Partners in Excellence

MARCH 11, 2024

I leverage them constantly through my day, but for very different purposes than the majority of sellers. We know how they work and shouldn’t have an expectation of much more–at least used in these ways. If we understand our ICPs, we already should understand: (If you don’t, reassess your sales enablement strategies.)

Healthcare 126

Healthcare Drivers/motivators Engineering Presentation 126

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 16, 2024

We spend 100’s of millions on SKO speakers, books, and training–all focused on doing the things that drive business, sales and marketing performance. We are inspired by thousands of articles, podcasts, and videos–each offering the same answers to what we have to do to be successful. (I

Cross-sell 121

Cross-sell Pipeline Meeting Presentation 121

Partners in Excellence

MAY 17, 2024

As individual contributors, we are conditioned to think about what we owe our managers and leaders. Are we getting all our tasks done–making the calls, doing the outreach, meeting with customers, progressing deals, keeping our reporting updated. What do we “owe” our people?

Trust 124

Trust Start-ups Meeting Customers 124

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2024

So job tenures do seem to be shorter than ever, from the SDR level all the way to CRO and CMO. In our quiet discussions, it’s often one of the first things that comes up. “We pay top of market, we have a great culture, we have years of runway, and great logos and problems to solve. . Yes, faster.

Start-ups 67

Start-ups Up-sell Closing Sell 67

Search Engine Land

MAY 9, 2024

Information gain means different things to different people. And unless you are a computer programmer, we can largely leave that can of worms unopened (for now). As you can see, we have three different meanings for the same term. You can see why Google SGE might help things if you think about this.

Engineering 105

Engineering Angle UX Trust 105

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 6, 2024

Just as selling has evolved, buying has evolved–but differently. Too often, there is an alignment challenge between what buyers need and what sellers do. We seem to be on diverging paths, and this creates problems for both buyers and sellers. We always seem to lead with our products and focus our conversations on those.

Education 137

Education Trust Sell Product 137

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

Sometimes our success limits our thinking about what we could be achieving. We think we are doing well, but we really should be doing so much more. I’ve written, often, about how we “settle” for win rates of 15-20% and are happy achieving our growth goals.

Territory 147

Territory Growth Presentation Meeting 147

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 12, 2023

We all know customer retention is important. Creating great customer experiences, making sure we deliver on our commitments, keeping them happy are critical. We are all familiar with the “bow tie” chart, showing the importance of not only retaining, but growing and upselling. The customer wanted to change.

Cross-sell 139

Cross-sell Up-sell Sell Customers 139

Martech

APRIL 25, 2024

What do you do if the vendor of one of your martech solutions gets bought? This can change many things, including price, customer service, contract enforcement and more. Here are 10 things that will let you be proactive if this happens. Even if true, this should be taken with a grain of salt.

Contract 99

Contract Legal Price Technology 99

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 13, 2024

We still have very antiquated views of our “value proposition.” ” Most of the time, we restrict it to the value that might be realized through the purchase and implementation of our solutions. And our competitors are doing the same thing. Are we addressing the FOFU they develop in the buying process?

Presentation 123

Presentation Process Customers Product 123

Search Engine Land

MAY 13, 2024

Whenever a new change happens, I first try to understand what the search engines are doing and why they’re trying to accomplish it. SEO is real marketing now With every algorithm and change, we move further away from the old days of tricking the search engines and closer to having to do real marketing. They come with risks.

Engineering 138

Engineering Legal Start-ups Trust 138

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 26, 2024

What should we be reading?” While the basic principles at the core of high performance selling are the same, each book has a slightly different perspective on how to implement them. Where do your customers go to learn? Through this, perhaps we can connect with them more effectively.”

Manufacturing 130

Manufacturing Technique Sell Customers 130

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 25, 2024

We know buying cycles are getting longer. It’s easy to chalk it up to buyers, blaming them for not focusing, getting distracted, not prioritizing the project, or all sorts of other things. Or we have other excuses. And then there is always VUCA, a great yet abstract excuse around why things are getting more difficult.

