Cait Kennedy 🏳️‍🌈 🥄

Founder & Fractional GTM Lead

Stealth

Co-Founder and CEO

Antler

Closed first investment, now in Antlers portfolio

Founder in Residence

Pavilion

Executive Member

RevGenius

Member

MindRev

Setting up GTM functions from scratch and Building Predictable Revenue Engines

- GTM strategy
- Sales Coaching

Clients include (not limited to): CTG, Workfully, ACELR8, Tribe, Sook

peoplepath.io

- Increased Outbound reply rate and meetings booked rates by 6x 📈
- 100% Target Achievement for Q4/Q1 Goals agreed at signing 🎯
- Launched our VC Talent Leaders community on LinkedIn and Slack, growing it to over 100 members from leading firms within 2 weeks of launch (and growing!) 👩‍👩‍👧‍👧
- Hosted 2 VC Talent Leaders roundtables with over 50+ attendees each, with demand for more 🎙
- Onboarded new SDRs 🌟
- Signed new clients 🚀

Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Talentful

Built and delivered onboarding & development programs for 6 BDMs and 12 SDRs in EMEA + US
👇Check out the "Recommendations" section to see what these reps thought about it👇 

(9 SDRs on Secondment)

Director of Business Development

- Lead team of 4 reps with 125%+ team target hit in 2021 
- Highest win rate in the team as an IC
- Highest annual revenue closed among the team
- Personally signed over 7m+ GBP/8m Euro/9million USD in 2021, while simultaneously hiring, onboarding, and coaching team
- Mapped TAM and developed a framework to identify Priority Prospects most likely to convert with a high customer LTV

Associate Director of Business Development, EMEA 

- 4x YoY Revenue Growth in DE/EU in FY 20, 195% of target in FY 21 (delivered revenue, booked 4x target)
- Highest win rate in the team
- Highest annual revenue closed among the team
- Organised Roundtable events resulting in signed revenue - including the largest new business deal in the companies history at the time of signing (majority of DE/EU signed pipeline generated during COVID stemmed from these sales-run virtual events)

Business Development, DACH

ACELR8

- Drove Revenue Growth by 123% YoY and hit/exceeded targets every quarter
- Grew BD team by hiring first SDR, selling into Startups through Enterprise
- Developed sales playbook, mapped EU market (TAM/SAM/SOM), defined BD strategy
- Implemented SLAs which effectively reduced customer churn
- Hired sales talent for external partners including VP Sales, Sales Directors, Enterprise Sales, and SDRs

Head Of Business Development

Think-it 

- Setup sales function from scratch
- Selling into North America and EMEA
(Short-term contract)

Head of Sales (Interim/Contract)

ResearchGate

- Led Sales Exec team with 25 reps for Mid-Market and Enterprise
- Team comprised of direct report ICs and 3 team leads, each with their own teams
- Selling into North America, EMEA, and APAC

Senior Lead - Sales Executives

- Led team of 8-14 Account Executives for Mid-Market and Enterprise
- Exceeded target every quarter at 125% average, with targets increasing every quarter
- Increased quarterly revenue achievement average per rep by +88% YoY 
- Doubled (2x) team win rate within two quarters of leadership

Team Lead for Account Executives 

- 150% quota (average team performance was 80%)
- Highest win rate in the team, winning deals for Mid-Market plus Enterprise
- Highest quarterly revenue closed among the team

Senior Account Executive

Helping Startups Grow | 3x VP/Head of Sales | Founder in Residence at Antler | Quantic EMBA Candidate | Harvard Alum

15 years in revenue generation, including 8 years leading gogetter teams

Closing track-record:

• Highest win/close rate (every role with multiple sellers)
• As an IC, I’ve as much as 4x’d my territories (DACH) YoY revenue in bootstrapped environments - without additional resources (Talentful)
• As a leader, I’ve doubled win rates and 2x’d average quarterly revenue *per rep* in as little as 2 quarters - also without additional resources (ResearchGate) 

Top-of-Funnel track record:

• Increased number of weekly meetings booked by 6x (Peoplepath)
• Average reply rate as high as 11x team average (Peoplepath)
• Generated largest new business deal in companies history *at time of signing* from sales run demand gen events (Talentful)

Talk data to me about the Science of Sales 

Launch coming Q2 🚀

If I ever wrote a Sales book, I would name it, "Sell Like You Give a Sh*t". It would be 7 chapters. Here's the TLDR of each chapter. 

Chapter 1: Give a sh*t about understanding your prospect's business. 

What do they sell? How do they sell it? Who do they sell it to? What's happening in their industry that is causing them to reconsider "how they've always done it"? Are they at the top of the pack, or chasing the #1 slot? Who do they compete with? 

Chapter 2: Give a sh*t about deeply understanding the problem you solve for your buyer. 

Learn the trigger events that cause the problem you solve to occur. Learn your buyer's tolerance level for accepting the problem. Learn all the things your buyers do on their own, before they realize "sh*t, we need to spend money to fix this". 

