Evan Knowles

>>> Despite What Your HubSpot or Salesforce Rep Says, Sales Software Alone Doesn’t Drive Growth If you’re sales team: ➡️ Doesn’t maintain accurate pipeline data in your CRM ➡️ Doesn’t follow up with leads that aren’t ready to buy immediately ➡️ Doesn’t log their sales activities so that you know what they do all day and how to coach them Then, investing in a new CRM or sales tool probably isn’t worth the cost and change management headaches if you’re not committed to changing basic sales rep behaviors. While selecting the right sales platform can make following your sales process significantly easier, it still takes leadership to get your sales people to leverage the tools that you have invested in to help them sell more. #crm #hubspot #inbound #salesenablement #nahb #builders #homebuilders #construction

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Easy deliverability win for your sales team: Don't use your SEP's (SalesLoft, Outreach, etc.) default link tracking. Set up custom link tracking & use your domain. Link tracking works like this. Click link ➡️ Sends you to a tracking page ➡️ Redirects to real page If that tracking page has a mismatched domain... straight to spam Why? Spam filters think you're phishing. A spam filter doesn't know where you're redirecting towards. + If a bunch of cruddy emailers are using the same link, you're going to be viewed in that same company. TL;DR... USE THE FEATURE!!!

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If your solution requires behavior change of any amount, you require a top down selling motion. Why? Behavior change is too hard to do bottoms up. It just doesn’t work. A pretty large number of SaaS apps think that they can go middle up or bottoms up. Then they are frustrated that their “champion” or “power user” isn’t driving the change they want. If your solution requires change, get good at selling to the c-level.

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If you want to hit $100M ARR (and position your company for true scale), you must master enterprise sales. Here are the 11 critical skills your team needs to consistently close 6, 7 and 8 figure deals: 1. Understanding fundamental differences between transactional selling and enterprise sales 2. Developing the right pricing strategies to align with your customer 3. True multi-stakeholder and multi-threaded sales processes 4. High impact account-based marketing strategies including dedicated virtual programming 5. Field sales support and in-person program development 6. Territory design and comp planning 7. Building the team including pre-sale architects, reps, and customer success 8. Aligning the organization and staffing new functions 9. Building out services to ensure your customers solve their problems 10. Mutual action planning built around client outcomes 11. Deal management at the Board level These are all fundamental skills Pavilion taught previously but the scope and intensity are different when it comes to true Enterprise sales. That’s why Enterprise GTM School is so important and it’s become a foundation of our educational curriculum. We’ll teach you the entire enterprise playbook, give you the workbooks, tools, and processes, and prepare you to hit true scale. The course is included FREE with Executive Membership. It's an absolute can’t miss! And it starts TOMORROW Apply here: https://lnkd.in/ezspvCZe P.S. Not a member yet? DM me to get 10% off Enterprise GTM School

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If you are an SDR manager, you can help your team get meetings by responding to the outbound you're receiving from other vendors. Ask the SDR who is emailing you if they use anything for revenue intelligence [obviously insert your category] and go from there. Find out the information, and then give it to the lowest performing rep on your team for an easy win. Here's the email you can draft for your SDR: "Hey VP of Sales, I spoke with my manager who mentioned you were using XYZ already, she talked to John (one of your SDRs) who gave us the tip. Would you be willing to have someone on your team evaluate us as an alternative?" ^^ It sets. Try it! #sdrlife #sales

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Revenue options is not a solo sport. As HubSpot’s sales, marketing, and customer service platform matures, there is an emergence of people who have years of RevOps experience under their belt. These bright people know HubSpot inside and out. They deploy creative CRM solutions and extend the platform in business-specific ways. But often revenue operations experts’ understanding of data, CRM administration, and automation options far exceeds the knowledge, vision, and expectations of the leaders in their company. They implement great solutions based on theory, logical organization, and the full extent of what the platform can do, but frustration mounts as innovative toolsets go underutilized and unappreciated. At my HubSpot consulting companies, we hire very smart people. They have decades of CRM architecture, automation, data analysis, and sales team training experience. However, there is one tool in our methodology that ensures we stay in alignment with the reality that sales reps face. >>> Regular, structured sales rep interviews. <<< This is by far the best non-technical tool for revenue operations teams. By interviewing at least one sales rep a week, without their boss or other members of their team present, you get a raw picture of their priorities, how they work, and the friction in your tools and process. Bringing this data back to the revenue operations team and making it central to the planning process for small adjustments, large projects, and sales tool training has increased CRM adoption, sales effect, and data cleanliness significantly. #hubspottipsandtricks #crm #revops #revenueoperations #salesenablement #inbound #hubspot #salesforce

