Terry Cornelissen

As a Fractional CMO, I found this article insightful on AI's potential to reshape sales tech. Thank you for sharing this Venkateswar Gopisetti Key takeaways: - AI may disrupt incumbent CRM players (salesforce, Hubspot), creating opportunities for new entrants. - Multi-modal data integration could provide deeper customer insights. - AI-driven automation of time-consuming tasks could dramatically increase sales efficiency. - The blending of sales, marketing, and customer success functions may lead to more cohesive customer experiences. - Dynamic, AI-enabled go-to-market strategies could allow for more personalized approaches. A shift from per-seat to outcome-based pricing models could disrupt SaaS pricing norms. The article effectively outlines how AI might transform sales processes, organizational structures, and technology stacks. While optimistic, it provides a valuable roadmap for sales leaders preparing for an AI-driven future. The implications for existing vendors (Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.,) and their partners could be profound - it's crucial to keep a close eye on these developments as they unfold in the coming months.

2

Category leaders don't need to be different. But you need to differentiate against them. The data is clear: when prospects are evaluating you, they are always asking, 'but how is this different from [a brand they're aware of]'? Differentiation is a hard business strategy challenge, no doubt. It's much easier to try to spend more on ads, tweak website copywriting, declare a new category, and so on. Largely speaking, there are four buckets of differentiation: 1. Product differentiation. This is when your product does something other products don't do. It's highly effective, but extremely difficult to sustain. Every popular feature will get copied and commoditized over time. I listed RB2B here as an example, but as its founder Adam said, they're seeing new competitors emerge on the regular now. 2. Brand differentiation. Unique brand identity or market segment focus. Kit is a differentiated brand in a massively saturated category. Basecamp is irreplicable because of its personality and visible founders. 3. Operational differentiation. This is when you have a unique way of doing something. Maybe a different business model or processes that improve efficiency over traditional alternatives. Many companies do market research, but nobody does it on-demand and delivers a full insights in 24-48 hrs like Wynter does. The two-sided marketplace model is also a moat. Price differentiation also falls under the operational bucket (assuming you actually have some structural advantages to be able to deliver something cheaper sustainably). 4. Customer experience differentiation. Consumer markets are full of companies that compete and win on customer experience (Amazon, Ritz-Carlton, Chewy, etc). However I could not come up with any B2B SaaS companies that truly differentiate themselves on customer experience. Probably an opportunity for many.

104

35 Comments

Ever since I entered B2B marketing, I've always been bogged down by never being able to understand the true impact of each marketing touchpoint on the customer journey. Joining RevSure was a decision rooted in this passion. At RevSure AI, we have a team of data scientists and engineers who are committed to redefining attribution and shaping the future of how businesses understand and optimize their marketing efforts. RevSure's advanced attribution models go beyond traditional methods. We're leveraging AI/ML to provide deeper, more accurate insights into what truly drives conversions and revenue. This is not just about measuring success—it's about empowering businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Do check it out.

1

“Death of a Salesforce”: Why AI Will Transform Sales. New post w/ Zeya Yang and Marc Andrusko 👇 AI is set to revolutionize sales so profoundly -- both the system of record AND the workflow -- that no incumbent is safe! Instead of a text-based database, the core of the next sales platform will be multi-modal (text, image, voice, video), containing every customer insight from across the company. The LLM powering the platform would be constantly ingesting data to create the most up-to-date context. Workflows will fundamentally change too, some may disappear entirely: e.g., AI will compile a ranked list of primed buyers, create personalized collateral etc. Your AI wingman may even be your live coach on sales calls. The implications will be broad: 📍Sales, marketing, and customer success will blend together 📍Per seat pricing --> outcome based pricing 📍Multiple GTM strategies will exist in the same company (target different buyer personas with highly customized sales journeys) In our post, we map what some of the best new companies are doing today. If you’re building towards this future, we would love to hear your thoughts! https://lnkd.in/g7wXYQ3X

174

25 Comments

"How many CSMs do we need?" "How many customers do my CSMs manage"? We've dug into our nearly $2 billion in client revenue data, analyzed industry standards like the Jason M. Lemkin and Gainsight suggestions, and crafted our own Infinite Renewals approach. Whether you're managing too many accounts or wondering how many CSMs you need, this is for you. A sample is below, but the good stuff is in the full report. The Infinite Renewals team of Kate Mazzini, Kristine Vallila, and Renee Murphy really dug in, and also put together a "choose your adventure" approach, which accounts for ACV, ARR, and allocated time per account. Next Thursday, October 3rd, from 1-2 PM EST, we'll be hosting an exclusive Ask Me Anything session. 📈 Drop "REPORT" in the comments to get the report. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain invaluable insights! 🗓️ Spread the word!