Chapter 3: Give a sh*t about your outbound emails. They're not just email addresses. They're humans. 

The spray and pray Gods are fed up. They don't want you to pray to them anymore. They want you to lead with a relevant observation about the customer's business, share a interesting POV, and give the buyer something helpful to learn more about the problem. 

Chapter 4: Give a sh*t about quantifying the cost of inaction (COI). 

Stop painting a picture of what happens IF they buy. Tell a story about what happens if they continue to do nothing. Don't call their baby ugly. Give them the formula and aid them in arriving at the conclusion on their own. People love to share good ideas with their peers/boss. Help them take ownership of that story. 

Chapter 5: Give a sh*t about reducing the buyer's effort to gain consensus. 

Stop sending your off-the-shelf collateral to buyers and asking them to socialize it. Do the work to frame the problem in a way that makes it easy for your buyer to get others involved. Help them sell the problem, before they sell the solution. Help them debate the problem, instead of trying to convince them of it. 

Chapter 6: Give a sh*t about the value of YOUR time. 

Stop trying to convince buyers to buy, because you don't have enough in your pipeline to lose them. Your time is your most precious commodity. Have the self-respect to walk away when the customer's problem isn't big enough to solve right now. 

Chapter 7: G*ve a shit about learning where your customers go to learn. 

Not where they learn about you. Where they learn about themselves. Where do they go when their boss gives them a new responsibility? Who do they learn from? We can learn a lot about how our buyers form their beliefs/assumptions about a problem, simply by showing up in the spaces where they're learning and observing those conversations.

If I started as an AE tomorrow, I wouldn't bother reading sales books to ramp up.

I'd focus on these 6 things to ramp up as fast as possible.

1. Study the buyer persona (to learn the pain)
2. Study the most common use cases (to learn the buyers' scenarios)
3. Spend 1-2 weeks answering support tickets (to learn the product)
4. Get on sales calls ASAP (to get comfortable)
5. Following up with lower quality leads (to practice)
6. Sitting on sales calls of top performers (to absorb)

Getting into the weeds > Getting into the reads



Ps. If you liked this post you'll like my newsletter. 
 
Every week I share tips from the front lines as a seller and coach on how to build, qualify, and close pipeline. 
 
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Every AE should use "the menu of pain" on their discovery calls.



Huge shoutout to 👩🏻‍🏫 Krysten Conner for the best sales strategy and name of all time.


𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀:

Simply give your prospect options based on your experience helping other customers.

Here are some examples:


𝗧𝗼 𝗸𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹:

Hey Jill - typically when Sales Directors join these calls they're facing a couple of issues:

- Issue 1
- Issue 2

But I don’t know how much any of that sounds like your world and what did I miss that you’re focused on?


𝗔𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀:

Hey Jill - Thank you for sharing. I work with other Sales Directors in a similar situation and they were each facing a couple of issues:

- Issue 1
- Issue 2

But I don’t know how much any of that sounds like your world and what did I miss that you’re focused on?


𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴'𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿:

1. You establish credibility and build trust because you know the issues and they don’t have to educate you. 

2. You take control. Open ended questions like “what brought you to ABC Company” are ok but it’s a lot of work for the prospect and nobody likes essay questions.

3. Customer experience: It gives prospects room to correct you and people love correcting people. So there's no real downside.


You game for trying The Menu of Pain in your discovery calls?

- Mike G


👉 For this week only get The Best Sales Course at 35% off with coupon code 𝗖𝗢𝗙𝗙𝗘𝗘: https://lnkd.in/gP_-mVXR

As many of you know,

I'm a MASSIVE education guy.

I check out new sales content pretty much daily and am constantly updating my list of favorites.

I thought I'd provide an updated list since the last one I posted was more than 6 months ago.

Enjoy 👇 


🎤 PODCASTS:
-30 Minutes to President's Club with Nick Cegelski, Armand Farrokh, and Jen Allen-Knuth
-The Game with Alex Hormozi

📕 BOOKS:
-MEDDICC by Andy Whyte
-Gap Selling by Keenan .
-Outbound Sales, No Fluff by Rex Biberston and Ryan Reisert
-The JOLT Effect by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna
-Selling With by Nate Nasralla
-How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
-Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss
-Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini

📈 COURSES:
Natoli's Nuggets by Anthony Natoli
All of Kyle Asay's courses and frameworks
All of Brian LaManna's courses
The Badass B2B Growth Guide by Josh Braun

🚀 COMMUNITIES:
Holistic Sales Co. created by Kyle Willis and Jc Pollard

🖊 LINKEDIN CREATORS:
Follow all the folks I listed above as well as
Cipriano Martins
Mike Gallardo
👩🏻‍🏫 Krysten Conner
Brandon Fluharty 🐝
Salman Mohiuddin
Haris Halkic
Christian Krause
Cait Kennedy 🏳️‍🌈 🥄 
💜 Will Allred
Ronen R. Pessar
Doron Luder
Jamal Reimer
Samantha McKenna
Chris Orlob
Dan Drucker
Ian Barker
Ian Koniak
Joey Gilkey
Kevin "KD" Dorsey

P.S. Apologies to all the people and content I missed (there's a lot). I could go on doing this forever 😁

Personalization is ✨ the buzzword ✨ in sales in 2024

But most people get it wrong.

