High performance sales culture doesn’t just happen. You have to be deliberate and consistent and communicate about it. At Xamarin, we built a sales team of 110 with a 5-star Glassdoor rating, less than 3% turnover, and we grew our business at an insane pace (triple, triple, double, double baby!) culminating in a tremendous exit when we …
Summary In today’s volatile economic landscape, where layoffs are rampant in every major industry, banks (like Silicon Valley Bank) are failing, and venture capital is harder and harder to come by, the need for efficient revenue programs has never been more urgent. Businesses are scrambling to adapt to new buyer’s journeys, which have undergone significant …
Summary In 2004, Harvard Business Review published an article titled “CRM Done Right,” which distilled the experiences of CRM leaders into four pivotal questions. Nearly two decades later, as we navigate the AI era, it’s time to revisit these questions and evaluate their relevance in today’s context. The original questions were: “Is it strategic?”, “Where …
CRM Done Right in the Era of Artificial Intelligence Read More »
Hope is not a plan, and yet, ‘work harder’ and ‘do more’ (in less time) is the frequent mantra of sales managers to individuals on sales and customer success teams. These unrealistic expectations lead to employee attrition and lower productivity while managers are still left without clearly understanding what’s required to hit revenue targets predictably. To …
Personal Sales Planning and The Scientific Method (for SDRs and AEs) Read More »
This post and supporting download aim to help SaaS executives consider the factors that really matter in growth planning, and ensure a smooth transition from annual planning into operating, managing, and continuously improving the business. The goal of this checklist is to help you answer the following questions: 1) What is working well, and what needs to …
Every year, the best startups set their sales strategy for achieving predictable revenue and/or hyper growth by translating their plans into metrics. These are typically represented in the form of a scorecard with objectives and key results (OKRs) that are translated into a management dashboard. For SaaS organizations, there are four levels of sales metrics: Business Results: wholly unmanageable …
Reflect Your Sales Strategy in your Scorecard and OKRs Read More »
The last 10 years have seen a major shift in sales force dynamics as millennials have entered the workforce in droves. At Xamarin, I was an Old Guard sales leader with an organization full of millennials, and I had a ton of questions on how to lead the group. What motivates them? How do you reward …
The Complementarity of Old and New Guard SaaS Sellers Read More »
High performance sales culture doesn’t just happen. You have to be deliberate and consistent and communicate about it. At Xamarin, we built a sales team of 110 with a 5-star Glassdoor rating, less than 3% turnover, and we grew our business at an insane pace (triple, triple, double, double baby!) culminating in a tremendous exit when we …
9 Lessons for Creating a Winning SaaS Startup Sales Culture Read More »
Your growth model is the backbone of your business plan, and the foundation for building your sales organization. Your goal is to understand your growth drivers and interdependencies, to connect the dots so to speak, between inputs (investments) and desired outcomes (units and revenue). As your company gains traction, you need from shift from a simple, linear investment model …
For growth stage companies, Q4 is always an exciting time for sales leaders and their teams. There is an exuberance that comes from closing deal after deal during the largest months of the year! For every Sales VP or Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) on planet earth, there are four top priorities in Q4: hit the …
Top Priorities for CEOs and Sales Executives in Q4 Read More »
As a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, I know about failure and have been lucky enough to taste success a few times too. The hard fact is that 9 in 10 startups fail or at least fail to achieve explosive growth. Many of us still have a lot to learn from the truths Geoffrey Moore published …
Why 90% of SaaS Startups Fail to Achieve Explosive Growth Read More »