Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

It made things much easier for me, in some sense. But in many ways it dumbed me down. Things went downhill after it was announced in the early 1970’s. And then, today, we are face with thing that often don’t have the answers. How do we figure things out? The HP-35 just gave me the answers.

Presentation 62

Presentation Closing Sell Process 62

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

If you establish the culture early—by choosing the right partners to start with, it will make your work much easier further down the line. I always look at retention – and one of the best ways to retain a customer is to make things easy and intuitive.” – Alfonso de la Nuez. Define and focus on one target persona.

UX 87

UX Government Growth User Experience 87

Search Engine Land

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Most recently, they’ve resorted to shutting down entire business units because of their inability to compete. Now, I’m not going to kick someone while they’re down. Any half-decent editor would just remove the entire thing ASAP. You shouldn’t have images in an article because it’s a dumb requirement before publishing.

Sports 114

Sports Start-ups B2C Drivers/motivators 114

Heinz Marketing

JULY 28, 2022

What if you say the wrong thing, or lose your thoughts? People don’t want to seem dumb in front of others. Even if you’re speaking via Zoom, standing can help you expel some of that nervous energy and calm you down. This pause forces you to slow down, breathe, and connect with the people you are talking to. .

Presentation 112

Presentation Contact Management Consulting Consult 112

Martech

MARCH 2, 2023

I can teach them how to break down the barriers to let empathy and authenticity come into their mindsets. They over-complicated things. In my case, that extrapolation of history combined with my opinions, plus chance and dumb luck, drives much of my content. But you can learn that. Get MarTech! In your inbox.

Presentation 103

Presentation Retail Technology Technology 103

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 8, 2022

We seem to be doubling down in dumbing down sales people. We revel in the future of sales as Virtual, it cuts down on travel expense and sales people can make more calls every day. The post Virtual Selling Is Not The Same Thing As Digital Buying first appeared on Partners in EXCELLENCE Blog -- Making A Difference.

Sell 85

Sell Up-sell Pitch Growth 85

SaaStr

JULY 6, 2020

Here are the Top 10 things I wish I’d been told. Double down there. You can screw up a lot of other things. If yours is, invest more there and worry a little less about pressure to do new things, new market segments, etc. Stressing about salary after a few million in ARR is dumb. Checking in with the team.

Finance 103

Finance Up-sell Trust Engineering 103

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

The two biggest mistakes business leaders can make in a competitive space are thinking their competitors are too smart or, alternately, too dumb. For Brex, the thing that universally resonated with folks was simplicity — ease of use, ease of adoption, ease of rollout. You just want it to work. Here you go.” . Key Takeaways.

Gaming 89

Gaming Launch Price Closing 89

Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 19, 2018

However, too often, our automation efforts have the unintended effect of making us worse, dumbing us down. The sales person doesn’t have to do a thing–they are freed up to make the next call on their list, with the system supporting them with insights they never see. Perhaps we are automating the wrong thing.

CRM 48

CRM Technology Technology B2B 48

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 8, 2019

” I’ve been obsessing with the trend I see with too many sales executives and too many sales organizations to dumb down the sales person and to let–no, expecting– the sales person stop thinking for themselves. These are about the only things that customers value in their interaction with sales people.

Assembly Line 77

Assembly Line Trust Consult Up-sell 77

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 25, 2017

” Perhaps, not by design, but in implementation, these tools and new sales enablement capabilities have the effect of “dumbing down the sales person.” ” Not long ago, I wrote about how my car now provides many capabilities that dumb me down or make me less attentive as a driver.

High impact 48

High impact Sales Drivers/motivators B2B 48

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 20, 2018

But in all our help, we are dumbing the sales person down. Perhaps, if we prepared our sales people to “figure things out,” they would be better prepared to deal with that situation that is different from the previous situation. DumbingThings Down Versus Radical Simplification.

Sales 52

Sales Follow-up Presentation Up-sell 52

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2022

So I did three things: I built a model that convinced me if we could get another 6-8 months down the road, we’d be fine and could raise our Series B. It was sort of a dumb idea with hindsight, for reasons I discussed here. I couldn’t go backwards. Which turned out to be true.

