Joshua Crossman

We're thrilled to introduce Real-Time Integrations with top CRMs like Affinity.co, Attio, Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, and many more! 🎉 These integrations will transform your workflow by: 🔄 Syncing Companies and Contacts in Real-Time 🎛️ Offering Fully Customizable Settings 🧠 Automating Data Updates And, with our Push and Pull features, you can enrich your CRM data with Specter's unique growth signals and insights, making your decision-making process faster and more efficient ⚡ Read more in the first comment below 👇

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It was an awesome time in Portland representing MintPass with Melissa Leventhal at TravelCon! 🙌 Here are a few takeaways after 3 days of chatting with travel creators of all kinds ⬇ ⬇ ⬇ 1️⃣ Making it as a startup travel creator is TOUGH 😓 And why wouldn’t it be? Getting paid to travel the world is the dream. The reality is that platforms are now saturated with this content vertical, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to separate oneself such to break through the noise and grow a following. 2️⃣ The game is skewed toward those who have already made it 🏆 The travel creator landscape is quite top-heavy heavy where those who were there early to build an audience continue to do well with guaranteed brand deals. Smaller creators long for unique, alternative tools to even the playing field and aid in community growth outside of the usual social platform algo hacking. 3️⃣ The new way to get attention is to niche down 🔎 Less is more in community growth when your community is hyper-focused on a particular niche. As the landscape becomes more and more competitive, travel creators are focusing more on finding their unique content vertical to differentiate themselves. We talked some cool ones across areas of geography, wellness, budget, luxury, family, solo, and so many others. 4️⃣ Web3 doesn't matter 🤷‍♂️ This one was obvious, but I’m reminded again that our means for delivering value is arbitrary and rather the value itself is what matters. Most of those with whom we chatted were not web3 users, but they were intrigued by the value that our web3 platform can deliver. Value = Adoption. Go figure.‍ As we aim to build MintPass into a tool for travel tastemakers, it was awesome to chat with and get direct feedback from the creator persona who often has the best recs to share, but lacks the proper tools for sharing and building a brand off of that credibility. 🤝 Thank you to all who provided insights for us. ❤️ Back to work. 👷‍♂️ #traveltech #startups #creatortools‍‍‍

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We use Circle for our community at Exit Five, and Matthew Carnevale has become a Circle power user (he runs our community). They did this awesome write about how to grow a community with insights from Matt and Exit Five sprinkled in. • How to use your community as an audience growth multiplier • 5 systematic community growth strategies • Why you should treat your community like a product, and • Best practices for growing your community https://lnkd.in/e9vs32NQ

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The biggest mistake we see management teams making is using separate systems for each step in the customer lifecycle. Sales chooses a CPQ, finance chooses a billing system, engineering builds a PLG experience on Stripe - and then they try to get them working together. Nue unifies the whole process with a complete Revenue Lifecycle Platform including an award-winning CPQ on top of an integrated API-first billing engine to support both the in-app and Salesforce direct selling experiences. If you can sell it, Nue can bill it.

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I don’t think I’ve experienced more challenges in my RevOps career than trying to build GTM for 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 companies. Myself, Bernardo Alves (our head of RevOps strategy), and Kyle Himmelwright sat down to discuss all of the challenges we have faced and some tactical solutions that we've seen work. Bernardo and I started working together at Emailage, a company fully built on a consumption based pricing model where we faced our first challenges building GTM around this model. With LeanScale, we’ve also worked with multiple AI-as-a-Service companies that are typically built on consumption based pricing, and we know this is where most companies are going in the future. Kyle has had an impressive operations career and has also been an operator in multiple companies with consumption based pricing models, bringing a unique and practical perspective to the conversation. 𝐃𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐥𝐥 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 🎯 How to 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭 in a consumption based model 💰 How to set up 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐬 and quotas 👷‍♂️ How to 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 your sales and CS teams 📊 How to articulate your “𝐀𝐑𝐑” - the metric most companies consider their north star ⚙️ 𝐓𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 you can use to help make the process easier

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Why is top-line growth the holy grail for SaaS success? Because it implies everything else is functioning well: product/market fit, retention, customer acquisition. Plus, it drives the highest equity value. And yet, it’s not the only important metric:

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For AEC focused startups, think about GTM this way. For scale and keeping CAC metrics in line. Bottom Up. PLG for PLG : Product Led Growth for Project Led Growth - User focused marketing - frictionless on boarding - No Sales Function (it’s too expensive) Enterprise: Leverage Project based success to sell to the enterprise. - High Level Solution Sales - Proven ROI Metrics - Make the CFO your champion - Have a well thought out - ABM strategies work well here. Enterprise Solution vs Discounted offering for bulk purchase. Spec to Check: Build generic specifications for your product and work with A/E firms to get them placed. This is for Construction Tech Specific. Owner Influence - Everyone’s ultimate customer. - Brand awareness - Thought Leadership - Building Type Specifc Marketing. We have an entire playbook on this type of stuff. Also what we teach in our stage agnostic incubator.

