Lily McClaskey

Multi-threading... A skill that's fast becoming the most critical in a sales reps arsenal. Why? 🤔 The market is tough at the moment. 🤔 Buyers are more budget conscious. 🤔 CFOs are asking teams to reduce spend and cut back on investment. 🤔 Prospects that once had buying power and sign off capability now have to get approval from C-Suite. It sounds like an uphill battle 🏃‍♂️‍➡️⛰️ but the truth is, multi-threading is not as daunting as you might think. ⭐️ Here's some tips that have worked well for me in the last 6 months ⭐️ 🗺 Map out your accounts. Org charts are critical for multi-threading. You need to understand who your prospects are, who they report to, and who holds decision making power. Tip - LinkedIn SalesNav let's you build drag and drop org charts! 🗣️ Check with your your champion. Confirm your org chart is correct. Ask them what the process is for bringing on a new vendor. If they don't know, 🆘 they are not a true champion. 📧 Share content early. Begin introducing yourself to key stakeholders quickly. Tip - Connect on LinkedIn with a short and sweet connection request, something like "Wanted to put a face to a name following some great conversations I've been having with (champion name) re (challenge). I'll send over some content via email shortly. I look forward to hearing your thoughts." 🎺 Make sure your content is personalised, engaging, and stands out. TOP TIP - Using a tool like trumpet 🎺 (digital sales room) is a sure fire way to encourage stakeholder engagement. Upload clear and concise value props, how you can solve their businesses challenges, client case studies and more. Ask these contacts to bookmark the page as you will regular update it with content as the deal progresses. And, track their engagement, so you can meet them in the moment. So far, my prospects have been LOVING it! 📞 Pick up the phone. Once you've connected on LinkedIn and sent content, call prospects to ensure that they have seen it. Ask what questions they have and tell them about next steps. By doing the above, when it comes to negotiation these stakeholders will be informed and aware of the entire process to date, and you and your product will be top of mind 🧠 Tenured AE's in my network (I know there are a lot of you), what do you do to successfully multi-thread? P.S. You can guess what I'll be doing in the office today :😉 #multithreading #sales #digitalsalesrooms #dsr #aestrategies

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💜 My Commercial Sales team for Gong's Utah hub is fully staffed 💜 When I started my journey with Gong In late March, I NEVER imagined that recruiting a team from scratch would be such a learning experience & challenge. 4 months, 400+ candidates, HUNDREDS of LinkedIn messages and an average of 20-30 hours/week in candidate screens, interviews and mock discoveries ... I have 6 AE's in seat. 🎉 If you are doing the math, I am at a 1.5% offer rate 📉 For context, Harvard University's acceptance rate for the class of 2028 was 3.59% 🎓 That means, its harder to get on as a Commercial Sales AE at Gong then it is to get into Harvard. 😜 What did I learn to share with you other hiring Sales Managers??? 🐺 You find the best talent out bounding. Top sellers aren't out applying for jobs as much as mid to bottom talent. Go hunting! 📜 Know your ICP (Ideal candidate profile). How much experience should they have? What companies are they working for (or NOT)? What kind of career progression should they already have in the last 3 years? 🤑 ❓ Treat candidates like you would a prospect and run discovery! What are their long term goals? What is their company or leader doing now to get them there? Find pain that you can solve for! 📊 Know the market & businesses you are pulling from, YOU need to be the expert. RepVue & Glassdoor are great resources to understand why reps might not be happy! You can easily understand attainment, comp and rep pain with those resources. 💜 Make it personal: People will see through you as a leader if you don't care. People don't leave jobs as top performers to go somewhere to "figure it out". They follow people they can believe in, learn from, someone who has a vision and passion. Make sure you have your own vision/mission statement! Final Thought: I have found most people are willing to leave a good job as a top seller if they don't have 1 of 2 things: 1. Career progression/upward mobility 2. Coaching and development Big surprise - they are weighted equally!!! If someone isn't getting developed as a seller and you can offer them coaching and feedback, they will leave! Hope this helps with anyone out there growing a sales team! 💰

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As an AE is a high win rate good? Not always. In Q1 my win rate from demo at Nooks was 55%, But my win rate was hurting me Let me explain... -Running too many deals -Discounting and lowering my ACV -Letting large deals slip through the cracks because i was spending too much time on smaller ones Since Q I've cut my win rate in half, but 3x's my ACV What do you think is a healthy win rate? Let me know in the comments

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Are your sales reps hitting quota? 🤔 Let’s chat about the opportunities that AI can bring to your organization.

