Dans l'article d'aujourd'hui,nous allons voir parler de l'Edge computing et quels bénéfices peuvent en tirer les industriels.Pour faire simple,l'Edge computing est une technologie qui permet d'effectuer le traitement et l'analyse des données niveau périphérie c'est à dire localement.
Your whole revenue organization’s fundamental goal is customer success. Customer success is when your customers see the ROI (return on investment) that they are looking for in your product. In times gone by, this would have been the responsibility of an account executive. Now, with customers demanding more from the products they invest in and with products growing more complex, keeping clients happy has become the responsibility of the customer success specialist (CSS).
Relationship dynamics are intrinsic to SaaS sales. No sale can truly be successful until the customer has seen through their contract with satisfaction (perhaps with an upsell or two along the way). Because SaaS products are complex and represent significant investments, ensuring that each customer can derive as much value as possible is vital. This devotion to customer success is all the more critical in times of real uncertainty in the market. Accordingly, we saw customer success professionals taking more and more meetings throughout 2020.
Let’s look at a customer success specialist’s profile, examine their typical duties, and evaluate exactly what they can bring to your revenue organization.
What Is a Customer Success Specialist?
A customer success specialist's job is to take your new customers through the launch lifecycle's key phrases to make sure they're comfortable and ready to get the most out of your product. They'll then take up account management duties to make sure a customer who starts happy stays happy.
More than any other single role in your revenue organization, your customer success specialist holds the key to maximizing your customers' lifetime value (LTV). They will answer to a customer success manager (CSM) in a mid-size or large company or the main sales lead or CFO in an earlier-stage startup.
Please note that the terms “customer success specialist” and “customer success manager” will often be used interchangeably. For the sake of clarity, we'll refer to a “customer success specialist” as a particular kind of representative and a “customer success manager” as the head of your customer success team.
You may introduce your customer success professional at any point in the sales cycle — and we'll explore the value of including them in team selling a little later. However, their main time to shine comes after your sales rep has done their thing and secured a closed-won deal. While your sales rep then goes back to winning their next customer, your customer success specialist takes over the reins of the relationship to start building up a great customer experience and getting your new signing up to speed with your product.
To that end, your customer success specialist will oversee what's known as the launch lifecycle. The launch lifecycle involves everything, from sending your customer the right software version and credentials to training them on how to use your product.
Your customer success specialist will act as the fulcrum between the other pods in your sales organization. For example, they will interact with sales development representatives (SDRs) to understand buyer pain points and the reasons why your customers need your product. They will also be closely aligned with your customer support professionals, keeping tabs on customers who seem to be experiencing particular difficulties when using your product.
Customer success representatives also work closely with your sales reps. Your sales rep has built familiarity and a relationship with this new customer. They will, as a result, possess vital information about customer needs and how to achieve customer satisfaction with your newly won client. Your customer success specialist will require this information to make their onboarding program a success.
Finally, customer success pros will also meet regularly with devs/product designers. Customer success specialists need to know all about your product. In fact, they should know as much or more about it than any other client-facing member of your revenue organization. After all, they'll be the ones showing your customers how it works. Customer success specialists will liaise often with developers and product designers to understand new and current feature arrays, as well as how to train customers in their use.
How Customer Success Specialists Handle the Launch Lifecycle
There's a reason that customer success specialists occupy their own niche on a sales team: the launch lifecycle they manage is a complex job and can last an indefinite period. Your customer success representative will look after your customers closely for the first three-plus months of their time with you. Depending on your product's complexity, speed of upselling, the state of the market, and other particulars of customer use, that period may be longer.
Handling the lifecycle and creating a great customer experience involves:
Holding tutorials for customers
Perhaps the key interaction for customer success specialists is the interactive tutorial/training session for customers new to your product. Customer success specialists will work with your developers/product designers to create a logical training program your customers can follow. They should prepare your customers for a frictionless relationship with your product.
Most customer success specialists will hold a Zoom call with new customers and guide them through the product via a simple screen share. When scaling makes this difficult, there are many ways to standardize customer training. For example, interactive content and interactive walkthroughs are fast gaining in popularity in customer success circles. This straightforward "learn-by-doing" approach to user training also helps you gather quantifiable information about user engagement at this early stage of your relationship with this new customer.
