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯? - 4. If your referrer says yes, ghostwrite them a message in THEIR voice. This helps remove as much friction as possible for the person who is making the introduction. Don't worry about including pleasantries in the message you draft (Ex. "Hope you have been well since our days working together at ACME!). I've found that most people delete the pleasantries you write on their behalf so it's not a good use of your time. - 5. If someone makes a referral for you, send them a thank you note + a gift. Seems obvious but this goes a long way. - 6. If you start to find success with outbound referral prospecting, consider adding an "outbound referral blitz" to your weekly prospecting cadence. -- Anything else you'd add re: prospecting for referrals?

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