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So your company has decided to add a partnerships department (*sigh*) ✅ Hires one partner person ✅ Shares data to get partner overlaps ✅ Assigns partner person a quarterly revenue number ❌ Does not create cross functional partnership strategy ❌ Does not assign partner focused KPIs to the sales org ❌ Does not engage in a partner enablement strategy 🤯 Cannot understand how partner referrals aren’t just rolling in the door. Partnerships is a strategy, not a department. Having a solid partnership strategy that envelops the entire GTM process is the quickest way to partnership success. And it’s still a long game. Best be getting started.

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What makes a perfect taco, and how would we scale that? Here at Fixify we think a lot about how to scale with quality and care. Join me for the third installment of this taco-based exploration of operations and optimization.

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Force and Friction Podcast is back with a new episode featuring 🚁Roee Hartuv from Winning by Design Roee dives into a game-changing concept for SaaS founders: Revenue Architecture. Did you know 60-80% of revenue often comes from existing customers? Roee breaks down why investing in post-sale teams can deliver compounding value over five years. If you're serious about maximizing retention and expansion, you won't want to miss this conversation. Episode goes live Tuesday 12/03/2024 #ForceAndFrictionPodcast #RevOpsLife #GTM #Bowtie #RevenueArchitecture

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So excited to unveil Nimble's new Email Sequences—designed to serve every team, not just sales. This new tool automates personalized emails, driven by recipient actions or set schedules, boosting efficiency across the board. 🙌🏻 Key Benefits Include: 🔹 Efficient Communication: Automated emails ensure timely interactions with the right leads, customers, and clients. 🔹 Versatile Use: Ideal for PR, marketing, sales, customer support and more! 🔹 Boosted Productivity: Frees up teams for strategic work by automating email sends. 🔗 Discover more about how Email Sequences can transform your business communications: https://lnkd.in/ejCfkqCx #CRM #EmailTips #EmailSequences #Outreach #Email

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Want to talk GTM? Join us on October 2nd at Gasworks Brewing for another round of Seattle Founders GTM. #founders #entrepreneurs #startups #gtm Sign up with the link below.

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Building WIN-WIN tech partnerships - how do we do it? 📌 Technical partnerships facilitate our growth Let's break it down how do we find them: Networking is our main strategy → finding connections via events or common communities. We prioritize quality over quantity, currently partnering with 10+ companies, including Triple Whale, Northbeam, Videowise, Social Snowball ☃️, Motion (Creative Analytics), Foreplay.co, Superfiliate, AdBeacon, and FERMÀT. Our selection criteria: 1️⃣ Our ICP overlap. 2️⃣ Our services complement each other. 3️⃣ We have good relationships with the founders/partnership team. 4️⃣ They committed to win-win relationships. 🔗 It’s all about finding mutual value & fostering relationships that help grow together. This is how we invest in and find the right tech partners. Let's connect and explore how we can create value together! 🚀

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Still managing sales outreach manually for your B2B business? Relying on a VA or manual research for prospecting? It’s nearly 2025 – let’s automate and work smarter, not harder. Here’s a tech stack that’ll make your outreach faster, smarter, and more targeted. 🔳 Data Sources - Find Your Prospects ◽ Gather high-quality prospect data from reliable databases, real-time intent signals, and smart data scraping tools. ◽ Suggested tools: • Apollo.io | LinkedIn Sales Navigator | Clay | Ocean.io • RB2B | Unify | ZoomInfo | Google Alerts | Cognism • Apify | Instant Data Scraper | PhantomBuster | ScrapeStorm EN 🔳 Data Enrichment - Get to Know Them Better ◽ Enhance your prospect list with additional data and insights to make your outreach more relevant. ◽ Suggested tools: • Clay | Unify | FullEnrich 🔳 Outreach - Automate Campaigns ◽ Scale your email and LinkedIn outreach efforts with tools that streamline your messaging. ◽ Suggested tools: • Instantly.ai | Smartlead | Woodpecker.co • lemlist | HeyReach 🔳 Sales Assistants - Pipeline Management ◽ Stay organized, track deals, and maintain control over your sales process. ◽ Suggested tools: • Attention | Pipedrive | HubSpot | Loom | Qwilr Stop doing everything manually – leverage these tools to save time, increase productivity, and get better results. 🚀 Want to build a customized system for your sales team? DMs are open!

