Miles Anderson

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  

13

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

102

12 Comments

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"

50

4 Comments

🤯 “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,

29

7 Comments

Your AEs not generating enough pipeline? Too dependent on SDRs? Some thoughts and suggested actions: ➡ Insufficient Training & Enablement Outbounding and selling are distinct skills, and over 80% of reps aren't proficient in both. Without a compelling talk track, AEs won't confidently pick up the phone. Solid email coaching is essential for generating responses. Action: Create a practical playbook for AEs and offer weekly or bi-weekly training sessions on the latest best practices. ➡ Lack of Accountability Outbound efforts are challenging and often unpleasant, much like exercising. Accountability is crucial as most people won't do it on their own. Action: Schedule weekly 1-hour blocks dedicated to pipeline generation. Assign a team lead or a rep with leadership qualities to ensure adherence and report on daily results. ➡ Misguided Sales Math Avoid setting arbitrary activity targets. Instead, help reps determine the precise outbound activities needed to hit their sales targets. Action: Calculate the necessary outbound activities starting from revenue and deals closed to the number of meetings needed. ➡ Inadequate Coaching & Feedback Pipeline and deal reviews dominate most managers' 1-on-1s and team calls, leaving little room for pipeline generation discussions. Provide guidance on target accounts, approach strategies, and messaging feedback. Action: Dedicate 10-15 minutes of your weekly 1-on-1s to focus solely on pipeline generation. What did I miss? #sales #outbound #pipeline #salestips #outboundsales

1

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?? 📈

29

7 Comments

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: " 🤯 "

9

CROs and sales enablement leaders want fast, repeatable, and reportable ways to deliver sales knowledge to sellers whenever they need it. BUT:  1. Sales training doesn’t help do this fast enough (it takes 3+ months for the average seller to ramp up, and they will continue to need SE support to answer everyday buyer questions after that) 2. SE bandwidth is limited and hiring more SEs to solve this problem is an extremely expensive solution To combat this at scale, Luke Martin, Senior Manager, Revenue Enablement Infrastructure Operations at ZoomInfo decided to innovate with AI – where every seller could ask AI a sales question, and it would answer it accurately and phrased the same way an SE would. Curious to know how that journey went? Join us for our webinar, 𝗡𝗼 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀: 𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗜 𝘁𝗼 𝗚𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝟵 𝗔𝗠 𝗣𝗧, 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟭 where we'll be discussing: ✨ The challenges Luke and many other sales/enablement leaders are facing today ✨ Separating gimmicky “AI software” from AI products and solutions that actually work ✨ Scaling AI adoption across your sales organization while keeping security, data privacy, and costs in mind Link to register 👇 https://lnkd.in/ecEBPG_t #CRO #Sales_enablement_leaders

57

2 Comments

Sales leaders - looking to boost win rates in 2025? Here's the top skill to train your AEs on in 2025 ⬇️ Uncovering The 'Need Behind the Need.' Top salespeople just get to the "heart of the problem" FASTER. Speed to uncovering the 'real' business problem matters. Here's why: Avg salespeople don't uncover even the tip of the ice berg until late in the discovery process (if at all). So they never get beyond the surface. They run out of time. Great salespeople get to the heart of the matter (without jumping in "too" quick) fast. That gives them TIME. Time to explore negative impact. Time to shape the root cause. Here are four questions (in order) that get to 'the heart of the deal' fast: 1. Tell me about the biggest challenges in X-area you'd regret not solving six months from now? Easy enough. This question is a filter. Buyers talk about 'must solve' problems only. But you still have work to do. 2. What's going on in the business that's driving [what they shared] to be a priority? Ask this, and your customers will CHUCKLE half the time. Why? Because you are striking a CHORD when you ask that. You're getting to the 'need behind the need.' That's where big money lives. Getting closer. 3. What metric is suffering most as a result of that? Avg sellers struggle to quantify pain. You walk into a different world when you go from expressed pain to quantified pain. Your customer's urgency ramps up. And spending money to solve the problem begins to look REAL good. 4. What's driving you to solve all this now rather than later? Ask this too early? And the answers will be weak. BUT... If you ask this AFTER those first three questions... Your customer now has the FULL CONTEXT of the problem top-of-mind. And now... their answers to THIS question will be far, FAR richer. Give those 4 questions (in order) a try. P.S. Upskill your SaaS AE team on virtually any topic or skill gap with the top 1% of revenue experts as instructors here: https://www.pclub.io/

148

13 Comments

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.

