Michael Testa

Athletes = better sellers. Change my mind. Imagine this skillset of a new sales rep... 1. A competitive mindset 2. Resilience and willingness to bounce back 3. Focus on the end goal (championship/quota) 4. Practice and preparation 5. Product knowledge (scouting report) 6. Adaptability (playing in weather/locations) 7. Goal setting 8. Performance metrics (goals/assists) 9. Teamwork 10. Endurance (long sales cycles) 11. Energy management 12. Leadership (team captain) 13. Motivation 14. Performance based Don't get me wrong... you can be a great non-athlete seller, but I don't believe anyone is born with grit, determination, and consistency. Once you harness that. You are unstoppable. ☎️ RYAN PEREUS 📜 Donald C Kelly JR Butler William Padilla Brian Liebel Ronen R. Pessar Harris Fanaroff Michael Manzi Nick Cegelski You all come from a sports world. How have your athletic experiences shaped your sales approach? In the pic - (sister)ellis taylor (brother)Franklin Taylor

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Here's a proven framework to instantly improve your #SalesTraining programs: __ P.A.F. __ P) Presentation A) Application F) Feedback __ Most critical to get right is the 20:80 ratio: 20% Presentation 80% Application & Feedback __ Let's break it down so you can start designing a delivering impactful training sessions ASAP: --- PRESENTATION --- 1) WIIFM (what's in it for me?) Highlight WHY it is so relevant and critical to learn and develop the skills they're about to be introduced to. 2) Information Transfer (IT) Deliver the information and content. Although the instructor will be delivering, the IT should still INVOLVE the learner so they are actively processing rather than passively receiving. In laymen's terms, don't just talk to them. The need to be ACTIVELY engaged. 3) Test For Understanding (TFU) Before launching the Application component, you should ensure the learners understand the information. You can do this formally or informally, but correcting/confirming understanding is critical. --- APPLICATION --- 4) Application Exercise This is where the majority of the time should be allocated. An important step in the design phase is to clearly define the Output(s) that need produced and what the performers need to DO (and the contexts in which they do it) to produce it. Don't sacrifice effectiveness for engagement. Fun and games are great if you can make them work, but matching work contexts and realistic practice is more important (so long as improving performance is your goal). --- FEEDBACK --- 5) Deliver Objective Feedback Feedback is either formal (impacts performance record: pass/fail) or informal (no impact to performance record). Whichever you use, it's most impactful to ensure it is OBJECTIVE. Best way to ensure it's objective? Share the CONSEQUENCES of their actions, as opposed as HOW they acted. ___ I'll end with a quote: "It has long been recognized that lectures are an inefficient strategy for imparting new knowledge and skills. We know from a body of research that learning happens during the application and feedback components of a training." - The Science of Training and Development: What Matters in Practice 20% Presentation. 80% Application & Feedback. #salesenablement

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Why Baseball is like Recruiting & building a sales team Ever thought about how baseball and sales recruiting are alike? Of course you have. You probably wonder the answer to this question hourly. Well here you go…. Scouting Talent: In both baseball and recruiting, success starts with scouting. You need to identify raw talent and potential, whether it’s a young player in the minor leagues or a promising candidate in the job market. Building a Team: Just like a baseball team needs a mix of skills – pitchers, hitters, fielders – a company needs diverse talents. Finding the right balance is crucial. Training and Development: In baseball, continuous training turns potential into performance. The same goes for new hires. Ongoing development and support are key to unlocking their full potential. Adaptability: A great baseball player adapts to different pitchers and game situations. Similarly, top recruits need to be flexible and adapt to various challenges in their roles. Performance Metrics: Baseball relies heavily on stats to measure success. In recruiting, tracking metrics like time-to-hire, quality of hire, and retention rates is vital. Of course the same goes with new hires, knowing their stats is a huge key to tracking success. Just like in baseball, recruiting salespeople is about finding the right talent, building a cohesive team, and continuously developing skills for peak performance. Now, let's play ball! #hiring #recruiterlife #recruiting #saassales #gsd #agsd #sales #startup #founder #ceo

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You want the A player, but can only afford the C player Huge growth org trap we see… Why not get the A player for a “fraction” of the cost? Companies looking to scale but lack cash, typically do this: They hire a fractional executive to help build the infrastructure that’s needed to support growth and a future team. They hire a fractional to start quickly, keep costs low, maximize ROI, and get access to someone that has encountered their challenge before. Once they have built a strong foundation, they move the fractional leader into more of an advisory capacity and bring on a more junior, and affordable resource, to carry the plan forward. This plan of attack is effective across sales, marketing, finance, product, etc and can be deployed quickly. Pro tip- it’s very difficult to hire an A player if you do not have the financial resources or infrastructure to help ensure their success. In fact, the majority of the executive attrition we see is due to poor processes and low likelihood of success, versus anything else. In 2024 you do not need to “save up” to hire a great leader- there are tons of options at your disposal.