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Wondering how to merge PLG and SLG for maximum impact? Japna Sethi talks about how they made this work at companies like Dropbox, Productboard, and Calendly. She calls it "defining the API" between the two growth motions so the right PLG leads get passed on to your sales team and shares the details on the approaches at the companies she has worked. For the full episode: https://lnkd.in/d-2ZAvir

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OUTBOUND IS DEAD - They shouted and fired the OB team. Then the reality check - How was your OB process setup? You used a tool to round-robin call 1000's of prospects, if they pick up the phone - SDR is on the call. Seems quite efficient - you manage to get the person on a call! No personalisation, no focus, no context. You may as well be selling mortgages or insurance slips or Dead Sea products the same way. Now you got you title (what's the actual role??) on the call. What do you say? They will automatically start with "not interested" and if you can't pinpoint the exact value and pain in the first breath of the call - it's all done and lost. So who killed outbound? You just did, by spamming your buyer on their personal phone without any context. Context is still king:) #isdead #sdr #abm #outbound #marketing #gtm

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SDRs - you were not destined to - hear voicemails - make manual dials - and be a robot all day every day It's time to unleash your full potential - take your career into your own hands - spend your day for meaningful conversations - stop doing robotic tasks A giant leap in your life starts with a tiny little step Forward this post to your manager or your Slack channel #sales #prospecting #coldcalling

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5 Steps to 10X your appointments set by increasing your cold call pick up rate! (🧊📞) Step 1) Scrape leads at volume using software like: - Apollo.io - D7 Lead Finder - Lead Rocks Step 2) Focus on cell phone numbers (Much higher answer rates.) using software like: - ClearoutPhone Step 3) Sort by area code and time zone. Step 4) Dial Time: - 8AM-10AM and 4PM-6PM tend to work best. Step 5) Leverage a Power Dialer or if possible, a Predictive Dialer like: - Close - JustCall - PhoneBurner Bonus Tip 1: Go High Level tends to end up in spam. Bonus Tip2: Use targeted area codes per state. Bonus Tip 3: I've heard there is easily accessible cheap underground software that hacks the Apollo API. #entrepreneurship #sales #revenue #coldcalling #business #leadership #worksmarter

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How do you know when to fire your SDR leader? When the SDR team isn’t performing, it’s not always their fault. Here are some things to consider. SDR leaders were often promoted from SDRs - Without any training on operations/process - They try to run the playbook they were taught - But they didn’t build that playbook themselves You may not have the fundamentals in place - Are ICP/Personas clearly mapped out? - Does the messaging resonate with them? - How many accounts/leads can SDRs work? - Without skipping critical steps and losing them? - Have we identified the absolute best leads/accounts? - Have we segmented them to match the right messaging? - Do we have an efficient process built out in the systems? - Do we have clear reporting to see what’s working and not? There’s a BIG difference between coaching SDRs and building a repeatable process and system for them. Anything you’d add here? 🤔 If we don’t have this in place, it’s hard to put the blame solely on the SDR leader. If we do have this in place, there are some experiments we can run to try to improve things quickly. 1. The 3-Week Messaging Experiment 2. The Conversion Rate Experiment Details in tomorrow’s 📰 𝙍𝙚𝙫𝙊𝙥𝙨 𝙒𝙚𝙚𝙠𝙡𝙮 📰 Subscribe to get it here: https://bit.ly/49RCm0h ✌️

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I’ve seen 200 + SDR teams. One of the most common reasons why SDR teams fail? They’re spending time doing the wrong things.   1) Companies are hindering their team with non pipeline generating activities. 2) Complicated or lack of process... CRMs that are like a maze and have 15+ fields to fill in just to change a lead status. 3) Activities that aren’t linked to quota. What have I missed? 💡

