Hayes Davis’ Post

Here’s a quick way to use a core dynamic books principle to empower your reps, sharpen outbound focus and improve your CRM data — all without big changes. Here’s the problem. Reps have worked their territories for 6 months and learned a ton. Some accounts have bad data, have been acquired, are a bad fit or can’t move forward because they’re mid-contract with a competitor. Your reps are doing bookkeeping to stash those accounts away so they don’t waste time going back to a bum account. Over time this cruft builds up and saps rep focus. Even worse, all that bookkeeping is a double waste because each rep does it differently, so you can’t actually use it to improve your CRM data. The solution is to set up a returns process to standardize and track this behavior. Give the reps a structured way to “return” an account with a logged reason. Typically this means that you’ll reassign the account to a pool user of some kind but it could also just mean setting a status and a few fields on an account. This makes it easy for reps to avoid these accounts when prospecting. And it gives RevOps a standardized way to identify and deal with data issues. Check out the video below for a simple version of the process for a rep using Gradient Works. You can do something similar in your CRM. Just make sure you’re validating ROE, flagging the account as a return, and storing the return reasons in a structured way. Give it a shot. If you’ve got questions, hit me up. Your reps, pipeline and CRM data will thank you. — PS: One of our customers’ favorite more advanced plays here is “Get Back to Me” which records a better time to reach out to the prospect when the account is returned. These accounts can be removed from the rep’s book and then reassigned to them at the appropriate time.

Anybody else think "get a free demo" is a truly bizarre CTA? I'm just young enough to have started my career well into the web-based software and SaaS era (though I vaguely remember people talking about "application service providers"). Anyway, I certainly missed out on the on-prem software days. So, I'm seriously asking... Was there a time where software demos cost money? Where a "free demo" was a differentiator? -- PS: To the folks in my spam folder... I'm not sure the "free demo" you're offering is as enticing as you hope it is.

Static territories shrink over time. But not (just) the way you think. When we think shrinking territories, we usually think about a growing sales team reducing the size of everyone's patch. That certainly happens (though less so over the past 18 months). But, there's another, sneakier, form of shrinkage that starts the day you hand a territory to a rep. And it starts with success. Here's how it works for a mid-market AE. We'll call our AE Sam. The SDR team’s been cut, so Sam’s entirely responsible for prospecting and closing. Sam has 600 accounts in her territory in January. You've done the revenue potential and pipeline math so you know that’s enough for Sam to hit her quota, which works out to 3 deals / month at your ACV. You’re also smart and you’ve considered activity levels. At your required activity levels, Sam can work 100 accounts a month so you expect her to work the whole patch 2x per year. Sam’s awesome. She works hard and she hits quota each month. Let’s look at what happens to her territory. Each month there are 3 fewer accounts for her to work because she’s closed them! They’re with an AM now. By the end of the year, 36 accounts are no longer available. Effective territory size at year end: 564. No big deal. Let's say that 10% of accounts she touches are disqualified. Any number of reasons: bad fit, M&A, out of business, on a multi-year contract with a competitor. Effective territory size at year end: 444. Interesting. Now let's say that we want each account to rest 90 days between sequences. That means ~250 - 300 accounts are "at rest" (half her total territory!) at any given point in time. Effective territory size at year end: 144. Yikes, that's tight, but there's enough. There's one more aspect to this. Sam's smart. She worked the best accounts. Some of those have been DQ'd. Now the dwindling "effective territory" increasingly contains lower-quality accounts as the year goes on. Not only are there fewer accounts, they're worse overall! Sam has to do more and more outbound work to build pipeline. That effort that takes away from closing. Prospecting efficiency gets worse and there’s a good chance win rates do too. Multiply this across the team and you may start to see pipeline coverage fall. It’s a sign of stress on the reps—all brought about because you did the “right thing” with your territory design. You can't set and forget territories. You need have to have a process in place to top-up reps dynamically with more good accounts over the course of the year. If you want to learn more about the dynamic books model and how it can help, let me know.

