Sales Assembly

As the President, I oversee all strategy and operations of the business.

About SA: Elevated Learning & Development for GTM Teams.

Sales Assembly's All-inclusive annual membership for the entire GTM organization combines strategic skill development, robust peer communities and an easy-to-use learning platform.

President

Spiff Inc

Advisor

My Subscription Addiction

Chief Revenue Officer

Head of Revenue Operations - led the go-to-market strategy for G2.

Revenue Operations teams (Sales Operations, Sales Enablement, and Partnerships) are responsible for: sales strategy, sales forecasting and reporting, territory and quota planning, sales training, Salesforce administration, sales compensation management, pricing/packaging strategy and rollout, process improvement, and systems management.

The Strategic Partnerships team negotiated integrations with other B2B SaaS leaders as well as sold review syndication and data solutions.

Vice President of Revenue Operations and Strategic Partnerships

Built and ran the CSM team to ensure customer happiness and ROI.  
Led strategic partnerships in order to drive revenue and growth.

Director of Customer Success and Strategic Partnerships

Built and ran the sales team which is tasked with reaching out to all software vendors across the B2B ecosystem and providing them with relevant marketing solutions.

Director of Sales

Toodalu

Helped facilitate partnerships and sales for a disruptive mobile payment technology

Vice President of Business Development

U.S. Bank

Structured Finance - Modeling Analytics Department

AVP, Wealth Management Trust Manager

Bank of America

AVP, Transaction Manager

Proven GTM Leader having led teams across the revenue org: Sales, CS, Strategic Partnerships, and Revenue Operations.  I have extensive experience in growing B2B GTM teams - including being employee #3 at G2.

I am currently scaling Sales Assembly, which focuses on foundational skill development for GTM Teams.  Fostering an environment of learning and growth is essential to developing GTM talent within any successful SaaS organization.

Here are the top 8 things I heard from investors and sales leaders over the past two days NYC:

1) Investors are starting to see deal flow pick up but in certain pockets. 

2) Some investors have reset their expectations to an extent, understanding that efficient, reliable growth is a great plan moving forward. Other investors are back to demanding growth at all costs - they lost 2 years of that after all.  Be acutely aware of who your partners are and what they want from their portcos. 

3) There are many GTM leaders - and CEOs - who are simply tired from the past 2 years and are stepping away. That’s healthy, it’s also an opportunity if you are looking to take on these types of roles. 

4) The best sales tool continues to be word of mouth. I heard the phrase “you’re the 3rd person who’s mentioned X tool to me this week, I’m going to check them out” multiple times. 

5) In person meetings are back and they’re spectacular. A coffee, lunch, you name it and they are becoming ever so important for deal flow and network yet again. If you/your team isn’t mixing in-person into their schedule, they are falling behind. 

6) While most companies are still hybrid (hard to see 5 days in the office anytime soon) many are now requiring or requesting some days in the office. There’s just too much benefit to seeing team members once or twice a week in person. 

7) Sales leaders have a hope that smaller teams with books that are primed with strong ICP accounts should lead to exceeding goals. 

8) Top of the funnel continues to be a challenge given the reduction in resources + less buyers with discretionary spend. 

It was great catching up with everyone.  See you in Chicago at the end of April for our big event!

Brad Rosen

Mixed signals are everywhere right now.  

Some teams are growing and hitting goals, some are still falling short.

Some teams are hiring again for crucial roles, others are still going through layoffs.  

Regardless of your situation, this report by QuotaPath, in conjunction with our partner Pavilion, is super enlightening. 

Why reps are missing quotas:

Market Conditions ~37% - Clearly we aren't in the frothy ZIRP spend, spend, spend era any longer.  But we also aren't in the depths of despair any longer either (from what I see/hear).  The markets have shifted and if you haven't adapted by realigning goals and focusing on a defined ICP, then I dont know what to tell you.  My hunch is this answer is the catchall for "other."

Lack of experience or skill ~37% - This could tie into the first answer in that your reps had the skills to sell in an up market.  What they are lacking is true sales process and rigor to be able to swim upstream.  The biggest cure here?  Training & Enablement.