Finance 92

Finance Trust Start-ups Pitch 92

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 14, 2018

Too often, the executives I encounter (sales, marketing, and senior execs) are: Fat, dumb, happy, with what’s currently going on. Perhaps they are so busy managing current problems/challenges, they fail to recognize how things are changing around them. We cannot turn a blind eye to the things that are happening around us.

Customers 89

Customers Process Service Sales 89

ClickFunnels

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

And keep in mind that trying to grab someone’s attention online is not the same thing as chatting to them in an elevator. they might feel dumb for not knowing what you apparently expect them to know and shut down. You need to have a solid elevator pitch for: Cold emails Social media. Networking events. …etc.

Pitch 244

Pitch Niche Up-sell Clients 244

Search Engine Land

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

It can’t wrap its dumb little head around anything subjective. There are still a few things AI can’t do and won’t be able to do for years to come. This is a perfect segue (if I do say so myself) because the one thing that video often has over plain text is personality. Water it down. Knowledge Graph.

Transportation 92

Transportation Gaming Angle Start-ups 92

SaaStr

JULY 13, 2023

This isn’t really a thing in SaaS at the moment, so if you can find someone who has been outbound for more than three or four years and you can smell the passion coming out of their pores, give them a path so they know they aren’t stuck with a second tier pack. Then things got worse in 2021 because everything was easier.

X-functional 73

X-functional Closing Growth Contract 73

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 5, 2021

We can “dumb down” the sales engagement, literally putting words in the mouths of our sales people, saying the same things over and over. We don’t have to invest in building skills on complex problem solving, business acumen, and value creation.

Assembly Line 107

Assembly Line Sales Price Trust 107

Search Engine Land

JANUARY 4, 2023

But here’s the thing you need to recognize about these oft-repeated clichés: They’re excuses. Because the best writers thrive on ingenuity, saying the same thing multiple times in multiple ways. The number of dumb questions or stupid arguments evaporates into thin air. The trickle-down effects are magical.

Assembly Line 101

Assembly Line Angle Start-ups Follow-up 101

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 7, 2016

Some leaders are developing organizations that do amazing things in engaging customers. Rather than respond to the changes in customer buying, too many sales managers seem to be in a race for dumbing down the sales person. The ultimate impact of this dumbing down of the sales force is that we don’t need sales people.

Sales 50

Sales Consult Up-sell Conversion 50

Search Engine Land

FEBRUARY 1, 2023

You also know that AI tends to produce some pretty dumb results. But reducing a list of ten down to a few solid ideas is much faster than starting completely from scratch. Prompt 11: “My conversions from paid traffic are down 20% month over month. Poor prompt : “Write a Google ad for my business.”

Strategize 100

Strategize Objectives and Key Results A/B testing Clients 100

Hubspot

JULY 27, 2016

Let’s all ask ourselves a really dumb question that’s less dumb than you might think: what on Earth is thought leadership? So now the question doesn’t seem so dumb. And the thing is that it’s actually really hard to do. See, that’s not the same thing as being Steve Jobs. We’re all inbound marketers here.

Real Estate 71

Real Estate Manufacturing Clients Event Production 71

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 18, 2023

And the first thing these platforms are doing is leveraging it for outbound prospecting. Then I wanted to drill down, I asked Chat another question. Inflation diverting spending to food, fuel, other things, away from investments. ChatGPT does not prevent dumb, it amplifies it! “Oh no, Dave.

Manufacturing 73

Manufacturing Prospecting Quota Product 73

ConversionXL

APRIL 1, 2019

Ask dumb questions you think sound too obvious—whether that’s through one-on-one surveys or by polling social media followers. For example, if you sell an email platform, those “dumb” questions could be: Do you know what CTR stands for? Tools like Hotjar can track mouse movements or identify how far down someone goes on a page.

Pitch 133

Pitch A/B testing Up-sell Launch 133

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 7, 2020

As a result, we do a lot of stupid things, because the cost of stupidity (from a cost of selling/marketing perspective is virtually zero. In the “old days,” when things cost real money, we tried to understand what worked and what didn’t, refining things to produce the best results for every dollar invested.

