10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective Of AI In Marketing
Top-performing companies are more than twice as likely to be using AI for marketing (28% vs. 12%) according to Adobe’s latest Digital Intelligence Briefing. Retailers are investing $5.9B this year in AI-based marketing and customer service solutions to improve shoppers’ buying experiences according to IDC. Financial Services marketers lead all other industries in AI application adoption, with 37% […]
Research Report: Improving Go-to-Market Results with Constellation’s ACF
Apply the Account Categorization Framework to Succeed in Account-Based Strategies An account-based strategy model needs to focus on re-establishing relationships. With a very-well-defined list of business-to-business contacts, the go-to-market strategy requires a disciplined approach to re-engage with customers. Unfortunately, most field organizations are saddled with tech-laden complexity. Constellation Research suggests that clients put human relationships […]
10 Ways Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing Sales
Sales teams adopting AI are seeing an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50%, cost reductions of 40%–60%, and call time reductions of 60%–70% according to the Harvard Business Review article Why Salespeople Need to Develop Machine Intelligence. 62% of highest performing salespeople predict guided selling adoption will accelerate based on its ability rank potential opportunities […]
That Super-Successful VP of Sales. Great? Or Just Lucky?
I get sent this resume to review all the time. Director+ of Sales at Yammer / Salesforce / Successfactors / Pick Your Brand Name SaaS Company. Took Hot Start-Up from $0 to $30m as VPS from Day 0. Was there “early” through IPO and did amazing things. That all sounds impressive, for sure. But was […]
Why CAC is Usually Irrelevant in Early-ish Stage SaaS Companies (vs. B2C Where It’s Critical)
I recently meet with a very high-growth “XaaS” company. Not software as a service, but one that provides some version of humans-as-a-service. And after huge top-line growth, they were struggling now with CAC. They’d fueled their hyper growth with a combination of Adwords and Groupons and Facebook Ads and Twitter Cards. And when that party […]
How to Ensure Your First 2 Sales Reps Actually Work Out
A long-time reader, first time caller recently wrote in to ask a question that pretty much everyone asks some variant of: If you had to force rank these items in terms of what we should primarily be looking for in these first sales reps, how would you rank them? – has sold SaaS before (as […]
Proximity Marketing
Proximity marketing or hyperlocal marketing as it’s sometimes called, is on the upsurge this year. The fact that the smartphone market continues to grow with ~1.3B shipments in 2014 WW, and a CAGR of near 10% through 2018 (based on the IDC Smartphone Tracker) is a part of that of course, but also the technology […]
A Review of SalesHood by Elay Cohen
I recently completed SalesHood by my former Salesforce colleague Elay Cohen and wanted to do a quick book review in this post. Net/net: I think SalesHood, along with Predictable Revenue (by another former Salesforce leader Aaron Ross) are two of the best books out there on contemporary business-to-business high-technology sales. Between these two books, you can […]
Transforming Data Into Action – Part Two
In part one of this series we looked at big data and transforming it into smart data, or data that is contextual, relevant and delivered to the right people / person at the right time. One of the other interesting and growing use cases in the business use of data is something called small data. […]
Don’t Be a Metrics Slave
I love metrics. I live for metrics. Every week and every quarter I drown my team in metrics reviews. Why? Because metrics are the instrumentation — the flight panel — of our business. Good metrics provide clear insights. They cut through politics, spin, and haze. They spark amazing debates. They help you understand your business […]