118

382 Comments

Last week, Sam Jacobs argued why CMOs are ideal CROs. As a former VP of Marketing turned CRO, I'm biased, but I agree. What is a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer)? A CRO oversees all revenue-generating processes, managing marketing and sales to drive growth. Why Marketers Make Great CROs: Process-Oriented Mindset: Marketers build efficient processes and automate workflows, focusing on metrics like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). As VP of Marketing, I automated and finessed our go-to-market machine. Leading sales just expanded this machine's scope. Revenue Accountability: As Head of Marketing, hitting pipeline targets while Sales missed revenue felt disjointed and problematic. Now, I can't blame Sales for not closing leads, nor Marketing for bad leads. If anything goes wrong, I can only blame myself. Data-Driven Decision Making: Marketers make decisions based on solid evidence by analyzing metrics. Campaigns don't have feelings. As a marketer, you're trained to let go of a low-performing campaign based on numbers, whereas in sales, it’s much harder to let go of a low-performing salesperson you believe in. What Are the Challenges for Marketers Who Become CROs: Gaining Sales Team Trust: Transitioning to sales leadership can be challenging. Sales teams might be skeptical, fearing the marketer-turned-CRO would inflate pipeline numbers and blame sales if targets are missed. Despite having a great sales team, it took me time to build that trust, and honestly, it’s an ongoing effort. Understanding Your Clients: Salespeople have direct interactions with clients, gaining invaluable insights into customer pain points. In marketing, you typically see clients through dashboards and data. I meet clients through lunches, events, or joining sales meetings, but it's not the same as making dozens of calls with prospects each month. Empathy for Sales Challenges: Sales roles come with unique pressures, like hitting quarterly revenue targets or dealing with slow months. It's challenging to empathize without having been in their shoes. I'm learning to trust sales managers' insights on salespeople's performance over just relying on dashboard metrics. Having said all that, exceptional sales leaders can become outstanding CROs. However, based on my biased experience, CEOs should seriously consider marketing leaders for the CRO role.

113

14 Comments

I heard my new favorite term this week: "𝗘𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗹𝘆𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘀" Where companies do handstands, backflips, and workarounds to get GTM pipeline/funnel data in a reportable format using Excel. If you're past Series A, >$10m ARR, and have ambitions to grow revenue/headcount/etc quickly, you shouldn't be living in spreadsheet hell and doing "excelympics." You really need reporting in your GTM systems to work and not perpetuate a process of: • Pulling loads of different reports into an Excel file • Doing a load of weird stuff to build a useful view of conversion/velocity • Having no one know actually how it works and no ability to repeat the process each month/quarter Put all that busy work into actually fixing the root problem: Your data and process (within CRM and MAP). #gtmoperations #revenueoperations #marketingoperations  

40

9 Comments

Visibility is everything for revenue leaders. Here’s one of my favorite examples: Four years ago, Joe was stepping into a global CRO role at one of Clari’s great customers. This was his first time having access to Clari. I reached out as part of our onboarding process. Immediately, Joe sent back this note. “Kevin,” he said. “I don’t know how I would have stepped into this job so quickly if I hadn’t had the level of visibility your solution has provided.” Visibility enabled Joe to:  - Learn his team’s pipeline at record pace - Identify revenue strengths and weaknesses - Feel confident implementing new strategies and tactics Before Clari, it would have taken Joe months to reach this point. However, he was up-and-running at lightning speed. That’s the power of visibility.

30

1 Comment

A conversation the other night turned to consumption based pricing. Both of us have been in the industry for a while and we found a ton of downside to consumption based pricing and limited upside. The upside, of course, is that it's good for the customer. They only pay for what they use. The biggest downside, especially if you have sales people selling a consumption based solution is that sales peoples job is to maximize revenue. Need 100 units of X, that is great, why don't you buy 150 units. I'll give you a bit of a discount and you're protected on the upside should you go over that limit. Win / win. Customer got a good deal, sales person got a bit more revenue. Everyone is breaking their arms patting each other on the back. But here is the rub. A year rolls around and there are three likely scenarios, like a consumption based Monty Hall game. Door #1 is that the customer used up most or all of their 150 units and is happy and is going to re-up or maybe buy more. This is winning the car on Let's Make a Deal. Door #2 is that the customer only used 100 of the units (that is what they forecasted anyway) and need to churn the other 50-units out of their agreement. This is the goat. Door #3 is that the customer had rose tinted glasses and only used 75 of their 150 units. Now they are in trouble. They need to churn 75 units and their boss is mad at them for overspending in the first place. This is also a goat. The analogy doesn't quite work, but it's early on a Monday. Give me some grace. Now, the company could move to a PAYG model, but that puts the sales person in a bad place because they are just going and getting clients, but can't make much commission. Great if you're product led growth, but if you want sales led growth, the consumption model contradicts the goals you want. Worse so, is that in a larger company (like the one the person I was with worked at), they know what the consumption forecasts look like, so they set quotas to align to that number, which makes exceeding quota really challenging. If you think about it, unless your the utility (gas, water, electric), consumption based pricing doesn't really help the company out. There is never a push from PG&E for me to use more electricity. In fact, it's just the opposite. I'm certain that there is a way to make consumption based pricing work for the client, the sales rep, and the company selling the software. We bounced a bunch of ideas around at Cloudinary. The main thing that we learned was that it requires multiple products and tight cohesion between sales and CS to make it really hum. Will write more about that later. How have you modeled consumption based pricing into your direct sales strategy?

