Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 27, 2021

I know it’s heresy, but not all revenue is good revenue—particularly for start-ups. In fact chasing and winning the wrong deals can be devastating to the long term success of a start-up. In start-ups, sometimes we are so compelled to get revenue, we book deals that completely derail us.

Start-ups 66

Start-ups Follow-up Up-sell Meeting 66

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2020

Should you take the risk of applying to a fast-growing startup, or slowly work your way up at a more established enterprise company? I have been an early employee at a very successful start-up (and several not-so-successful ones), and I’ve also been in Sales and Management at large, enterprise corporations.

Start-ups 76

Start-ups Non-Profits Territory Sales 76

Veloxy

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Grab a warm coffee or tea and let’s get started! This includes having up-to-date info about what they’re selling and being equipped with technology that aids their sales pitches. This allows them to focus more on selling and less on administrative tasks. Here’s a quick checklist to get you started.

Objectives and Key Results 279

Objectives and Key Results Territory Inside sales Cross-sell 279

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 6, 2018

A friend forwarded me an article entitled, “Giving People More Time To Sell Is BS.” The article started with a statement to the effect of “ill informed pundits quoting data that sales people spend only 10-30% of their time F2F with customers.” Here’s where that part of the argument starts falling apart.

Up-sell 52

Up-sell Sell CRM Cold Call 52

Iannarino

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

There have never been as many options to continuously level up your sales force. How much revenue generation from pipeline coverage do you generate from the lost deals that make up your pipeline coverage? You may be causing your team to behave poorly by telling them to speed up acquisitions. Your team wants you to coach them.

B2B 227

B2B Objectives and Key Results Pipeline Sales 227

SaaStr

APRIL 12, 2024

When you sell: it’s not yours anymore; and your upside is capped. Start with Challenge #1. Are you still OK selling? Most founders I know end up looking back after selling, IF the acquisition was a success, and almost universally feel like they should have made 2x as much. Do you care? Will you care?

Strategize 96

Strategize Up-sell Start-ups Sell 96

Hubspot

JANUARY 29, 2018

Here's how to engage the prospect so they don’t immediately hang up. It also shows you aren’t trying to sell them something right away. Bringing up your prospect’s coworker tells them to take you seriously, while focusing the discussion on an emerging revenue source ensures you’re talking about a company priority. Hi [Prospect].

Start-ups 94

Start-ups Prospecting Niche Sales 94

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 2, 2024

Since Tekelec, he has been involved in a number of technology start-ups, has developed a specialized fund, providing seed capital to some start-ups. My friend, Dave Brock challenged me to explore, “why I’m obsessed with selling.’ This does not reflect my conviction and passion for selling, not one bit.

Sell 105

Sell Negotiate Relationship building Up-sell 105

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 11, 2024

Preface : Jill Konrath is one of the most well respected author, speaker, teacher on all things selling. She’s written 4 masterpieces on selling. Yet, if I wanted to start my own company it was necessary to learn how to sell. I focused on getting up to speed as soon as humanly possible—and got really good at it. (I

Sell 101

Sell Manufacturing Up-sell Consult 101

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 10, 2024

Preface: I’m departing from my normal process of introducing a new story about selling. Some with very distinguished leadership and selling careers. We started exchanging notes about some of the stories. Why Am I So Interested In Selling Why am I so interested in selling? That I would just end up failing.

Sell 119

Sell Up-sell Start-ups Growth 119

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 13, 2024

We lost track of each other–John ended up going to senior executive levels in IBM, eventually was the General Manager of IBM Global Finance. We renewed our relationship, discussing things we had seen happen over our very different careers, periodically catching up an exchanging ideas.

Sell 115

Sell Finance Clients Up-sell 115

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 17, 2024

We started sharing ideas about sales performance, particulalry in some of his early leadership and entrepreneurial roles. A line that stood out, “If you accept sales is about moving people, then it becomes easy to stay positive about selling. You start to see sales everywhere.” Selling is about moving people.

