This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Salespeople have to prospect. That's the truth. Salespeople can find their prospects in lots of different ways: introductions, social media, networking, lists, internal referrals from business partners, cold calling, pre-approach email, association memberships, and business networking groups. What is also true is that no matter how a salesperson gets a name, the next step is to contact them.
As we wind down 2025’s second selling quarter, we can check our performance versus our YTD quota to see exactly where we stand. That’s the beauty of selling and the pay-for-performance lifestyle, isn’t it? There’s no mystery about where you stand. Your YTD number is there in bright lights and it’s reflected not only in your compensation but in how you feel about yourself.
The post Why Social Media Belongs in Your Sales Funnel appeared first on ClickFunnels. TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook: these platforms might not immediately come to mind when mapping out your sales funnel. But judging by where your potential customers spend their time and how they discover businesses today, it’s clear why social media should be part of your conversion strategy.
B2B marketers are under pressure to deliver pipeline, but the old playbook of MQL chasing, generic content and paid ads isn’t cutting it anymore. To drive growth in an AI-saturated, attention-poor market, we need to refocus on what really moves the needle: building a brand that stands out, connects with buyers and earns trust. The limits of MQLs in an AI-first world Traditional, MQL-focused lead generation isn’t doing well.
Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Global Sales at Allego
In a world where buyers are more informed and objections are more nuanced, confidence isn't optional—it’s a competitive advantage. In high-stakes conversations, knowing how to handle pushback can make or break the deal. Join industry expert Brendan Sweeney for a behind-the-scenes look at how teams are transforming sales coaching with real-time feedback, objection-handling role plays, and pre-call preparation that actually sticks.
The AI revolution is coming fast – it’s reshaping industries, redefining workflows, and promising unprecedented growth to sales organizations. Yet, many leaders are hesitant to make a big bet on AI. The wrong move could cost you time, revenue, and credibility. With the right foundational strategy and the right tool, AI should be a sales force multiplier enabling your teams to sell faster and more proficiently, bringing more value to customers and more impact to revenue.
Dear SaaStr: How Does a Founder Mindset Change As You Go From Startup to Scaleup? The big changes I see: Moving (Over Time) From Hustler to Strategist. Though Stay a Hustler, Too 😉 In the early days, you’re in the trenches—selling, building, and doing whatever it takes to survive. But as you scale, you have to step back and focus on strategy. You move from being the doer to the leader, managing teams and making high-level decisions.
Most sales teams don’t realize how much ground is lost before they even speak to a lead. People don’t wait around for a discovery call to figure out if you’re a good fit. They do that on your website. That’s where they start building trust, checking if you understand their problems, and sizing up your product against others. This means your site serves a bigger purpose than just attracting interest.
Most sales teams don’t realize how much ground is lost before they even speak to a lead. People don’t wait around for a discovery call to figure out if you’re a good fit. They do that on your website. That’s where they start building trust, checking if you understand their problems, and sizing up your product against others. This means your site serves a bigger purpose than just attracting interest.
We are obsessed with eliminating the friction! We want to create frictionless experiences. We fetishize efficiency. We leverage technology to do the work. We strive for easy. But what if we were to shift our point of view? What if we recognized that friction isn’t our enemy, but it’s our source of value? Permit me, for a moment, to revert back to my training as a physicist.
Making the best targeting decisions can have a compounding effect on return on ad spend (ROAS), according to new data released this week by TransUnion. According to the TransUnion analysis, the upside in ROAS from better targeting could be as high as 9x. TransUnion used real-world campaigns from 25 of its measurement clients across five verticals and found a widening performance gap as audiences became more targeted.
Imagine trying to sell hiking boots to someone who never steps off the pavement? Or pitching pet food to someone without a pet. Sounds like a waste of time, right? No matter how great your product is, if you’re talking to the wrong people, it’s a lost cause. Yet, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) fall into this trap. They try to sell to everyone, hoping something sticks.
