Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier
Many moons ago when I was young product marketing manager, I heard a new VP of Marketing speak at a marketing all-hands meeting. He spoke with a kiwi accent and his name was Chris Greendale. What he said were six words that changed my career: Marketing exists to make sales easier While this has clearly […]
Does Enterprise SaaS Need a Same-Store Sales Metric?
Enterprise SaaS and retailers have more in common than you might think. Let’s think about retailers for a minute. Retailers drive growth in two ways: They open new stores They increase sales at existing stores Opening new stores is great, but it’s an expensive way to drive new sales and requires a lot of up-front […]
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 […]