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When done right, partnerships can be the most efficient GTM motion. One key is getting buy-in from your CRO and other C-suite leaders. Here's some advice on how to make that happen!

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Is Your SaaS Business Leaving Money on the Table by Ignoring Rate Limits? When scaling your service, rate limits aren’t just an afterthought—they’re a must. Too many businesses miss this step early on, and it costs them. Why should you care? Without rate limits, you’re paying for extra calls, whether they’re to internal systems or external APIs. Each unchecked call eats into your bottom line. Plus, storing frequently fetched data in a table can cut redundant calls and save time, budget, and server load. stories of fractional CTO. #SaaS #TechStrategy #RateLimits #CostEfficiency

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🔥 What the top operators discussed in the Operators Guild's open Q&A forum between July 28 and August 2… 💡 Messaging / Positioning Workshop Facilitators – Seeking recommendations for experts in developing enterprise SaaS brand messaging for internal workshops. 📊 Fractional Customer Success Leader – Looking for someone experienced in building CS programs and teams, or recommendations for the same. 💰 Product Launch Readiness – Tips and templates for setting product launches involving ops teams up for success, including milestones, timelines, feedback loops, and roles. 🔍 Debt Collection Agencies – Recommendations for good collection agencies in the US for uncollectible invoices. 🖥 Fractional CFO for Semiconductor Business – Searching for someone with significant experience working in the semiconductor industry. For these and many other hot takes and goodness —> come check out Operators Guild. 🚀 #Finance #Operations #TechLeadership #OGCommunity

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I advise a few early stage GTM execs at tech companies, and probably the most common problem is this (and this isn't just about tech, this applies broadly): Focus. Here's an example of how it goes: Them: We've got SMB customers but enterprise aspirations. Me: Is the product built for the enterprise? Them: Recently, yes. Me: Do you have any enterprise customers? Them: Yes, 20. Me: Are they paying for it? Them: Yes, we're getting upwards of 7 figure deals on 3 year terms. Me: That says a lot-- you've got a repeatable sales motion. Why are you still selling to SMBs? Them: We get a lot of leads like that, and it's hard to say no to a quick close. Me: How much work does it take to service those SMBs? Them: A TON. They have no process for adoption or even people to use it. Plus, there's no expansion upside. Me: What type of company is the CEO telling the board she's trying to build? Them: An enterprise SaaS company-- and that's what the sole focus of the product team is. Me: Why are you not focusing exclusively on selling to the enterprise customer? Do you even really want the SMB customer? Them: Good question. Me: If you focused on that, wouldn't you also be more capital efficient? Would it increase your sales productivity? And let's not forget that sneaky cost to service the customer that's happening with SMBs. You might be actually losing money on them. Them: I think we need to focus or GTM effort. End scene. For my company, I'm focusing on one grape variety (Sauvignon Blanc, or Sauvy B as some cool kids say). You can buy it directly from our website, or it'll be available in very limited geographic locations (Cape Cod, Islands, the Hamptons). All about the focus. #gtmadvice #marketing #b2b #wine

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Who owns your end to end GTM system? What about the Bowtie data model? This was a key question during our two-day Revenue Architecture Summit in Santa Cruz. Marketing owns awareness. BDRs or equivalent own education. Sales owns selection. Finance oversees the mutual commit/contracting. Professional services do onboarding. CS helps with retention. Account managers focus on expansion. So do we even need somebody to own and optimize the overall #bowtie process and data model? YES! "But my marketing is great at increasing leads and sales is increasing close rates, so why worry about an overall owner?", you might say. What if the new leads are low quality and sales is rushing through the sales cycle, ultimately yielding high onboarding and ongoing churn? Whether you like it or not, revenue production is a closed loop system. Something you do on the left side of the bowtie impacts the right side and the other way around. Best to assign an unbiased data owner who does that personally have anything to gain by making the data tell any particular story. The most likely owner for the overall system, or at least for the overall data model, lives in operations or finance. We see new titles around GTM Strategy and Operations. We also see RevOps moving from CRO to COO or CFO. So hence my question: In your company, who owns the end-to-end revenue production system? Who owns data definitions and brings together your teams to decide on next actions to improve revenue production based on the data? #revenuearchitecture #bowtie #revops Photo courtesy Jill Guardia (she/her)

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