Sales Assembly

The revenue leaders of the Mile High City came out in full force last night for Sales Assembly latest executive-level dinner in Denver! Was close to standing room only in a room of 35+ VP and C-level sales, CS, and RevOps leaders. Lots of businessy talk about board meeting prep, org chart structure at the senior leadership level, driving pipeline, and yada yada...but here are the highlights from my perspective: - Arm wrestling Alyson to determine, once and for all, if mezcal is terrible (which I think it is) or delicious (her opinion). She won, btw. 🥺 - Seeing OG Sales Assembly member Emma for the first time since her move from Chicago to Denver. - Josh and I chatting at length about having only one kiddo. - Brittany and I brainstorming on ideal places to live abroad. - Chris theorizing on the buoyancy of Tanner if we were to throw him into a swimming pool (spoiler: not very buoyant). - Sushila giving me some absolutely clutch advice about estate planning given the fact that I'm married to a Canadian citizen like her. Plus, we had a celebrity cameo appearance by Jonah who just happened to be driving by the restaurant (while he was in town from NYC) and was good enough to pop in and say hello! Probably the most fun we've had at one of our dinners this year. Kudos to Kyle and the Gradient Ventures team for being a great partner in bringing the Denver ecosystem together on this. Finally, huge thanks to Nooks and Ladidadi Events & Incentives for turning this Denver dinner idea into reality!

I’m happy to share that I’ve obtained a new certification: Pipeline Management for Existing Business from Sales Assembly!

Always a great day when I get to talk about ICP Demographics, Customer Segments, and working with sales to reduce next year's contraction. Thanks Sales Assembly for the opportunity and looking forward to seeing Brad Rosen, Jeff Rosset, and Matt Green here in Denver, CO this evening!

We run a Cold Communication certification for the thousands of reps across the Sales Assembly ecosystem.  We created a resource from this program that will take you through cold outreach strategies top performers swear by: 1) #SMYKM We’re all familiar with this acronym (or, at least, you should be) coined by Samantha McKenna One of our courses focused exclusively on how you use the methodology in tandem with persistent but timely follow up to help you book meetings with prospects. Critical components: ⃗- Conduct ICP and account level research before reaching out ⃗- Establish relevance immediately - Embellish your email or call with a personalized nugget at the end  ⃗ As salespeople we need to constantly remember how many times per day a prospect is receiving outreach that looks a lot like our own. Standing out is hard - but possible - if you aim to establish relevance in every sentence within your outreach. 2) Pattern Interrupts via Multi-Channel Outreach Speaking of standing out, sometimes you’ll need to try something completely different to get a buyer’s attention. You’d need to come up with something that: ⃗- Is wildly different than anybody has sent to them that day, month, or even year.  - Uniquely shows your personality…and is authentic. Given how critical breaking through the noise is these days, we had an entire course built around it. 3) Anatomy of an Effective Cold Email You’re likely already following 💜 Will Allred.  If not, stop reading this and rectify that now. Email is, by far, the most saturated outreach channel. Even so, reps don’t spend nearly enough time creating a compelling “why.” Why should your prospect care? Why should they even bother reading, much less responding? Will walks us through: ⃗- Showing deep understanding of the market, your buyer and their problems/goals - Establishing this immediately when you reach out - Having a solid reason why you are reaching out with your message 4) Creative Cold Call Openers “Can I have 27 seconds to tell you why I’m calling” was the gold standard opening line for a cold call once upon a time. What is the best approach now? Will Aitken shares 3 of the simplest and best ways to open a cold call to generate a conversation. Your opening line needs to: ⃗- Disarm fears of a spam/irrelevant/time wasting call ⃗- Explain clearly who is calling, why and what they want to discuss ⃗- Drive an open conversation rather than a closed-loop question and answer session This full resource, along with clips from all of these programs, can be found right here: https://lnkd.in/gajWEKax Hope they’re helpful!

Sales Assembly just turned 7 years old.  Feels more like a bajillion years.  Part of that is because we didn’t set out to build what we’ve built today.  Another reason is because of how much can happen within 7 years… 2017 - Jeff comes up with the idea for Sales Assembly It’s a community for VPs of Sales and CROs of B2B tech companies here in Chicago. We do a quarterly breakfast, some small group coffee get-togethers, and make connections between leaders. 2018 - Members start asking if we can teach their BDRs to get better at objection handling. We start hosting in-person workshops every month.  50 people at a time, all from different companies. Then we get asked to do the same thing for AEs.  We comply. Everyone is hiring, so we start hosting career fairs. 2019 - Begin rolling out training for CSMs and AMs. Hosting in-person training sessions multiple times per month. Still getting the VPs of Sales & CROs together every quarter. Inbounded by every org that opens up an office in Chicago saying they want to join. Other companies ask us to start doing stuff virtually.  We say “lol nah…virtual sucks.” 2020 - “No, you misheard us.  We didn’t say virtual sucks.  We said virtual is amazing!” Start hosting all of our training and community gatherings on Zoom. Have no idea what we’re doing, but we just start doing a lot of it.  Quantity = quality. 2021 - Up and to the right. Signing up members is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Build lots of new stuff, much of which doesn't have anything to do with the other, but why not?  People ask for stuff, and we deliver it. It all seems to work. 2022 - decline 2 acquisition offers. Let’s just keep growing.  This shit is easy.  We’re geniuses. 2023 - We’re idiots, and this shit is hard. All that stuff we built that didn’t really make sense but worked?  Well, it still doesn’t make sense, and now it doesn’t work. 95% of our clients bank with SVB.  Are our invoices going to get paid?  We’re a bootstrapped business…will we be able to make payroll next Friday? Had no idea how much the rising tide of the market was carrying us over the past 3 years.  As the rising tide recedes, we identify a whole ton wrong with our business that needs a fixin. So we get to fixin. 2024 - Well….so far, so good. Empowering revenue teams for peak performance. Great product.  Amazing clients (many have been with us since we launched). The best part?  The team I get to work alongside with and learn from every day. Sure, I have much more gray hair than I should for someone my age.  And I’m sure the single year of 2023 took at least 6 years off of my life. But holy moly have I gotten to work alongside some really, truly amazing people while building this. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t trade this for any other timeline. Excited to see what the next 7 years will bring! PS - this photo was from one of the first BDR training sessions we ever held. Seems like centuries ago...

