Categories: Sales Kickoff | Sales Leadership | Sales Training Initiative
The sales kickoff (SKO) is where you the stage for what’s coming, explain what’s changed and chart the path for success in the next year. But let’s get real. Rallying the troops and rah-rah speeches are great, but they are not what helps land high-value accounts or meet the growth imperative. Moving the needle comes by taking direct action on the day-to-day selling motion. The top performers on your revenue teams appreciate nothing more than having obstacles removed from their path. Clear the runway for them to go after and successfully land high-dollar targets by making efficiency an overt theme across your SKO. In a conversation with John Kaplan on the Revenue Builders Podcast, Tenable COO Mark Thurmond refers to this leadership function as Removing the Friction. In this clip, Mark breaks down how he approaches these conversations and digs into the nuts and bolts of removing roadblocks that impede productivity:
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Categories: Sales Kickoff | Sales Leadership | Sales Process
The sales kickoff is a galvanizing moment for a sales organization, rallying the team around their purpose, strategy and goals for the year. As a sales leader, you've likely been a part of many of these kickoff events, and you may be familiar with the quick fizzle that sometimes happens once everyone gets back to their daily responsibilities. Driving behavior change with a SKO is no small feat, but consider the stakes - increasing competition, aggressive sales objectives, and highly guarded budgets - can you afford to invest in an event that doesn't move the needle on your business objectives for the year? Ensure your sales kickoff event makes it out of the conference room (or Zoom meeting) and into the day-to-day activities to drive meaningful impact on revenue. The key to ensuring SKO success beyond the event is to understand what it takes from the sales reps, managers and yourself as the leader to drive lasting outcomes. Then, commit to making it happen.
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Categories: Front-line Managers | Sales Leadership
Win/loss analysis is critical to improving win consistency and growing revenue. You may know the reason why a specific deal was won or lost, but can you and your account teams reverse engineer that process to improve results on the next deal? Is your team currently leveraging those insights to repeat successes and avoid known setbacks? Don’t scream at the scoreboard, or just tell your people what to do. Help your managers provide the how. Define exactly what’s working and what isn’t so you can focus on the best opportunities to support your salespeople in improving win rates. First, you need to equip your managers to get beyond the data of why deals are won and lost.
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Categories: Product-Led Growth | Sales Leadership | Sales Messaging | Selling Technology
The product-led growth (PLG) era marks a disruption in how SaaS companies interact with customers. A good working definition of PLG is that the product itself is the vehicle for acquiring, retaining, and expanding customer accounts. PLG companies share some characteristics. First, their solution is a significant upgrade from the previous status quo. Second, freemium or open-source versions usually feature a frictionless (meaning minimal human interaction) customer experience. Not every company has these characteristics. But the reality is that customer expectations have shifted, and the most successful companies in today’s B2B tech market are borrowing from the PLG model in order to satisfy the demand for a frictionless approach to customer engagement. Whether your company drives revenue from more traditional sales-and-marketing-led efforts or has a purely PLG-driven approach, the fundamentals of selling SaaS Solutions remain the same. Organizations get ahead of competitors by:
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Categories: CRO Best Practices | Sales Leadership | Sales Training Initiative | Sales Transformation
For revenue team leaders, no objective looms larger or more urgent than meeting aggressive revenue goals and satisfying the growth imperative. Recent studies show that the average tenure of CROs in SaaS startups lasts between 1.5 and 1.9 years. For commercial CROs, the average tenure jumps to two years, but the point remains: if you want to make a splash, there isn't time to spare.
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Categories: Customer Success | Differentiation | Sales Leadership | Selling Technology
Customer Success (CS) is a critical component of a successful customer engagement process. Growing revenue requires your organization to be cross-functionally aligned on buyer value and solution differentiation before and after the sale. Capturing that value after the initial deal is essential for driving recurring revenue and expansion opportunities within accounts. Fostering alignment between the traditional sales organizations and your CS team is one way today’s top B2B SaaS and Tech firms gain an advantage in a competitive marketplace. When CS is able to maintain continuity through handoffs and convey value through the post-sale stages of the customer relationship, organizations reap the benefits of high renewal rates, reduced churn, and increases in Net Retention Revenue. For revenue team leaders selling HiTech solutions, we’ve designed this leader playbook for improving CS execution. Dig in for more strategies and thought leadership from leaders who’ve built and leveraged elite CS teams.
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