Kris Buerkle

Tired of losing hard-earned deals? Solve for Revenue Leak. In Clari’s 2024 Revenue Leak Report, RevOps leaders said leak happens at every stage of the funnel. - Creating: Poor and slow upsell pipeline tracking - Converting: Unsure where pipeline is dropping off - Closing: Slipped deals Don’t let Revenue Leak drag down another quarter – or another year. Download the Revenue Leak Report for more: https://lnkd.in/g9gnGrdz  

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🤯 “Ramping up SDRs, AEs and CS people  takes us no less than 6 months.” 💣 🙈 This is what I heard on a recent demo from  a CRO of a rapidly scaling tech business. 📈 Time to efficiency is a struggle Heads of Sales Enablement and Customer Success are going through across their commercially-driven teams… 📖 At the moment, they expect internal  sales and CS decks, call recordings,  business pitches, etc. should do the job. 🙄 But it doesn’t! 🗓️ They're wasting too much time for people to start performing, closing deals, effectively onboarding customers, reducing churn & upselling… ❌ Sometimes, they still don’t perform... And then guess what? Off leaders go through to recruiting mode again starting from ground 0. 🎯 Hence the need for action-based learning.  Not just passively reading through PDFs  and listening to call recordings. 👨‍💻 Below are some use cases we see our customers here at UJJI AI ✨ leveraging our tech for: 🔸 Business-specific lead gen and outbound 🔸 Pitching quick and easy over the phone 🔸 Delivering demos and answering queries 🔸 Effectively onboarding new customers 🔸 Efficiently implementing product features 🔸 Practising great customer support 🔸 Guiding customers to upselling 🚀 Ultimately, growing tech businesses comes down to predictable new business development, high customer retention and low churn. 💬 So, DM me if you want to see examples  of AI-powered. easy to build and consume knowledge equipping experiences. 👇 Anything to add to this, Sales and CS leaders? Gautam Rishi Rohan Dickinson George Heron Russell Mitchell Callum Hartley Jon Teale James Dixon Seán Colfer Caroline L. Guy Rubin Jake Carter David Muscat Arun Raveendran Steve Eveleigh Ayo Kukoyi,

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The results are in! Gong has been named a leader in the new report, The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Orchestration Platforms, Q3 2024. In this report, Forrester analyzed and scored 12 top vendors in the market. Gong received the highest scores possible for more criteria than any other vendor, including:   ⭐ Innovation ⭐ AI and automation differentiators ⭐ Range of analytics insights ⭐ Platform UX and integration “Gong’s AI reveals unique buyer and seller insights to improve deal outcomes. One of the few companies founded with AI at its core, Gong has used its nine-year AI résumé to create transformative insights for revenue organization." Check out the full report here: https://lnkd.in/dzmzU62Y

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Churn rates in SaaS are often taken for granted. A 5% churn rate? Sounds manageable until you unpack the numbers. If you're losing customers at that rate every month, you're left with less than half of your original users by the end of the year. The average B2B churn rate might be lower due to the methodical decision-making process, but there's no getting around the fact that B2C companies are more susceptible to quicker exits. Voluntary churn is where the real battle lies, as buyers pull the trigger on cancellations for reasons ranging from budget cuts to outright dissatisfaction. So, what's the play? You need to visualize your churn as a strategic battleground. Whether it's by tightening your onboarding processes, identifying churn indicators early, or even tailoring your cancellation offers, the aim is simple: keep the customers you’ve worked hard to acquire. Churn isn’t just a metric—it's a mindset. Let's debate: Is it smarter to accept a higher churn as a given in a rapidly changing market, or is the focus on reducing churn at all costs a more sustainable strategy? Keep it civil, folks. https://lnkd.in/ehMpvWed

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The job of your sales enablement tech isn't to drive product usage, give you more data, help you pass quizzes or beat bots. The job is to make you more money, by making your reps better. If you improve what your team says and how they say it, you'll generate more leads, close more deals, and boost retention rates. That's why 90% of GTM orgs invest in sales enablement tech. The upside of solving the real issue is huge. YET 90% of the things you teach reps never get used in front of clients. Your tech stack is failing you, and they're probably putting the blame on you rather than looking at themselves. Regardless of what tools you use, your reps don't practice, don't receive enough feedback and you likely have no idea if A) taught skills get used with actual clients and B) if it impacts your actual business. This is why we have struggled with how to describe what we're doing. Because AI Roleplay, Conversational Intelligence, Feedback Automation and even Learning Management Systems just don't cut it when it comes to doing those things. Our entire point of view is that you need 3 things. Practice, Feedback and Measurement. Think of it like an Enablement Trinity. If you solve for that, you unlock the full potential of every client interaction. Everybody wins. The job-to-be-done is not to use a product. The job-to-be-done is to actually adopt the things you're taught. We are creating the world's first Training Adoption Platform.