650

103 Comments

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

105

10 Comments

Something that I see new SDRs and AEs missing is "Nurturing the prospect" It's completely different from follow-ups In follow-up, you generally ASK the prospect for something or there is a CTA involved in it. BUT When you are Nurturing the prospect there is NO ASK or there is no CTA involved in it You simply GIVE them something that's relevant to them or something that helps them to make a better decision in future like 1. Case Studies 2. Success Stories 3. Ebooks / Informational Videos etc The idea is to stay on top of the mind of the prospect during the non-buying seasons or to stay connected with them when they have already told you that buying will take time. Try making a nurturing sequence just like a follow-up sequence, you will see a good difference in your sales and sale cycle. #b2b #saas #sales #nurturinglead

38

2 Comments

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.

209

15 Comments

The same page… AEs, SDRs, CSMs & renewal managers How are you tracking to your goal achievements 🎯? Some mid-year reminders for the team. - Re-align to find out what has changed in your shared account(s) - Stay connected on a regular cadence - Build report and trust - you want to rely on each other - Meet in person if possible - see previous bullet - Enable tough feedback sessions - so important - Share current customer status and revisit top priorities - Strive for a unified front & strategy - Known when to engage leadership - target this as a step - Share your success metrics, KPIs, and percent to goal Success is a #team sport Have a great day!

6

Here is the real impact that value selling is having for revenue teams: Tom Pisello David Yockelson 🔑48% improvement in winrate 🔑35% increase in deal size 🔑25% reduction in sales cycle time BUT...... ⛔️ only 19% of reps and 19% of pipeline is using value selling today. BIGGGG opportunity here...!

17

4 Comments

One of the biggest disconnects preventing an AEs ability to provide a world class buying experience to prospects is this ⬇️ No visibility of marketings influence on the prospects journey prior to their first call with Sales 👀 By the time and AE speaks to a prospect they may have… - Opted out of a marketing list ✉️ - Had zero dwell time on a number of display ads 😢 - Skipped by video ads on social channels 👀 - Been to an event 3 years ago 😱 BUT 🥊 If you ask any AE do they have this information prior to their meetings 🙃 The answer is NO 🛑 That’s why connecting Marketing and Sales is more important than ever before 😀 Stellar advice to any AE in SaaS is to spend time with your Marketing team. It should be part of all companies onboarding programmes tbh 😎

10

1 Comment

I was fortunate to spend a year in Dan Fougere's sales org at Medallia and learned at a rate I've never experienced at any other point in my career. Some of my key takeaways, which he also shares in this conversation. ➡️ A repeatable sales process/playbook is the foundation for scaling an Enterprise business. ➡️ The best Enterprise reps hone and maintain maniacal discipline around PG. They never let it fall off their calendar. ➡️ The most effective frontline managers spend more time coaching and supporting their team early in the sales process (i.e. Discovery & Evaluation) than they do in the later stages (i.e. Negotiation/Closing). Without explicit guidance from 2nd and 3rd line leaders, most tend to get this balance wrong. ➡️ Sales leaders (at all levels) have to be 'in it' with their teams i.e., involved in outbound prospecting, regularly speaking with customers, playing an active role in deals, being audible ready etc.. ➡️ One of your core responsibilities as a sales leader is to create a high performance environment where people feel like they are challenged, constantly learning, and being supported to achieve things they didn't think were possible (securing C-Level meetings via outbound PG, winning 8 figure deals, earning international career opportunities etc). If you work in sales, this Podcast is well worth an hour of your time. #sales #salesenablement #coaching #salesleadership

99

14 Comments

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

61

10 Comments

35-50% of b2b buyers choose the vendor that is fastest to respond. But, most vendors are still forcing buyers to: Fill out a form Wait for a response  Talk to an SDR So, It can take buyers weeks to: See a product demo Learn about pricing Talk to subject matter experts If buyers choose the vendor that is fastest to respond… Why are we still forcing buyers to jump through so many hoops? *(Source: InsideSales.com)

23

1 Comment