Your customer success representative should be making careful records of:
Customer responses to new and present features
The ease and frequency with which customers use particular features
How closely your SDR’s anticipated user behavior (based on buyer personas) aligns with how your customer is using your product
This information can be of vital use for other arms of your business as well:
Sales reps, to know which features have particular value for certain kinds of buyers
SDRs, to understand the accuracy of their buyer personas
Product developers, to learn how to tailor new features to customer preferences
Customer success representatives should see disseminating learning from each of their onboarding experiences as a vital part of their job.
Maintaining progress reporting for new customers
We already spoke about the benefits of rebooting that old warhorse, the sales report, for your departmental benefit. Assiduous reporting can help you ensure customer success as well. New customers are particularly vulnerable to frustration when using your product for the first time, and this can lead to lessened LTV and even churn.
Keeping tabs on progress reporting allows your customer success specialist to tend to any customers who aren't quite tapping into your product value yet. Additionally, it can help assess the effectiveness of your customer training and onboarding.
What to Look for in a Potential Customer Success Specialist
As a sales enablement professional or sales manager, you will likely help vet candidates for customer success specialist positions. When choosing your CSS/CSM, look for evidence of some of the following:
Experience in implementation, customer success, or account servicing
Customer success can be a challenging job, particularly if, as in recent times, you're dealing with customers demanding "extreme ROI." Of course, you can get great results by hiring a new customer success specialist who's got nothing in the bag but a bachelor's degree, energy, and talent. Nevertheless, experience in dealing with demanding or frustrated clients can make the difference between business retained and business lost.
Flawless communication skills
The customer success specialist deals with the most important (and most interactive) stages of the customer relationship. Our research shows that customer success specialists will deal with an average of 4.6 stakeholders per account. As a result, it's no surprise that a suitable bedside manner goes a very long way.
Excellent communication skills are particularly important in the current climate. It's vital to assure customers of your product's value in helping their company weather economic storms.
Comfort in the Sales Environment
A customer success specialist can play a key role during the sales process. Our research has shown more touchpoints recorded per deal and increased C-suite participation on sales calls during the past year. Reps will seek out strategic advisors from elsewhere in their organization to contribute at specific stages of the sales cycle, depending on which buyer-side stakeholder they’re talking to.
A customer success specialist who is happy to jump into the sales environment can be an invaluable asset. Their naturally warm manner will set prospects at ease. If a sales rep brings a customer success specialist into the sale early enough, the CSS can craft a clearer picture of what client success will look like for the prospect. A prospect who already knows exactly what their path to ROI will look like is more likely to be confident in authorizing a sale.
Competence as a problem-solver
The title “customer success specialist” can give something of a false impression of the role. Life as a CSS is frequently fast-paced and deals with a lot of unforeseen circumstances. Particularly if your company likes to put custom packages together for new customers, your customer success specialist will be the frontline support for your clients’ teething troubles. Malfunctioning portals, incomplete download packages, missing features — they’re all bound to happen to one client or another. Your customer success specialist needs to know how to deal with these issues.
Ability to speak multiple “languages”
Your CSS has ties to your customers, but they also have links to every department in your company. They will frequently be interacting with a variety of stakeholders, both buyer- and selling-side. To understand and communicate the needs of the various parties involved, your customer success specialist will need to communicate competently with marketers, devs, and support departments alike.
Strong presentation skills
Although they don’t necessarily have the word “representative” in their name, customer success specialists are, in many ways, the most representative members of your sales organization. They need to be able to devise and deliver effective, logical training sessions. They need to make sure all the instructional packs, PDFs, and tutorial decks they send out are well-structured and on-brand. A good presentation is a game of inches, but the inches add up fast.
Acute Systematizing intelligence
As well as presentation skills, your customer success specialist needs to have good awareness for storing and maintaining informational databases. Their sense of how best to clearly express and store information must be on point. Their ability to analyze usage metrics and spot trends in the data should also be road-tested — are they aware of all the forms that churn risk can take? Do they know how best practices differ when dealing with delinquent churn as when dealing with a customer unhappy with their experience? Do they know how to derive insights from your churn rate?
