Amazing how my world comes full circle:
2008-2009 – I sold one of the world’s first “Deal Rooms” for M&A Due Diligence at Firmex.
2017 – LinkedIn introduces PointDrive in Navigator and my company Sales for Life was a pioneer in enabling this platform globally.
2020 – LinkedIn introduces SmartLinks in Navigator. Oddly, while easier to use, less feature-rich.
2023 – Digital Deal Rooms for Account-based Sellers are slowly making their way mainstream.
Here are the three topics this week:
1. Digital Deal Rooms – putting Account Prioritization back in the hands of Account-based Sellers.
2. The Deal Waterfall that will scare the pants off your investors.
3. AuthoredUp changed my content game in 2023. Will change yours too!
Digital Deal Rooms – putting Account Prioritization back in the hands of Account-based Sellers.
I should have seen this sales category coming 100 miles away! I’ve been a HUGE proponent of Digital Deal Rooms for sellers for years. The problem – no one had access to a “free version” except LinkedIn Navigator users.
What’s the skinny?
The reality is your account-based sellers spend a disproportionate amount of time prioritizing accounts. For all the features that a Digital Deal Room provider will sell you (collaboration, transparency, CRM integration, etc). Seller Usage / Utilization hinges on correlating these deal rooms into $$$.
What a Digital Deal Room creates is a private landing page between a prospect and a seller. Think as easy to develop as “drag and drop”, but as feature-rich to include everything a buyer needs to:
- Internalize everything they heard in a demo
- Share with their buying committee
- Sell their buying committee as a champion.
The seller on your team gets 🔔🔔 Alert Notifications:
- Who’s viewing?
- What are they focused on? (think Package A vs. Package B)
- Who’s on the buying committee that I had no idea about?
Ultimately, sellers that can leverage this intelligence (which is independent of marketing’s Buying Intent – which very few Account-based Sellers actually use), and make OBJECTIVE decisions with this intelligence – will win.
Speaking of winning, I’ve always bet on Vidyard. In fact, we’re already going to put bets on our jockey. What Vidyard does so well creates a distribution channel that’s free for Account-based Sellers to start (just like their Video for Sales product). This will allow us to enable 10,000’s sellers to become better, more objective account prioritizers.
Time Management is a competitive advantage that underpins account-based selling.
The Deal Waterfall will scare the pants off your investors.
I want to credit Ryan O’Hara for helping scare the pants off us all. Here is his original LinkedIn post.
To help summarize, there is a MASSIVELY broken Cost of Customer Acquisition paradox that has metastasized out of control. Let’s dive into the numbers:
- Cold email replay rates are 1/10 of what they used to be. Today @ 0.7%.
- This constitutes an AVG of 220 sales activities in a sales enablement platform to yield a meeting.
If I’m a CFO, would I pay a $70,000/year BDR to be a drinking bird?
To Ryan’s point, the system is really broken.
The cost of Customer Acquisition is swollen with massive marketing budgets, revenue ops building 48 tools, and BDRs being paid like their corporate accountants. I recently read a Twitter post that claimed that the BDR ecosystem for SaaS companies is spending approx. $11 billion on support spend (tools, excluding marketing spend)… in which 97% of all activities GO NOWHERE. In fact, the BDR lead-to-close rate has been measured to be as low as 2.4%.
It’s time to take a scalpel to the GTM team.
- SDR/BDR model needs to be revisited considering the number of companies that use it:
- Outsourced pay-per-performance lead generation with success.
- Global talent arbitrage. 1,000 companies are paying a ⅕ to prospect offshore via email and LinkedIn.
- Enable the AE’s the be surgeons in their markets. They can each yield 5% more at scale. They are the heavy hitters.
- I really like what Ryan’s creating at Request for Meeting. Focus on the Chet Holmes Pyramid of the +3% of the market that is actively keen to purchase.
AuthoredUp changed my content game in 2023. Will change yours too!
I’m the first to admit that my content isn’t perfect. It’s not the most viral. But it’s improving, and improving 1% every day means you will be 37x better in 1 year. Over the years, I’ve created a 21,000-follower database on LinkedIn with a 2,000-subscriber newsletter in the last few weeks.
One of my favorite weapons of choice has been AuthoredUp.
Created by Ivana Todorovic – this is one of the first FREE tools on LinkedIn that’s really able to teach you how to:
- Write a “Hook”
- Create a Call-to-Action
- Teach you about special awareness on LinkedIn at the Top of the Fold of each post.
You can review each posts analytics in detail:
As you can see, we mix things up. Between Polls, Images, Videos, and soon-to-be Carousels. I’m still a huge believer in 4:1:1
4 content posts that are about your market, vertical, and news (not about your product).
1 content post that drives your followers into your funnel (webinar, podcast, newsletter).
1 content post that is inspirational. For me, this is the life of a “parallel entrepreneur” running multiple companies simultaneously.
Check it out!
FREE RESOURCE – Self-Generated Quota Gap & Activity Tracker.
Are your AE’s struggling to meet sales quota?
They could have a QUOTA GAP.
Do they know what percentage of their sales quota THEY NEED TO SELF-SOURCE? (not driven inbound from marketing or the channel)?
For many companies, this is shocking. This could be 50%, 75%, or even 90% of every AE’s sales quota. Download it here.
Ensure your sales team has a clear understanding of where they need to focus their efforts.
Free Resource:
Self-Generated Quota Gap & Activity Tracker
Do your Account Executives (AE’s) need more leads than Marketing can provide?
Do your Account Executives have a sales quota that’s larger than your current Inbound Marketing lead flow?
Each AE needs to understand their “Self-Generated Quota Gap” – the percentage of quota THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR not covered from inbound sources. They have to create this sales pipeline themselves.