Sell 77

Sell Up-sell Start-ups Technology 77

SaaStr

APRIL 17, 2024

The Journey of Selling Your Startup Harry was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later. During those rapid growth years, someone would reach out every once in a while and ask if Harry would consider selling.

Sell 63

Sell Negotiate Up-sell Price 63

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2024

Imagine you are selling a $100,000+ product and you yourself as CEO/founders have limited knowledge selling to the customer base. But as the deals get bigger, the value of domain expertise in the early part of a reps tenure does go up. You can pick that up in 60 days. That’s a Double No. At $1k a year, so what?

Niche 108

Niche B2B Price Up-sell 108

Martech

APRIL 15, 2024

I like more the communication and the data part of it, so I ended up being really interested in digital marketing because it really had a lot of data you could leverage. When I was finishing up college I had the opportunity to do an internship at a project that was funded by the Brazilian government. That really piqued my interest.

CRM 95

CRM Retail Technology Technology 95

Force Management

DECEMBER 28, 2023

With a new year comes a clean slate – our once-annual fresh start. For revenue team leaders, today’s decisions will help define where the company ends up in twelve months. Help your team step up their game by providing them with tech tools built to boost performance, keep morale high, and sustain long-term success.

Technology 122

Technology Technology Gaming B2B 122

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

Once as a start-up exec, and twice as founder. In my first start-up job, we were acquired for $1b with < $10m in revenue. I sold my first start-up for $50m after 12.5m This was the most lucrative time of the 3, but looking back, the team being tired is both the most logical and worst reason to sell.

Sell 78

Sell Up-sell Price Start-ups 78

SalesLoft

OCTOBER 6, 2016

On to Day 3 of Dreamforce 2016 , we’re jam-packing the day with sessions, joining sales leaders from across the country to share tips and best practices around modern selling. Where sales is focused on selling (naturally), sales ops is focused solely on analyzing data, analytics and the entire sales process. ” -Sean Kester.

Up-sell 52

Up-sell Sell Cross-sell Sales 52

Martech

FEBRUARY 7, 2024

Greg Kihlstrom is a best-selling author, speaker, entrepreneur and valued contributor to MarTech. A: I started off more in the creative realm, more on the design end. I started teaching myself HTML and all about the web and building websites for anybody I could. That first company wound up going out of business.

UX 106

UX Technology Technology Up-sell 106

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 22, 2024

He and I share ideas about the state of selling and how we can drive improvement. He talks about how he wanders between different roles and experiences, sometimes avoiding selling, but always finding his way back to selling. I showed up, I wanted to help, and good things happened.” It was selling by numbers.

Sell 77

Sell Construction Finance Up-sell 77

SalesProInsider

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Even after removing the stretching pull on it, the rubber band is stretched a bit beyond where it started. Your beliefs are stronger and all your activity around selling is easier. And when that rubber band is stretched, it never returns back to the exact baseline. They aren’t sure the fee is worth it… Bam! Belief shrinkage!

Clients 126

Clients Referrals Pitch Lead generation 126

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 18, 2024

These are the discussions we strive to get since it is all about us and what we sell. If they have very little experience in buying these solutions, it may be better to back them up, asking them about what they are trying to achieve? They are asking about our products, that’s what we want to talk to them about, what’s up?

Customers 127

Customers Up-sell B2B Trust 127

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 7, 2024

Marketers sell! At least Carlos Hidalgo sells. Sometimes, “we” have mis-conceived notions about selling, thinking that only those in some sort of formal sales role sells. But selling goes far beyond the titles. And some of the very best have never had a selling title. Preface : Surprise!!

Sell 117

Sell Tradeshows Pitch Up-sell 117

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 5, 2024

Our relationship started as one of those very “tentative” LinkedIn relationships. Then he started sending me questions and views on some of my posts. Since then, I pay attention to everything he does, he’s a great thinker/practiioner in selling. I love his passion/obsession with selling.

Sell 73

Sell Retail Up-sell Start-ups 73

Salesforce

NOVEMBER 21, 2023

Field service can help drive revenue growth by selling to your existing customers, also called upselling or cross-selling. We’ve found that 65% of mobile workers are successfully selling to existing customers. Let’s dig into each of these best practices for upselling and cross-selling in field service.