Once upon a time I lived through a nine month comp plan fight that ended in a stalemate—in the end nothing changed. During that time I was also responsible for all the ROE adjudication for two former competitors that had recently merged. It was... not a fun time. Rep churn went through the roof. Let me tell you very few things will demoralize your team more than a bad or uncertain comp plan. And leaving things stuck in place just because you can't adapt to a changed environment is just going to make it twice as bad. That's why I'm really intrigued about what my friends at QuotaPath have just shipped. I know these folks well and AJ Bruno and team are fantastic about listening to customers. In this case they kept hearing how important it is for comp processes to be as dynamic the teams they support. (You all know I love me some dynamic processes...) Sure looks like they've delivered. Some of these capabilities (like multi-level approvals) are probably better suited for teams that are a bit larger than ours but I'm psyched for Lily and I to test some of the new stuff for ourselves. Great job QuotaPath team!

Market Map 3 is out today! Just in time for that mid-year territory refresh or H2 re-prioritization. Market Map helps you find your next best customer whether or not you use dynamic books. Consider this. Your next best customer[1] most likely: * Isn't showing intent * Is already in your CRM * Looks like your current customers Market Map builds from here. Its AI scours the web to learn what your prospects actually do. It gives your prospects customer lookalike scores and groups them into targetable clusters of similar accounts. It's like your very own tailored industry classification that actually helps your sellers—not Saved by the Bell-era NAICS codes built for government economists. Here's what's new: 📍Multiple Maps Multiple maps for different use cases! Want to prioritize a subset of your market? Or get lookalike scores based on ideal accounts that aren't even customers yet? You got it Our customers are already using this to prioritize partner overlaps and find cross-sell opportunities. It's just a few flicks for any HubSpot list or Salesforce report. Once you're satisfied, export scores and clusters back into CRM. ✨ Better AI Each account and cluster now gets an explanatory summary—quickly see what the AI has discovered about each account and what commonalities exist in a cluster. Plus, we've made our web crawler even smarter so we're feeding even better information to the AI models. 📊 Rethought UI We've joined our Market Map Explorer visualization with all the tools you need to dig into the details. Detail data and similar customers are available in a handy info pane for any account. Same for clusters. We've got spreadsheet-like interactive tables for accounts and clusters with filtering and sorting. It's all super-fluid and easy to use. Hit me up if you want to learn more. -- [1] If you're a decent-size company, you've mapped a big chunk of your market into CRM but only about 10% will be showing intent at any time. Your reps need prospects they can tell relevant customer stories to. These need to pass the similarity "eye test", not just some black box firmographic match.

This isn’t a wrap up post for the Pavilion CRO Summit[1]. This is about vendor presentations. Every sponsor who spoke did a great job and added real value. I wish every event could be like that. I genuinely tried to do my part to keep the quality high in my dynamic books presentation. I hope I succeeded. For what it's worth, here are a few things I’ve learned giving talks I’ve felt proud of: Don’t sell. This is the ONE RULE. If you break it, your next sponsorship won’t come with a speaking slot—no matter how much you pay. You’re an expert on something. Share the why and how of something related to your expertise in a way that's valuable even if the audience never hears about your company again. The less you sell in the talk, the more your company will sell later. Trust me. Materials matter. You need a solid baseline design that’s not screaming your brand. Too much production and you look like a brochure, too little and you look like an amateur. Say less, fam. You’re probably talking about something you care deeply about. If you’re like me, you want to share all the details and show all the work. Fewer words (on slides and coming out of your mouth) are better. You can break this rule once in your presentation. Choose wisely. Practice. Despite what Allen Iverson would have you believe, practice matters. You owe it to the audience to polish the story, clean up the delivery and nail your transitions. Practice in as close to the real environment as possible. Most of us don't have a hotel ballroom handy but you can still try. Buy a clicker and use your laptop as a confidence monitor while you airplay on your living room tv. Force your pets or, ideally, a reasonably critical human to be your audience. The tl;dr is probably this: unless you truly believe your talk would be valuable to the audience even if you weren’t a sponsor, don’t give it. Anybody else got any tips to share? Would love to hear from speakers, event producers and folks who've had to sit through vendor presentations (good and bad). — [1] I do have to give a shoutout to Allison Metcalfe for a non-sponsored, super-thoughtful and practical discussion of the role of CRO. And of course, a big thank you to Sam Jacobs, Kathleen Booth and the whole Pavilion team for a great event.

Shoutout to Seamus Ruiz-Earle and Andy Hastings. Excited to see our partner SBI, The Growth Advisory acquire Carabiner Group. They’re building a powerhouse over there. Nice to see them get some love at Pavilion’s CRO Summit.

