8 Key Takeaways

1. Cold outreach is often highly ineffective. Instead, focus on (a) seeking referrals from delighted customers (b) active inbound demand generation (request to become a client; request for demo), (c) passive inbound demand generation (webinar, whitepaper, etc.), and (d) warm outreach with highly disciplined and personalized cadences.
2. You cannot meet a current year sales gap by hiring. Current year hires drive business next year and beyond. If you have a gap, the only viable answer is marketing and sales execution.
3. Nothing is counted in forecast unless it has a next scheduled meeting
4. Focus on WHY NOT? In other words, do a pre-mortem to identify red-flags. Why won’t they buy? A manager should ask this of reps and reps should ask this of prospects.
5. Recycle leads from closed lost deals, checking in with real value every 90 days
6. Set monthly goals and share daily performance covering AMP = activities, meeting, & pipeline.
7. Use hybrid hunter-farmer reps when accounts have significant upsell and/or cross-sell potential that AEs must have significant influence over. Otherwise, separate into specialized hunters and farmers (aka. Customer success/account managers).
8. Manage your online brand/presence since prospects will Google you and look you up on social media (esp. LinkedIn)

 

Takeaways from each session

 

The XYZ’s of Selling (Jeffrey Gitomer)

• Don’t chase your customers, have them chase you. This happens when you build loyalty with existing customers by delivering exceptional value after the sale. Consistent value creation builds loyalty which serves as the fuel for referrals. Stated another way, deliver a “first class” customer experience.
• Don’t find prospect’s pain, find their pleasure – rooted in their WHY. [JD: Frankly, I think this is a false dichotomy. Solving need/pain leads to prospect happiness/success.]
• On prospecting: (a) Put yourself in front of people who can buy from you and give them value first (bonus: ideas ARE value) (b) walk in prepared both in terms of them and in terms of you
• Manage your online brand/presence since prospects will Google you and look you up on social media (esp. LinkedIn)
• Build relationships by asking emotional questions since people want to do business with their friends. Examples: (a) ‘Where did you grow up?’ instead of ‘Where are you from?’ (b) ‘When I say (product/service) what one word comes to mind?’
• Don’t talk (i.e. brag) about yourself, leverage references and voice-of-customer testimonials
• Love to learn (speaker cited Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and Earl Nightingale)

 

The Future of Sales: What to Know, Do, & Prepare For (Tiffani Bova, Cate Gutowski, Sam Lee)

• Most of the time, you are not selling a product or service, you are selling business transformation
• Current applications of AI in sales: (a) Lead scoring/prioritization, (b) recommending next activity in opportunity management, (c) recommending next activity in customer success
• Leverage peer-to-peer executive introductions (your execs and theirs) in new business and renewals

 

Scaling Your Sales Team: The Do’s and Don’ts (Sam Jacobs, Kristen Habacht, Bill Sexton)

• The SDR + AE + sales specialist “stack” is only viable for large ($100K+) deal sizes. If you deal sizes are smaller, esp. < $10K, then you need a much lower cost of sales structure.
• Product first, then marketing, then sales.
• Outbound sales is highly ineffective. Instead, focus on demand generation.
• Smaller companies should build out sales ops before they need it. Defined as: analytics, process, tech stack, collateral, and training/certification.
• Hire reps to meet demand not (proactively) to create demand. You cannot meet a current year sales gap by hiring. Current year hires drive business next year and beyond. If you have a gap, the only viable answer is marketing and sales execution.
• Maintain high hiring standards
• Work backward from revenue to # deals to # of opportunities to # of meetings to volume of activity to amount of needed AE capacity
• Sales and marketing technology (CRM, marketing automation, etc.) will fail unless you first define your sales process
• Rather than getting lost in analytics for execs, sales ops should focus on serving first-line sales managers and AEs.
• Explore coaching via voice analytics (Going, VoiceOps, etc.)
• Panel could not come up with sales learning system success stories
• Don’t hire senior people from the outside. Instead, promote from within – SDR to AE to manager to exec. Have new hires cut their teeth on low-quality leads.

 

Peace, Love & Dashboards: A Lesson in Stakeholder Harmony (Jeremy Wiggett, Marc Jacobs)

• At SFDC, SDRs specialize in inbound and BDRs specialize in outbound
• Key SDR metrics: (a) capacity and tenure (b) activity: calls, connects, and “flips” = opportunities created by SDRs, aka MQLs (c) lead quality, esp. by source (d) speed to lead since every minute counts (e) persistence – # of calls & emails per contact vs. target.
• If something is not working, find the leak in the funnel: contact/lead – MQL (“stage 1” at SFDC; created by SDR) – SAL (“stage 2” at SFDC). Handoffs must be flawlessly executed so there is no lost time and no negative prospect relationship impact.
• Prioritize active inbound (ex: request for demo) above passive inbound (ex: whitepaper download) in lead scoring.

