Jeff Kushmerek’s Post

Couldn't agree more with #6 on this list. NRR and wallet share expansion have to be tied to activities that can actually be tracked and upleveled.

Catalyst put 100 CROs/CCOs/VP of Sales/CS in a room to debate the most broken GTM strategies leading to missed ARR targets. Detailed notes below👇 1️⃣ “Health Score” is broken. Almost 100% agreement in a room full of top operators from the world’s best companies. None of them trust it. None of them use it in the board room. Yet so many force CSMs & AMs to use it. The irony is how it is the top requirement on a “Customer Success Platform.” Multi weighted multi-product parent-child health scores with fancy little drag n drop weights. 12+ fancy buttons. 0% accuracy. The only thing that matters to executives (backed by churn data) is tracking the PBOs (Positive Business Outcomes) for their customers, yet many struggle to do so effectively. 2️⃣ QBRs aka the Waste Your Time meeting Case in point --> ALL of these execs bought software products. Signed the DocuSign. How many of them showed up to QBRs? Zero. QBRs are supposed to be the most important meeting for the CSM yet the DocuSigner doesn’t even show up. How is that effective? There’s got to be a better way to communicate value to your “Renewal Committee” that don't show up to QBRs. 3️⃣ Uniform agreement that Sales is superior & far more advanced in their operational rigor compared to Customer Success teams. Think about the sales discipline it takes to hit new business targets with 95%+ accuracy. MEDDIC, Stage-Based entrance & exit criteria, Command of Message Training, Deal Inspection, 1:1s, Weekly Forecast Meetings. Where is the operational discipline on the other side of the house? The most important opportunity of all isn’t the New Business Opportunity. It’s the Renewal Opportunity. 4️⃣ CRO 1.0 & CCO 1.0 leaders will be replaced. The highest ranking Chief “Commercial” officer isn’t specializing in outbound sales (SDR/AE) & isn’t a happiness-vanity-metric customer officer driving “adoption” & “usage.” The evolution? A commercially oriented leader, highly proficient in P&L, metric-driven on extracting the highest NRR, GRR, & CLTV. The 3 most important metrics in the board room. 5️⃣ CSMs driving "adoption" will be wiped out. Clari stripped their team down & got rid of every CSM that drove “adoption.” The economic didn't add up. Too much overlap between AM, SE, CSM, Renewal, AE, etc. Their adjustment? You either are a highly technical product expert or you're commercially minded. No middle ground.   6️⃣ Measuring Activity to Impact. If you can't correlate your team's actions to higher NRR/GRR, you are a second-tier leader at best. Driving your team's actions based on insights and reporting on the impact of those actions is the MINIMUM requirement going forward. ------------ If you found these notes helpful, we're planning our 300-person, 2-day CRO CCO Summit for early next year at one of the most exquisite retreats 🏝️ Like 👍 this post and Comment "CRO" and we'll add you to the top of the waitlist. #sales #customersuccess #clg #ceo

"If you can't correlate your team's actions to higher NRR/GRR, you are a second-tier leader at best." - Kevin Chiu Industry Insiders Expose Flaws: Top Execs Reveal the Truth About Broken GTM Strategies and ARR Nightmares! 1 - Your Health Score is broken 2 - QBRs without the DM waste time 3 - CS should run like Sales 4 - 1.0 C-leaders need to go 💥 Must-Read Insights Below👇

It took me losing a team of 3 sales reps to learn to avoid these mistakes: Losing team members is never easy, but sometimes it’s the wake-up call you need to reevaluate and refine your sales strategies. Here are four critical mistakes that led to the departure of three skilled sales reps from my team—and the lessons I learned to prevent this from happening again: 1. Not Taking Notes in the CRM: Your CRM isn't just a tool; it's the lifeline of your sales process. It’s your business’s heart - pumping opportunities everyday. Initially, we underestimated the power of detailed note-taking in our CRM. This oversight meant missing crucial client details and preferences, leading to less personalized follow-ups and ultimately, lost sales opportunities. Now, our team rigorously records every interaction, making sure that no critical information slips through the cracks. 2. Not Calling a Lead Within 5 Minutes of Opting In: The speed of your response can make or break a deal. We learned the hard way that waiting even an hour to reach out to a new lead significantly reduces the likelihood of conversion. Implementing a strict policy to contact leads within five minutes of their opt-in has dramatically increased our engagement rates and conversions. 3. Neglecting Pre-Qualifying Steps or Sending Assets: Skipping the pre-qualification process was a direct path to inefficiency. By not filtering out unqualified leads or failing to provide them with preliminary assets, we burdened our sales reps with low-probability prospects. We've since developed a robust pre-qualifying funnel that includes sending informative assets upfront, setting the stage for more quality discussions and higher conversion rates. 4. Assuming Non-Payers Will Never Convert: One of our most limiting beliefs was that if a prospect didn’t buy immediately, they were a lost cause. This mindset led to missed opportunities with clients who simply weren’t ready to commit in the initial stages but could have been nurtured into valuable customers. We now focus on long-term engagement strategies, recognizing that today’s 'no' could be tomorrow’s 'yes.' These lessons reshaped our approach to sales, turning painful losses into powerful learning opportunities. By addressing these mistakes, we not only improved our processes but also built a stronger, more resilient sales team.