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This is absolute creative gold! Calling on ALL Sales Leaders, BDR Leaders, and sales reps to take a look at this video. 6sense can help you. #Salesintelligence #accountdata #salesai #predictive #accountprioritization #outboundsales https://lnkd.in/gEc_cv5Q

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Great discussion with my team this morning on show-up rates for booked meetings. Traditionally, our org followed a two-step SDR > AE sales process. However, the new crew I'm leading are full cycle — these AEs now handle their own prospecting, and that's the best part of the job! As AEs take on more responsibility for building pipeline, we're focusing on early call structure, setting expectations, and offering clear value to lock in the next steps. Every conversation is a mini sale — we aim for full buy-in at every step. Ghosted meetings lead to calendar bloat and endless follow-ups, so it's crucial to drive urgency and clarity. Are you a Full Cycle AE or have experience leading a FC process? Share your key pillars for driving up show-up rates! #Sales #FullCycleAE #saassales #softwaresales #smbsales #mmsales #enterprisesales #aelife #sdr #salesdevelopment #salespipeline

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SDRs/ AEs: Prospects owe you nothing before an initial meeting. They're not responsible for you being upset when they no show/ghost. I started taking ownership for all of the outcomes in my life a few years back. It takes what it takes -- and it's up to me and on me. Not where I want to be? I can change it. Not happy with my current state? No ones' fault but mine. Way better to operate through the lens of "it's on me" vs "why me :(" Focusing on what I can control and letting go of what I can't has helped decrease no-shows. End of the day, the prospect owes me nothing. But, I can make it a no brainer for them to join by focusing on what I can control. World keeps spinning if they don't show up - it's going to be ok. Indifference wins. P.S-- this is the exact scenario that makes practicing mindfulness, working on your inner game and building a great life for yourself outside of work critical, especially in sales.

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SDR Dashboards - what do you want to see? Gimme your top 3 stats/charts/reports you like to see on YOUR dashboard for pipeline gen. There's the obvious activity levels and SQL/SAL volumes but what else do you like to see.....

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Big disconnect right now between frontline sellers and Exec teams I posted yesterday about a few things that have come up recently with a few leaders that have reached out to me. From that post, I got a slew of front line sellers reach out to me and tell me they feel like their companies just dont understand what its like being on the frontline. This is a fundamental breakdown of communication between the frontline, middle and senior leadership teams. The good news though, this can be fixed pretty quickly. The responsibility sits with Director and VP level leaders. Understanding and communicating about the real challenges the sellers are facing on the frontline is essential. Taking that feedback and championing it with senior leadership cross functional is an essential role function of the Director and VP. Too often, the Director or VP are too focused on trying to execute what the business expects that they do not take the time and effort necessary to solve these challenges. If you struggle with this, you are not alone. Help is out there and coaching is available for those of you that want it. Its our responsibility to ensure our frontline folks are heard and supported! Lets all do better.

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To all SDRs or anyone entering B2B sales, read this post to avoid falling into common traps. 1. The most successful AEs I have met were the best SDRs. 2. SDRs who didn’t excel in the role and are now AEs are still struggling to generate their own pipeline. 3. AEs who skipped the SDR role, often due to an MBA or strong interview skills, fear switching jobs and roles without inbound leads. They’ve never faced the grind of building a pipeline from scratch, filled with rejections. 4. AEs who have never been an SDR majorly rely on their SDRs or Inbound leads from marketing to help them build pipeline and if any Quarter they don't get inbound or enough meetings from SDRs they sh** in their pants. 5. When these AEs become managers, they often question their team—"Where are the numbers?" or "Why isn’t there a pipeline?"—instead of guiding them on building it. Lacking experience in pipeline generation, they fail to lead by example and eventually lose the respect of their team. Learn the art and science of being an SDR and excel at this job at any cost, you will never have to look back or depend on anyone for pipeline EVER. Prospecting and Generating Pipelines is fundamental to Sales whether you are an SDR, AE, Sr Manager, or VP if you don't know how to do OUTBOUND you will continuously live a sales life of fear and anxiety. So SDRs ask yourselves do you want to be such AE and Managers in the future who depend on others to determine their performance and faith or would you like to own your job? #sales #prospecting #outbound #pipeline #sdr #ae #b2b #saas

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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/gcMbj9uC

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Sales + Confidence = Momentum Confident salespeople: 1. Build trust with customers. 2. Stay in control of the conversation. 3. Enhance the effectiveness of a pitch. Be confident. Build momentum.

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Founders from Foam cold called Target and closed a $130,000 deal They then got a deal on Shark Tank They are true BDR Lifers If this doesn't tell you cold calling and BDR Lifing can work I don't know what will Keep dialing and keep BDRing!! #bdrlifer #bdr #sdr #sales #salesdevelopment

