Cory Bray

Founder + Managing Director

CoachCRM

The first platform for driving the coaching. plans, activities, and results that create winning teams.

Follow our company page for updates. If you want to work with us, please send me a note. Will be hiring for all roles in 2022.

Co-Founder

ClozeLoop

ClozeLoop is a revenue strategy firm. We drive performance for Management, Sales, Customer Success and Sales Enablement in the fastest-growing companies on the planet.

If you want to get to know us better, a great next step is to read our books on Amazon. Here is a link to all of them: ClozeLoopBookstore.com.

Co-Founder & Board Member

2.12 Angels

The Highest value-add to founders per dollar invested.

We do 2 Zoom meetings. You get our decision the day after the second Zoom. At 12:00p PT. We are called 2.12 for that reason. We cut $100,000 checks in pre-seed / seed companies, Enterprise / Cloud only. We don't lead rounds. We are focused on North America.

Partner

Sales Playbooks: The Builder's Toolkit

A well-designed, relevant, and highly utilized sales playbook creates teams that engage with more prospects, produce more pipeline, and close more deals. A playbook creates more consistent top performers, more quickly. It will also close the gap between your top performers and everyone else.

Playbooks are living tools that must continue to be developed, revised, and curated over time. Growing companies are constantly hiring new people, promoting internally, entering into new markets, and facing direct or unforeseen competition. In order to drive success, an understanding of how the business operates, what has worked in the past, what is presently working, and what is anticipated to work in the future is required.

Co-Author

Sales Development (Book - Published 2018)

This book is THE GUIDE for sales development representatives (SDRs) who are looking for a job, trying to improve their performance, or thinking about future career opportunities!

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1979107947

FREE ON AUDIBLE (if this is your first free book): https://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Sales-Development-Audiobook/B07934V438?asin=B07934V438&ref_=pe_1542220_127106600

The Sales Enablement Playbook

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1546744762/

As of 1/2/18 it was rated 5.0 stars on Amazon with 40 reviews. 

In The Sales Enablement Playbook, sales veterans Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey provide insights into creating a culture of sales enablement throughout your organization. This book provides a series of stand-alone chapters with frameworks and tactics that you can immediately implement, regardless of company size or industry. Whether you are a sales executive, sales practitioner, or a non-sales executive looking for ways to impact growth, The Sales Enablement Playbook will help you identify your role in a thriving enablement ecosystem.

If you are in sales or work with sales teams, you'll probably find actionable insights in this book.

Buy it and expense it!

Sales Enablement Society

Founding Member

Ravel Law

I was recruited to Ravel to build out sales and marketing, and later customer success. Prior to my arrival, there were no sales reps and no marketing personnel, which created a very exciting opportunity to build these departments from the ground floor. 

We accomplished a lot at Ravel. We signed a large number of customers, including several marquee accounts. Our marketing team enabled us to have conversations with over half the accounts in our target market. We designed a customer success playbook to drive renewals and upsells. Infrastructure was put into place to provide for scalability including systems (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.) and business processes. We grew our “business side” team from me to 8, and I have many new life-long friendships. 

Ravel was a great experience, but toward the end of my tenure I felt a calling to start a company that will have a lasting impact on the world. Enter ClozeLoop.

Head of Sales

Birst

I worked on a short-term Sales Enablement project for Birst's Product Strategy team.  My goal was to take incredibly complex use cases and distill them down into simple, digestible, and powerful messages for use by the sales and marketing teams.

Product Strategy Contractor - Sales Analytics

CorSource Technology Group

In July 2013 my former firm, Ateli Consulting, joined forces with CorSource in order to realize mutual synergies related to our Business Intelligence (BI) efforts.  

I led our BI sales team (including all Sales Enablement responsibilities), and within 10 months we went from never having closed a BI deal to winning Birst’s Partner of the Year award from a field of 50 partners.

Head of Business Intelligence Sales

If you're in sales leadership or oversee sales leaders, check out what we're building at CoachCRM.com. Also subscribe to the Sales Management Podcast on Apple or Spotify where I release episodes multiple times a week!

If you're considering firing your prospecting team and making your closing salespeople absorb all of their duties...consider this first...

Many companies take accounts away from new-logo account executives (AEs) the minute the first contract is signed. 

Many of these newly-signed customers have massive upside potential. 

The company gives the account to a customer success manager (CSM)...many of whom can't sell their way out of a wet paper bag. Some do a great job of upselling...most don't. But even those who sell aren't nearly as good at maximizing wallet share as the best AEs. 

So...instead of giving the highly-paid and highly-skilled-at-selling AE the most basic job in sales (cold calling to book a meeting)...have them own land+expand on those big accounts that can drive massive revenue AND referral opportunities. 