Your customer success specialist must also prioritize their time effectively. They will be spending a good chunk of time onboarding new clients. However, a good CSS will also be keeping track of the status of existing customers, vetting who’s ready for an upsell (and who’s a churn risk), and proactively reaching out to them.
Why a Customer Success Specialist Is Fundamental to a SaaS Sales Organization
It’s easy to think that a deal is done once the client signs on the dotted line. However, that is a vestige of pre-SaaS sales thinking. The period immediately after signing — i.e., onboarding — represents a time of peak churn risk for customers. Having a customer success specialist on hand to tailor and guide customers through the process prevents late-deal and onboarding churn by supporting the new user experience (NUX). While a less noted cause of churn, poor onboarding causes 23% of overall deal risk. A customer success specialist reduces the likelihood of these kinds of avoidable losses.
SaaS sales are, after all, about relationships: building them and maintaining them. The customer success specialist takes on this task as a separate discipline. Not only does this enable your already time-strapped sales reps to focus on selling, but it also allows your customer success specialist to take a 360-degree approach to client retention. Training, frontline tech support, upsell outreach, informal check-ins, and survey building — your customer success specialist is in charge of it all.
The presence of a customer success specialist also enables a more direct understanding between your internal team members and your customer’s pain points. Your SDRs and sales reps will have an informal or partial understanding of pain points from their own time with this new customer. However, the customer success specialist has a front-row seat for how these pain points manifest day-to-day with your customer and how your product solves (or does not solve) those problems. Your specialist can then communicate insights from this first-person experience to other teams (like sales, product, tech, marketing, etc.).
Feeding back the right information from onboarding to your product/tech team can, with the right solution, lead to better product outcomes.
How to Enable Your Customer Success Specialist
Once you’ve sourced the right talent, your main responsibility as a frontline sales manager is to make sure you equip your customer success specialist to do their job. But this task isn’t as straightforward as it might sound.
Your customer success specialist's own job success relies on client context management: their needs, pain points, and more. Ironically, few SaaS companies plan their analytics architecture for customer success, or, at least, they don’t plan it for their customer success specialists. The information your customer success specialist needs will probably be scattered throughout your CRM or across multiple CRMs. There might be more of it contained in private email chains. Pressed-for-time sales reps who have discovered key client insights on a call may not have recorded this important information in any form whatsoever.
That’s where a solution like Chorus.ai’s Deal Hub comes in. It’s a tool designed explicitly with customer success and customer success specialists in mind. It collects disparate data in one place and enables reps to provide a clean and comprehensive handover of vital information to customer success specialists when the time comes. From a chronological feed of client emails to deal-review specifics detailing what made your new customer choose you, Deal Hub can be a foundational pillar of a stellar onboarding and service experience.
Customer Success = Company Success
Think of customer success as a progressive investment. As your client role call expands and their demands become more various, the single intrepid customer success specialist you started out with will become part of a whole customer success team committed to helping your customers get the most out of your product.
Customer success specialists can help bring the best out of your other sales team members, too. With sales reps already spending only a fraction of their time selling on average, a customer success specialist can both free up your department and make it more effective. By having someone at the center of events, you can maximize each customer’s LTV while keeping your entire revenue organization in the loop in terms of how your customer is doing with your product.
Coaching is one of the most crucial aspects of a sales leader’s role. But, it can be hard to carve out more than 30 minutes per week to coach. That suggests most sales reps aren’t getting the training they need to succeed which, in turn, can hurt the company’s bottom line.
When the sales coaching process is broken, it prevents modern businesses from scaling kick-ass sales teams successfully.
That assessment set the stage for a recent webinar, Driving a Kick-Ass Coaching Culture: Dispelling Myths & Adopting Best Practices, hosted by Sales Hacker’s director of partnerships Scott Barker. The webinar featured Chorus.ai’s Vice President of Sales, Joe Caprio; Matt Lubbers, Director of Partnerships at Lessonly; and Chuck Marcoullier, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Reflektive, and a user of both Chorus.ai’s and Lessonly’s solutions.
During that discussion, Caprio described the “Paradox of Success” that sales organizations can experience when they need to grow so fast, they end up with a team composed largely of new — and inexperienced — hires. “The stark reality for companies is that if they hit their sales numbers, that number then often doubles,” said Caprio. “And then, they need to double the size of their sales team, which means bringing in new blood and promoting producers to frontline manager roles.”
