Selling Saas

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Mark Ackers, the author of best selling book "Problem Prospecting," and previously the Director of Sales at Allego. The conversation talks about the shame one feels when getting into sales and how society looks down upon the industry, how you try to hide the fact you're in it by creating different descriptions and titles for yourself, and how you can get passed the internal anxiety you have from that conversation.  

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

1:30 - Just because you're not Digging holes or some labor intensive job, doesnt mean sales can't be a noble and amazing profession.  

3:00 - Trying to hide being in sales by masking your title or shying away from the career question.  

4:30 - How do you get passed the internal anxiety or feeling of shame when you first get into sales, or if its something that has never left you.  

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Meagan Davis from Hunters to chat about the need for patience when implementing sales enablement and understanding the real timeline involved, and how important it is to define the measurable's you're looking to impact so you can track how effective it is over time.  

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

0:48 - Losing patience in the enablement plan when its hard to connect the strategy directly to new revenue.  

2:15 - How long does it take to actually rollout a sales enablement strategy and why?  

4:15 - defining the metrics and the key results you're looking to impact will make the biggest difference when rolling out enablement  

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Tim Geisenheimer from Correlated to talk about some of the growth they're seeing in the market as it relates to product-led growth, non-traditional GTM strategies, and some of the things that are working for them as a startup as well.  

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

1:05 - Can't just be sales getting feedback for "what works," needs to be every one rallying around the customer journey and optimizing for product adoption and usage.  

2:30 - How to start the conversation with product and engineering to get onboard with and prioritize the work for product-led growth.  

4:30 - including product and engineering teams in the GTM strategy discussions so they understand the need

5:50 - Traditional campaigns are 't working anymore, so what is? Word of mouth.  

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Meagan Davis, and chats about the different expectations of customer-facing teams, and how most of the time it is just sales that is expected to bring in results. Support reps need to be able to handle chats and fix problems, while customer success managers are responsible for keeping accounts executives happy.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

0:01:03 - The Different Roles of a Customer Facing Team

0:02:49 - Sales Enablement: The Biggest Challenges Facing Revenue Teams

0:05:21 - The Importance of Sticking to a Plan in Sales

The conversation discuss sales enablement from the perspective of improving mindset and skillsets to help revenue teams. They discuss some of the challenges that sales reps and revenue teams face, including the no decision cop out, and how sales enablement can help address those challenges. Finally, they talk about the importance of mindset in sales enablement, and how it can help sales reps push themselves further.

Meagan talks about the importance of having a sales mindset in order to stick to a sales plan and be successful. They talk about how a sales plan takes discipline and patience to execute, and how it can be helpful to have a mentor or coach to help with guidance.

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Tim Geisenheimer from Correlated, and discuss the importance of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and how they are often undervalued or ignored by product development teams. They also lament the lack of information and education available to CSMs, making it difficult for them to properly measure the health score of their customers.  

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

1:20 - Health Score: A New Way to Measure Customer Engagement

2:30 - Using specific tools to automate messaging and re-engage customers and cross sell opportunities.  

3:20 - Who owns the health scoring process in a Saas company?

Companies can use health scoring to improve their marketing and sales strategies. Health scoring can help identify areas where customers are disengaged, at risk of churn, or ready for cross-sells. The goal is to help teams prioritize accounts and winnow down lists into more manageable chunks.

And, discuss who is responsible for monetization within a company. They explain that it is often a collaborative effort between different teams, including product, engineering, design, marketing, growth, sales, customer success, and ops. They note that growth marketing teams and sales teams often work closely with monetization efforts, as they are responsible for conversion and expansion.

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Meagan David from Hunters to chat about necessary its become over the last few years and how its over looked until a company puts a process in place, then it becomes an asset they can't do without.  

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

0:01:03- Sales Enablement: The Importance of Training and Development

0:02:15- Sales Enablement: The Biggest Misconceptions

0:05:02- Basics in onboarding with new hires, and the ongoing check ins as they progress in their employment.  

The biggest challenge with sales enablement is that there is no one clear definition of what it is, and where it fits into an organization. Additionally, there is a lack of understanding of why sales enablement is necessary. Without a clear understanding of what sales enablement is and why it's important, it's difficult to build a business case for it.

One way to overcome this challenge is to focus on specific programs, such as employee onboarding, and to attach it to specific metrics, such as the total cost of sales. By doing this, you can demonstrate the value of sales enablement and build a case for it within your organization.

The salesperson and account executive can own the entire deal process and close on their own a deal that was not inherited from someone else on the team or their manager. For an account executive, leading indicators of success can be practice activities leading up to that, such as being able to pitch the company they are with without any prompts. Everyone at every company should be able to tell a stranger what their company does.

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In today's episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Brendan Short from Groundswell, and discusses the importance of user feedback and sales reps in figuring out how customers are using your product. He stresses the importance of getting user feedback in order to improve the product and make it more successful. He also talks about the sales reps and how they play a role in figuring out how customers are getting the AHA moment from the product.

1. Leaders should get all departments (e.g. marketing, product, sales, customer success) on the same page when it comes to product led growth initiatives.