 

Pipeline Management: We’re Doing It Wrong! (Jason Jordan)

• Sales management training is way more important than AE training. Starting with the latter, and especially only doing the latter, is a recipe for failure.
• A bigger pipeline is not necessarily a better pipeline. Ultimately, success is about rep productivity ($/AE/time). The amount of pipeline that is good is = quota/(win rate), rolled up on an AE by AE basis.
• Managers should spend less time on forecasting and more time on deal coaching. There is little correlation between the former and sales productivity and strong correlation between the latter. One great leader cited held separate meetings: (a) a Friday forecasting meeting to meet a Monday deadline (b) a Tue deal coaching meeting to review specific opportunities.
• Managers should be cleaners, not closers. That means getting involved with AEs much earlier in the sale cycle to help qualify or disqualify.

 

The Playbook to Successful Sales Leadership (Dave Rudnitsky)

• The tactics contained in playbooks should change over time
• Be passionate, confident, and paranoid but never arrogant.
• Encourage AEs to run their book like their own franchise
• Check out the (online) brand of people before you hire them
• Always all with a plan; always connect as high as possible, esp. via a warm referral.
• To hire great reps, ask your customers who their favorite vendor salespeople are
• Use you execs in the sales process, but don’t bring them in too early
• Ride along with reps
• Focus on WHY NOT? In other words, do a pre-mortem to identify red-flags. Why won’t they buy? A manager should ask this of reps and reps should ask this of prospects.

 

Lightning Talks: Seller Metrics, Sales Hiring Operational Excellence, and Revenue Acceleration Hacks on the Cheap (Pete Kazanjy, Noah Goldman, Evan Bartlet)

• (Hiring) Apply the same discipline to sales hiring as you do to pipeline management. This means: (a) developing a hiring profile (b) screening (c) assessment (d) compensation (e) applicant tracking system (f) hiring funnel metrics (g) operational cadence of weekly hiring review meetings (h) have a playbook for sales hiring and train/certify managers on it
• (Metrics) Be holistic and don’t just drive for performance of a single number. To improve: (a) higher fidelity inputs (b) isolate best practice being wary of super-hero skills that do not scale (c) Roll out change with pilot groups before scaling (d) Automation/technology should only come after process definition and manual process success.
• To drive change, you must credibly prove to AEs that new tools and/or process will either help them close more deals or close deals faster
• (Revenue acceleration hacks) (a) Nothing is counted in forecast unless it has a next scheduled meeting (b) Diligently find the person of authority – “Are you the person who can choose to sign the deal without asking anyone else?” “Who besides you is involved in the final decision?” “How are decisions to purchase services like this made?” “I’m prepping the proposal, whose name should I put on the signature line?” If the CFO involved, then ask how you can them your prospect prepare the internal pitch. (c) Problem-prospect fit should come before you do anything else, ex. Before a demo (d) schedule the decision date working back from the go-live/customer value realization date (e) recycle leads from closed lost deals, checking in with value every 90 days

 

This Is How We Do It: The Salesforce Sales Playbook (Stephanie Glenn)

• 79% of customers want their rep to be a trusted advisor (source: SFDC State of Sales 2016)
• Components of SFDC playbook: (a) go to market territory design (b) Lead to cash pipeline machine (c) data obsession, starting with goals (d) Build your bench
• SFDC structures with (i) SMB for 1-200 employees with geo only (ii) mid-market for 201-4500 employees with geo + name accounts only (iii) strategic 4501+ with named accounts only. Additionally, SFDC has vertical for Financial Services, Healthcare, and Retail.
• Start territory planning 4 to 5 months before the end of the fiscal year
• Create equal potential territories based on per-account upsell & cross-sell opportunity
• Engage leads immediately (even if that means dropping low scoring leads into drip nurturing) and track activity from lead source to close.
• Set monthly goals and share daily performance covering AMP = activities, meetings, & pipeline.
• Create a “clean your room” dashboard with (a) pushed opportunities (b) opportunities without recent activity (c) big deals missing critical information
• Promote from within. At SFDC from inbound SDR to outbound BDR to AE to manager to executive
• Use hybrid hunter-farmer reps when accounts have significant upsell and/or cross-sell potential that AEs must have significant influence over. Otherwise, separate into specialized hunters and farmers (aka. Customer success/account managers). At SFDC, they have hybrids and non-quota bearing customer success professionals focused on driving adoption.

 

AI for Sales – How CA Technologies Uses Predictive Analytics (Atul Kumar, Tiffany Giddens)

• AI can help answer: Which accounts? Which people? Which products? When to engage? How to engage?