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How to save your agency $20-40k/m in costs (by hiring A+ players at 10% of the cost) I ran this exact playbook and saved an agency ~$700k/yr in costs - They had great sales and revenue numbers - But, they had no profit and loads of debt Why? - They had a 100% onshore US team - They couldn't afford to pay them - So they took out loans and debt So we conducted a TEAM AUDIT Q: "Which roles need to be onshore?" A: Account strategists Q: Which roles are not account strategists? A: Media Buyer, Ops Manager, Community Managers EASY - For his media buyer, I introduced him to multiplymii - For his ops manager, I introduced him to go carpathian - For his community manager, I introduced him to cipher HC. All of these companies staff offshore talent from different regions. All have been vetted by me and have clients working with their talent. All of them have more cost effective options. Words of caution 1. Offshoring IS the solution for this founder, but I did warm him, it wouldn’t be as easy as hiring a vendor and then he’ll be immediately successful. 2. Letting go of employees is hard, but when there are no margins, you have to do it. 3. Not every hire works out. Working with an agency mitigates this from happening and sometimes they’ll staff until you have a successful hire. If you need help finding any type of role for your business, connect/dm me and I’ll introduce you to someone I trust.

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https://lnkd.in/gZ3s8ddj Hubleed updates this week: - add an administrative dashboard for qualifying leads. - Watches bet feeds on supported sites for high quality players. - Compares player names to telegram accounts or similarly named accounts. - Filters out low value players and places an alert for team members to cross promote them to other partnership sites. - Sends a message to any players who have authorized the bot if their account catches a rain or tip publicly. - Accept bet ID submission for challenges & tip those automatically. - Broadcast announcements for challenges 24/7 from a schedule. - Connect exchange and apps with discord. - Add a smart contract for managing funds. Want to partner with us? Send me a DM.

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Three Things I Learned In SaaS, Sports, Tech, & Live Events:   1. They really will steal from you.   In the early days of TicketManager, we’d get calls from “Strategics” looking to “learn more” or “invest.” They’ll say things like they “have sincere interest” to get you to let your guard down.   Everyone around us told us this was normal. Don’t be too guarded. Just build and trust that they won’t steal from you. They almost shamed us for being so arrogant as to think others would take their time to steal from us.   They were wrong.   They all stole from us.   GMR, a major agency, feigned interest and even attended our customer conference in the mid-10's. They hit the market with a copycat just over a year later.   MSG took us to the contract phase—even assigning a project manager—and then built a cheap copy that looks exactly like our tech. The UI is so similar.   A private equity software currently for sale told us, after we rebuked their interest following two months of diligence, they were going to build a competing product. I respect they did.   A major, now public, ticket marketplace spent months in diligence with us then, in the StubHub case six years later, tried to testify they didn’t have “any real interest” in doing the deal and their IOI was “just preliminary.” (On the bright side, they were a star witness for us. They tried to bury us and it was so gross it backfired.)   And StubHub spent two months feigning interest in us before deliberately trying to crush our business, leading to four years in court and a $16m judgment.   Investors and bankers are wrong. Guard it all and protect yourself.   Yes, some sell and that’s the process, but others are just phishing. Protect your fish as best you can.    2. "I don’t give b--w jobs but I know when it's being done wrong"- Bill Maher.   When starting a business or becoming a new leader, there is so much pressure to let your team do their job and trust the experts around you. And that's great advice - most all of the time. But….there will be times those teammates or advisors have bad ideas. And you know they're bad ideas.   When that happened, I found it hard to stand up for myself.   An example: Back in 2013, right before we signed our largest customer, two of our advisors were adamant we sell the business for $10m and "find something more scalable." They spent an entire drive to dinner trying to convince us it was the right course of action and leaning on their vast experiences. I'm glad we didn't listen.   3. Scott Galloway is wrong: Part one million   Walking through baggage claim on Wednesday returning from the All-Star Game I mentioned to my wife I'd be working long hours the next few days as I'd been out of the office Monday and Tuesday.   Her response: "Tony, I didn't see you. You were at work events from the minute we landed"   Ignore the cynics. They only know their own path.   Do what you love and you won't work a day in your life. 

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Every CEO wants to hire only the Top 1% sales talent. Very few of them are Top 1% CEOs themselves. Unable to pay Top 1% comp for Top 1% talent. A+ players flock to A+ teams in A+ settings. Work your ass off to create an A+ setting. Players building the team will follow.