I'm looking forward to the Pavilion CRO Summit in Boston next week. It's a privilege to get to speak alongside some very smart folks like Andrew Sherwood, Allison Metcalfe, Erin Stanwood Bates, Joe McNeill and Ryan Sorley. I know I'm going to learn a ton from those talks as well as all the conversations with a bunch of great operators. As for me... I'll be sharing how the last four years of systemic shocks have fundamentally changed sales, how the OODA loop provides a framework for responding to that change, the surprising source of a lot of GTM friction and how dynamic books can help us execute faster. See below for a little preview. See you all in Boston! #PavilionCROSummit2024 PS: We know that summer's here, so our team is bringing some tiki vibes (and treats) with us. That *might* just be better than my talk.

Show of hands. Who here has pivoted a list of accounts on industry and sorted by number of customers as part of your segmentation work? Who here has created a Salesforce formula that checks for particular industries and adds an arbitrary number to an ICP score? Who here felt like the results were really effective? I’m guessing I know the answer—the industry data you get from bulk data enrichment sucks. Most industry data is based on decades-old standards like NAICS (30 years old) and SIC (90 years old). These classifications were built for government economists, not sales teams. NAICS, for example, has more categories devoted to coal than software. You can go 5 layers down in the NAICS hierarchy but the result is the same: you’re shoehorning your prospects into inaccurate categories that don’t provide enough precision for meaningful targeting. Industry data should answer one question: Do these companies *do* something similar? Answering that question should help us do one thing: Sell to companies with similar needs. Current industry data doesn’t do that. Broad industry categories categories like “Food & Beverage” or “Manufacturing” make traditional industry data useless for real specialization (e.g. vertical SaaS). They’re also useless for reps. “We help companies in the Manufacturing industry” isn’t very compelling or relevant thing to say in your outreach. This, of course, assumes the data is even accurate in the first place—a pretty huge assumption. This is the part of the post where I’d like to offer suggestions for how to do fix this yourself but I’m genuinely not sure you can. In a perfect world, you’d tackle industry completely differently. You’d have a team of interns read up on each of your prospects and group the similar ones together. You’d use that to target accounts that look most like your customers. You could even reference the use case of the customer they look most like. You could build case studies for groups of accounts that exist in *your* TAM, not in some government taxonomy. It’d be an awesome set of plays. But it would be expensive to do, miserable to maintain and nearly impossible to operationalize. I’ve had all the same problems. That’s why we built Market Map to do all of the above with AI. Lookalike scores and clusters feed back into your CRM so the information is available to reps. And if you’re using dynamic books with Gradient Works Bookbuilder, you can easily distribute customer lookalikes to reps and hold them accountable for coverage. A whole bunch of our customers are running these plays as we speak. Let me know if you want to drop the pivot tables and do the same.

Let's talk about Colonel John Boyd, originator of the OODA Loop. He's got a solid claim for most interesting man in the world. (And no this isn't about territories or dynamic books. Stick with me here.) First, he was a fantastic fighter pilot. He had a standing $40 bet that he could start with another pilot on his 6 (shoutout to Top Gun for me knowing what that means) and get a kill within 40 seconds. He never lost. Second, he came up with an original theory about how planes work called Energy-Maneuverability Theory — using stolen computer time to do the calculations (this was the 70's). He nearly got court-martialed, instead the Air Force gave him an award. He ended up playing a key role in the design of the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, even though he'd never designed aircraft before. Third, he was a brilliant military strategist. Not only did he come up with the OODA loop as a fundamental theory of how to win in complex environments, he came out of retirement in 1991 to design the "left hook" maneuver in the 1st Gulf War that caused the Iraqi army to crumble. Finally, he never wrote a book on his ideas. Instead he went around the Pentagon after he retired doing a 15 hour(!) "briefing" with 327(!!) slides—all before Powerpoint. (This may be more impressive than the other 3 things combined.) It was titled "A Discourse on Winning and Losing" and it influenced multiple generations of Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense. I've been doing research on Colonel Boyd and the OODA loop for my talk at the Pavilion CRO Summit in a couple weeks. Probably the most fun I've had building a presentation in a while. Can't wait to discuss this more in Boston on June 6th.