Alexis Bourdamis

Love these tips from Daphne to stop CSM’s being reactive and start being proactive

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"Outbound is dead." Anyone else sick of hearing that? Email opens are down. Clicks are down. Replies are going down.   But, 6sense’s outbound prospecting efforts are outperforming inbound. Join 6sense's Senior Director of Sales Development Ernest Owusu for a 60-minute webinar with Pavilion and Lattice where he’ll discuss how to: -Keep BDRs motivated  -Manage remote teams  -Harness technology to help sellers be more effective -Bring your questions, because we’ll set aside plenty of time for Q&A.

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With the amount of information available, final pre-call research used to take me hours the night before important meetings. It was a guaranteed way to cut through the noise and stand out against 15 other seller calls an exec had that day. Over-prepare, deliver with confidence, and the results will follow. It worked. Lately, I've been using ChatGPT to inform outreach and quickly make messaging more impactful -- building custom models for each account. This takes time to set up, but it's a no brainer for strategic customers or top prospects to cut down research time while improving relevancy. I'm evolving the strategy, but phase one looked like this: 1. Collect important investor materials → 10K, 10Q, Earnings transcripts, Investor Summit PDFs, Leadership bios, top news articles. 2. Create GPT → Upload docs and ask to familiarize with materials, your role, and mutual goals you're working towards with the customer 3. Draft a series of prompts → Provide clarity around your market, platform, and typical customer value points. Start simple:   • I work in sales for [x company] and we provide [x service]. Customers usually see value in these areas: [driver 1], [driver 2], [driver 3].  • Typically, our customers are most interested in solving [pain point 1], [pain point 2], or [pain point 3].  • Our website can be found at [website]. (helps to include individual product pages where applicable) • Based on the information shared, will plan to ask a series of follow up questions to validate how our solutions can benefit [x company]. Does this sound ok? 4. Save as [Customer Name] GPT Model  → Repeat for each customer and save in personal ChatGPT environment for future promoting. You now have unique GPT models, each with advanced knowledge of your top customers or prospects -- contextualized around your offerings. Let's test it out. Ask a few questions: • Knowing that I work in sales for [your company name], what opportunities should I focus on when talking with [customer/prospect company name]? • Given your knowledge of [your company name], what strategic initiatives could we most likely impact at [customer/prospect company name]? • What are some of the top risk factors challenging [customer/prospect company name] this year? Next time you have an EB or Go-No-Go call and need to understand positive business outcomes leadership could be evaluating them on... boom! Want to make sure your POV is targeted, based on C-Level strategic initiatives... here you go! Care to see if they were featured in any podcast, video, or interview... and what points may be useful... ask GPT! AI + Automation is changing the way we work, and sales is no exception. Sure beats my old method of CTRL + F searches on SeekingAlpha transcripts. 🔍 Give this a try and let me know what you think. Any other GPT tips for sales?

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Day -5, Customers - 4, ARR - $0 If you aren’t a force multiplier as an IC, you won’t be as a manager In some cases I have seen people make bigger impacts on culture as an IC peer vs team lead. IC’s can - set the standard - educate their peers - sympathize and empathize - problem solve by truly understanding the problem Impacting a culture can seem daunting, if you are struggling to get started, show up with relentless positivity and you will figure it out from there

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What's a fair salary for a CSM? Last week Noah Little blew the CS corner of the internet with a hot take that CSMs should be paid like sales reps. Needless to say, when it comes to money, the more the merrier. 🤑 But should CSMs and Sales Reps be paid in the same "structure"? Probably not... Different roles and different tasks, therefore different comp structures. So instead of comparing ourselves to sales, we need to be able to: 1- compare ourselves to the rest of the industry 2- align the comp of the CSM to the revenue it generates That's how we fight for more of the pie. The issue is that if you are in Europe, it's really hard to get good salary data to even start this process. That's why I partnered with some of the top CS brands in Europe to collate a survey that helps us understand our local salary landscape. The report will help: - Leaders design fair and equitable compensation packages - CS Professionals benchmark their offers and salaries Link to answer the survey is in the comments section! #csm #customersuccess #salary #compensation #growthmindset

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Remember to email all of the prospects you are actively pursuing for a meeting over the next 4 days! Why? You are going to get a ton of out of office replies that will have: 1) Alternate contacts 2) Mobile phone numbers 3) Information on when the prospect will return from the break Simple things like this can be the difference between hitting your number vs. not hitting your number for qualified meetings. Hope it helps. Happy 4th from Iceland. #salesprospectingtip

