The Revenue Architect Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.therevenuearchitect.com [https://www.therevenuearchitect.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Early-stage ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are usually way too broad, leading to a host of problems in your GTM, from low response rates to outreach and ads, to disjointed feedback from customers to struggling to maintain multiple sales and marketing motions. This happens when you rely purely on generic company attributes to define your ICP, like industry, number of employees, geography, recent hires etc, because these attributes don't tell you whether a company has the problem you solve. This lesson walks through 4 deeper attributes you can add to your ICP to give you a higher chance of predicting the problems that leaders in the company are dealing with and increase your chances of finding prospects who are interested in buying your product.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.therevenuearchitect.com [https://www.therevenuearchitect.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Early adopters are the lifeblood of an early stage startup because they are the bridge between your initial (tiny) group of design partners and your mainstream market. If you can’t easily find them your growth will stall while you burn cash. This lesson is on how to build a target list of early adopters for your startup and covers the following topics: * Why early adopters are important * Common mistakes in identifying early adopters * 3 ways to find early adopters - using a case study of a startup that sells a content marketing solution to B2B marketers If you’re already a paid subscriber to The Revenue Architect, the full version of this lesson and all other video lessons are included in your existing subscription, along with full access to every issue of the newsletter, the full archive and private Q&A with me. If you don’t yet have a paid subscription, you’ll get a short preview. I hope you see this growing catalog of lessons as another great reason to upgrade to a paid subscription! It’s $15/month, you can expense it to your training budget and it really helps support my work.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.therevenuearchitect.com [https://www.therevenuearchitect.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Warm outreach is a hot topic in early-stage GTM as startups look for new ways to cut through the noise of cold outbound and connect with their best prospects. This lesson is on how to set up a scalable warm outreach motion and it covers the following topics: * Common mistakes with warm outreach * Identifying your best connectors * Organizing contact data in a central hub * Identifying prospects * Messaging to use for warm intros * Getting your connectors to deliver for you If you’re already a paid subscriber to The Revenue Architect, the great news is that the full versions of this and all past and future video lessons are included in your existing subscription, along with full access to every issue of the newsletter, the full archive and private Q&A with me. If you don’t yet have a paid subscription, you’ll get a short preview. I hope you see this growing catalog of lessons as another great reason to upgrade to a paid subscription! It’s $15/month, you can expense it to your training budget and it really helps support my work.

Most frontline sales managers get promoted into the role on the back of being superstar salespeople. So why do so many struggle to succeed in a management role? Well, it turns out that being a top sales manager takes a completely different set of skills to being a top salesperson, not least the ability to be an effective coach. Common wisdom says that it takes years of experience to become a great coach, as you need to have seen a wide range of scenarios before you can start dishing out advice. However, frontline sales managers don’t have the luxury of time as they are expected to deliver results instantly. What if there was a way to accelerate the learning process? Well, there just might be. Matt Benelli is at the forefront of solving this problem as co-founder of Coachem and shares his wisdom in this week’s podcast. From how to step back from trying to do it all yourself, to how to personalize your coaching approach for each of your direct reports, to what data to use to identify coaching opportunities, there’s a ton of actionable advice in here. It’s a must listen for anyone who is a new frontline sales manager, anyone who is managing a frontline sales manager and anyone eyeing sales management as the next step in their career. Podcast contents 0:30 Can you tell us about Coachem and the problem you’re solving? 3:50 What are the top skills gaps that you see in frontline sales managers? 6:30 Why do frontline sales managers need to step back and not try to do everything themselves? 7:30 What would you do differently if you treated each of your salespeople like the biggest deals you’ve ever closed in your career? 8:55 The 6 elements of a coaching framework: Trust, Personalized Focus, Role Modeling, Deliberate Practice, Immediate Feedback, Consistency. 12:30 Why “do it like me” is the death knell for performance. 14:00 The importance of personalized focus. 15:30 What does deliberate practice entail? 19:30 The dangers of asking too many questions without first establishing trust and credibility. 22:30 Balancing short term performance pressures with long term coaching by using data. 29:00 How to drive immediacy of feedback. 32:30 How preparation and practice improves objection handling. If you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Matt, you’ll love listening to this one from the archives with Bernadette, who recently went through the transition from AE to sales manager and shares what she learned. And if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.therevenuearchitect.com/subscribe [https://www.therevenuearchitect.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Outsourced procurement is one of the biggest trends sweeping SaaS right now as companies switch from a growth at all costs mindset to one of finding greater efficiency. Companies like Vertice [https://www.vertice.one], Vendr, Tropic and others are capitalizing on this trend by helping companies optimize their SaaS and cloud spend, through a combination of price transparency, usage tracking and competitive bidding. This is disrupting the status quo for software sales teams, especially the 55% that have historically not published their pricing and instead leaned on techniques like value-based selling to maximize order sizes. Matt Hicks [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthicks85/] is at the forefront of this trend in his role leading the global sales team at Vertice and gives us a peek behind the curtain of this burgeoning category. From how Vertice works with its clients, to what salespeople should do when they run into an outsourced procurement team during a sales process, to where this trend is taking us in the next year, there’s a ton of valuable advice in here. It’s a must listen for anyone in a software sales role. Give it a listen here or on Apple Podcasts and let me know what you think! And if you haven’t done so already, please consider subscribing. Podcast contents 0:40: Can you tell us about Vertice and your role there? 4:50: Discussing the lack of price transparency in SaaS compared to other industries. 5:45: What advice would you give a salesperson when an outsourced procurement provider shows up in the buying process? 9:25: Does an outsourced procurement provider have to secure additional discount from a salesperson to justify their value to their client? 12:20: When a client is interested in buying a piece of software, does Vertice go out and find competitive bids for similar solutions from other vendors? 16:00: The lack of standardized terms in SaaS causes a lot of friction in the buying process, especially when compared to industries where all parties . How do you see this playing out in the long term? 21:00: Outsourced procurement tends to show up late in the sales process, which frustrates salespeople. How do you educate your clients on when to bring you in? 25:00: Sounds like you are getting into the Contract Lifecycle Management space? 28:00: Discussing the chronic under-utilization of SaaS tools, especially in salestech and martech. 31:00: How did you get into selling financial services? 34:30: You describe yourself as a servant leader. How does servant leadership influence how you lead a sales team? 40:00: What lead generation strategies have worked best you over the years? Resources The Ultimate Guide to Purchasing Sales Software [https://www.vertice.one/inside-saas/reports/sales-tools-2023/thank-you] (Vertice) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.therevenuearchitect.com/subscribe [https://www.therevenuearchitect.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]