10

B2B tech companies: WE'RE DATA-DRIVEN! But also: - We only have one person owning GTM data quality (+ million other things) - Our execs don't trust the reports - Our SFDC data/process = chaos So in reality: - Our SFDC reports haven't been refreshed since 2019 - Our whole team does excelympics every month for the board reporting - The tenure on the revenue teams is <1 year because everyone is burned out Fixing the data isn't easy. But it's not impossible. The first step is making sure you have the team to build what you need. Either internally or internal + external. A team that has the skills and is incentivized AND enabled to make the changes necessary (often an important piece that gets missed). You really can get to a better place where you have reliable data to make decisions. It just takes some effort and focus. #gtmoperations #marketingoperations #revenueoperations  

108

27 Comments

Meet the people-first GTM funnel. Mark and I were having dinner together last week and mapped out this entire model (a lot more to come), but I think it represents how people buy today. All right, let's break it down... There are two things to think about first before getting into the funnel. • Qualification: Meet your ideal customer profile through firmographic, demographic, and psychographic rules. • Intent: Understand signals from subscribers, members, and customers for better sales and marketing actions. Subscribers: Capture your ideal audience with high-value content. Aim for qualified subscribers who fit your customer profile. Subscribers are the new leads. Owned at the forefront vs rented. Members: Build an engaging, free, or paid community to network and discuss. Aim for members who meet your criteria. Customers: Offer tailored products and services to fit customer needs and increase usage and retention. Turn customers into advocates. So there you have it—a real and tangible way to measure whether you're doing and following People-first GTM. Much more to come on this. What do you think? Disagree? Agree?

39

14 Comments

This one was a crazy finding from the recent UserEvidence Customer Evidence Gap Research Report. The biggest missing content asset for sellers is competitive evidence. Reps are struggling to answer the question, "why should we choose you vs your competitor?" What is competitive evidence? Customer stories about why users switched from an incumbent vendor. Detail about what features and differentiators lead customers to choose you vs alternatives. How easy was it to migrate from another solution? What was the impact/delta post switch? This makes sense given the backdrop: - an explosion of new vendors is making for increasingly crowded and noisy evaluations. - Bigger vendors keep building larger suites (e.g. SFDC, Gong, Clari, Salesloft) that are merging into tangent spaces encroaching on point solutions - Flight to safety + known brands. Emerging vendors have to overcome a larger burden of proof to switch customers off of established incumbents. - With AI, everyones pitch is starting to sound pretty similar Showing you have 4.61 stars average reviews vs your competitor with 4.59 isn't enough to prove you're better. Buyer's need detail and substance - and sales reps can't credibly tout why they are better than the competition. Reps need to be pointing to customers to answer that question. Link to full report in comments. #productmarketing #competitiveintelligence #salesenablement

48

18 Comments

There is a murder scene happening in your GTM org right now. 🎃 But not with people (phew). But with FY2025 budgets getting dished out, many GTM leaders are slashing and redlining their current expenses to adapt to the change in budget or getting rid of things that didn’t work. 🔪 Now, if you are a new CMO/CRO, be careful not to just slash for slashing sake. Especially on operations support. Take the time to dig into what is useful for the team and better yet, lean on your operational support to give you the insights to make these “cost-saving” slashes. And on that topic of “cost-saving” here are places I would look into “slashing” first to save money instead of reducing on brand programs, operations, and consultants that provide value. 😊 • The full GTM tech stack  This is the very first place I would look to find tech bloat. It’s likely you might have tools that do similar things, tools no one has touched in ages, and tools that you could easily replace by building functionality within existing tools. • “Lead acquisition” data vendors Buying lists of “verified buyers” or buying “meetings” is not the way to go. Trust me. • Syndicated Content Maybe you don’t need to completely get rid of this channel (although I would think about it based on all the data I have seen). But the better thing is to invest in building your own content program that your team can consistently stick to and that resonates with buyers. • “Silver-bullet” reporting tools This kinda relates to point #1 but just letting you know - there isn’t one. • Any channel that you have invested a lot of time into but see little pipeline $ Use your data to the best of your ability when making cost changes. But know that marketing takes time and pipeline attribution is a lagging indicator. But if a certain channel or program is just not working - then make the case to stop and invest in an experiment instead. Any others you would add? Would love to hear it!