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Ashi from Gong is fast (😮‍💨10k) But not as fast as Gong Engage users when they use Lavender. Access to your Gong calls in our personalization assistant ✅ Access to our coach & "Ashi fast" personalization in Gong ✅ Better 🤝 Faster 3.0 (and so much more) coming soon

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"AI" on its own is just a buzzword and is already a commodity in its most basic form. What's more relevant are "Autonomous Applications" - Apps that leverage AI to do the contextual "busy" work for specific jobs with no user intervention - presenting the most significant update in Autonomous Applications for Go-To-Market to date. The day when sales teams spend 0% of their day in the CRM is (nearly) here.

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Sales folks especially SDRs and AEs I will tell you a hack about how to achieve more in less time ↓ "Start blocking your calendar thoughtfully and strategically every single day" Working out of whims & fancies and adhocism will not get you the desired result you aspire to achieve. You need to have a plan for your day even before starting the day. Every time you block your calendar make sure you block it for a single activity and you define what output you want to achieve out of this activity. Have a time block for at least Prospecting, Identifying new accounts, and Follow-ups on a daily basis, the rest you can block based on your roles and KRAs. Remember: "You cannot control time but you can surely control how you want to spend the time"

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The most underrated role on Go-To-Market teams: Revenue Operations A great Rev Ops leader gives your revenue team leverage. I waited too long to hire for this role, instead choosing to do the job off the side of my desk. I was being lazy. I didn’t fully understand what “sales operations” or “revenue operations” meant. I hadn’t taken the time to sit down and write out the job description. But once I found the right person, it was like the world opened before my eyes. Our Rev Ops leader was my partner in running the revenue team. They were involved at the strategic level and at the tactical level. They knew where all the bodies were buried. So what does Rev Ops do? I’ll do my best to list some of the key responsibilities: - build the revenue model - weekly sales forecast - select, implement, and maintain the tech stack (CRM, sales engagement tools, etc) - design sales compensation plan - run the sales compensation report monthly - own the TAM data in the CRM (super important!!) - analyze sales team performance - manage lead distribution The list goes on. If you have 3 or more sales people on your team and you are planning to scale, hire a Rev ops leader ASAP. Who is your favorite Rev ops leader? Tag them!

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A simple chart can tell an important story and provide actionable insights. When we launch new sales messaging, we use Gong's slide trackers and smart trackers to monitor adoption and usage of the new messaging by our sales team. Looking at the first few weeks on this chart, we see healthy adoption pick up and peak at 40%. That's actually pretty good for most sales initiatives. It tells us sales managers are encouraging their teams to use the new deck and that salespeople are finding it helpful. But then something happened: in early June, adoption declined. We had no way of knowing this if we weren't tracking it using Gong Knowing that adoption was declining immediately triggered the following actions: * We reviewed who used the deck in May and stopped using it in June, so we could ask for their feedback: was something not working for them? Wasn't it landing well with buyers? * We could schedule a refresh training session for new reps who missed the first enablement session and use that opportunity to showcase some of the reps already using the new deck well. How are you managing adoption and usage of your sales materials?

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A few weeks ago, I talked to Sarah Brazier – 4x president club winner at Gong. Here is her 4 step playbook for turning existing fans into pipeline and accelerants in active deals: 1) Understand the contact’s previous role – an end user, previous economic buyer, influencer, or person responsible for adoption post-sale influences your strategy 2) Use a specific playbook based on their experience with the goal of sparking a dialogue – “below the power line play” is great for understanding an account, building account maps, and forming unique POVs 3) Approach advocates as part of your overall account strategy – ex users and buyers are ONE PART of the account plan - you should still prospect the exact right titles, work exec connections, and use relevant offers (events, webinars, content) 4) Think further than top of funnel – Sarah uses advocates to gain momentum in POCs, get direct feedback, and and tie to big company-wide priorities to accelerate deals Watching her chop it up with Peter Zendt – a successful rep at Clari – about the STRATEGY behind making an advocate-based strategy successful was a masterclass. It’s clear these two people have thought deeply about this topic, speak from experience, and are still in the trenches practicing what they preach. Recording here: https://lnkd.in/e3XsctZ4 PS: I see buyers continuing to put less weight into 3rd party review sites and more on their network, communities, and hearing directly from customers. Dimmo 🦖 helps you do just that – without engaging in a premature sales cycle. Big shoutout to the Dimmo team.