Here's what it's not:

"Hey Bob the Buyer,

Saw you went to Yale. So cool! My sister went there too. Go bulldogs!

We're the leader in XYZ... we worked with ACME and they loved us.

Here's my calendly!"

The thing is...

Bob does not care. 

Seeing where someone lives, where they went to school, how cute their dog is, isn't hard on LinkedIn. 

This is what I like to call fauxonalization.

And the problem that makes it even worse? 

About 1000000000 startups selling AI generated "ice-breaker" email software like the above popped up into the market in 2023

So that the shortcut will really get you nowhere.

But psssst, I'm gonna share a little secret

there's a better way.

Forget fauxonalization or whatever you wanna call it.

Try ✨ relevance ✨ 

Try actually helping your buyer.

Try understanding their problems and then making those problems go away.

The trick to this is researching what's happening in an account, 

making an educated guess about what that could mean for your buyer,

and then offering to share tips on how to make it hurt less. 

If you're thinking it sounds hard, 

you're right, it is.

But you know what's harder?

telling your boss/investors you missed another quarter.

Comment down below and I'll hook you up with a guide on how to get started.

#personalization 
#outbound

Dive deep: top strategies from closing masters 🔥

• Justin Michael: My signature 7-Step Closing Process
→ https://buff.ly/4cXvYqn

• Mike Gallardo: An AE on my team has a 42% close rate.
→ https://buff.ly/447oZXN

• Jacob Karp: The hardest part about closing a deal is the initial pipeline generation. → https://buff.ly/4458vzw

• Brandon Fluharty 🐝: How to close a transformation deal in less than 9 months → https://buff.ly/4d1ZkDZ 

• Monica Stewart: Here’s 5 steps to turn your pipeline into $$$ by EOY
→ https://buff.ly/3UkhTvT

• 👩🏻‍🏫 Krysten Conner: Getting deals un-stuck
→ https://buff.ly/44ar0m7

• Chris Orlob: 99% of salespeople get 'closing' wrong.
→ https://buff.ly/3UkPvJV

• Mark McInnes: How do you keep your deals moving through the summer break? → https://buff.ly/3UlIx7H

• Marcus A. Chan: "Marcus, good to go. Can you send me the agreement?"
→ https://buff.ly/3xDn4yf

• Brian LaManna: 6 months ago I won the largest deal of my career
→ https://buff.ly/4d4eys3

• Dale Dupree: If you’re manufacturing urgency to close deals, you’re stuck in the 1980’s. → https://buff.ly/3xFQtHU

• Chet Lovegren 🩺: We’ve closed 3 deals for a total of $47,000 this month
→ https://buff.ly/3xC78fE

• Cynthia H.: Closed 2 deals last week
→ https://buff.ly/3xD3XEm 

• Nate Nasralla: Preventing slipped deals.
→ https://buff.ly/441a0Pg 

• Troy Munson: Want to increase your closed-won rate?
→ https://buff.ly/3wq3ll2 

• Richard Smith: Questions to be asking your prospect today, for the Q1 deals you are looking to close → https://buff.ly/445irZL 

• Cait Kennedy 🏳️‍🌈 🥄 : Closing begins in Qualification
→ https://buff.ly/447p4L5 

• 🎺 Rory Sadler: How did I close deals in 2023?
→ https://buff.ly/3UmtryP 

• Ian Koniak: 3 key ingredients to close big deals
→ https://buff.ly/4abAyPI 

• Firat Berber: When I lose a deal it’s often not because of closing skills.
→ https://buff.ly/492mYh6

• Tanveer Mostafa: February was my biggest month - $280k closed.
→ https://buff.ly/4419GQi

• Rich Adams: Difference between being a good “closer” gettin people to “say yes” → https://buff.ly/4aD1tVc 

• Himanshu Choudhary: Key strategies that helped close my biggest deal
→ https://buff.ly/4d24bVD 

• Sebastian Borchi: Why Do Your Deals Stall?
→ https://buff.ly/4cUGhvv 

• Saad Khan: Sellers don't close deals anymore. 
→ https://buff.ly/4d3DLCU 

• Neil W.: All about a deal I closed.
→ https://buff.ly/4aSW6Bv 

• Arnaud Belinga 🧊🔨: From ghosted to deal won
→ https://buff.ly/4404VXr 

• 🏄‍♂️ Scott Leese: $2.6m deal without cold outbound
→ https://buff.ly/4d3ATpY 

• Keith Weightman: Closing deals is important.
→ https://buff.ly/4d3WJta 

• Dominic Blank: The secret about closing
→ https://buff.ly/3UkWAtX 

Try my daily sales newsletter: harishalkic.com
(read by sellers from: stripe, zendesk, Salesforce, New Relic, DocuSign, braze)

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