Revenue growth behind plan for the third-quarter – where does the finger typically get pointed? Assuming a sales led motion, it always starts with the sales leader who has missed their number. Reasons include pipeline quality or quantity not quite being there. Team members still in a ramp period. Key opportunities close but buying decisions keep getting pushed out by a quarter. Next is marketing, who aren’t sourcing enough of the “right” type of leads. Lead qualification criteria is clear but pipeline conversion rates remain lower than ideal. Campaigns and channel activities are well thought out but never yield as hoped. And if churn is creeping up, there must also be a problem within customer success – whether it’s people or process. Is there visibility of customer usage? Are users within customers fully enabled? Are we contacting the right people well ahead of their renewal date? These are all valid questions asked in a valid order. But the thing they have in common is they all have very objective measures of success. But there is one function that underpins all of them which is much harder to measure, and tends to get off lightly in these debates. Product. “Product/market fit” is probably the best known start-up term of recent times, but measuring it gets disproportionately overlooked in commercial discussions. Be a fly on the wall of most board meetings and I guarantee sales, marketing and CS are critiqued through multiple KPIs. But aside from a review of the near-term roadmap and engineering efficiency/performance (usually towards the end of the board meeting), how many boards apply the same level of rigor to whether the product remains better than alternatives? I think the main reason is it’s challenging question to objectively answer. You can typically work out ROI cases against the “do nothing” competitor depending on if the product is a revenue driver or cost saving driver, but comparing to other competitors (direct or indirect) is a completely different ball game. Sales teams develop insights over time from prospect feedback, but getting first-hand visibility of a competitor product can be difficult, let alone to then work out and justify the incremental value of yours in a customer setting. And because of this, product and engineering leaders rarely find themselves under pressure for revenue underperformance, despite being responsible for the highest leverage and most fundamental point in the value chain. Every increment of improvement they deliver multiplies performance across all other functions. How do the best companies track product strength relative to competition? NPS, product stickiness ratio, one off competitor reviews are all helpful, but none carry the same weight or finality as revenue does. If anyone has any frameworks or metrics for measuring it (other than revenue growth and sales efficiency), be great to hear about it in the comments! #product #startups #vc

‘Sales Forecast’ track history. Sales Pipeline reports track ‘win rate percentages’ of various deals based on subjective opinions. Most sales reps assign rosy percentages to avoid bashing by the sales manager. Time to junk ‘sales forecast system’ of sales reporting….. ……instead use ‘SALESFORESIGHT’, which is opposite of ‘sales forecast’. Both, Sales Forecast and SalesForesight are two methods of tracking sales quota achievement. Sales Forecast involves analysing trends and extrapolating it to future, while SalesForesight approaches the challenge of tracking sales opportunities from the opposite direction. In SalesForesight, you envision where you want to be in the future in a deal and then you ask yourself- “What do I need to do to reach that envisioned goal”? SalesForesight helps you to develop your ability to 1) Visualise upcoming steps with the customer in every deal, and 2) Proactively prepare to align your value chain with the buyer’s key decision-making points in the buying value chain. SalesForesight enables you to map the entire customer journey with your brand, even for the most complex B2B deals. Knowing the customer journey allows you to ‘create and deliver business value’ for each key buyer decision-making events. SalesForesight enables to you drive the future vs. being one of its passengers in Sales Forecast. Need help to map the entire customer journey? There can be more than 150 distinct customer touchpoints with your brand, offerings and people covering the entire sales funnel from awareness stage to consideration, to evaluations, to legal contract, to commercial, to financial to logistics, to installation, to usage to advocacy to post-sales services, to product end-of-life to repeat sales. DM me OR Write to me at mayank.g@salesforesight.in Hi, I’m Mayank Gupta. I simplify B2B selling. I help to visualise your customer’s unique journey with your brand and offerings, enabling you to build a custom sales value chain that 100% aligns to the buyer’s value chain, thereby enhancing sales win rate to 3x to 5x. DM me to know more