When those newly hired or promoted sales pros don’t get the training and support they need to be confident and successful in their roles, that’s where high-climbing sales organizations can quickly start to stumble. “We overload our sales teams with information and then expect them to be experts,” said Lubbers. “But we can’t expect great performance without also giving them the right training and space to practice.”
Creating a kick-ass coaching culture begins with sales managers recognizing that rep training needs to be sustained far beyond the onboarding stage, Caprio said.
“Most frontline sales managers seem to believe that enablement and training are handled during the onboarding process,” he explained. “That’s a fallacy. A rep can’t learn everything in 30 days and then go off and be productive. Their development must be continuous.”
And, if it isn’t, sales organizations risk seeing their promising sales pros heading straight for the exit door. Research from leadership development firm Zenger Folkman bears this out: More than 60% of sales reps said they would consider quitting a company if they had a poor sales coach or coaching culture.
So, how can leaders of kick-ass sales organizations build a world-class coaching culture that will help teams to scale and reach new heights of success? The following six tips are based on the advice that Caprio, Lubbers and Marcoullier offered to the webinar audience:
Tip #1. Don’t wing it: Structure your coaching curriculum — and coach with intent.
Caprio, who was once a frontline manager, admitted that his idea of coaching used to be:
Plug into a sales call.
Take over the call.
Win the deal for the rep.
Unplug from the call, and then tell the rep not to pitch like that again.
“That 30 seconds of off-the-cuff feedback, which was a little bit rude, was how I thought coaching was supposed to be,” Caprio said. “But clearly, that approach wasn’t helpful or sustainable. Reps can’t absorb lessons in the moment. They are thinking about the deal — not up-leveling their skills for the rest of their career.”
Caprio and Lubbers are in strong agreement that a well-developed curriculum, along with coaching with intent in a measured, scheduled and repeatable way, are the keys to lifting up reps’ performance and setting them on a path for long-term growth.
Lubbers said, “Modern sales training doesn’t involve dull and static classroom-based lectures. It’s more agile. You can update sales reps with five- to 10-minute micro-lessons that are engaging and helpful, and get them back to work quickly.”
Tip #2. Give reps the chance to prove their mettle before going live with customers.
Lubbers is a firm believer in the old adage, “Practice makes perfect.” Sales reps, he emphasized, need to have the opportunity to practice what they are being coached on before they try applying those learnings in a real-world sales call. But too often, sales managers overlook the importance of giving reps ample time to practice their craft.
“Some sports teams have a 15-to-1 ratio of practice to game time,” Lubbers said. “That’s not to say that sales reps should practice 40 hours a week and then go out and perform. But giving them the ability to test out what they’ve learned before going live with a customer can be a powerful coaching tool.” Webcam and screen-recording technologies can be useful tools for these types of practice sessions, he said.
When a rep records a mock video call or web presentation, reviews it, and then asks a manager or peer to critique their performance, the rep can gather meaningful feedback that can enhance their future development, Lubbers explained.
Tip #3. Make your training pop by letting reps hear the actual voice of the customer.
Reflektive’s Chuck Marcoullier, who participated in the webinar through a pre-recorded presentation, noted that sales pros often criticize training for being hypothetical — and not applicable to their field. One surefire way to “kill that critique,” said Marcoullier, is to use a conversation intelligence solution like Chorus.ai. Real calls with customers that are recorded, saved and shared in the platform can provide invaluable insights to reps, he said.
Marcoullier said his team at Reflektive clip their best discovery calls in Chorus.ai and incorporate them into their training materials provided to reps in Lessonly’s cloud-based learning management system. Those recordings offer a powerful proof point to reps, he said, because it shows them that the process they are learning does work and can help move the sale along.
“We let reps listen to complete sales calls, but we also break them down into smaller snippets with instructions in the practice scripts in Lessonly,” said Marcoullier, adding that reps are then tasked with executing against those practice scripts.
Tip # 4. Use meaningful metrics to gauge reps’ progress and know when to “let them fly.”
