Krupa Shah

There’s a dramatic divide in how GTM teams are setting up signal-driven outbound. Some teams are thrilled with a 2% conversion rate, and others expect 20%. Here’s why: It comes down to whether your motion is for SMBs or MM / ENT. Companies selling to SMBs have a massive TAM. Using Bluebirds, we found ~500k accounts in the US with less than 200 employees. With smaller ACVs and this large of a TAM, SMB motions need to rely on automation to make the economics work. Here are the benchmarks at an account level: - 0.3% meeting rate with just email sequences, no signals - 1% meeting rate with email sequences that are signal-driven (job change, job postings, fundraising, etc.) - 3% to 5% meeting rate with email, call, connection requests and signals It’s difficult to scale beyond these benchmarks without smaller territories and higher-touch rep involvement, which breaks the unit economics. Luckily this works really well if you can automatically touch thousands of accounts per week using tools like Smartleads, Bluebirds, Clay, dozens of inboxes, Orum / Nooks, etc. On the flip side, companies selling to MM / ENT have a much tighter TAM of ~50k accounts. After tiering, reps might be responsible for 100-200 accounts and need to drive $30k+ ACVs. Three VP of Sales running this GTM motion said they expect their reps to convert at a 15-30% meeting book rate, within 2 weeks of working an account. These teams still want signals to improve productivity and know where to focus, but don’t wan’t extreme outbound automation. Their tech stack looks more traditional, using Outreach instead of Smartleads, a moderate number of inboxes, and something like Bluebirds for signals. One approach isn’t better than the other, it just depends on your GTM motion. Feels like this nuance has been glossed over in the signal-driven outbound conversation on LinkedIn.

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CRO tip of the day. It is fine to use drag and drop editors to prototype and get things out fast. But once you find something that works, build it natively. You will likely gain a slight lift in conversion rate due to page speed load time--and being able to attain pixel perfect design (vs. clunky looking). #cro #ecommerce #conversionrateoptimization

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Most growth partners/agencies spend way too much time “managing clients.”   - They’re watching email.   - They’re responding on Slack.   - They’re writing long-winded updates, but not saying much.   - They’re having the client service guy pop-in "just to see how it’s going.”   - Unsurprisingly, the outcomes are often not there either 👎   Yes, you should take care of clients. But the above is a bad definition.   The best growth agencies do it differently -   ✅ They spend less time managing and more time growing.   ✅ They don’t lock you into lengthy contracts.   ✅ They use outcomes as their tool for retention.   ✅ They have an aversion to fluff.   ✅ They're obsessed with learning, executing, & repeating.   B/c they know for every minute they’re not doing this, they’re leaving growth on the table.

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We at ZUZU Hospitality are doing exactly what Dharmesh Shah said HubSpot's product and GTM strategy was - Broad featureset and SMB focus. We just happen to do it for Hospitality. One more thing, we are doing it with an added layer of services components to take away the more complex bits such as Revenue Management. Thanks you Dharmesh Shah for articulating this strategy. Gives us early builders more confidence in what we are going for.

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Special feature post in The GTM Newsletter today: Kyle Poyar broke down 10 “PLG plays” that every company should implement - even if they’re *NOT PLG*. Kyle consistently shares exceptional content around PLG, growth and pricing. It was a ton of fun collaborating and seeing his breakdown. The first point is an interactive demo on the website. The fourth point is to leverage product data to drive customer outcomes. This fourth point I found particularly interesting. The CRM is the "source of truth" for go-to-market teams, but often lacks product analytics to provide customer behavior understanding from in-product activities without human or sales rep involvement. But in reality, even non-PLG companies can use this data to assess customer health and tailor sales conversations. I'll drop the link to the details on these 10, including examples and screenshots 👇 -- The GTM Newsletter is a weekly newsletter by GTMfund's media brand, GTMnow, that goes out to over 50k revenue leaders who are scaling their companies and careers. If you aren't already subscribed, you can do so through the Substack post in the comments.

