Stopping Inception Churn: The Prospective Customer Success Review
I think for many sales-aggressive enterprise SaaS startups, a fair amount of churn actually happens at inception. For example, back in 2013, shortly after I joined Host Analytics, I discovered that there were a number of deals that sales had signed with customers that our professional services (PS) team had flat refused to implement. (Huh?) […]
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% […]
If Your Enterprise Customers Want An SLA — Just Give It To Them. You Owe Them That Much.
Many start-ups and even larger SaaS customers are reluctant to provide a Service Level Agreement — an SLA — that says they will, well, stay up. It’s not our fault, they think. What if Amazon goes down? Or our email provider? That’s not our fault. The lawyers tell you to try to not to do […]
All Platforms Have Their Favorite Partners. Be One Of Them If You Can.
Recently I was catching up with an exec from a SaaS company well in excess of $100m ARR. One of the key platforms their app integrates with has started to … slow down their access. Slow down access to new features, to semi-documented APIs. Slow down access to their team. In fact, the partner’s sales […]
My head’s SPINning with storytelling acronyms
Sam Sethi’s podcast A few days ago I was the latest victim on Sam Sethi’s Marlow FM 97.5 radio show and podcast – Sam Talks Technology (and there’s a Facebook group here). Sam and I go way back to the start of the London social media scene in the mid 2000s and it was a […]
My Final Verdict on Multi-Year, Prepaid Deals
After years of experience with and thinking about multi-year, prepaid SaaS deals, my mental jury is back in the box and the verdict is in: don’t do them. Why? Multi-year, prepaid deals: Are not the norm, so they raise eyebrows among investors and can backfire with customers [1]. Complexify SaaS metrics. SaaS businesses are hard […]
Price Qualification: The Tiffany Way
Most salespeople are familiar with so-called BANT qualification: does the prospect have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe in order to make a purchase? While Solution Selling purists dislike BANT (arguing that it’s great way to find existing deals that have been already rigged for the competition), most sales organizations today use BANT, or some form of […]
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 […]
Conquering the three big fears in enterprise sales
I can’t believe that 2018 is nearly over ! I have been checking in one folks that I mentor for the last couple of weeks to see how well everyone is doing before we all head for vacation time. Those with a sales quota that hasn’t been retired generally are on an overdrive of emotions […]
