Michael Wilde’s Post

When I started my first sales job... We didn't have SalesLoft or Sales Automation. We didn't have Clay or Apollo. We didn't have a simple Cloud-based phone system/auto-dialer. We didn't have Zoom or Fathom. We didn't have Slack or Teams. We had no CRM, but only a stack of loose pieces of paper; tasks written by hand. We had 1980-style wired phones on our desks, manually dialing every phone number. We had a sales script printed on recycled 8.5x11" paper. And we had no pitch deck—just our voice. We grew past $1 million with just me as a solo salesperson in 7 months. Business owners and entrepreneurs believe sales tech can solve their sales problems. The craze of AI everything has diluted entrepreneurs into looking for the silver bullet. This is the furthest thing from the truth. Creating their sales process, obsessing over their ideal customer, crystalizing their offer, their story, their scripts, and their objection playbook is what moves the needle. Sales tools accelerate results, but they don't replace the foundation of a successful sales team. #sales

How to change B2B tech selling model. If you are in B2B tech selling and you are not thinking about XaaS model and potential changes in selling models, you are already loosing. Tomas Lah and J.B. Wood are offering some ideas about potential new selling models in their book Techology-as-a-Service Playbook: 👉 Remote Selling Models. Now some enterprise XaaS companies are successfully conducting the entire XaaS subscription sales process without ever going to the customer’s site. 👉 Process-Driven Selling. Hiring less-experienced talent and then teaching and enforcing very tight adherence to a proven sales process. 👉 Land-Only Sales Teams. The land team and the customer success team. In this model, sales lands. That’s what they do. They don’t own adopt, they don’t own renew and they even don’t own most of expand. The adopt/expand/renew team own growing a customer’s spending on the offer platform already in use (adding more users, more transactions, more services), but they hand opportunities to land an additional (major) offer platform at that customer to the land team. 👉 Automated Sales. Everyone has had the experience of buying something or signing up for a subscription on a website. A new and far less-used tactic is to imbed upsell and cross-sell offers that present themselves to the customer directly through the technology. We have seen resistance to this tactic. 👉 Blended Sales and Service Models. At TSIA, we predict there will be a massive blurring of the historical lines that separated sales from services. You empower service and marketing teams to up-serve the customer by both providing services or information and recommending those new products and services that the employee truly believes would benefit the customer. Service interactions can occur 15 to 20 times more than sales interactions. 👉 Outcome-Based Selling. Let’s face it: Tech has always been a product industry at heart. Selling to business buyers is fundamentally different. They don’t want to start the conversation with the product; they want to start the conversation with their business outcomes. Business—not technology— is the new language of sales. It doesn't matter at which stage of maturity you are with your sales organization, you should at least move in the remote selling and automated selling direction already and think about other potential models from the list and how to enable them in your organization. #newB2Bsellingmodels #techselling #XAAS #sales

Salesforce's two new, fully autonomous sales agents will help scale your sales team. 🔹 Einstein SDR Agent engages with inbound leads, in natural language, to answer questions, handle objections, and book meetings for human sellers. 🔹 Einstein Sales Coach Agent facilitates life-like role-plays, simulating a buyer during discovery, pitch, or negotiation calls. See how companies like Accenture will leverage these agents to improve sales team effectiveness, scale to support more deals, and free time and effort for teams to focus on the most complex deals. https://lnkd.in/ePdtrtkT

Chatbots might feel like a buzzword. But they're a game-changer for lead qualification. Think of them as your 24/7 sales assistant. They work off a set of rules you provide, and can quickly and accurately qualify leads. No more: - Expensive software - Endless rounds of phone tag - Wasted time on leads that don't go anywhere Best of all, they allow you to personalize and automate your outreach at scale. Yes, chatbots can still feel impersonal- unless you take the time to craft a human-like conversation. (- it's possible!) If you're still not using chatbots for your lead qualification, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to scale your business. It's time to embrace the future of sales.

Product-led sales (PLS) is a B2B SaaS approach for an initial product experience and a sales team to work together to be more persuasive together than either sales-only or product-only approaches. In essence, the user experience for propsects of trial and self-service demo-scenarios comes early rather than late in a process and so can better “presuade” potential buyers ahead of follow-on personal sales and BDR (business development representative) meetings. The initial proof of value and fit is demonstrated experientially by the product, and sets the stage for the highly relevant and detailed sales conversation that can follow in the prospect experience. The product user experience itself then tends to answer many questions—before they are asked—and then sales teams can spend time in meetings more focused more on the prospect’s unique interests and concerns with highly qualified leads. As summarized by Gartner, in PLS: "The product takes a central role in driving customer acquisition. By focusing on an accessible self-serve model and an intuitive end user experience, a product's inherent value propels the sales process forward." PLS is product, user experience, and people all working together. Orginal AI image created with Midjourney #userexperience #productmanagement #productdesign