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I’ve looked around and haven’t found a casual regular zoom meetup with product/growth/product marketing folks working in B2C2B or PLG+Sales-led companies to trade ideas and talk shop about monetization, freemium upgrade paths, success metrics, and retention. Drop me a note here in the comments if you’d be interested in such a thing. Maybe we should make it happen? #plg #productmarketing #product #growth

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Are you following TMIMIE? AKA, The Most Interesting Man in Ecommerce? If you’re into Shopify, DTC, Ecom SaaS, etc., you’ve got to know Jeremy Horowitz'. We recently caught up for my newsletter. Here’s 6 things I learned about ecom, business, & writing online - ✅ If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. ✅ Building on this, 3 things to move fast in your career - maniacal focus, ruthless prioritization, & teaming up v. going solo. ✅ The best newsletters a) solve a valuable problem b) too few are talking about (BTW, you should check out Jeremy’s). ✅ Most people a) do too much and b) are impatient. Winners do the opposite. ✅ There’s a secret to entrepreneurship - love the problem so much you’re happy to weather every sh–t storm. ✅ Shopify may be a trillion dollar biz with a $100B market cap 😲 … 👋 Catch our full chat on ecom & business at moonwater[dot]studio/scale-mba (send #18)

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Your GTM is broken. We have more knowledge, tools, and AI than ever... So why did 56% of companies miss revenue goals last year? ↳ Misaligned Teams - 60% of companies say sales, marketing, and CS are out of sync leading to wasted hours. ↳ Siloed Tech Stacks - 11,038+ GTM techs on the market - The average enterprise has 23 tools in their GTM tech stack, often not integrated ↳ Lack of Trust - 71% say internal go-to-market clarity is the biggest blocker to business growth than competition or market conditions. Your GTM is Better Together... Decisions about GTM technology, interoperability, team roles, and strategies cannot be made in silos any longer. → GTM Teams are Better Together - GTM-aligned teams are 67% more efficient at closing deals → GTM Tech is Better Together - 82% of tech buyers want software that integrates with existing solutions. They rank ease of integration higher than the cost or security. Source: G2 2023 Buyer Behavior Report → GTM Trust Happens when Teams and Tech work better together. Teams that work better together are 50% more productive (source: Stanford) and drive 21% more profitability (source: Gallup) Join us for Better Together... Learn more and request an invite from the 🔗  in comments #BetterTogether G2 Clari TechnologyAdvice Totango + Catalyst Software ZoomInfo ON24 Vidyard Demandbase MadKudu

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You're not the only association that gets phone calls from members asking where content lives on your website. Not the best look, that's for sure. Why isn't your best content findable? We’ve spent years helping associations like yours tackle this exact challenge. The simple solution? A combo of sound content strategy and powerful AI Search. Let's break it down: 💡 Content Strategy: It's your blueprint. Ensuring every piece of content is audience-centric, goal-driven, and constantly refined based on real feedback. 💡 AI Search: This is no ordinary website search. AI Search breaks down silos, delivers precise results, and curates all disparate content sources into a single index. Your content is discoverable and useful again. Combine these two, and you've got a website dream team! Check out the 8 ways we've help revolutionize the way content gets found for organizations just like yours. https://lnkd.in/gBhG_PCq #federatedsearch #facetedsearch #fusesearch #aisearch #contentstrategy #assnchat #associations

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Day -5, Customers - 4, ARR - $0 If you aren’t a force multiplier as an IC, you won’t be as a manager In some cases I have seen people make bigger impacts on culture as an IC peer vs team lead. IC’s can - set the standard - educate their peers - sympathize and empathize - problem solve by truly understanding the problem Impacting a culture can seem daunting, if you are struggling to get started, show up with relentless positivity and you will figure it out from there