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There are two ways to solve gaps in signal-based selling. Only one is guaranteed to work at scale. 1) Revenue Enablement Provide continuous training for (a) every new hire who joins a team and (b) every 6 months to refresh reps on essential information, workflows, and processes. Many factors can impact the effectiveness of enablement activities (from the comprehensiveness of training materials to the trainer’s institutional knowledge, to how closely the individual reps were paying attention that day). Enablement only becomes harder as more people and processes are added to the mix because there are so many moving parts. 2) Revenue Operations Through automation, RevOps can reduce gaps — especially from human error — that cause friction or inaction among reps. Specifically, end-to-end automation. Most common “automations” in signal-based selling usually don’t go far enough. Therefore teams are overly reliant on enablement touchpoints to stay aligned. Ex: A champion moves to a new role and this is automatically updated in Salesforce This automation gets the process from point A to point B, but still relies on multiple human touches from B to Z. End-to-end automation ensures that essential tasks throughout an entire workflow are set up to keep the process moving toward an end goal. It anticipates gaps and opportunities for human error from point A to point Z (meeting booked). Ex: A champion moves to a new role, the CRM record is updated, a rep is notified, and a multi-step persona-specific email sequence is triggered. Would every rep follow this process if it was entirely manual (even with enablement training)? Probably not. That’s why every signal play should be accompanied by clear workflows enabled with end-to-end automation. The play can scale with your team. Signals without action are just noise for reps. Automation guarantees signals get actioned.

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There’s something special about not just getting our Sales Dev team together but the whole GTM org in person once a quarter at Lattice. A pipeline opportunity created or a closed won hits different when you actually get to smash the gong (pun intended 😉) So why am I even more stoked on the future at Lattice after this week? ✨Sarah Franklin shared her vision for our product and how to bring it to market. When I see features that I KNOW will make my life easier as a people leader, I can only imagine how amp’d our buyers will be! ✨PMM laid out some stunning new positioning and I am giddy about writing new talk tracks for our calls (thank you Ross Gordon and others for the fuel!!) ✨We got a preview of our quarterly product release that’s dropping next week. 20+ new features!! It’s so much fun to sell for a company that is innovating. Thank you Kerry Wheeler and Amaury Sablon for kicking off the fun. ✨Gabrielle “GB” Blackwell ran her first BDR training for our team. The best advice I’ve gotten is hire leaders that are better than you #ironsharpensiron. Her outbound sales skills are out of this 🌎 and I can’t wait to see where she will take the entire sales team with her insights #gtmstrategy #salesdevelopment #hrtech

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SDRs often face high turnover rates in many companies. This is inherently challenging in the role, particularly when a robust support system is lacking. At Alleyoop, we prioritize our SDRs' success, resulting in excellent retention rates. We provide coaching camps for cold calls and have three levels of leadership dedicated to supporting our SDRs. They are vital to our business, and we ensure no investment is too small to help them succeed. Their success is our success! #sdrcareers #sdrsupport

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CSM, get out of the hamster wheel before you burn out. ❌ Stop fire-fighting ❌ Stop with check-in calls ❌ Stop reacting to your inbox ❌ Stop taking support queries ❌ Stop ineffective repetitive tasks ❌ Stop solving for this month's number ❌ Stop emailing unresponsive contacts ❌ Stop only prioritising in-month renewals ❌ Stop manually doing what should be automated A ton of hard work. Very little to show for it. You'll never get out of the rat race if you keep working this way. Here's a different and better way of CSM-ing: ✅ Establish your customers' expected outcomes ✅ Build a Success Plan from day one ✅ Ensure they have the right set-up ✅ Hold customers accountable ✅ Report on and share results ✅ Ask if they intend to renew ✅ Monitor leading indicators ✅ Pick up the phone ✅ Multi-thread Proactive, strategic and consultative. 1000x better. If reading this makes you feel ashamed because you don't know where to start or overwhelmed because your current work situation is too chaotic to create the time for this, you're not alone. Thousands of CSMs feel exactly the same way. I know what you're thinking: -> You can't afford to stop right now -> You don't have time to make changes -> You only need to weather the storm and things will get better I've been there too. But these are the excuses that are holding you back. Nobody is coming to save you. You need to save yourself. So here's my advice: 🛑 Stop everything 🛑 Book 2 days "OOO" in your calendar. And do these 3 exercises: 1- Create a Calendar Blueprint: Set up a separate calendar from your current one. You'll use this to design a new calendar blueprint for yourself. You should add every single thing you need to do proactively in this calendar, it's the baseline for you to start changing the make-up of your working day. 📆 I'll link the one I designed for CSMs in the comments. 2- Book of Business Review: Do a full review of your customers and place them into one of the 4 buckets of priority. This way you can decide which customers to pay attention to and which ones to de-prioritise at this time. 🧰 Engagement prioritisation framework linked in the comments. 3- Calendar Planning Book or delete meetings based on customers you need to prioritise over the coming 6-8 weeks. Craft unique messages to send to these customers with compelling reasons why they should attend. 🤖 Use the T.A.V.U method I shared in the newsletter a few weeks ago + ChatGPT can help you be efficient here. Do these 3 things and I promise you that you'll: - get better results - transform your work-life - improve your mental health Create the space. 📥 If you're interested in improving your Customer Success skills, consider joining 10k+ CS Professionals who read my weekly newsletter on how to build and scale a CS Team [sign up in the comments section]. #csm #customersuccess #customerexperience #revops #saas