Customers 117

Customers Sales Presentation Start-ups 117

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 18, 2024

There seemed to be virtual shrugging, “That’s just the way things are…” In any organization I’ve been involved with, this data would be the equivalent of a 12 alarm fire. Sure we don’t want to waste time an resources on things way outside our ICP. Win rates are based on qualified deals only.

SQL 125

SQL Quota Presentation Prospecting 125

Martech

MAY 28, 2024

While Google said everyone should be off UA as of March of this year, some major corporations still haven’t finished their migrations. We talked to Michael Loban, InfoTrust’s chief growth officer, about why they haven’t and about what to focus on as the clock ticks down. On July 1, 2024, Universal Analytics 360 will shut down.

Profit margin 52

Profit margin CRM Growth Process 52

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Every day I think we have reached bottom with the level of stupid advice I see in my social feeds. Every day, I’m surprised that we can find new depths of stupidity. Sadly, too much of this is from smart people who should know better. It’s rare that I see someone suggest, “Why do we accept this?

Consult 131

Consult Clients Follow-up Up-sell 131

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

“Discovery” has been an important part of the sales process ever since I started selling (Yes, that was back when we had first chipped a wheel out of stone.) In all our training, we’ve gotten playbooks, done role plays, and learned how to conduct discovery and what questions we should be asking the customer.

Technique 117

Technique B2B Start-ups Up-sell 117

SaaStr

MAY 17, 2024

But how do you tactically achieve all of that? Building Trust as a New CPO As a CPO, the most important thing you have to do is build trust with your CEO or founder. Building Trust as a New CPO As a CPO, the most important thing you have to do is build trust with your CEO or founder. That’s a very senior role.

Product 97

Product GTM Trust Growth 97

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 17, 2024

We talked about some fascinating concepts: Mis-diagnosis and Missed-diagnosis. But each requires different approaches with our customers. They are so busy doing their jobs, they fail to see there might be a better way of doing things. We are helping our customers think differently about their businesses.

Manufacturing 125

Manufacturing Represent Clients Education 125

Martech

MAY 16, 2024

To further confuse matters further, we often refer to the discipline of “customer experience management” simply as “customer experience.” I thought I’d dedicate an article to listing out several things that I’ve heard and to debunking those notions. Still, the CX team is not doing the work to improve systems, processes, policies, etc.

Customers 117

Customers B2C UX User Experience 117

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

I was excited to see the CMO of one of my clients speaking about a pillar their culture, “Pursuing Better, Differently… ” It’s such a critical concept, particularly if we want to stand out to our customers and differentiate our companies. It’s, also, so obvious–or should be.

Clients 120

Clients Growth Product Customers 120

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 3, 2023

One of the things he discusses in the concept of “Selling Possibility.” They’ve done all the heavy lifting of trying to figure out what questions they should be asking, who should be involved, the risks, the necessity of changing. But we miss a huge opportunity by waiting for our customers to figure things out.

Sell 134

Sell Up-sell Start-ups Customers 134

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

On the selling side we would have perfectly structured steps like Qualification, Needs Identification, Solution Presentation, Closing. The thinking being, as long as we stayed aligned with the customers’ process we could help them with their buying process, maximizing our ability to win. They would often get lost.

B2B 138

B2B Up-sell Contract Start-ups 138

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 21, 2023

As our conversations often go, we were talking about the state of selling and how we improve. The conversation got me thinking about the issue: “Our customers desperately need help, but do we want to be helpful, do we know how to be helpful? We face issues we may not have experienced before.

Customers 130

Customers Quota Up-sell Conversion 130

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

If I pose this question to sellers, the responses I get are usually about what their products do. To effectively engage our customers in business conversations, we have to understand the and be able to talk to them about their business problem first. But then, we have to first know what types of organizations have these problems?

