Using “Win Themes” to Improve Your Sales Management and Increase Win Rates
At most sales review meetings what do you hear sales management asking the reps? Questions like these: What stage is this opportunity in? What value do you have it at in the pipeline? Is there upside to that value? What forecast category is it in? In what quarter will it close? What competitors are in […]
Just Effing Demo
We do pretty extensive win/loss reporting at Host, and I remember one time reading a loss report that went something like this. “We were interested in buying Host and it made our short list. When we invited you in for a demo with our team and the CFO, things went wrong. After 20 minutes, your […]
I Hired My VP of Marketing at $20k MRR. It Wasn’t a Week Too Early.
One of the starkest differences I see between First Timers in SaaS and Second Timers is when they hire their VP of Marketing. At BoxDev the other week (our post here), the contrast was especially vivid. Second-timer Shan Sinha, now CEO of Highfive hired his first head of marketing a year before first revenue. A […]
The Fat Pipeline
One of the significant benefits of modern sales technology based on things like the cloud, social media, analytics and journey maps, is our ability to widen the sales funnel. Unfortunately, we might not be taking advantage of this. You know the drill. We start the quarter with a pipeline full of opportunity and over the […]
Top of the Funnel
Marketing and selling are not what they once were but we all know this. Customers are in control, which turns the sales process on its head because it’s now a buying process. Proponents of the status quo might lament this turn of events saying this is the end of a golden era while opportunists might […]
Integrating Your Marketing and Sales Funnel
The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea but neither is sales or customer service though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM got started. Sales and service evolved organically making incremental changes as markets transformed and new technologies became available. Marketing is in the middle […]
