ICYMI: A recap of Q4 at The Revenue Architect
ICYMI: A recap of Q4 at The Revenue Architect
Top posts and highlights
Welcome to the final quarterly recap issue of this year. The last few months have been exciting on multiple fronts!
I’ve been serving as a fractional CRO for six early-stage startups, helping CEOs and sales leaders diagnose their GTM problems, refine their ICPs, build pipeline through warm intros, improve their selling skills, get deals across the finish line, build upsell motions and plan for next year. Please get in touch if you’d like to explore working together.
I taught the first cohort of my live course on Maven on building your early-stage GTM. A terrific group of startup CEOs and sales leaders came together and nailed their ICPs, re-wrote their messaging and gave me 4.9 out of 5 stars! The next cohort kicks off in January so please hit reply if you’d like chat about whether it could be good fit for you.
My substack audience has continued to grow; fast approaching 3,000 subscribers in sales and marketing roles at startups. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has read my content, especially to everyone who upgraded your subscription. Your support is a huge motivation for me.
If you find my weekly GTM advice is making your job easier, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get access to the full archive of 130 issues and to my virtual office hours to ask questions.
Recap of Q4 posts for GTM leaders
How to build your 2024 GTM plan
2024 is shaping up to be another year of economic uncertainty but this doesn’t mean you have to sit on the sidelines. History has shown us that chaos always creates opportunities for startups, favoring those who take a proactive approach, build achievable plans and implement an operating framework to manage execution.
This issue goes through five essential steps to building your GTM plan and includes links to deeper dive guides on each topic from the archive.
How to get realistic about your exit options
With dozens of startups competing in every niche and buyers looking to work with fewer vendors, market consolidation is inevitable. But it doesn’t happen without a lot of planning and effort.
This issue covers everything from deciding if you should try to sell your company to building consensus to move forward, getting aligned on price, identifying buyers, running a sale process and avoiding common mistakes.
How to build a realistic sales comp plan
There’s no magic formula to building sales comp plans. They’ve always been a battle between the dreams of investors an the realities of customer needs. But finding the balance is key to motivating and retaining good salespeople.
This issue covers the components of a comp plan, how to calculate quotas, how to allocate OTE between base and variable, how to handle ramping up periods, how to chose the right length of quota period, how to manage exceptions and common mistakes to avoid.
How to run an effective pipeline meeting
The pipeline meeting is one of the key meetings you need to run a successful sales team but often ends up overly-focused on arriving at an accurate revenue forecast rather than on helping move deals forward.
This issue covers the details of how to get your salespeople to prepare, how to prepare as a manager and how to allocate your time to make the meeting productive.
Recap of Q4 posts for salespeople
How to build and present a sales proposal
Of all the sales materials in your library, your proposal is the one document that will be viewed by all stakeholders on the buying team, so it needs to stand on its own. However, there are a lot of awful proposals
This issue covers the 5 key sections of a sales proposal, what to include in each section, what to leave out, how to lay it out and how to present it to your customer.
Google recently announced its plans to crack down on bulk email senders, sending shockwaves through GTM teams that still rely on high volume outreach. Making your outbound emails more customer-centric and engaging has become essential in order to survive this latest change.
This issue reviews the strengths and weaknesses of 5 cold emails from tech vendors against the best practices for writing engaging messaging.
Why software sales today looks a lot more like media sales
Software companies and media companies have historically taken very different approaches to executing the B2B sales model. However, the world of software sales has changed a lot in the past year and now shares a lot of similarities with media sales, which presents an opportunity for sales leaders to take advantage of.
This issue covers the 3 big recent changes in software sales that make it look more like media sales and how to apply best practices from media sales to capitalize on them.
This issue is a roundup of the top questions my subscribers asked me over the past 3 months. It covers a diverse range of topics including what to do when you have multiple ICPs, how to handle inbound leads outside your ICP, handling pricing questions on an intro call, how to expand average deal sizes and how to add a sales-led motion to an existing PLG motion.
That’s all for now. The next issue of The Revenue Architect goes out on January 4th. Happy holidays and see you next year!