I had to manage discount usage of over 500 sales reps. Here is one of the frameworks I used, and it should work in any industry. First we had to define the metrics we wanted to track their performance on. We kept it simple and tracked two metrics for each sales rep: - Discount Rate (Total discount all accounts/Total Revenue all accounts) - Growth Rate YOY (YOY growth rate of net revenue/margin(preferred)) We then created a scatter graph using that data. Adjusted the axis to intersect at the median for both axes to get quadrants. That created 4 quadrants and 4 unique ways we could identify discount use. That graph was a wealth of knowledge on discount and rep performance. We classified our sales reps based on 4 different ways they used discount. - Growth Vanguards: These reps were the ones that had high growth and used the least discount(Bottom Right). These were able to speak the 'value' language the best. They knew how to steer away from price to customer pain and then pitched solutions accordingly. They used the ROI calculators, case studies supplied. They were the champions of the value selling process. We used them to train other reps on value story and sit in on important calls. - Discount Achievers: These reps brought in high growth but they also had an high rate of overall discount (Top Right). So essentially they were using off and on invoice discounts to close the accounts but doing big deals along the way. Typically we found a lot of these reps focussed on getting new customers into the door. They provided customers with terrific ROI off the back of discounts which had to be normalized the year after. They were coached on not overselling which led to inflated discount. - Insightful Zens: These reps were special(Bottom Left). They usually had lower discount rate overall on accounts but they also grew the account less. They never oversold, they never overstated ROI. So they never felt the need to use discounts either to grow the account exponentially. These were trusted advisors for discount reduction at account level. Less discount meant more margin. -Struggling Sellers: These were problematic. They used discount on every call but still struggled with growth rates. These reps rarely sold on value. These reps had to be trained by insightful zens or growth vanguards on selling on value and finding the customer pain points and recommending solution. They had to be coached on steering away from price and focus on solution. Our aim was to move everyone to bottom right. For every 1 rep moving to bottom or saving 1% margin we bought tens of thousands of dollars back. It also helped us with prudent discount management. Let me know if you have a framework to track sales reps and discount effectiveness. -------------------------------- I write about pricing, and strategy. For frameworks and case studies like this click follow and join 3000 other professionals who receive updates like this.

How to build a high performing sales team? Selling SaaS is a complex process, and it is important to have the right team in place to ensure that you are successfully converting as many sales as possible. Learn more in this article- #sales, #saas, #salesteam, #b2b

The key to unlocking effective Product-Led Sales (PLS) contradicts all conventional wisdom from saled-led businesses. Why? I hear you ask!? In traditional enterprise sales-led businesses, you incentivise and reward the largest (ideally multi-year) lands, and worry about user adoption and engagement later. The focus is on pulling forward an artificial ramp based on some projected (or often perhaps more accurately described, imagined) future usage ramp. This often results in what later becomes clear as OVERSELLING. Overselling leads to 🔻 Low user adoption 🔻 Low user engagement 🔻 Low user retention These are all leading indicators of 🚨 Down-sell 🚨 Churn 🚨 Lower revenue retention. So what’s the solution here? Product-led Sales (PLS) PLS is a long-term game. PLS prioritises the health and longevity of the customer relationship and hence customer lifetime value (LTV) and Net Dollar Retention (NDR). With PLS, you intentionally defer revenue today for greater revenue tomorrow. Self-serve lands will typically self-right-size or purchase at a lower volume than anticipated future usage. Sales-assisted (driven by Product Qualified Accounts - PQAs) deals should similarly land low. Put another way, you UNDERSELL confident in the product’s ability to drive retention and acquisition. ✅ Smaller lands ✅ Less churn ✅ More expansion For this to work well, two things should be present: 1. Product-led retention and acquisition. 2. Sales incentives that support the behaviour you want to encourage. Compensation plans must reward future expansion revenue at some greater-than-1 multiplier of the reward for net new land revenue. Nothing prevents those with enterprise sales-led motions from adopting this approach. However, the cost of nurturing the account to drive future expansion is significantly higher when the product cannot do that for you. CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics says: "The enterprise motion not only "oversells" but then kicks it over the fence to a customer success team (who the P&L also has to find a way to pay for) with the tough job of then backing off previous promises and trying to deliver value in an unreasonable timeframe. A lot of times (like with a Netsuite purchase), there are hidden implementation costs (and opportunity costs re: time) that the customer has to pick up and builds ill will over time." #plg #pls #sales    PS: Exceptions do exist; there are many sales-led businesses with strong net dollar retention because of things like high switching costs and outstanding post-sales / CX teams, but eventually, they will face tough competition and risk of disruption from product-led entrants where the product does most of the heavy lifting.

𝗗𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵-𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺? "By having your SDRs perform their job effectively, you can be confident that your entire pipeline is thoroughly covered." By analyzing data, we have uncovered ten invaluable tips that can help you build and manage a sales development team that performs at the highest level. With these insights, you will be able to unlock the full potential of your team, achieve your sales goals and stay ahead of the competition.  Get the 10 tips now ➡️ https://lnkd.in/e2eBBTjq #SalesDevelopment #SalesLeader #SDRs #SalesPipeline #Revenue