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting a session on how to lead organized and productive meetings. I started the session with framing different categories of meetings which led to a discussion on the attitudes and POVs a #CustomerSuccess professional can consider based on the type of meeting and the attendees. This clip shares a bit of what was covered in that segment. Thanks Sales Assembly, Jeff Rosset, Brad Rosen, Matt Green and everyone on your team for your work to help leaders in Sales and CS improve their skills.

92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know, yet sellers rarely ask for them. Here's a 2-step referral strategy to help get you more meetings with less cold outreach. I actually learned this from Matt Green a few weeks ago when he used it on me. Step 1: → Reviewed my LI connections that fit his ICP. → Threw them all into a Google sheet Step 2: Emailed me with 2 questions. 1. Would I be open to him sharing the list 2. Would I be comfortable helping with an intro We work with Matt's company and I know and trust him, so was happy to help. Of the 45 on the list, I knew 9 well. Within 2 days - 5 agreed to meet. 5 meetings, 0 cold outreach needed. I'd take that every day of the week. If you're interested in more detail - here's the full write-up (with templates) 👇 https://lnkd.in/eyncYHEZ

We're closing a logo per week so far this year at Sales Assembly. We're not blessed with inbound, and we don't do traditional outbound. Here are the 3 things that have worked well for us: 1) In-person stuff If you wanna break through the noise, it's best to break through the screen. We host dinners for VPs of Sales and CROs in different cities every month. Usually 30 people at a time. These dinners arent to talk about Sales Assembly.  In fact, I actively avoid talking much about us at all. Nobody wants to spend their evenings hearing me talk about skills training.   That said, 50% of the people in the room tend to be existing clients. I'm sure they end up saying nice things about us, what we do, and the value we've brought to their GTM teams to the 50% of folks in the room who aren't current clients. So...what do we do with all of these prospects in the room? We take the opportunity to shake peoples hands and just build relationships. We'll then hop on a call a week later and see how we can add value to them. If it makes sense for them to explore Sales Assembly at that time, great. If not, we'll try to add value where we can anyway. Some of them convert quickly. Some convert 2 months later. Some 6 months later. Some never. Even if they don't end up becoming clients, at least they end up becoming friends (whether they realize it or not). 🥹 2) Social engagement When I'm talking about this, I'm talking about #samsales Consulting. Not just following Samantha's SMYKM frameworks and stuff. I'm talking about actually using their team. They provide invaluable guidance around profile optimization, content ideas, and outreach strategies. That's why we've been engaging with them over the past year. LinkedIn is one of our most productive lead channels (both in quantity of new opps and # of closed won deals), and Sam & her team have been instrumental in that. 3) Referrals Dunno what to say here. Just ask for more referrals, people. Kills me that people still don't do this. If you ask, folks will give them to you. It's really that simple. Anyway, the common thread that connects all of these is that they involve building solid, authentic relationships and, especially in the case of referrals, doing right by people. For those of y'all who are blessed with inbound, maybe explore adding one of these arrows to your quiver. They aren't hard to stand up (especially referrals). We're a small, bootstrapped company with a mid-markety sale. If we can make this stuff work, I'm sure you can too. PS - Isaiah Crossman yelled at me the other day for not doing more cold outbound. In the interest of not getting yelled at again, maybe we'll reconsider. 😬

This is why we do what we do. To see notes like this. And no I didn’t change my name. This wasn’t sent to me. Nobody has ever enjoyed spending 50 mins with me This was sent to 💜 Will Allred after the program he ran this week on the anatomy of cold email (kind of a critical topic in 2024, eh??) We actually get to see notes like this pretty often. Why? - we work with over 100 of the BEST thought leaders and operators throughout B2B tech who lead our programs and certifications. They crush it. - we make sure our programs are engaging and enjoyable. No death by PowerPoint 🚫 - all 250 of our live programs follow a similar and specific structure, to ensure content is actionable (versus just theory), and based around specific outcomes learners can achieve post-session Love seeing these notes! Thanks Jennifer Li Dotson, MSc 李麗玲 for sharing!

I really dig the way Nick at Asana weaves simplicity, storytelling, and transparency when presenting pricing: 1 - Priorities. Aligning to projects, goals and current pains. The business case for the purchase. Sounds obvious but SO many times a deal is lost because there is no real need or reason big enough to justify the purchase. This haunts reps and inflates their pipeline leaving them left short at the end of the quarter. 2 - Company Growth. What does the purchase do to aid company growth? Emphasizing the Why, fighting against a No-Decision. This is where the top performers really stand out. They’re selling into executive level goals and projects and using those initiatives and reasons for them to keep the sales cycle moving with urgency.  3 - Pricing & Support. What are the options and how does it all work? The menu style approach makes it easier for your prospect to digest and choose the tier which works for them. Nick was enough of a mensch to present this as part of Sales Assembly's Negotiation certification. Just one of the many reasons why he's my favorite Golemis! 🕺🕺🕺🕺