50

16 Comments

Unrealistic expectations from CMOs is why they have the shortest tenure in the C-suite (3 years). They either burn out, quit or get fired because they fail to show ROI. A typical B2B CMO is expected to ✅ Drive SQLs ✅ Impact revenue ✅ Increase awareness ✅ Find new growth drivers ✅ Leverage AI in marketing ✅ Make marketing visible internally ✅ Lead GTM through data and creativity Which sounds great, until you realise there's: ❌ Siloed departments ❌ Huge martech debt ❌ Tiny marketing budgets ❌ Marketing is sales support at best ❌ New initiatives take forever to roll out ❌ C-level doesn't understand what marketing does ❌ Marketing has never measurably contributed to business metrics All these are expected for a company in a digital transformation phase, but each will massively impact your ROI timeline. So many CMOs face a disconnect between the expected outcome, and the time needed to build functional marketing. This is one of the reasons for CMOs to have short tenure. Too much is expected too quickly and with little resources. Companies need a reality check about where their marketing is today, and what results can be reasonably expected. Chasing trends (AI) or having crazy expectations (20% pipeline growth) will simply cause an endless stream of CMOs with very little progress. #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #cmo

123

39 Comments

To run revenue with data-driven precision, tracking the right revenue metrics matters more than ever. The right metrics can accelerate deal velocity, prevent revenue leaks, and give you a competitive edge in the market. The wrong metrics can lead to misaligned goals, missed opportunities, and stalled growth. Enter Clari’s new playbook: Run Revenue: Metrics to Win More Deals. Discover how to: -> Identify key Forecast, Performance, and Operational Metrics -> Eliminate revenue risk with data-driven insights -> Scale team success with metrics that align to business objectives Make every metric count, download the playbook here: https://lnkd.in/gFPg2XjA 

16

1 Comment

This single role is replacing sales reps. 5 SDRs = 1 SAS Sales Automation Specialist. AI is now automating personalized email outreach at a level that most SDRs simply can't compete with. Using Clay agent you can send personalised lines like these at scale: ✅ "Saw that Sarah just joined your team as an SDR. Her background in environmental science is an interesting twist for sales - bet she brings a unique perspective..." ✅ "Came across your latest Facebook ad showcasing your eco-friendly product line. The before-and-after comparison was..." ✅ "Saw your last LinkedIn post, and I agree - flexible hours really do boost team productivity..." ✅ "Your TechCrunch feature on sustainable tech was really good. The part about reducing e-waste through modular design really stood out to me..." I believe the future of SDRs is shifting: SDRs will focus more on warm calling and strategic prospecting for key accounts. Meanwhile, the role of Sales Automation Specialist will become increasingly demanded & prevalent in sales teams. Want to level up and outperform entire SDR teams with advanced sales tech and AI? Join our ColdIQ accelerator program and take the fast track to becoming a high-earning "AI Sales Automation" leader. Click the link below to learn more and secure your spot! ai.coldiq.com/accelerator (https://lnkd.in/eqH7t-4e)

101

73 Comments

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

2-4X the average meeting rate from #ABM targeted accounts. I LOVE this hard metric from Hillary Carpio from Snowflake in her latest chat with Workato. Is this the lift your team is seeing from account-based targeting? Would love to hear what lift rate folks are seeing below. #demandgeneration

11

To all the LinkedIn livestream skeptics (looking at you GTM pros) ... I feel your pain. 1. It routinely glitches. 2. Live attendee count can be low. 3. Analytics are janky. 4. What if someone says something terrible? But here's why I love them: 1. Where else on LinkedIn can you make contact with up to 1000 of your 1st connects in a non-pitch slap way in less than an hour (I just sent out 800 invites)? 2. What other format offers a mass synchronous experience with comments and tagging? 3. They're way more fun to make than anything else on LinkedIn. Are they wave of the future? Is everyone going to start a livestream? Probably not.  But for those of us who love them, there's no turning back. So, if you want to try the Hottest Show on LinkedIn - tune in tomorrow for The Hotness Unleasher Show S3 E9 - Cybermarketing. Where I'll be hosting none other than Mark Bliss , Aileen Casmano , and Bronwen Hudson and we'll be talking about people behind their backs... In a good way. The point of the show is to pay attention to people or their work in an intentional way. The show's trusty producer - Elijah Drown - is busy keeping things fresh and full of sweet graphics, sounds, voiceovers, and making sure things flow smoothly. Remember - the audience is co-creating this thing with comments. So - please - come out, join in the fun and help Unleash the Hotness.

26

8 Comments