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Walked into a room full of strangers for a roundtable session and left feeling like we're about to create KC's sharpest GTM mastermind. Top 3 hot takes of the night 👇 🔥 The traditional B2B SaaS inbound motion is broken. Buyers are rarely ready for a demo the first time they come to your website, so why are we slapping 'Book a demo' buttons in every section of copy? Emily Elizabeth said that she and her team at Onspring lead with the ideal experience that every buyer wants — to choose their own pace and engage at the level that makes sense for their own journey vs being forced to book a sales call before you're ready. In practice this means: ⚡️ instead of booking a demo right away, you can watch a demo. ⚡️ when you're ready for the sales call, you get a fast response. Paired with lower-funnel content and personalized landing page experiences, they've achieved a 400% increase in conversions. 🤯 Can you believe?? 🔥🔥 Sales teams are leaving cash on the table when they focus only on acquiring new customers. Brian Nelson said he and his GTM team at ClientCircle reversed churn and rapidly affected ARR by focusing first on keeping existing clients happy and expanding as relationships grew. In practice this means: ⚡️ for every sales exec, there are TWO account managers. One is focused on client strategy to help them grow their business, and another to provide day-to-day account support. ⚡️ mapping out the customer lifecycle and orchestrating outreach that supports product adoption and fosters champion-building relationships with customers. This customer-first sales approach not only keeps more money on the table for them — it also helps their clients do the same. 🤑 That's an undeniable win-win. 🔥🔥🔥 As a collective, we are missing the mark on messaging. Ryan Couch said that after years of working with cybersecurity teams at Fishtech Group and Cyderes, the message that clients need to hear is vastly different than what most marketing provides. "A CTO or CIO doesn't care about the latest AI feature, they want to be able to sleep at night knowing that their business is secure and they won't be in the headlines the next day because of a breach." In practice this means: ⚡️ Creating messaging that outlines solutions for business problems vs messaging that only addresses technology gaps. ⚡️ Closing the gap between sales and marketing when creating messaging that resonates with the ICP — listening tools like Gong help GTM teams tap into the minds of their prospects. The product marketer in me could write a full dissertation on ALL things messaging, but that's coming next week in part 3 of my guide "3 Critical Initiatives in 30 Days". (Stay tuned 😎) Huge thanks to the rest of the roundtable: Chandler B., Aaron McKee, Christopher Greco, Peter Lane, Jeff Loos, and Eric James 🙏 Thank you Jason Myers for getting us all together!

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The path to $10MM ARR is about finding your repeatable, scalable sales motion. The formula is simple, but not easy. It looks like this: Effort + Enthusiasm + Messaging + Lead Quality = Results When you are scaling a sales team, your job is to manage the inputs. Those are the things on the left side of this equation. If you can reduce the variability of the inputs, you will have more consistent results. Put another way. Consistent inputs leads to consistent outputs. Let's break it down... 1. Effort is the driver for your sales performance. You cannot scale without consistent effort. Effort includes the velocity of sales activity (phone calls, emails, meetings, etc.). Effort also includes the way that you execute your sales activity. This is your sales process and sales playbook. You can improve the quality of your effort with learning and development. 2. Enthusiasm is an amplifier for your effort. You have to act like you want to earn the business. A little enthusiasm goes a long way in closing more business. I've found that you can't teach enthusiasm. You must hire for it. 3. Messaging is how you get prospects to believe what you believe. Your messaging is your value prop. It's how you approach your ICP. It's the way that you convince customers that their current version of the world is no longer acceptable and they must make a chance. The best messaging illustrates the consequences of inaction. 4. Lead quality drives your conversion rate You have to stay focused on your ICP. The more variable your lead quality, the more inconsistent your sales results. The best effort, enthusiasm, and messaging are helpless if you are focused on the wrong accounts. This is the formula for predictable, repeatable, scalable sales. Manage the consistency of your inputs and you will have consistent outputs. What about you? What's your formula for repeatable results?