Service 105

Service Growth Cross-sell Appointment 105

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 22, 2024

Preface : Orrin Broberg has such a diverse and fascinating background in selling. He has worked in some of the largest organizations through starting his own companies. His final sentence sums things up: “Call it sales if you want, but to me, it is connecting, understanding, educating, and solving problems. I loved it.

Sell 73

Sell Retail Cold Call Commission 73

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 12, 2024

As I look at selling, today, it requires far too much effort—far more than I’m willing to do. They don’t care about what we sell, they don’t want to go through our demos-at least until they have no other alternative. And for those that eventually do make a decision, we end up winning about 15% of them.

Sell 114

Sell Commission Up-sell Quota 114

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2023

So much of it resonated with me, especially the story of the CEO’s 10-year journey, and turning down an earlier $100m offer to sell. In the first start-up I joined, we sold for $1b quickly thereafter, and I was worth $12m on paper. You have no back-up plan. If it feels right to push on, don’t sell.

Sell 139

Sell Up-sell Start-ups Price 139

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

Ever since I started selling–you know back in the old days when phones were still attached to cords–I’ve been taught, “Buyers have a structured buying process.” On the selling side we would have perfectly structured steps like Qualification, Needs Identification, Solution Presentation, Closing.

B2B 128

B2B Up-sell Contract Start-ups 128

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 4, 2024

Immediately after that, he started sending me questions and ideas. Since then, we have constant conversations–and a few debates—about selling. Why am I so interested in selling? by: G Page Singletary Dave Brock understands ‘selling’ at a level few ever will. He was in the audience of a webcast.

Sell 73

Sell Mechanical Engineering Up-sell Technology 73

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 16, 2024

Why I’m So Interested In Selling Sales wasn’t on my UT Dallas agenda. It all started my freshman year. Waking up to a request for a meeting in his office felt surreal. The privilege of guiding someone towards a solution, watching their eyes light up as they see the value, that’s the fuel that drives me.

Sell 94

Sell Pitch Account management Up-sell 94

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 4, 2024

He’s so creative in his selling approaches, looking at very large deals and developing strategic partnerships with customers all around the world. Hi Dave, I got into selling almost by chance… As a young man, all I ever wanted to be was an Army Officer like my grandfather. After two years of partying – they kicked me out.

Sell 73

Sell Strategic partnership Cold Call Up-sell 73

SaaStr

MARCH 14, 2024

That’s way up from 60% in 2023. Mobile Subscription Pricing is Flat, Not Up This is interesting. of Business Mobile App Trials Start in the First 24 Hours This is another area where mobile is way, way ahead of most browser-apps. It really pays to lean in on retention, especially if you sell to SMBs.

Price 102

Price UX Up-sell Start-ups 102

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Time Available For Selling is a critical issue for everyone in sales. But before I go into a further discussion about time available for selling, let me first define how I look at time available for selling. There are review meetings-ideally to help improve their selling performance.

Sell 137

Sell CRM Technique Territory 137

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

With $10m+ in the bank, you can start making those hires now. Tiny experiments are OK, and investing in segments that are just starting to take off is good. But almost always, the fastest and easiest way to go from $1m to $10m is to double down on what is working: Sell more to the types of customers you already have.

Engineering 103

Engineering Up-sell Start-ups Closing 103

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 5, 2024

But Craig has hung in there, we have conversations and exchange ideas and opinions about the state of selling. Plus he, like so many others in this series managed to put up with my “humor.” Why I Absolutely LOVE Selling! One evening I got up in the middle of a class and I walked out. Enjoy his article.

Sell 73

Sell Retail Cold Call Commission 73

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 14, 2023

It’s interesting to see continued predictions of the death of selling. Some focus on PLG types of approaches, where the product sells itself–at least until one wants to scale that to the enterprise level. I actually never see anything about this other than within the selling community. Hmmm, what am I missing?

Sell 120

Sell Retail Promote Up-sell 120