Or...if you want to have a person making $160-350k spend half their days making cold calls while Chris in CS processes flat renewals at companies that could 2-5x how much business they do with you...do that. 

Whatever. It's your company. 

“Sales development isn’t working in 2024” 

That’s the equivalent of saying  “The gym isn’t working in 2024”

You can’t just go the gym and expect to get fit. You have to PUT IN THE WORK at the gym. 

Look at my spam folder. 7/8 are agencies offering “appointment setting services” 

They’re so desperate for clients that they blast MOAR emails! The less it works, the MOAR they blast! 

Anyone blasting LinkedIn Voice Messages? No? Why not? Because you can’t? Oh wow… guess what’s become our most effective channel, LinkedIn 🤣

Anyone blasting personalized Voicemails? No? Why? Because you can’t? Riiiight.

Guys, my top SDR just broke a record of meetings completed in Altisales History… his commission check was OVER $13,000 FOR THE MONTH! 

Guess how many calls he made? Guess how many emails he sent?

357 calls, 423 emails. 

Not one of them to the wrong ICP. 

Y’all stop the excuses. Sales Development works, but only if you know what you’re doing and only if you put in THE WORK across channels.

Comment “train me” if you’re an SDR and want a free session on how to succeed in 2024. 

Comment “empower me” if you’re an SDR leader who wants to know how to coach your team better. 

Let’s win together, but only if you’re willing to put in the work. Peace ✌🏼

Here's something I seriously don't understand. Really need some help here. 

Chris is an AE (closer) and Pat is an SDR (prospector). 

How is it "the future" to have full-cycle AEs where you get rid of Pat and have Chris do both jobs...own prospecting and selling...because...get this...Pat's unable to produce the results needed to justify their existence? 

So the expectation is that Chris will be able to do as good-job as they're doing currently AND...in a part-time capacity...do a better job than Pat was doing focused on prospecting full-time? Really? 

All that tells me is that the company sucks at hiring and/or training and/or coaching.

Should AEs prospect when they have time? Sure. Should you try to force two jobs into one person? Show me another industry where that works?

Dentist/hygenist
Doctor/nurse
Lawyer/paralegal (or partner/associate)
Pilot/flight attendant
Controller/AR+AP

All of the above COULD do full-cycle. But it's not worth it...doesn't make economic sense to have a surgeon taking blood pressure readings...and the "junior" person in each equation is well-trained and certified in their job...they're held to standards as they learn the craft AND as they execute it.

I truly don't get it...


There should be a "you don't know what you're talking about" emoji. 

If you think that Sales Development doesn't work anymore, ask yourself one question: 

Is the person managing the SDRs an objectively good manager? 

One way to determine if someone is an objectively good manager is by asking: if we lost a manager in another department, could this person jump in and lead the team with as-good or [hopefully] better results? 

If the answer to the question above is "no", then their "SDR management skills" likely have nothing to do with management, but rather subject matter expertise. 

Building a management team out of subject matter experts doesn't work outside of "things are easy" environments. Lack of a common understanding of management principles. Constant wheel-reinventing. Over-complicating. 1-hour tasks taking 1-week or 1-month....and all of the downstream performance and retention issues caused by these. 

Having a bunch of 22 year olds report to a 23 year old who is managed by a 27 year old whose formal training and degrees have nothing to do with management CAN work. Sure. But is that the right bet? 

Another big problem with the full-cycle sales vs. role specialization conversation...career paths for account executives. 

High-performing salespeople want to:

1) Work bigger deals or territories which = more money

2) Work their way into management

3) Build the skillset to start their own business, or acquire one and run it.

We all agree that when sellers have downtime they should prospect. We all get that. 

But...

In a world where folks want to remove SDRs and just have full-cycle salespeople, here's the conversation...

Hey Alex. You've had a great career. Tons of prior success, which is why we hired you here. You've done a great job over the last two years in our company. BUT...because Mark over in Marketing sucks at hiring SDRs, enablement can't train them, and no one wants to manage them...and whoever is managing them has no formal management training and a sad excuse for a management skillset...we're going to get rid of the SDR team and make you full-cycle...so...

INSTEAD OF WORKING TOWARD YOUR CAREER PATH OUTLINED ABOVE...

WE EXPECT YOU TO SPEND 50% OF YOUR DAY COLD CALLING. 

Here that sound?

It's ***Alex's resume being updated*** 

So then all the people who are middle/low performers stay and you end up with the JV squad doing two jobs when they weren't even performing at one. 

Solid decision, fellas. 