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Hire a Great First 1-2 Sales Reps? Hiring your first AE (Account Executive) is a pivotal moment for your startup. It’s not just about finding someone who can sell—it’s about finding someone who can sell your product in the messy, unstructured environment of an early-stage company. "Never, ever hire a VP of Sales until you have 2 individual sales reps really closing.
Speaker: Jady West, VP of Hospitality & Chris Bennett, Head of Sales & Engineering
The modern hotel room is no longer just a place to stay—it’s an experience to remember. Today’s guests expect seamless 5G connectivity, personalized comfort, and high-tech convenience. From AI-powered smart room controls to in-room entertainment and app-based services, technology is redefining hospitality from the inside out. In this new session featuring industry pros Jady West and Chris Bennett, we’ll explore how high-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity powers the innovations that are enabling
As we test and monitor our newer business strategies, challenges emerge, and it’s vital to examine all possibilities to uncover the dysfunctional causes that create distress and even chaos in some cases. Recent experiences raise the question, ‘Do you encourage or discourage new business?’ Current Trends Being current with new strategies and methods for client care, as well as technology for both in-office and remote work, we also need to examine our processes.
All our customers are critical to our success. We strive to retain, renew, grow, and expand those we currently have. Every deal in our pipeline is important to us and our ability to achieve our goals. But what would happen if we were to disappear? In our current customers, what would happen if we disappeared? Would they just find a substitute product and move on with no impact?
Salesforce today introduced Marketing Cloud Next, a significant update to its marketing platform that embeds autonomous AI agents across the entire customer funnel. The company says the product represents a shift from traditional campaign-based marketing to its much-touted “agentic marketing,” where AI agents act independently to execute campaigns, personalize customer interactions and optimize performance.
Traditional user experience (UX) work assumes you’re designing screens that will be built exactly as drawn. But generative development is changing that assumption entirely. With AI systems now able to assemble interfaces and create dynamic user experiences on demand, designers must move beyond familiar practices to embrace this fundamental change.
Retailers know the clock is ticking–legacy SAP Commerce support ends in 2026. Legacy platforms are becoming a liability burdened by complexity, rigidity, and mounting operational costs. But modernization isn’t just about swapping out systems, it’s about preparing for a future shaped by real-time interactions, AI powered buying assistants, and flexible commerce architecture.
Why 40% Cloud Adoption Marks the End of Easy Growth. And why the AI budget war is just getting started Top 5 Takeaways 1. The 40% Tipping Point : With 40% of workloads now in the cloud, SaaS has hit market maturity. The easy growth is over—companies like Zoom exemplify this with saturated markets and nowhere left to expand rapidly. 2. AI is Eating SaaS Budgets : Companies like Cursor are generating massive revenue by replacing traditional SaaS workflows entirely.
75% of managers are overwhelmed, according to Gartner, and the pressure is only intensifying. Hybrid teams, relentless change, talent churn, rising expectations, and AI are fundamentally changing the structure of work itself. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of today’s middle management roles.
The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Dennis Lyandres is an Advisor with ICONiQ and a Board Member of Speedchain and CaptivateIQ. Dennis amassed incredible insights through his experience as the Chief Revenue Officer of Procore, where he helped grow the company from $10M to $900M+ in revenue and guided it through a successful IPO.
Three major surveys released between Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 offer distinct yet complementary views on martech and organizational readiness: The CMO Survey (Duke University). MarTech’s State of Your Stack Survey. Gartner’s CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey. Despite differences in methodology and audience, a cross-analysis reveals troubling patterns in how organizations navigate technology transformation.
Documents are the backbone of enterprise operations, but they are also a common source of inefficiency. From buried insights to manual handoffs, document-based workflows can quietly stall decision-making and drain resources. For large, complex organizations, legacy systems and siloed processes create friction that AI is uniquely positioned to resolve.