Misaligned sales activities ~36% - They aren't doing what they should be doing to progress deals in the sales process.  This is a leadership + training issue.  If your process isnt clearly defined with detailed next steps, then your reps are just spinning their wheels.  The first step is defining these activities, the next is tracking to ensure your reps are deploying them.

Poor time management ~34% - Blame it on WFH, blame it on wearing multiple hats, whatever it is, this has always been an issue.  Help your team focus on what's important and either outsource or eliminate the activities that are not.

New hire ramp-up periods ~33% - This has always been an issue but is probably more of a glaring one now.  With less enablement resources + hybrid work environments, its hard for teams to ramp their new reps quickly.  Chalk another one up to Training & Enablement.

Unstructured sales process ~33% - The sibling of misaligned sales activities.  If you dont have a defined sales process, you simply can't guarantee the right activities are being done.  Pick a sales process, any sales process, and stick to it.  Consistency is more important than worrying about if MEDDPICC is better for your org than Challenger.  Another Training & Enablement issue.

Lack of motivation ~33% - It's been a long few years.  Finding ways to drive excitement is half the battle right now.  Team building, surprise & delight moments, and investing in your people can all move the needle here.

Unrealistic quota or sales goals ~32% - This is unfortunately tied to the growth at all costs mentality.  Find a way to set realistic targets at the board level, then deploy books that are filled with high propensity to buy accounts directly in your target ICP, is one of the only ways to rectify this.  

*So if you are scoring at home, Training and Enablement is the biggest thing you can do to address many of these issues.  Process is the next biggest solution (also ties to T&E). 


Using AI in prospecting is real, and it's spectacular...sort of.

While there are tons of tools utilizing AI to aid in prospecting (and more popping up every day) right now, its hard to decipher if the benefits outweigh the challenges.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐀𝐝𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠:

- Precision Targeting: With new AI models, tools are able to quickly, and relatively accurately, determine your ICP and highlight your ideal prospects.  Running more than a regression model, AI can use your data to help you understand prospects with the highest propensity to buy.

- Personalization at Scale: The old spray and pray isn't gone yet, but it's about to be.  You can personalize anything from emails to videos.  Tools can easily pull the prospect's school and summarize their last LinkedIn post (though thats some pretty poor personalization).  Will they be able to tell its AI personalization vs. a human?  That's the next evolution.

- Predictive Insights: Lead scoring and 3rd party intent data were nice, but AI can dive significantly further into predictive behaviors.  Having these insights should allow for true personalization and an ability to tailor your outreach/pitch for the prospect's specific use case.

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐝𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬:

- Data Quality and Integration: AI relies on specific data sources to gather its information.  ChatGPT, for instance, can only pull stats from September 2021 and before.  If you have your own LLM or multiple data sources, which most people dont, you can start to solve this but be weary of the data sources your AI model is using.

- Change Management: You thought implementing MEDDPIC was hard!  Try integrating a whole new technology that is rapidly evolving and threatening to take some people's jobs.  Couple that with immense training and educational needs, and AI isn't something that you can just flip on over night. 

- Algorithm Bias: AI are machine models built by, you guessed, humans.  Humans have biases thus, AI models have biases.  Just google "Google Gemini founding fathers" and you'll get a glimpse into it.  Will this be an issue for someone prospecting?  Not sure, but it's not hard to imagine that as AI advances, its generating 100% of a team's outreach and that outreach may be incorrect or offensive due to a models biases. 

TLDR: you should be experimenting and investing with AI in your prospecting, but you can't blindly trust tools to be perfect all the time.  So do your research, check the work, and train your team how to be more efficient.  

Does an open role in Rev Ops = good sign?

I've been pinged this week about 3 different open Rev Ops roles for strong, growing companies.  It got me thinking about how an open role in Rev Ops or Enablement is generally a good sign that a company is doing well.  

Should these roles be foundational to a business regardless of their growth trajectory?  Absolutely.  

However, we see too often that teams cut back on Ops + Enablement when times get tough - arguably when they need it most.  

So while I dont necessarily agree with the pattern, it is good news that we are hearing about these roles needing to be filled again.  

If you are a seasoned #revops pro and looking for your next gig, shoot me a note to see if an introduction would make sense.

Taplio

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