By request...another episode of "Why you shouldn't demote your high-performing salespeople to half-time cold callers because someone on the internet told you that outbound prospecting is dead."

Two things salespeople (AEs) can get really good at that will advance their careers and drive additional revenue for their company. 

1) Demos

Sales engineers (SEs) are great at setting up PoCs. But when they demo, the highly-skilled-at-selling AEs are sitting on the sideline. They aren't able to use questions and active listening to dig deeper in the moment without interrupting. They can't seamlessly navigate to another part of the product, slide diagram, or kill the screen share (or in-person whiteboard something) without cutting off the SE. The SE is driving. And only because they know the product better than the seller. Learning product use cases inside and out to drive better discovery is a better use of time than cold calling...even if you don't have SEs. 

2) Scoping

If your company sells services, the AE probably doesn't scope them. BUT, massive upsell opportunities are discovered during the process of scoping services. Nothing wrong with having an SE or someone from services in the meeting, but if the AE leads, they can find opportunity that they couldn't sitting on their hands. Even without services...scoping the use cases for the product across the org in more detail yields results. 

So...do you want your best sellers MASTERING ways to drive huge revenue thru demos & scoping while advancing their career paths...or do you want to demote them to part-time cold callers?

It's your company...

SBF will likely be out of prison by age 50. He can get a book deal, movie deal, speaking gigs, etc. He’ll be making millions a year, far more than almost every other American who ran the rat race. 

If you really want him out, cap his earnings at least. 

Our criminal justice system is a joke. For this and a hundred other reasons. We have these laws then judges arbitrarily apply them in wild ways. In what world is going light on a guy who stole billions AND THEN tampered with witnesses a good idea?

People are finally realizing that business is hard and it's not "show up and get promoted every 9 months." Welcome to reality...lolz. 

Hilmon Sorey is doing a webinar next week covering all of the hiring mistakes we've seen people make recently. Details on the ClozeLoop company page. 

FIRE episode on conversational AI with Aditya Kothadiya, CEO of Avoma. 

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/en_3CTwk

Apple: https://lnkd.in/efTs5vCc

open.spotify.com

63. Conversational Intelligence with Avoma CEO Aditya Kothadiya

Exciting opportunity to join a fast-growing sales team at Hexmodal...one of my favorite early-stage companies. 

They are looking for an ambitious Sales Development Representative (SDR) to help the team build pipeline. 

This is a unique opportunity to solve a tangible, burning, problem facing the clients, using a solution they absolutely love. Even better, it's a chance to work with an extremely communicative clientele that is comfortable doing business over the phone. 

Apply here:

https://lnkd.in/eq8-yszB

Looks like my 30 Minutes to President's Club episode made their Hall of Fame. Check it out here...we dig into deal velocity and demos. Rapid fire!

Hall of Fame: Cory Bray Ep. 80

Fun algebra problem for you on a Saturday. 

X% of deals I lost were because I DID NOT have the right content. 

Y% of deals I won were because I DID have the right content. 

Solve for X and Y for a typical seller. 

---
I know this isn't actually algebra...but ya know what I mean. 

Call scorecards are great tools for assessments and certification. They’re terrible tools for coaching.

Proud of what you've accomplished in enablement recently? Apply here for the 2024 Revenue Enablement Excellence Awards!

I'm a judge and am excited to see who wins this thing!

survey.alchemer.com • 1 min read

Revenue Enablement Excellence Awards - 2024

How much ops/enablement is the right amount as you scale? Check out my conversation with Ryan Vanshur who as a founder started, scaled, and right-sized ops, enablement, and management at his last company. 

Also, Ryan is on the market for his next opportunity. I worked with him personally in the past and completely vouch for him...and y'all never see me do this online so take that into consideration...he's a rockstar. 

Apple: https://lnkd.in/e_DgWjEq

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eCQdq4sE

podcasts.apple.com • 1 min read

‎Sales Management Podcast: 64. What's the right amount of sales enablement and ops as you scale? with Ryan Vanshur on Apple Podcasts

Frustrated with your CRM being a burden instead of working for you? People make a lot of bone-head mistakes when it comes to CRM setup + ongoing usage, and we talk through a lot of these + solutions on this episode of the Sales Management Podcast with my guest, Kevin Ascher. 

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ezE3VcNm

Apple: https://lnkd.in/eN5jfVUy

65. Optimizing your CRM with Kevin Ascher

Seth Olsen's team showed 300% in new business growth over in Europe in 2023. I thought 2023 was bad for tech? Well, he joined me on the podcast and we dug into his transition from selling the US to leading teams overseas. Fun conversation. Check it out. 

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eDJJUHP7

Apple: https://lnkd.in/e8vm_UFJ

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