2. Try to build out two plays: 1) a product qualified lead and 2) a good fit account.

3. Take action when those two things happen and track the results for a month.

4. CEOs should be bought in on building out the go to market motion around PLG.

Brendan and Duane discuss product led growth (PLG) and how it can be beneficial for salespeople. They also talk about how Groundswell, a company Brendan is involved with, can help with PLG strategies.

TIMESTAMPS  

0:00:03   The Benefits of User Feedback and Sales Rep Input for Product Growth

0:00:55   Product Led Growth: What Go-To-Market Leaders Need to Know

0:03:43   Product Led Growth with Brendan Short

HIGHLIGHTS  

I love product led growth in that whole sales world and go to market strategies because more people want to sell, more and less people want to talk to sales rep, so it kind of goes hand in hand.

So what does a product qualified lead look like? That means what are they doing in your product and then is it a good Fit account?. Just those two things are important for you to be able to say.

That means marketing product, marketing product ideally as well as well as on the sales side and customer success side. That already is like, okay, when have those people been in the same room and tried to kind of build an initiative out? It's tough, especially as you get to a bigger company.

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane talks with Meagan Davis from Hunters. Meagan talks about what it means to master the employee experience and comments that this cannot simply be achieved by adding a few perks like a ping pong table in the break room. The goal is to create a positive experience for employees from the moment they are hired to the moment they leave the company. This can be achieved through thoughtful onboarding, development opportunities, and a focus on company culture.

In order to create an amazing employee experience, companies should consider hosting events and giving employees the opportunity to connect with one another on a personal level. Additionally, employees should be involved in the process of solving customer challenges, as this makes them feel more connected to the company's purpose. Finally, it is important for employees across all departments to have a clear understanding of the company's development roadmap.

The conversation is about how sales not just sales, but every department can work together to improve the product and the customer experience. They talk about how important it is to have regular meetings and how it can help the sales team to understand the product better. They also talk about how this can help the engineering team to understand the customer's needs better.

TIMESTAMPS  

0:00:03   The Benefits of Mastering the Employee Experience

0:00:48   The Impact of Employee Experience on Business

0:03:30   The Impact of Sales and Engineering Meeting on a Regular Basis

HIGHLIGHTS  

And it has this uphill effect that it's really hard to measure the impact of sales and engineering meeting on a regular basis or engineering listening to customer calls. It's one of those things that, like I said, it's hard to tie directly to revenue that you kind of have to buy into in order to believe it.

And so I started meeting with the head of engineering, like the head of Sales head of engineering meeting on a regular basis. And it started that whole conversation. And any time I talked to another sales leader about that, they're like, why do you spend time with the engineering team?.

And then on the flip side, with the customer experience example, people want to work for a company who that is really making a difference in the world. And I think if you're too far removed, I think sellers actually have the benefit of hearing directly from prospects about their challenges and the challenges that their business is solving.

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

In today's episode, Duane Dufault and Tim discuss the importance of looking at unit economics when growing a business. He explains that if unit economics are in the positive, and above industry standards, then the business is likely headed in the right direction. Dufault also says that businesses should focus on win rates, as this is an indicator of success.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

0:00:03

The Benefits of Focusing on Your Unit Economics

0:00:50

The Impact of Product Market Fit on Customer Churn

0:02:13

The Benefits of Product Data for Customer Success Managers

0:04:05

SellingSaas Podcast: Using Data to Drive Upsells and Improve Customer Health

And so where at least we see value in kind of product data and some of the plays is good things and bad things. So on the good things front, if you see spikes in usage, spikes in spend, if you're a usage based billing company, things that are kind of inflecting in the right way, then that's when maybe someone on the CS or account management side can come in and say, hey, things are going well.

Yeah, so we see a number of our customers using us on the customer success or account management side. And I think where we see less usage for us at least is on the more the size of the book that you just mentioned, 50 to 100.

Well, most product like growth strategies that I've seen is all centered around go to market teams, growth, net new sales, and that type of stuff. But how does a CSM, let's say they've got a book of customers, they've got maybe 50 to 100 customers, and on the front end they were product led growth.

So I always look at product usage and churn to kind of help me really pinpoint, do we have product market fit? Because you could have a low conversion, right? You could be an enterprise type software or mid market where you've got three SDRs to one account executive type of scenario.

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.

 In todays episode of the SellingSaas Podcast, Duane sits down with Meagan Davis the Director of Sales Enablement from Hunters, and talks about how focusing on creating an environment that creates brand ambassadors across the whole company and how it has such a major affect on revenue.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:  

2:30 - disorganized efforts that felt like random acts of enablement

4:30 - Going from a start up to a super start up and how every person on the team has a huge impact on growth

5:45- How Service Now's head of enablement coaches and trainings every customer facing rep to act like a brand ambassador with a focus on customer experience so its a wonderful experience regardless of who they interact with

If you get value from this episode, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with your friends, as we all can benefit from more positivity and leadership in today’s society.

Go to www.SellingSaaspodcast.com to get episodes sent directly to your inbox and get the weekly newsletter.