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Andrew Chase is one of the best HubSpot consultants out there. If you ever want to learn about what else you need (or don't need) inside of your portal, you need to talk to this guy and Pyxis Growth Partners. Listen Here --> https://lnkd.in/epiuNm2u #revops #crm #hubspot #ai #sales #marketing #customersuccess

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Meet the people-first GTM funnel. Mark and I were having dinner together last week and mapped out this entire model (a lot more to come), but I think it represents how people buy today. All right, let's break it down... There are two things to think about first before getting into the funnel. • Qualification: Meet your ideal customer profile through firmographic, demographic, and psychographic rules. • Intent: Understand signals from subscribers, members, and customers for better sales and marketing actions. Subscribers: Capture your ideal audience with high-value content. Aim for qualified subscribers who fit your customer profile. Subscribers are the new leads. Owned at the forefront vs rented. Members: Build an engaging, free, or paid community to network and discuss. Aim for members who meet your criteria. Customers: Offer tailored products and services to fit customer needs and increase usage and retention. Turn customers into advocates. So there you have it—a real and tangible way to measure whether you're doing and following People-first GTM. Much more to come on this. What do you think? Disagree? Agree?

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I'm shocked that more DTC brands aren't obsessing over increasing conversion rate (and profitability) by leveraging this tactic... Hyper-personalized marketing. It's the year 2024. Capturing customer and prospect data is easier and cheaper than it's ever been. Why aren't more brands obsessing over testing hyper-personalization strategies? My gut tells me it's because it's an iterative process that takes time to figure out. But with the rise of data analytics and AI capabilities, this is something that every DTC brand MUST figure out. If you can crack the code on hyper-personalized advertising, the conversion rate lift just might be the difference between losing money and being incredibly profitable. Ryan Rouse Justin Buckley Ian Lenny Greg Shuey Kevin Kovach I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

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Feel uninformed on what MMM can do for your business? Listen to Scott Zakrajsek's 60 second breakdown -- it's the perfect description. This latest Conversion Tracking Playbook podcast is rich with so much amazing information around how to put your data to use today, holdout testing, CDPs, and more.

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5 ways to get new leads for your SaaS. Number 5 is surprising and underrated! 🤯 1. Build a free tool 2. Leverage third-party marketplaces 3. Share compelling customer use cases 4. Referral program 5. Cross-promote with other products

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The secret to getting 25-100X more customer feedback (...and it's not lengthy surveys) Most companies struggle to get meaningful customer insights. The industry average response rate for NPS is a measly 1-4% once a year. But TheySaid is getting 11-14% response rates 12-16 times per year! How? 3 key things: 1️⃣ Personalized questions — We only send 1 question per customer. It's tailored to their role and stage, asking about what THEY care about. 2️⃣ Respect their time — Customers will give you 5 seconds, not 30 minutes. Keep it short, sweet, and relevant to them as a human being. 3️⃣ Close the loop — The #1 reason customers don't give feedback is they think you won't act on it. We built a system to action EVERY response within 2-24 hours. When you ask personalized questions, respect their time, and show you're listening... You create a positive cycle of customers giving feedback and getting better service & value. It's a win-win! But generic NPS surveys that only benefit the company? Forget it. Customers just don't care. If you want to learn how to get exponentially more customer insights... Watch this video breaking down the 3-part formula:

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Absolute game changer coming in the next Appinium Revenue Enablement release: actual proof of the value of your Content Selling strategy. Starting top left going clockwise: Is there a higher win rate when content is leveraged? How is content selling impacting revenue throughout the sales stages? Which contact roles (personas) are most likely to engage with your content? Which content is most engaging (or least engaging)? Who is sending the most content across the business? Which sales owners/leaders encourage content selling? What is the win rate of each rep compared to their content selling? Take it even further: which content is converting the most leads, which certifications create the most successful sales reps, and more. It's something only a Content Enablement Platform (CEP) can do. That's Appinium. Huge props to Elisey F. and the product team for making this happen. Appinium Steven Jacobson Nick Nieset Lisa Dubernard Darian Edwards

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