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it's so important to know your numbers as an AE Here's what I used to do to make sure I was working backwards from my rev number 👇 (using example data) Rev target is $150k a Quarter Opp source: BDR 15 (take their target and use historical attainment, flip rate to derisk) Marketing 5 = 20 qualified per Q With a 25% close rate, you can expect 5 of those to close. On an ACV of $25,000 that gets you to $125,000. This leaves you $25k short of coverage and on a 25% close rate, means you need to generate 4 of your own opps at the start of the Q to hit goal. 24 opps in total 12 weeks in a Q 2 qualified opps per week By tracking this each week and the pacing across sources, you can figure out how much time you need to spend on prospecting 🔥

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QUICK POST OF 3 HOT SALES ROLES (and who to contact and how I found them): 1. Seqera is hiring Sales Ops, an SDR Manager and AE (remote NY). Reach out to CRO Melinda Pautsch 2. Navina (healthcare AI) is hiring remote Strat AE's. Reach out to Dana McCalley, MBA, who wants VBC knowledge, tech savviness, and presentation/sales cycle skills. 3. Cognitiv is hiring a Senior AE and a Sales Director in the Central US. Talk to Amy Hudec if you're interested. How I found them: Search: "Hiring Sales" Filter: Posts, Last 24 hours That's it! Easy peasy. DO THIS with whatever job you're looking for and get some hot leads!

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Do you track your Cover Deals? Or am I speaking Jibberish to you? The last 3 weeks of a quarter is made or broken by Cover Deals. Some Sales and RevOps Leaders LOVE Cover Deals. Others HATE them! My viewpoint is EMBRACE them. FACT: ... deals you were sure were going to come in will slip or get lost. @#$% happens. Yes we can try and anticipate them better - better process etc. But EVERY Sales Leader has a few "deals in their pocket" to cover for this. So as a RevOps Leaders do the following... Create a bucket for "Cover Deals". Be VERY specific what this means - deals NOT currently in the forecast. But that have an outside chance of being "pulled into the quarter". And then every quarter track what % of those deals actually do get pulled in. NOTE to ALL : This is not sand-bagging. It's good contingency management. #sales #deals #revops

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Approaching 4 years with Map My Customers and the top take away in talking with outside sales leaders continues to be that traditional CRMs aren't made for field sales. 1. It's not mobile-friendly. 2. It's not easy to use, even on the web. 3. It doesn't help field reps in real-time. 4. It doesn't help field reps be strategic. 5. Sales leaders lack accurate data for tracking results and performance. I've spent my entire sales career living inside CRMs. They are AMAZING... when used correctly. The problem is they're just not set-up to help outside reps while they're on the road or visiting customers. So, what do these sales folks do? They log everything on their "office admin day." And we all know how easy it is to remember every visit you went on throughout the week at 4pm on a Friday, right? The CRM world is primed for a shake-up. Especially for field teams. - Reps hate the CRM, so they game the system or don't use it at all. - Sales leaders don't trust the CRM because reps game the system or don't use it at all. The forward-thinking, dedicated sales leaders of today aren't accepting this. They want the software to work for their team, so they can be better player-coaches out in the field. As it should be. #outsidesales #fieldsales

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The entire buyers journey for #B2B products and services needs to change in 2024. Not only is the bloat hurting the company's internal #economics but it's also harming the buying experience. Company's like Amazon and Walmart DRASTICALLY changed the expectations of buyers in the #B2C world but we've failed to take heed in the B2B market. To make that adjustment, you need to have an objective view of the entire process and your organization.. that's where Curolux comes in to help. Our experienced consultants will help make sure your business is on the forefront of the buying experience.