Fire Your Top Salesperson: The Red Sox Lesson for Better Sales Teams What if firing your top salesperson would make your sales team better? The Boston Red Sox showed the world how to do it this past weekend. I know you might not care about the Red Sox or even baseball, but this is worth reading because there’s an amazing lesson here. The Red Sox were in the midst of a five-game winning streak and had just completed a three-game sweep of their arch-rival New York Yankees when they traded their be
I see it happening everywhere. Board meetings where someone inevitably asks, “Don’t we need a VP of AI?” I saw a term sheet the other day where a leading VC firm reserved $1m of the round … for hiring a “VP of AI” Leadership teams scrambling to post job descriptions for “Head of Artificial Intelligence.” Recruiters cold-calling anyone with “machine learning” on their LinkedIn.
We have probably all heard the phrase “Good, Better, and Best”. This is typically used in product comparisons. The same might hold true when related to performance. Let’s take sales as an example. While we all want to be the “best”, what if your current status is only “good”? Is being the best too far away or is just getting “better” the appropriate first step?
Great sales conversations don’t just happen. They’re crafted. Ask any top-performing financial advisor their secret to closing more clients and you’ll hear a consistent theme: preparation. But here’s the kicker: most advisors do prepare. They prep to share data. They prep their questions. They might even rehearse their pitch. What they often don’t prep for?
B2B marketers face a number of challenges, including: continuously generating great leads converting leads to active sales prospects finding vendors that deliver real results Aggregage has proven content syndication, webinar, online advertising and intent signal marketing programs that deliver higher-quality leads. More than 700 companies have already benefited from our programs.
You don’t have to wait for Black Friday and the holiday season for online retail and ecommerce success. Ecommerce calendars have expanded significantly thanks to numerous holidays and cultural events. The result is a year-round selection of purchasing opportunities, all vying for customers’ attention. Yet, despite the opportunities to save money, shoppers are signaling fatigue.
This article sounds like a beast, but it’s one of the shortest I’ve ever written. My backup title was Adventures in Account Management , but I didn’t want to get too cute. Here we go! I was at the optometrist’s office, waiting for my broken glasses to be fixed, when SHE walked in. She approached the receptionist and said, “I’m the new rep for a frame company, and I stopped by to introduce myself.
Dear SaaStr: How Do You Balance Optimism with Realism When Pitching VCs? Successful startups balance optimism with realism by presenting a compelling vision while grounding their projections in credible, data-backed assumptions. Bear in mind, most VCs — not all, but most — have pretty good B.S. detectors. They will cut you some slack, but if you start saying things that just don’t tie to the numbers or reality, they won’t fund you.
As human beings and business professionals we crave structure and order in everything we do. We build carefully architected sales processes. Our customers draft detailed project plans, guiding them on their journey.
AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.
For the past several weeks, I’ve been writing some fairly esoteric/philosophical things. Talking about entanglement, durable revenue, rethinking value, and that value is in the friction. But most of you know me as a “ruthless pragmatist.” You are probably confused–and you should be. So I’m embarking on a series of articles, moving from philosophy to practice, theory to execution.
Large Language Model (LLM) agents aren’t very good at key parts of CRM, according to a study led by Salesforce AI scientist Kung-Hsiang Huang. The report showed AI agents had a roughly 58% success rate on single-step tasks that didn’t require follow-up actions or information. That dropped to 35% when a task required multiple steps. The agents were also notably bad at handling confidential information. “Agents demonstrate low confidentiality awareness, which, while improvable th
You don’t have to be the most intelligent person in the world to realize that people are distracted and can easily lose focus in times of turmoil. The headlines scream something new and unexpected every day, ranging from tariffs, wars, regulatory shifts, and political upheaval, while everyone is still expected to wake up, go to work, and cope with it all.
Dear SaaStr: When Should I Hire My First AE? We’re said this many times over the years at SaaStr, and it’s as true today as then: You should hire your first AE (Account Executive) once you’ve closed at least 10-20 customers yourself as the founder. Not before. And even then, you have to stay in founder-led sales mode until you have 1-2 sales execs that are scaled and really hitting quota.
Today’s buyers expect more than generic outreach–they want relevant, personalized interactions that address their specific needs. For sales teams managing hundreds or thousands of prospects, however, delivering this level of personalization without automation is nearly impossible. The key is integrating AI in a way that enhances customer engagement rather than making it feel robotic.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 26,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content