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Many sales organizations spend days or weeks on account prioritization and territory planning exercises. There's got to be a better way... If you're heading to Gartner CSO next week, don't miss Ami Arad's presentation on May 21 at 2:05pm! He'll contrast the traditional ways sellers prioritize their accounts and the new way made possible through buyer intent and predictive models. Get the details here: https://okt.to/GhFXdQ

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SDRs can be taught to be AEs SDRs can be taught to be CSMs [shoutout to Eric Partaker for the post inspo] Also... SDRs can be taught to be Managers SDRs can be taught to be Marketeers SDRs can be taught to do almost any role Fact: It's better to hire someone who is 60% ready with the right behaviours. Than 100% ready with the wrong ones. SDRs deserve a chance. Do you agree? PS. Share ♻️ with others in your network. And follow Chris Ritson for more sales content like this.

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As CS is getting increasingly aligned with the revenue function, this conversation is happening a lot... CRO: "I just took over customer success, can someone explain to me what our CSMs do?" VP CS: "We make sure that our customers are getting value from the product..." CRO: "OK, what does that mean?" VP CS: "We answer all of their questions and log support cases." CRO: "Isn't that support?" VP CS: "Well no, because we have QBRs" CRO: "OK, well what do we talk about in the QBRs?" VP CS: "All the tickets we fixed and the features that we rolled out" CRO: "Ok, what other things do our CSMs do?" VP CS: "We help with implementations and continuous improvement!" CRO: "Isn't that professional services?" VP CS: "Well we read an article that says that we shouldn't charge for services, so our CSMs just do it." CRO: " 🤯 " VP CS: " 🤯 "

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I was asked what is the fasted way to win new business for sales - get warm introductions in your target accounts. Here are 7 steps that I think will help you get radically more pipeline fast:🔥📈 Inboxes are overflowing, cold outreach is losing its punch. Warm introductions are the key to breaking through the noise and accelerating your sales pipeline. 1. Define Target Accounts 🎯 Zero in on accounts that align with your ideal customer profile. Know their challenges, and understand how your solution uniquely solves them. Focus on a subset you’re confident about – don’t let analysis paralysis slow you down. Key: Don’t get stuck on the first step; just go for it! 2. Identify Connectors in Your Network 🕸️ Expand your network (or automate this with platforms like https://lnkd.in/e-XsFVmR) to match up with contacts who have trusted relationships with key players in your target accounts. Look for people with deep industry and solution experience- they’ll help boost your credibility.  3. Engage with Value First 💬 When requesting an intro, lead with value. Show why the intro matters to their connection and how it benefits them. Remember, your Trusted Advisor isn’t your sales rep – they’re a facilitator of value for their network. Offer insights, unique perspectives, and collaborate in a knowledge exchange. This will set you apart as more than “just another sales rep.” 4. Personalize Your Outreach to the New Contact 🧑‍💼 After a warm into, skip the canned pitch. Reference your mutual connection, then tailor your message to your target accounts needs. Tap into your advisor’s inside knowledge on what truly matters, from active projects to key priorities. This approach makes you relevant, aware, and genuinely interesting. 5. Nurture the Relationship, Not Just the Opportunity 🤝 Warm intros open doors, but it’s the relationships that close deals. Focus on building trust, actively listening, and providing value. Even if there’s no immediate sale. 6. Don’t Forget Your Sales Process 🚀 Whether it’s Solution Selling, MEDDICC, or MEDDPICC, stick to your process to stay on track. Use your advisor’s insights to set you apart, but also to qualify out quickly – if it’s not a fit, pivot to protect your credibility and the trust of your connection. 7. Reward Your Trusted Advisor 🏆 Recognize your advisor’s role in your success! A thoughtful gesture, creative reward, or a few percentage points on the deal can make a significant impact. It shows appreciation, strengthens the partnership, and sets the stage for future collaboration. Warm introductions are your ticket to stronger connections, faster cycles, and higher close rates. Are you tapping into them? 🔑 And if you want to make this easy, check out https://lnkd.in/e-XsFVmR – the first platform designed to automate and scale your ability to find and leverage warm introductions into all of your target accounts. 🔗 #SalesTips #Sales #SDR #SalesPipeline #WarmIntroductions #ForceEquals

