The best of 2021
Thank you!
Hi and welcome to the final issue of The Revenue Architect for 2021!
What a year it has been—I started writing this newsletter in April this year after having seen dozens of companies of all sizes, stages and industries running into the same sales, marketing and leadership problems. In helping them diagnose and solve their issues, I realized there were likely many more companies in the same boat who would benefit from similar advice.
I originally started writing a book until my friend Jess told me, “Blog > book. Check out Substack”. Thank you Jess for those pearls of wisdom and thank you to my dear friend of 20 years Josh for being my first subscriber.
36 posts and 38,000 words later, I’m blown away by the 30,000 views my posts have received, driven entirely by your word-of-mouth endorsements. I’m equally humbled by the dozens of you who have reached out 1:1 to tell me how my advice is helping you in your job.
THANK YOU so much for your support and encouragement, please continue to send your questions my way and please continue to tell your colleagues to subscribe!
The 10 most viewed posts of 2021
Here’s a rundown of the most popular posts this year:
1. How to write emails that your prospects will actually respond to
Most email outreach efforts are ineffective because they are overly seller-centric, which is a by-product of focusing on quantity over quality. If you want to get a prospect to respond your outreach needs to be customer-centric, which takes some thought and effort. This post outlines how to do that.
2. How to scale your outbound sales
Virtually every venture-backed company makes the mistake of extrapolating their early inbound success into lofty outbound goals, only to fall way short of them a year later. The key to avoiding this is to focus on the sweet spot in your target market, make your your messaging customer-centric and standardize your process. This post lays out how to do that.
3. How to get your entire sales team performing like your superstars
Most startup sales teams have a couple of superstar reps that consistently hit their goal and a larger group that consistently struggles. The first step to solving this isn’t to try and hire more superstars; there aren’t enough of them in the world. Instead you want to unpack the sales process into stage-to-stage conversion rates to see where reps are struggling and why.
4. How to identify the top opportunities to maximize growth
It can be challenging to know where to focus and which strategies to deploy to maximize revenue growth. This post provides a framework for describing and benchmarking your customer’s journey to flag common growth issues and provide strategies to resolve them.
5. What SaaS and media sales leaders can learn from each other
Sales cultures in SaaS and digital media have historically been very different; SaaS tends to be more new logo and process-driven, whereas media tends to be more expansion and insights-driven. Both cultures have norms that should be challenged and this post offers up some suggestions.
6. How to build a go-to-market team for your startup
Making your first GTM hires can be daunting, especially for founders who haven’t done sales before. This post is a framework for which roles to hire, when to hire them and what their key responsibilities are.
7. The 3 biggest problems facing SaaS in 2021
With 22,000 SaaS companies in the world, SaaS has become a victim of its own success. Customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed due to a shortage of GTM talent and saturation of B2B channels and switching costs are lower due to the proliferation of vendors and established budgets. This post outlines how to address these problems by challenging some of the industry norms that got us here.
8. How to stop your deals dying in Proposal
You nail the demo, you send a proposal and your prospect stops responding. The deal sits in Proposal for weeks and eventually dies. It happens all the time. The #1 reason is not identifying and engaging with all the stakeholders on the buying team before creating the proposal. This post outlines a technique for avoiding this scenario.
9. How to introduce marketing into your startup and make it successful
Marketing is always world of possibilities but when done wrong causes a world of hurt. This post breaks down the 5 core disciplines in marketing, what they are, why you need to deploy them in a very specific order, and what goes wrong when you skip ahead too quickly.
10. How to build a high-converting prospecting process
Prospecting works best when the focus is on quality over quantity. The starting point is a well-defined ideal customer profile and the key to driving engagement is to have unique insights that connect the dots between using your product and achieving a business outcome. This post lays out the process in detail.
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