Redacted from a WhatsApp conversation last night - on the variables on Outbound: "I feel like forever I’m going around thinking, is it a rep problem? A message problem? A targeting problem? Things are coming and this is the first year of having done it from scratch and we’ll close ----------- from cold outbound so not a failure by any stretch; just not as quick as the VC would like us to be running" My big message to the market this year has been: 1. Create a daily work structure which allows you to measure everything scientifically. My post here: https://lnkd.in/eQGQA9Zf 2. Apply a Framework like MECE as your guiding principle to think about your experiments: https://lnkd.in/eQDXuHuA 3. Gamify and eliminate SQL incentives - move to points for behaviour mix as well as outcome mix: Chat to 💙 Derry Holt 4. Be prepared to see what works change in 4 days' time and adapt 5. Kill email as your first touch - eliminate channel mix and comprehensively cover a channel before moving to the next channel 6. Create dispositions which create call or email funnels based on outcomes and responses. Check in with Tito 🚀 Bohrt and his breakthrough at Altisales This only works if you eliminate sellers from thrash and enable them to have 25-35 conversations daily - which is the key to unlocking the frustrations. And even after all this, the maths never lies - conversion will still be 8-10% at the high end and average at 4-5%... Why, well the market silly

Running sales development in high-value B2B SaaS or services. If I were building from scratch, I would remove email and sequencing and adopt a conversation-first strategy. I would create a highly focused and disciplined structure that forces sellers into measurable work, compounding learning and feedback loops. I would standardise messaging and eliminate rep creativity until we hit statistically relevant failure points. I would utilise sprints and agile to design and intentionally develop the systems and shape of work execution. I would mandate email as a second-order communication channel - to ONLY be used after 20 dial attempts. I would hire people who are happy to work in this system. But I do not want robots. I like intelligent, critical thinkers who can analyse the insights and unique value of signals from their conversations and apply that knowledge to the next set of experiments. PipelineHeroes love structures like this, and I only want PipelineHeroes. To execute well I would wrap this in new forms of incentives, points and games and eliminate MQL and SQL incentives altogether. This is what this would look like. SalesDevOS in action

EASIEST way for PMMs today to build rapport with sales: enablement. listen to reps, build what helps hit quota, and show why it matters. But not many of us do all that by default, because good enablement is a Barry’s class and a half. Easy start, do a lot to keep up, slip, and then fall into a pool of your own sweat (or maybe tears?). Good enablement, a lot of times, is falling forward. Here’s an AI prompt I landed on this past week: (Use it especially for technical products) ———————————- “You’re a product marketer, who wants to earn a quick win with sales reps. Goal being to earn trust fast. Enablement is one way to do that. Our reps today find it hard to show product value, against our technical infrastructure. Doing this well increases confidence on sales calls. Here is the transcript of our call and my notes. Please write a talk track to explain the above, as if I’m 12 years old. Ask me questions to help tailor what you write next.” ———————————— Quota is not based on technical acumen. Give your reps what they need to hit quota. Even if that means using AI to make good enablement, easy. AI is just like any other tool, like an exercise band. When used right, you get more out of your work and worry less about what your peers think. Because, you’re more confident in your approach. And that feeling is contagious. Every rep wants a piece of it. Good enablement is sales confidence. Be the one who can always deliver that. A PMM who gets influence with sales. P.S. You can now attach documents in ChatGPT. It’s my fall Cinderella story, try it out.

I've increased the outbound meetings for Designity by over 300% from 2023 to 2024 Sent over 200k + emails this year alone for the org How did we do it when it's even harder to do cold email this year than in 2023? By having a dedicated person always learning about the newest outbound process I took it upon myself to understand every part of cold email From data sourcing and cleaning to keeping bounces at nearly 0% To a complex custom email infrastructure setup And even copywriting, AI workflow tools, and other automations -- So how do you get these results for yourself? You need to adapt or die Anyone can do this, but it takes time, dedication, and hard work (shocker) Everything I talked about will change again in 3 months The AEs, SDRs, and agencies that keep trying to do the same thing over and over slowly die out The ones that adapt will be light years ahead of the competition So pick someone on your team to get in the weeds or find an agency from the outside who knows their stuff This is what it's going to take in B2B sales going forward to win How are you keeping up to date with the changing landscape in outbound?

Highly recommend Leadbeam to all B2B Outside Sales ! 💡 If you’re a sales rep and want to be more efficient save time logging activity into Salesforce and stay organized this is your solution. Or if you’re a sales leader who wants efficiency from your team with higher productivity and a clean pipeline hit up the main man Gabe Naviasky !!!