Price 62

Price Prospecting Contract Technique 62

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 17, 2015

Prescriptive approaches help guide us down a path that maximizes success (do this, don’t do that). In many ways, rather than enhancing the abilities of sales people, we actually are “dumbing them down.” How do we develop our people’s abilities to figure things out? How are you figuring it out?

Education 51

Education Conversion Process Meeting 51

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 27, 2017

Despite, all this data, too many organizations seem committed to doing the things that don’t work. Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.). ” We know customers prefer personalization and things that are relevant to them. Yet doing them at an ever increasing cadence and intensity.

Quota 53

Quota Pitch Up-sell Prospecting 53

SBI

MAY 14, 2013

Almost a year to the date, I posted a blog called Dumbing it Down: 5 Secrets for Getting Smart People to Buy. Whatever it was that led them to engage with you you can be sure of one thing: they will turn on their heels and run the other way with the slightest provocation. You need to dumb it down because buyers are risk-averse.

Sell 55

Sell Objectives and Key Results Lead generation Technique 55

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 4, 2018

Before I go further, I have proclaim my obligatory fascination and bias toward all things technology. Technology, as a replacement to things that technology does far better than human beings is powerful. They were presenting 3 different things, only one of which was slightly relevant to me. It also can do the opposite.

Technology 84

Technology Technology Sell CRM 84

Partners in Excellence

MAY 20, 2013

Our worlds are too complex, we seem to keep piling things onto everything we’ve done in the past. It goes on and on…… Too often, however, in response to this complexity and all the “tools” that have been put in place to manage complexity, instead of simplification, we dumb things down.

Follow-up 82

Follow-up Technology Technology Customers 82

Gong.io

NOVEMBER 25, 2019

One of the things that we found was people always gravitate towards the silver bullet solutions. You know, all these things that many sales leaders are always talking about. . The reality is that there are all sorts of things surrounding the salesperson that make it difficult for them to do those new things.

Price 71

Price Strategize Up-sell Cold Call 71

Search Engine Land

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Sure, some obvious things are different. Social media marketing takes things that have already existed for decades, like the town square in some feudal state centuries ago, and combines it with a megaphone to amplify the same conversations across every other town just like it in the known world. The rules of engagement are different.

Networking 122

Networking Promote B2C Engineering 122

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 1, 2014

It’s about developing new business models, looking at things in ways that have never been considered before, developing whole new approaches. General sales performance is down, win rates, reps making quota, and so forth. Undoubtedly, there are fledgling companies innovating new business models that will throw Amazon.

B2C 96

B2C Construction Quota Up-sell 96

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 27, 2022

Please, keep the cheering down.). Then there are those, who are so busy doing their jobs, they don’t take the time to consider, “Can we do better, can we do more, should we be doing things differently?” AI/ML are bad at addressing absolutely unique situations, things that have never happened before.

Retail 68

Retail B2B Manufacturing Consult 68

SalesLoft

MAY 8, 2019

When you find yourself doing that, do something to inspire growth – find a conference, have a drink with your mentor, or sit down with a customer to talk about what they’re seeing in the market. Moreover, why would you want to sell a thing you don’t believe in? Visualization is a real thing. You’ll both be better for it!

Teamwork 94

Teamwork Clients Sports Trust 94

The Lost Book of Sales

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

Things like envy, social-proof and many other related and core human biases and psychological workings are missing in most schools. ” This is a dumb way of handling problems. Munger, like Buffett, believes a successful investment career boils down to only a handful of decisions.

Intrinsic 105

Intrinsic Price Construction Government 105

Spiro Technologies

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

Adam Honig: I know this might be a dumb question, but is the flexibility of it, which gives it that utilization, better because it can fit and be contoured into the truck? My personal experience is that when things are going well, it’s only up, and when things are not going well, it only looks down. Randy Reed: Yes.

Manufacturing 52

Manufacturing Transportation Electrical Engineering Construction 52