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Ways your RevOps team should be leveraging AI: ✅ 1) Finding similar clients This is a big challenge in many larger orgs. You're looking for a few companies to name-drop in cold outreach or to weave into your sales deck. You end up messaging half a dozen people to find companies of a similar size, industry, etc. RevOps can use AI to automatically populate 3 similar companies in a Salesforce account field. - Similar employee count - Similar department size (if applicable) - Similar industry - Similar product / use case etc. ✅ 2) Customer success stories We all want reps to use more stories in their outreach and during the sales process. But this is really hard if you weren't the rep who closed the deal. So enablement/ops ends up creating a spreadsheet for everyone to use. It gets messy. RevOps should use AI to automatically populate customer success stories to a Salesforce account field. - The problem - The approach - The result - Name + role + testimonial ✅ 3) Measuring adherence and behavior change Conversational intelligence tools are doing a decent amount of this with multi-threading in deals, etc. But the problem is that most sales leaders spend little time on those platforms. They spend more time on Salesforce reports. RevOps can use AI or a conversational intelligence tool to append adherence metrics to in-flight deals like: - # of active stakeholders (buyer and seller side) - Adherence to specific techniques or language - Follow up time of emails after calls - Use of customer stories etc The possibilities are endless with this one. Then run a report on everything you want to see. Kyle Norton talked about this quite a bit in his recent podcast episode with Mark Kosoglow. ✅ 4) Contact & Account data Reps spend hours hunting for emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, etc. Reps may need to see Crunchbase profiles, investor pages, etc as well. RevOps can use AI to automatically append most of this data to contacts and accounts in Salesforce. ~~~ This list is just the tip of the iceberg. Where do you see RevOps using AI to improve rep efficiency? Drop a comment below and let me know.

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Top Sellers aren't begging for specific features to beat competitors Or more training... what do they think will help drive more revenue?? 👀 See the report below for the real data 👀 Met with killer revenue leaders at Gong's annual conference last week and read their report on the "State of Sales Productivity" Similar to what we saw re: GTM Execution being a top priority for Founders / CEOs, this report shed light on top challenges impacting reps and hindering productivity... And it resonated. The least motivating thing when I was a seller? Wasting time OFF THE FIELD updating fields + busywork that didn't help my customers / prospects. I've yet to meet a successful seller who'd rather focus on internal tasks vs spending time moving deals forward... No surprised the top 3 areas that negatively impact rep productivity: 61% - Admin Tasks 47% - Inneficient processes 37% - Time management *Spending time on non-selling activities is de-motivating *BS internal processes slows down deals *Time is the most valuable asset to sellers / Opps (time does kill all deals) From spending time obsessed with making customers successful and being at the top of the leaderboard, I can tell you firsthand most GTM tools don't help with what frustrates the field the most. And is why I felt passionate enough to quit an amazing gig at Stripe to build Accord. To win in 2024's market, every moment counts. Revenue leaders can’t expect their team to be hit targets if they are not setting them up for success. Take the admin work out of it, and have fields populated automatically IN the flow of work. Build a repeatable playbook that is foolproof and can help leaders identify slipped deals, before they slip Make sure you team isn’t spinning their wheels on pipeline or activities that don’t move the needle. Are you making sure your team is motivated, focused on their customers, and setting them up for success going into the final weeks of the year and into 2025?? 📈

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Too many sales leaders are obsessed with scaling: - More calls - More leads - More emails - More meetings - More opportunities Without nailing: - ICP - Discovery - Messaging - Buyer journey - Value proposition Better to 2x what works than to 10x what doesn’t.

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My initial focus when joining LaunchDarkly was turning around our outbound motion. In my first full quarter, we’ve seen a 170%+ increase in outbound pipeline generated. Today I’m highlighting our PG leader, Marissa Mengert, and sharing what’s working for her: 1) Targeted Prospecting It starts with deep research - crafting a clear hypothesis on how a specific organization can benefit from our solution. Understanding buyer personas and aligning their needs with what we offer is key. 2) Balancing Personalized Outreach Personalization goes beyond surface-level changes. She tailors her messaging to top prospects, focusing on their pain points and what really matters in their day-to-day. Whether it’s email, phone, or social media, she ensures each touchpoint is relevant and specific. 3) Consistent Follow-Up Persistence is non-negotiable. It often takes 3-8 touches to get a response, but that’s where the magic happens. Consistent, thoughtful follow-ups keep you in the game. 4) Clear (and Brief) Value Proposition She keeps her value proposition to three sentences: what we offer, the problem we solve, and proof that we deliver. 5) Multi-Channel Engagement Utilizing various channels (email, calls, social media) not only increases response rates but also meets prospects on the platforms they prefer and builds familiarity over time. 6) Diligent Preparation She starts every week with a template that outlines which current customers and prospects she’ll be reaching out to, with tailored messaging ready to go. She also makes sure to log off every Friday knowing exactly who she is outbounding to the following week. I’ll leave you with her mindset: “The 50th "no" in a row can be tough, but with a well-prepared plan, it’s easy to stay focused. Success in sales is about execution - and the best way to execute is to prepare diligently, every single time.” Thank you for sharing your advice with us, Marissa! We are so lucky to have you on the team.

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