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!

Now that your SDRs can't spam-cannon 300 people a day and call that "work"...maybe now managers will coach them to focus on...

1) Knowing their buyer persona in-depth...to the point they could play on one TV

2) Asking pain-based discovery questions that actually get to pain...not process or inefficiency

3) Manage resistance like a pro while maintaining rapport

4) Disqualifying bad leads early.

5) Setting great next steps to set their teams up for success

6) Telling great customer stories...and actually knowing a good story for each persona / market segment / use case

7) Making the calls and executing quality touches that let them get to points 1-6.

Or not...

If firing top salespeople “saves you money”…then one of three things is true:

1) You were sick the day they taught math in school

2) Something else is up and they’re either not actually a top salesperson (might be processing orders and not adding value) or there is clear evidence they won’t be top in the future. 

3) They’re an HR/Cultural disaster.

Yesterday I ran an experiment. I posted the dumbest thing I could think of and the smartest thing I could think of at the exact same time. 

The dumb thing crushed...beat smart by 1.5x (views), 1.8x (likes), and 4x (comments). 

The smart thing was about coaching...something that could make or break this quarter. 

I'm in a good mood today...first 10 people who ask get a free copy of our $500 sales coaching course. 

If your company’s training feels like “drinking from a firehose,” you’re doing it wrong and people in charge of training have no idea what they’re doing. 

If you drink from a firehose:

1) thirst won’t get quinched 

2) you’ll likely get hurt

3) you won’t have fun

4) you’ll expect future hires to do the same since that’s what you had to do…frat hazing culture.

Sending your managers to a conference to listen to speeches by people who paid to speak there is not sales manager enablement, FYI. 

Your sales team should build their own custom sales methodology. 

Your engineering team should create their own programming language. 

Your accounting team should develop their own accounting standards. 

Your HR team should create their own learning management system. 

Your legal team should write bills and also spin up a lobbying arm. 

Your logistics team should build their own wheels. 

...figured I'd say it in context this time lolz. 

Can anyone name two people who were promoted from individual contributor to VP while working 4-day weeks? I don't know any...curious if others do. 

Light work weeks are great for people who are happy where they're at. Have they been proven to build tomorrow's leaders? 

Nonstop negative press coverage on Uber and Tesla for the last 10+ years doubting their viability. Now in one quarter Uber's net income >$200MM and Tesla >$1bn. 

Celebrations?

Nope...media on to their next negative stories so they can sell more ads. 

There's a J-curve in startups and both of these companies executed against it nicely. The media won't tell you that because that doesn't sell ads. 

If accounting firms hired like many sales teams, there would be a ton of SMB accountants who don't know accounting managed by self-taught accountants. 

Curious why people like me and JR Butler are always talking about hiring military veterans and athletes? Check out our discussion on the Sales Management Podcast. 

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gCrmqDgF

Apple: https://lnkd.in/gzMWWFN8

Open article: 44. Boosting Sales Performance with Athletes and Veterans with JR Butler by open.spotify.com

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7iOoKu4xRMG3IuQBNvH9ZJ

“You don’t need software to solve that problem” is being said soooo much right now due to the lack of professional development that’s happened across the boom and the freak out period.  You’ve heard of technical debt? So many teams are struggling with human debt.

If you're worried about programming for your managers during SKO, I have a gift I can send you.

If you're a manager who's frustrated that your enablement team spends all their time with new hires and SDRs, I'll send it to you too. 

Or if you're in enablement and not the head of the department, and want to figure out a way to break out and show some initiative, hit me up. 

And if you're the head of enablement and are thinking "gee whiz, if we put more effort into our managers, maybe all of our other programming would stick better," ping me! 

Finally, if you think that enablement is for new hires and SDRs and not for managers, go outside and talk a walk while contemplating your position...maybe you'll wake up!

If you're scared that coaching everything that needs to be coached will overwhelm your employee...then zoom out and coach these items in the context of pre-meeting prep. 

If you're coaching one thing at a time and they're struggling with setting agendas, finding pain, managing objections, talk time, next steps, and customer stories...

You can position all of these in the context of ONE THING...pre-meeting prep. 

And if they're struggling with all of these things...I can guarantee you that their calendars aren't full so they have the bandwidth to do this prep. 

Let's go Q4! 

Struggling to get back up after you get knocked down? Check out my awesome conversation with Resilience Coach and one of my favorite people Gayle Charach. 

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dY5JxpBd

Apple: https://lnkd.in/dqZy-Vfd

Open article: 45. Resilience as Your Super Power with Gail Charach by open.spotify.com

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DLqFs3eG223au5Vz19jwJ

Trying to coach someone's sales call who doesn't do anything they are trained on is like trying to coach a basketball player wearing football pads and cleats as they wonder why they can't make 3's and can't get back on defense. 

One of the biggest areas of waste during the boom was having managers with 3-5 people on their team. Outside of major enterprise, the only way that managing 3-5 people is a full-time job is if you're under-hiring and having the manager also act as the enablement team and assistant (or lead) salesperson. 

Are your company's deals stalling during / after a trial / pilot? Many are. We made a short course on how to convert trials and pilots. First 10 people who ask get access. 

It's Jared Fuller week! Beyond the amazing content coming out of the Nearbound Summit this week, he was on the Sales Management Podcast! Check it out here.

Open article: ‎Sales Management Podcast: 42. Partnerships & Nearbound with Jared Fuller on Apple Podcasts by podcasts.apple.com

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/42-partnerships-nearbound-with-jared-fuller/id1631765942?i=1000634286336

I have 5 free passes for CLEAR for the holidays. Does anyone I've done business with in the past want one? 

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