105: Scaling to $100M ARR with Creative Demand Gen and Hiring Discipline with Sam Blond
- You need to be able to hire people who are more senior than you and better than you at their specific functions
- Every quarter, ask yourself, ‘What were the 3 most creative/contrarian demand gen campaigns we did?’
- Engage prospects in concentric proximity circles: friends & former colleagues –> people in groups/tribes you are affiliated with –> competitors of existing customers –> companies in a restricted geographic area. Do all of this before cold outbound.
- If you sponsor an event, don’t just be a silver/gold/platinum sponsor. Also challenge yourself to think about 3 ideas to have the cool/visible/genius creative impact.
- Rippling gives gift cards to people who post on LI about their positive onboarding experience with their software.
- As your business scales, you don’t need to be as creative. For example. cold outbound will fail in the early days but work when you have an established brand.
- Few things, if anything, are more important to your company’s reputation, and therefore its success, than implementation and customer onboarding.
- Hiring more salespeople can actually decrease total, not just incremental, new bookings when you are operating in a demand-poor environment.
- Sales leaders must embrace personally generating demand as a core job responsiblity.
- It is much harder to increase win rates by 50% from 20% to 30% than it is to increase the number of opportunities by 50%.
- We are under-resourced and under-focused on customer marketing. We should be deliberate about leveraging raving fan customers to generate new ones. Go above and beyond for these people.
75: The AI Evolution: Cross the Chasm of First to Future Iterations with Gong’s Eran Aloni
(no key highlights)
62: The Revenue Viking Shared His Competitive Edge & Winning Culture Tactics with Mark Cranney (replay of episode 1)
- Hiring criteria
- Competitiveness
- Character (esp. focus & discipline)
- “Golden Spur” (why they want/need to be successful)
- Process beats heroics every time
- New hire bootcamp
- 4 to 5 days
- In-person
- 50% product & market – unpack the value proposition, segmentation, differentiators, product gaps (& roadmap to close them). Competitive playbooks.
- Competence gives people confidence
- When I design a sales process, I have a stage called Executing a Competitive Strategy before the Technical Validation stage. This includes:
- Understanding who your competitors are on the deal
- Pre-positioning lockout evaluation criteria
- The Proof of Value stage is critical and helps answer “Why you?” and “Why now?”
- Track your win rate overall as well as by segment and versus specific competitors
- Most of the negotiation must happen, especially on evaluation criteria, before the PoC/PoV.