ICYMI: A recap of Q3 at The Revenue Architect
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ICYMI: A recap of Q3 at The Revenue Architect
Top posts from Q3 + my new live cohort course on Maven
Welcome to this quarter’s recap issue. It’s been a very exciting past 3 months with 20% growth in readers, 115% growth in paid subscribers, 37k views of posts and a steady flow of startups looking for a fractional CRO to help with their go-to-market.
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has read my content, shared it with a colleague, given me feedback and upgraded your subscription. Your support is a huge motivation for me to keep writing!
If you find my weekly advice is making your job easier, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get access to the full archive of 115 issues and to my virtual office hours.
My new live cohort-based course on Maven!
I'm thinking about building a live, cohort-based course on Maven for early-stage founders and revenue leaders on how to build your GTM.
This new course is launching in November. If you are interested, apply here to get notified when registration opens.
Course overview
This course is designed for first-time founders and early-stage startup revenue leaders who are struggling to build consistent pipeline.
It mixes live instruction with community discussions and self-paced material, building on the most popular frameworks from my blog with workshops where we’ll discuss case studies and apply them to your business.
Expect to have 4 live workshops led by me, as well as a handful of Q&A style sessions that will allow you to get very targeted help for your specific challenges.
Topics will be adapted based on the needs of who signs up and are likely to include:
Refining your ideal customer profile to focus on high value targets
Building your target list of people likely to respond to your outreach
Making your messaging stand out and engaging
Using your network to build your pipeline
Students will also get a year long paid subscription to The Revenue Architect
The course will run in the first two weeks of November or December, depending on schedules.
Q3 posts for startup GTM leaders
How to fix the leaks in your sales process
When you see a wide spread of quota attainment across your sales team, it’s a sign that you have gaps in your sales process and your salespeople’s skills.
This issue is a detailed 3-step process to finding and fixing the gaps, starting with calculating your stage-to-stage conversion rates, unpacking the lossiest stage by closed lost reason to figure out where to focus in your process and repeating the analysis across the team to figure out which skills each team member needs to improve.
How to crush it as a new sales manager
Making the jump from salesperson to sales manager is a huge achievement in your career but it can also be a huge shock when you suddenly find yourself working twice as hard for less money as you struggle to get your new sales team performing at the level you did when you were the top rep.
This issue goes into detail on the 4 skills sales managers need to develop (Analysis, Delegation, Coaching and Hiring), the common mistakes that first-time managers make and the self-guided steps to take to develop each skill.
How to build a realistic sales forecast
You’ve build your forecast and your boss tells you the number needs to be higher. How do you respond? Many sales leaders succumb to the pressure and raise their forecast without any basis for hitting it, only to lose their credibility and sometimes their job.
This issue lays out how to build a sales forecast, how to walk your boss and leadership team through it to drive alignment and how to lay out what you need to make the forecast higher.
Are you making costly prospecting mistakes at your startup?
Outbound prospecting has become even more competitive as buyers look to cut costs. It’s no surprise that most startup sales teams are missing their prospecting goals and, with the high fixed costs of running a sales team, losing money.
I launched a free prospecting scorecard to help leaders diagnose and fix their issues. Answer 10 questions about your outbound process and get a personalized scorecard with specific solutions.
200+ startups took the quiz during Q3, leading to some interesting insights on the state of outbound prospecting in 2023, in particular what’s working.
A simple framework for diagnosing a self-serve customer journey
Product-led growth (PLG) has become a popular go-to-market strategy for selling software. This post lays out a dead simple framework to help diagnose conversion issues in a self-serve journey
It’s useful if you are trying to improve the results of an existing self-serve journey or if you are thinking about adding a PLG strategy to complement an existing sales-led strategy.
Q3 posts for salespeople
There’s a mountain of advice on the internet on how to write a good cold email yet the standard of vendor outreach remains low. I see evidence of this both as someone getting 30+ cold emails a week and from the data collected by my prospecting scorecard which revealed how 35% of teams don’t research prospects before reaching out to them and how 69% of teams connect with fewer than 10% of the people they reach out to.
Sometimes its easier to learn through reviewing good and bad examples so I tore down 5 cold emails, analyzed their strengths and weaknesses against best practices and rewrote them from scratch. It was the most popular post of Q3.
Early adopter customers are the lifeblood of an early stage startup. They fuel your initial revenue growth, provide invaluable feedback on your product and pave the way for your success. Without them your growth will stall so it is vital to find them as efficiently as possible.
This post details 7 online signals of early adopters, how to find them and how to implement them in your go-to-market without a huge lift,.
Q3 posts on exciting new salestech
Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with publishing how-to guides sponsored by up and coming salestech startups. Reader engagement with these posts has been excellent so I’m going to continue to test them. A huge thank you to Storylane, Journey and Attention for partnering with me on these first few. If you are interested in sponsoring a future how-to guide, please get in touch with me at arnie@therevenuearchitect.com or send me a message through LinkedIn.
How to get your buyers to request more demos from your sales team
Requesting a demo can be a frustrating experience for buyers, who have to wade through qualifying and discovery calls with AEs and SDRs before they can actually evaluate the product.
Demo automation platforms like Storylane are a new type of tech that that helps sales and marketing teams increase qualified leads and shorten sales cycles with personalized product demos that can be built in a few minutes.
How to stand out in competitive deals
Standing out in a competitive deal process is getting exponentially harder as the number of similar vendors in every category continues to grow and buyers face increased scrutiny over every purchase they make.
Digital sales rooms like Journey are a new type of tech that allows sales teams to create a centralized communication hub of content for a buying committee, from the first call through to closing and into onboarding. It’s an essential tool for closing enterprise deals that involve large numbers of stakeholders.
How to use AI to improve your win rates
Today’s buyers want more than just a product. They want a partner who will listen to their needs, help them find the right solution to their problems. and be responsive to their questions.
Sales AI platforms like Attention are a new type of tech that collect sales data, automate manual processes and provide salespeople with actionable insights during and after calls so that they can improve their active listening and follow up skills.
If you find my weekly advice is making your job easier, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get access to the full archive of 115 issues and to my virtual office hours.