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Well said, Jen Abel. And even beyond these ARR guardrails, startups often instinctively throw in enterprise and SMB as dual strategies. Or direct and PLG. Outbound and channel. And more! #startup #sales #GTM #SMB #channel #enterprise #PLG #directsales

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When prospects are confused, they don't respond. Here's a sales message that confused me: "At ABC, we are building a GitHub Copilot for sales reps to assist them and save 5 hours per week with automation." The cost of confusion? Lost sales. Here's the problem: Chances are you've never been taught how to explain. You can't get better at something you've never been taught and practiced. So, let's practice explaining what you do. Here's a framework you can use: With {product}, you {what the prospect does} and {desired result} without {what people don't want to do}. Example for Uber: “With Uber, you press a button, and in 15 minutes, a Mercedes takes you to where you want to go without taking out your wallet.” Example for Notion: “With Notion, you can categorize, tag, and search for LinkedIn posts so you can surface them later without having to dig.” Example for Calendly: “With Calendly, you paste a link into your email and schedule meetings without going back and forth to find the perfect time.” Example for Grammarly: “With Grammarly, you type your text, and it automatically corrects spelling and grammar errors without needing to proofread manually.” Okay, it’s your turn. What do you do? Use the framework, and I'll provide feedback.

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I partnered with Kyle Poyar this week to uncover 10 PLG plays that can enhance your customer engagement, streamline processes, and drive revenue growth. Even if your company doesn't identify as Product-Led Growth (PLG), these are strategies from PLG that ANY company should be incorporating. Full post in today's GTM Newsletter by GTMnow, I’ll pop the link in the comments. The TL;DR: 1. Interactive demo on the website 2. Replace hard feature gates and paywalls with soft gates 3. Incorporate a usage-based component to pricing 4. Leverage product data to drive customer outcomes 5. Offer trials for new features 6. Correlate product usage with revenue growth 7. Automate resource-intensive processes with AI 8. Implement smart email nurture cadences 9. Build and leverage power user communities 10. Offer starter packages or proof of concepts ✍️

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We get asked a lot - how should warm leads from the website captured by our unique buyer-level ID tech get actioned? Where do they fit alongside all the ways B2B companies prospect today? What should be your Daily Sales Plays? Where should your SDRs and AEs spend their time? Whether you are an SMB, Mid-Market or Enterprise - here are some sales outreach tactics to consider as you grow! #b2b #marketing #sales #gotomarket #usa #BuyerLevelID #PersonLevelID #VisitorID #WebsiteVisitorID #abm #salesengagement #personalization #demandgen #salesplays #openai #chatgpt

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B2B SaaS investors... For your last handful of *seed* deals... What was MRR, rough growth trajectory, pre-money and total size of the round? Where do you feel like seed is at the moment? Either comment, or if you wanna DM me, I'll aggregate them into an average...

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Who was more efficient at growing from $350M - $2.5B in ARR? Hubspot and Salesforce were pretty similar on the CAC payback front during this phase of growth.  The charts show Salesfroce from 2006-2012 and Hubspot from 2017 to 2023. During this time they both grew revenue from about $350M to almost $2.5B. So who did it more efficiently? Salesforce averaged 26.1 months and Hubspot averaged 28.4 Similar to the magic number metrics (we reviewed last week) we get an inversion in the overlapping years of the GFC and COVID.  GFC made it harder to grow - COVID made it easier.  But pre and post this period Salesforce is slightly more efficient. But we are splitting hairs here - the numbers are very similar.

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Any successful CRO program uses revenue impact as a guiding light. It has to. Or your business ends up chasing $5,000 ROI opportunities when you could be honing in on $500K+ ROI opportunities.  Businesses are often so concerned with driving top-line revenue growth that they don’t tie a monetary value to their A/B tests. But you can’t place value on a winning test if you don’t factor in the time or money it takes to find it. Sizing the potential revenue impact of any A/B test is the only way to discern between actual winners and tests that are simply a waste of your time and resources.  Even in 2024, rarely are eCommerce businesses asking themselves if the ROI on a test is worth it. But your business should be! It’s time to stop treating CRO like a democracy in which your business implements the idea that gets the most votes – and instead, start approaching CRO with real data and consideration for ROI.  #CRO #ecommerce

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