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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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HIRING NOW: ENTERPRISE & COMMERCIAL AE - SaaS - Automation - $ALES & MARKETING account signals and insights SaaS tool 💸 Commercial Account Executive: $125k base 50/50 split - $1m quota 💸 Enterprise Account Executive: $150k base 50/50 split- $1.2m quota Actual inbound leads - $20k - $500k deal sizes - 6 months sales cycle You keep account in your book of business for upsells while CSMs are responsible for renewal #seriesbstartup, working under one of our longer term #vpofsales who JUST started - you must have experience - at an earlier stage org of less than 200 employees - selling a complex solution - ideal experience selling into #gtm #salesleaders or desire to Selling into other SaaS orgs! work with clients like GitLab Notion MongoDB and MORE - providing insights on how their #gtm can do more with less, and make more $$ In a world of tech, where everything is connected it is more possible than ever before to build connections between your current clients, and your ideal prospects This solution combines Sales, Marketing, Community and Operations and uses AI to enrich, score and analyze intent - $ignals are one of the most important aspects of monitoring what is working, and the best way to target, support and optimize every account. An ideal rep understands sales strategies including #productledgrowth and #productledsales MUST BE HUNGRY, LOVE BUILDING PROCESSES and have experience working in a startup get on my schedule! 206 747 9724 #accountexecutive #commercialaccountexecutive #enterpriseaccountexecutive #gtmsaas #gtmsales #salesjobs #salescareers #bestfootforward #softwaresales #saassales #salesdevelopment

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A bad sales comp plan will kill your sales team productivity. A good sales comp plan motivates your team to hustle through the end of each month. As we scaled the Levelset sales team to 60+ front-line sales reps, we learned a TON about how to build great comp plans. Here are my principles for good sales compensation: 1. Salespeople don’t do sales and other things well. Let the salespeople sell, don’t saddle them with additional responsibility. For example: Sales and Customer Success are separate functions. 2. The compensation structure should be so simple that you can do the math on the back of a napkin. 3. No commission-only roles. Sales reps should get base salary + variable compensation. 4. At least 40% of sales reps On-Target Earnings should be in the form of variable compensation. 5. No “draw on commission” for ramping reps. New reps should have some mix of guaranteed variable compensation during their ramp period. 6. Sales reps should be paid “straight-line” up to 100% of quota. There should be compensation accelerators above 100%. There will be no compensation hurdles or decelerators for producing below 100%. 7. Annual quota for Account Executives should be 5x On-Target Earnings. For example: $500k annual quota, $100k OTE. This keeps your cost of sales to between 20 - 25% of gross revenue. ‍ 8. Did I mention accelerators? You need to include accelerators for over-performance. This isn’t a comprehensive list of principles. But if you follow these principles, your comp plan will motivate the team to hit their number. Read the full list of principles here: https://lnkd.in/gmwXkRE9

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ZoomInfo - 1st place in Sales Analytics. As companies this year try to perfect the quality of their data and their GTM sales/marketing processes, there is no better place to be. Over 350M contacts, 95% accuracy on verified data, and literally all the tools under the sun to make your GTM sales and marketing teams set up for success. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help take your business to the next level!

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it's so important to know your numbers as an AE Here's what I used to do to make sure I was working backwards from my rev number 👇 (using example data) Rev target is $150k a Quarter Opp source: BDR 15 (take their target and use historical attainment, flip rate to derisk) Marketing 5 = 20 qualified per Q With a 25% close rate, you can expect 5 of those to close. On an ACV of $25,000 that gets you to $125,000. This leaves you $25k short of coverage and on a 25% close rate, means you need to generate 4 of your own opps at the start of the Q to hit goal. 24 opps in total 12 weeks in a Q 2 qualified opps per week By tracking this each week and the pacing across sources, you can figure out how much time you need to spend on prospecting 🔥

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✨ Hiring Manager Spotlight! ✨ I am so excited to be partnering with Matthew Boehm to help recruit for his San Francisco Mid-Market AE team at Gong! 🎉 Want to get to know him and what he is looking for in his next hire? READ ON! 👀 Fun Fact first! -- Matt went sykdiving a few years ago in order to conquer his fear of flying head first. Spoiler: It didn’t really work 🙂 😂 Why does he love Gong? Gong has provided me 6.5 years of incredible opportunity. It’s provided me the opportunity to learn every single day and get better every single day. It’s a culture filled with top performers who are invested in everyone’s success, where everyone from our CEO on down is willing and excited to help. Finally, career advancement is through the roof and I’ve been able to move up to multiple roles and be challenged in these roles over my time here - but I’m far from the only person with that story. Everyone that I’ve started with at Gong has moved on to be Enterprise AE’s, Directors, VP’s, you name it - and the career opportunities are only increasing with time. How is his team doing? His team has achieved ~113% to goal in Q1 and Q2, with top performers averaging 150% over goal (and two team members at or nearly at their annual quota already) 👏 What are you looking for in your next hire? Looking for an Account Executive that has a high motor and will to succeed, is coachable and excited by self-improvement & has the ability to bring fantastic new ideas to drive our culture in a positive way that betters the team as a whole. Did this resonate with you? If you are a SaaS seller with 3+ years of closing experience with deal size experience in the 50-250k range, comfortable in a complex sales cycle with multiple stakeholders and are looking to be coached by one of the best -- please apply here: https://lnkd.in/gtZQQWUD We look forward to hearing from you! #hiring #saas #jobalert #midmarketAE #accountexecutives #sales

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