ICYMI: A recap of Q2 at The Revenue Architect
ICYMI: A recap of Q2 at The Revenue Architect
Top posts from the past 3 months
Welcome to this quarter’s recap issue. It’s been an exciting past 3 months; subscribers grew 24%, my posts were viewed over 34,000 times and I launched a paid subscription tier giving access to step-by-step guides with examples and templates and to my office hours!
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who read my posts, shared them with a colleague, gave me feedback and upgraded your subscription. You continue to make writing an incredibly rewarding experience!
If you find my content useful in your day-to-day, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get access to the full archive of 100+ posts and support my work.
Here’s a round up of what I’ve published over the past 3 months:
Resources for sales leaders
How to demonstrate credibility to your buyer on a sales call
Asking open-ended questions is a best practice in sales, however from your buyer’s POV it can quickly start to feel like an interrogation.
Adding context to your questions is a way to showcase your expertise while also keeping the conversation focused on the problems you can actually solve. This post shows you how to transform your questions with templates and examples.
How to handle the pricing question
When you don’t display your prices on your website, your prospects will naturally want to know how much your product costs before they get into evaluating it.
Forcing your prospect into your linear disco → demo → proposal sales process only serves to frustrate them so you need to handle the question head on. This post gives you a simple technique for doing exactly that and cue cards for handling your buyer’s subsequent response.
How to talk less and close more deals
Most salespeople are good at asking questions but not so great at listening, which leads to bad outcomes like prescribing the wrong solution, failing to build trust and losing deals.
Improving your active listening skills helps you overcome this but takes preparation and practice. The fastest way to improve is by building cue cards of things to listen for, a set of follow up questions to ask and a template to recap what you’ve heard. This post lists the common cues in B2B sales, how to develop your own cues, example follow up questions to ask, examples of how to recap, and how to measure your progress.
How to handle an indecisive buyer
Getting a “no decision” or “timing not right” closed lost reason is often a sign of an indecisive buyer — just because someone has the authority to buy doesn’t mean they have the ability to buy.
The root of a buyer’s indecision lies in the fear of making a bad decision and the repercussions on their job performance and career, so it’s important for salespeople to get ahead of it. This post shows you how to detect buyer fear early in the conversation, how to adapt your approach and how to use candor in handling objections.
Understanding outsourced procurement
Outsourced procurement is one of the biggest trends sweeping SaaS right now as companies turn to vendors like Vertice, Vendr and Tropic to reduce their software spend.
This is disrupting the status quo for sales teams, especially vendors who do not publish their pricing and rely on value-based selling techniques to maximize spend. This podcast is an interview with Matt Hicks, Global VP Sales at Vertice, providing insight into the outsourced procurement trend and advice for salespeople on what to do when they run into a procurement team.
Resources for founders and GTM leaders
Why you need to turn your customer success team into salespeople
Retention in B2B software is no longer the layup it used to be. Every renewal discussion has turned into a full (re) sales process as customers look to jettison their nice-to-haves and expansion has become a focus as customers look to consolidate their must-haves with fewer vendors.
These shifts are having a profound impact on customer success teams, which have historically been reactive organizations but now need to quickly adopt a proactive mindset to multi-thread on renewals and probe for pain and critical events to identify expansion opportunities. This post is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to turn your customer success team into a proactive account management team and includes the processes you need build, what needs to happen at each stage, what new metrics need to be measured, who is responsible for what, what skills to focus on and how to develop them quickly.
How to build your ideal customer profile in 2023
Many startups still have a poorly-defined, “sloppy” ICP, based on a generic firmographic like company size and a generic executive buyer persona. This leads to having a huge target account list with a broad set of needs.
Whereas in the past you could paper over a sloppy ICP with venture capital, in today’s more sober economy, you need to make hard decisions over where to invest your capital and this requires having a precise ICP. This post lays out the 4 questions that inform your GTM strategy, contrasts the complexity of answering them with a sloppy ICP with the clarity of answering them with a precise ICP and gives direction on what goes into a precise ICP.
Hiring a fractional executive is becoming an attractive option for startups who need an expert to coach them through decisions around ICP, strategy, process and hiring but don’t have the budget for a full time executive.
This post helps founders figure out if they should hire a fractional CRO and what they should expect the person to do.
Is it time to retire the SDR role from tech sales?
I asked this question on LinkedIn and it turned into a very heated debate with 100 comments and 70,000 views! People are definitely split on the issue!
For those of you in the United States, have a wonderful (extended) Fourth of July weekend! I am doing a 5k race on Saturday morning and hoping to go sub 22mins for the first time, so wish me luck and follow me on Strava if you want to know how it turns out!