Timo and Patrick talk about Timo's journey at Jobmatch.me when he joined the startup 1.5 years ago. The company made a shift from sales-led to product-led growth and at the same time, Timo had to build up a well-oiled sales team that can follow-up with leads from the free trial as well as are able to reach out cold to the most important accounts. If you want to know what it takes to build a team that wants to work together every day, listen to that episode. 

Daniel worked for all the well-known companies in the tech industry: Microsoft, IBM, AWS, SAP, Gartner and recently became the Manager of the Enterprise Sales Teams in Switzerland and Austria for Zoom. Daniel and Patrick talk about his approach to defining an ICP and focus the sales team on the best opportunities, what difference to expect when selling to large corporation and how to reach out to prospects with those restrictive data protection laws in Europe. 

Finn Thormeier claims to still have no clue about life after just turning 25. We heartily disagree and think he has more clues about life than 99% of 25-year olds. Especially about creating consistency in video content creation and publishing.

Stephanie Biebel and Manuel discuss with Finn about different ideation and content creation strategies and mindsets, but also the variable effort behind what it takes to publish attractive content consistently.

Aaron Ross is one of the true grandmasters of B2B Outbound Sales after building it up at Salesforce, writing Predictable Revenue and Impossible to Inevitable and more than a decade helping sales teams coach and build SDR teams.

Here are 3 things among the many more I learnt from him:

1) "Done for You" is not a silver bullet: Predictable Revenue offers both "teaching you how to fish" and "going fishing for you", but running both at the same time is hard. Also, it is a lot about expectation management.

2) Western Europe is still attractive for cold outbound: Applying state-of-the-art cold email outbound practices in the US yields <5% reply rates at scale. Applying similar practices in Europe, especially in Switzerland / DACH can get you to 20-40% reply rates quickly as the market is less mature (or crowded by 8-12 step sequences from Sales "Engagement" software).

3) A players (like Aaron) want human conversations: More Slack channels, virtual conferences and Q&A forums are not solving the puzzle of building a trusted, connected, flexible B2B Sales Acceleration partner ecosystem. Travel to meet physically is a challenge, but desirable for dedicated meetups. Until then small 2-5 people Zoom "Fireside Chats" can help.

The other not B2B sales-related feat which I find even more impressive than his sales track record is that Aaron takes care of his 9 kids as an actual father by limiting himself to 20 hours for (the better part of) the last decade, currently also across the ocean between Los Angeles and the UK.

One of the most underestimated assets you have as a company is the value you can bring to your customers not only with the product but also with a sophisticated sales process and well-trained and knowledgable salespeople. Your reps need to be in a mindset to be useful to your prospects and customers.

Are you looking for sales tips you can apply immediately? Then this is series for you. Markus Eilers and Patrick Trümpi talk about the 5th commandment in sales: Be useful first! 

Patrick and I loved interviewing 50+ sales leaders for our B2B Startup Sales podcast.

Mark did so very successfully with Speak on Podcasts to help B2B Tech Brands increase brand awareness and generate more demand by speaking on podcasts your audience listens to and trusts.

After spending 12 years in B2B sales, marketing and recruiting, Mark and I talked about the value of having conversations instead of pitches, always be connecting and why cold email is not dead at all.

Here are 3 things among the many more I learnt from him:

Silvan successfully founded and sold GymHopper cold-calling independent gyms and closing deals quickly.

He then moved on to sell 6-figure deals for RenTouch 100% remote from Switzerland to +/- 50% US customers.

He also interviewed 150+ Swiss entrepreneurs on the Swisspreneurs podcast and shares with us his insights he gained from successful entrepreneurs such as Ariel Lüdi and Tobias Häckermann.

Simon and Patrick talk about the nine stages in Simon's sales process that help you to categorise your Leads/Opportunities to get your prospects through the funnel and engage with them the right way at the right time. Simon has been in sales for more than 18 years and loves the profession. You can feel that with every word that crosses Simon's lips.

Julius Göllner was at Zalando while the company was growing from roughly 200 to 10’000 employees and since then founded, advised and invested in multiple B2B SaaS companies himself.

Here’s 3 things we learnt from him:

Sales coaching is crucial for a sales team’s success, but the DACH market is quite intransparent on what’s worth investing in.

Founders are often not 100% clear on what they require at which stage regarding product-market-fit, hiring sales talent and how to sell to which buyer personas.

Figured out sales is a lot about cooperation and long-term trusted relationships and  not living an “Ellbogenmentalität” as many people believe (and would have loved to know this at 20 years old already).

Dan Englander is doing truly impressive work on finding a fine line between personalization and scale in outbound sales.

We talked with him about how to execute relationship-based sales at scale, why most sales people fail due to inconsistency and also how email is still the most anti-fragile sales channel in today's noisy world.