I know many veteran entrepreneurs would agree that “Raising venture capital is the easiest thing that a startup founder is probably ever going to do.” Marc Andreessen said that the venture capital business is a 100% game of outliers- it’s…
Overview: In December 2017, ConnectAndSell conducted a comprehensive retrospective study on follow-up B2B telephone calling, comparing the efficiency and effectiveness of two basic calling scenarios: Cold calling — having initial conversations with prospects chosen for a combination of company characteristics…
In an acquisition, cross-selling both companies’ products is essential to achieving the hypothesis for success upon which any merger is based. This plan sounds simple; however, due to the structure of traditional sales (territories, measurement of results, lengthy timelines), the…
In Part 1 of this blog series, I wrote that “Almost every acquisition fails to achieve its goals as laid out at the time someone decided it was a great idea,” and ended with the questions, “Can this sad story…
There’s a debate in sales that never seems to die down. Should we call? Or email? Or do social? In response, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article that compared phone hounds to dogs and email/social aficionados to cats. They both hunt.…
Sales is the stepchild of business. That’s why it’s the “S” lumped in with “G&A” on so many financial reporting structures. Given the obvious importance of sales, why is this? It’s simple, really. Businesses are generally conceived of as static…
How to eliminate the #1 risk of B2B startups in 7 easy steps: Step 1: 30 minutes Craft a breakthrough script using plain language. (See https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-sentences-change-your-life-part-1-chris-beall/) Step 2: 30 minutes Buy a list of 1,000 hypothetical decision makers from ZoomInfo.…
In sales, we have long had the notion of a territory, granted as a kind of fiefdom to a salesperson willing to mine it for us. The notion is fundamentally feudal, but still congenial for a certain type of person…
In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, I made the claim that sales headcount is not a growth constraint for most B2B companies. This claim must, of course, be wrong. How do I know I’m wrong? Because the entire…
While there is variety in the business-to-consumer world, it is nothing compared to B2B. The reason is that there are only so many kinds of human consumers (I’ll leave our cats, dogs, pigs, and weasels out of this one!) constrained…