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When you're arguing with somebody who talks to customers every day about what they need to do, you should assume you are almost certainly wrong. Most SaaS support functions "helping" product, CS, and Sales (enablement, PMM, ops, comms, demand gen, whatever) would do well to decide which of those audiences will benefit from their work, leverage individual connections with high performing members of those teams to ask what they want/need, and form a reporting cadence to surface those things and your history of solving them with their leaders. Ship what they want/need quickly, don't focus on perfect until you've vetted the thing, anticipate that it will change rapidly, and respond to those changes by shipping more until it's fixed. If you're going to argue with them about what they need, you better have a direct connection to the customers, users, or prospects where that insight is coming from. "Can't you just" does not work unless you can prove that in fact, they can "just do x" and that the customer will respond the way you're intending. If you're not wrong, you need to be able to argue your point so convincingly that they say they agree, and be willing to stake your career on being right. You don't have a track record of building great product, or closing/renewing revenue, which means you don't have a license to work on what you want to work on. You don't get as much grace when you're wrong as they do. Their job is harder, riskier, and more vulnerable. Know that and be ok with it. Working on almost anything that doesn't come directly from or get validated by one of those teams telling you to do it is performative bureaucratic churn on it's way to a well-deserved removal of you in the role. I don't care who the order comes from, whether it's the chairman of the board or some genius on linkedin. everybody has ideas, but the people talking to and building things for your customer will eventually decide your fate. Most importantly, when they're telling you what you're doing isn't working, it's not an attack. It's a plea for help. Acknowledge it and go figure it out, they'll be THRILLED to help you once you make clear you want to solve it. If you can't do it now, explain what you need as far as organizational support to be able to do it. The longer they've been asking for it, the more submissive you need to be in the beginning of that conversation. No time is too late, but it gets harder the longer you don't do it.

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HIRING HOT TAKE 🔥 (I think saying "hot take" is super cringe but it gets people's attention and people know what it means so here we go) Do any other folks in the SaaS + Sales world predict that adaptiveness will increasingly be more valuable than experience alone to recruiters looking to fill AE seats? I'm seeing more and more companies posting for full cycle roles, expecting you to fill your own pipeline. But I suspect for people who have been in the game for a while and are not used to self-sourcing, it could be a change they are reluctant to make. Would love to know your thoughts. (I know, it was kind of a lukewarm take...) #sales #saas #recruiting

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You just landed your first role as a CSM or just joined a new organization only to find out that your new company doesn't have a formal onboarding program for new hires. Sadly this is the reality at a lot of early stage companies or organizations lacking people and resources. But even if there is no formal process you can still onboard yourself effectively into your new role. Here are the 4 areas I'd focus on as a new CSM: ▶ People: ⤵ What does your organization look like? ⤵ How will you be expected to work with these cross-functional teams? ⤵ How do those teams work with and support customers? ▶ Product: ⤵ What does your product solve for? ⤵ How does your product work? ⤵ How do customers use the product today? ⤵ What does the roadmap look like? ▶ Process: ⤵ What does the Customer Journey look like and how do you (as a CSM) orchestrate the customer through that journey? ⤵ What are the internal processes you'll need to follow to get things done? ⤵ What are you expected to do as a CSM in your new company? ▶ Customers: ⤵ Who is your ICP and why do they buy your product? ⤵ What information do you have about your customers today? What information do you need? ⤵ Why do customers stay? Why do customers go? What would you add? Yes, ideally your leader will have some kind of plan for you, and yes that should be the expectation, but if they don't it's not the end of the world, you can still onboard yourself effectively into the business just spend time on these 4 areas. And if you're a leader and you don't have a plan in place, take this framework and build out a shell or guide so your new hire has a place to start. Ask other members of the team to contribute to it OR even ask your new hire to build on the framework when they start so you have it for the next new hire. This could be a good project for a spiff or some other reward. Good luck!

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