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In the past month I've spoken to 5 CEOs of companies between Seed and PE backed about their go to market strategy, and they are all suffering from a few common problems: 1. We're able to execute well in our channels, but we feel like there are a ton of gaps, and we don't have the time to find and fix them. 2. Owned channels like SMS and Email work really well, but we're not sure we can trust the data anymore, and everything is costing us more. 3. AI has made it easier for us to test multiple assets and messages in paid channels, but we're not sure we're on the right track. Revenue is not up, but spend is. It seems like many startups are in the same situation. Why is this happening? Between AI flooding the market and internal teams racing to be more productive, the hard work that has to be done manually in the middle of the funnel/buyer journey is being ignored. Not everywhere, but I'm seeing this often. If this is happening to you, slow down, and rethink your entire customer journey. It's true that metrics are getting harder to trust due to data privacy and platform issues. Your best source of truth is your own revenue. Can you map revenue back up to a channel? I'm not talking about perfect attribution - you can learn a lot by simply asking customers how they heard about you first. For paid channels, if you're using a single channel strategy and trusting the paid platform algos to do all of the work for you, it's no surprise costs are up and ROI is down. Platforms are built to spend your money. Running PMAX campaigns can be great, but what else are you doing to ensure you're getting the right message and offer in front of your audience? I'm seeing wildly similar messaging across the board now, from all sorts of companies that are popping up. There is no differentiation. And it feels like a race to the bottom. There has never been a better time to slow down and reflect on what is happening in your business and in your competitive market.

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The key to revenue is distribution. But... you can have millions of new leads coming in at the top of the funnel and if you can't handle that volume in a timely and consistent manner then all of that time, money and effort you put into acquiring those leads is all for not. Fortunes are made in the follow up!

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STOP Wasting Time Chasing Deals You’ll Never Close. Most buyers fumble because they don’t know their weak spots. Get your BBR Score and uncover what’s holding you back. 🔥 Don’t guess—get clarity in minutes. Your million-dollar future depends on it. Take the Assessment Here https://lnkd.in/emEzGXZ2

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🧪 CRO Case Study Episode 54 One A/B test → 930K plus revenue 🚀 Swipe to learn how one A/B test added over $930K to our client's annual revenue. The Results Breakdown: +$77,558 per month +$930,696 per year (forecasted) +$0.58 revenue per session Bookmark this!

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5 Steps to 10X your appointments set by increasing your cold call pick up rate! (🧊📞) Step 1) Scrape leads at volume using software like: - Apollo.io - D7 Lead Finder - Lead Rocks Step 2) Focus on cell phone numbers (Much higher answer rates.) using software like: - ClearoutPhone Step 3) Sort by area code and time zone. Step 4) Dial Time: - 8AM-10AM and 4PM-6PM tend to work best. Step 5) Leverage a Power Dialer or if possible, a Predictive Dialer like: - Close - JustCall - PhoneBurner Bonus Tip 1: Go High Level tends to end up in spam. Bonus Tip2: Use targeted area codes per state. Bonus Tip 3: I've heard there is easily accessible cheap underground software that hacks the Apollo API. #entrepreneurship #sales #revenue #coldcalling #business #leadership #worksmarter

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PE investors / operators: have "hire additional sales capacity" on your VCP or annual plan? HIRING new reps is only half the battle. For the ROI math to math, gotta then make 'em productive. As quickly as possible. But when it comes to making reps productive quickly, B2B companies face two big challenges: →The average tenure of a B2B sales rep is less than two years, YET... → Reps hit their peak performance two to three years in. Translation: Most reps leave before they’ve reached max productivity. Eek. In many cases, weak sales onboarding is to blame. But taking a more intentional approach to sales onboarding has a bevy of obvious benefits: • Reducing sales turnover • Shortening time-to-revenue • Higher odds of achieving your rev targets Hit on this in the book in Winning Move #32, but check out the vid below for a deeper dive on the P's and Q's of sales onboarding ▶️ * * * * * Found this helpful? Plenty more where that came from. Check out the Winning Moves Platform: the ambitious PE leader's toolkit for accelerating value creation. ↳ A digital arsenal of resources, how-to's, and tools to help private equity leaders make value-generating Winning Moves with confidence. Link in the comments below. ⤵️

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Any successful CRO program uses revenue impact as a guiding light. It has to. Or your business ends up chasing $5,000 ROI opportunities when you could be honing in on $500K+ ROI opportunities.  Businesses are often so concerned with driving top-line revenue growth that they don’t tie a monetary value to their A/B tests. But you can’t place value on a winning test if you don’t factor in the time or money it takes to find it. Sizing the potential revenue impact of any A/B test is the only way to discern between actual winners and tests that are simply a waste of your time and resources.  Even in 2024, rarely are eCommerce businesses asking themselves if the ROI on a test is worth it. But your business should be! It’s time to stop treating CRO like a democracy in which your business implements the idea that gets the most votes – and instead, start approaching CRO with real data and consideration for ROI.  #CRO #ecommerce

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"B2B buyers engage with 3-7 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep." (Kurve, 2024) This means you need more TOF awareness content to get more B2B buyers. Cold-outbound or SDR services alone are not enough anymore. You need to: - Educate your prospects on what you do. - Create more noise than your competition. - Showcase your industry-leading insights. - Reinforce your messaging & stay top of mind. - Position yourself as the only & go-to in your market. - Build multiple touch-points through content marketing. - Address common pain points and provide solutions early. - Ensure content speaks directly to their current buying needs. We're currently helping our clients sign the likes of Nvidia through our Content & Outbound System. If this post caught your attention, you can book in and hear about our strategy 1:1 here: https://lnkd.in/gu5n57sd

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