Customers 121

Customers Territory Manufacturing Finance 121

Martech

MAY 20, 2024

Since that initial announcement, we have introduced the term “Position-less Marketer” to hundreds of leading marketing executives and learned that readers and the audience interpreted it in several ways. As we noted, you can do more than one thing. She said, “I like this phrase immensely.”

Sports 101

Sports Retail Consult Growth 101

Search Engine Land

MAY 6, 2024

We were expecting the enforcement to begin this week, we posted a reminder last week. Meaning sites impacted by this site reputation abuse policy should have received notifications of these penalties in their Search Console profiles. Danny Sullivan from Google told me , “we’re only doing manual actions right now.

Education 144

Education Launch Trust Closing 144

Martech

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

He knew from a very young age that running a business was what he wanted to do. Q: How far back does the business thing go? I’d tell my mom about it, and she’s like, “You know, you should be an architect. You always think about building things.” And so I always knew I was going to do something in business.

Clients 102

Clients Management Consulting Start-ups Consult 102

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 1, 2024

We tend to spend the bulk of our time responding to people who are looking to buy. We identify them because they are hitting on our websites, downloading white papers and we reach out to them saying, “We have the best solutions in the world, can we talk… ?”

Manufacturing 77

Manufacturing GTM Represent CRM 77

Partners in Excellence

MAY 25, 2024

SaaS subscriptions are very predictable, we have an ongoing monthly stream of revenue coming from the subscriptions… ” When I reply, “All you are doing is talking about cash flow, not predictability,” people’s eyes roll, they know I’ve gone off the deep end. And I get frustrated. Well, at least 99.9%

Assembly Line 73

Assembly Line Manufacturing Contract Represent 73

Martech

JANUARY 12, 2024

As we slide into 2024, B2B marketing leaders face new challenges: deals are harder to close, budgets are shrinking, and expectations are rising. We must rethink what it means to be effective in marketing. But is safety really what we need right now? Is 2024 about doing more of the same?

B2B 128

B2B Construction Strategize Growth 128

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 9, 2023

Regular readers know I go through alternating phases of being very optimistic about the future of our profession and the hope that I carry for the impact we can have with our customers, our companies, our peers, and our communities. Yet underlying this criticism it the deeply held belief we can move past it.

Consult 123

Consult Start-ups Conversion Up-sell 123

Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 17, 2023

” I worry whether “we” can’t handle the truth. Post after post, we cite examples and data that indicate something is broken. As sellers, we would hope that customers would want to engage us, but the reality is they do everything the can to minimize their need to engage selling.

Technique 106

Technique Technology Technology Sell 106

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 16, 2024

But in what world do we consider that acceptable? Even though it’s 2-4 times better than other approaches, why do we consider that an acceptable response rate? Why aren’t we challenging ourselves to figure out what it takes to get 5% or more? It’s like so much other data we see.

Manufacturing 123

Manufacturing Technique Pitch Up-sell 123

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 28, 2024

We tend to see things the way we want to see them. We find facts and evidence that support our experience or what we want to believe. Our propensity to do this causes us, perhaps unconsciously, to defend the status quo. But this doesn’t mean we are right. We may be making mistakes.

Engineering 73

Engineering Customers Sell 73

Search Engine Land

MAY 20, 2024

Since that initial announcement, we have introduced the term “Position-less Marketer” to hundreds of leading marketing executives and learned that readers and the audience interpreted it in several ways. As we noted, you can do more than one thing. She said, “I like this phrase immensely.”

Sports 87

Sports Retail Consult Conversion 87

SaaStr

MAY 13, 2024

And that thing I’ve learned is that you can take two brutally competitive products, that are very similar, give each a booth at SaaStr Annual, Europa or at one of our digital events… or each can try a podcast ad or do a newsletter ad … and one can walk away with more leads than you can follow up on. The difference?

Quota 95

Quota Pipeline Follow-up Start-ups 95