Caprio, Lubbers and Marcoullier agree that a kick-ass coaching culture should include the use of metrics, like Chorus Scorecards in Chorus.ai, that can provide new hires with measurable feedback. But meaningful metrics can help drive overall sales team performance, as well.
“Coaching is an ongoing cycle, so it is important to be able to quantify results,” said Lubbers. “Metrics allow sales leaders to more closely identify areas where extra coaching or reassessment is needed. And metrics can help make feedback more meaningful, and ensure sales reps are engaged in the process.”
“With metrics in Chorus.ai, we can see if reps are meeting the standards that we’ve asked them to meet through the Lessonly path,” said Marcoullier. “If they struggle, we put them back into the Lessonly path. But if see that they are getting it, then we let them fly.”
Tip #5. Set specific goals for reps and check on their progress regularly.
As Caprio noted when discussing the Paradox of Success for fast-growing sales teams, learning needs to be an ongoing process for reps. Training should extend well beyond onboarding, so that reps can, at the very least, fully ramp up on new products or even markets.
One way to ensure that learning is ongoing, and relevant, is for reps and managers to check in regularly about training needs and progress toward defined goals. Caprio said his sales reps and managers align monthly on a specific skill and maintain a Google Doc to monitor progress.
“At the end of the month, the manager and rep create a status report, explaining what the rep focused on and what they learned, and providing an example of how the rep exhibited that behavior in the real world,” Caprio said.
He continued, “This process not only shows that the organization cares about each rep’s professional development, it also links directly to an asset like a Lessonly path, a mock role-play or a Chorus.ai playlist that reps can refer to and utilize.”
Tip #6. Leverage tech to create a “flywheel” that gives all reps the ability to improve their game.
Chuck Marcoullier is walking the walk when it comes to leveraging technology to create a flywheel effect at Reflektive that is helping him to build a high-performing sales organization. “You can no longer pick a training module and ride it into the ground,” he said. “The modern sales process requires that you adapt on a dime to capture the marketplace. Adaptive and iterative technology tools like Chorus.ai and Lessonly allow our team to do that.”
Leveraging tech is especially critical for distributed sales teams, according to Caprio, who pointed to Chorus.ai’s sales organization as a prime example. The team is split between Boston and San Francisco, with another third of the team working remotely. “I can tell you from firsthand experience that reps in distributed sales organizations are much more likely to engage with video and recorded training assets,” he said. “So, distributed sales teams that do not have these capabilities will want to think about beefing up their tech stack.”
Developing a kick-ass coaching culture in the sales organization, and supporting it with the right tools, can potentially enhance the company’s bottom line. Consider recent research from the Sales Management Association, which shows that an investment in sales coaching can help to grow revenue by 17%.
If that’s not incentive enough, think about how such an investment can improve retention by reducing the risk that sales pros won’t feel valued, or that they don’t have the opportunity and support to learn and grow. Another benefit: If word gets around about the organization’s kick-ass coaching culture, attracting great new sales talent can get a lot easier, too.
Caprio said, “I tell my sales managers: We can’t always offer reps a raise or a promotion. But we can, through ongoing coaching, offer investment in their career. And by supporting their learning years, we can help enhance their earning years.”
"Sell more." "Sell faster." These might be the laws of the art of sales, but they’re not great sales goal examples. Your business might be headed in a great new direction, and there might be a fantastic vision behind it, but without well-chosen, well-articulated sales goals, your sales team won’t be equipped to get you where you want to be.
We’ve spoken recently about the value of motivation in sales and how essential organizing your methods and objectives is to the success of a business. Sales goals combine the two: they help fire up your sales team while improving the likelihood that, with everyone pulling together, you meet those goals.
What, then, do ideal sales goals look like? To give you an idea, we’ve put together this guide of 10 essential sales goal examples. We’ll show you what they are, why they’re important, and what resources you need to ensure that your team can fulfill them.
What Are Sales Goals?
Sales goals are set objectives for your sales team. These goals center on a specific sales KPI and are often tied to overarching business goals. Typical sales goal examples include increasing revenue 25% year over year or boosting customer retention 10% in 2020.
The finance department, executive leadership, and the sales team all collaborate to set sales goals that will satisfy the company’s broader vision and ambitions for growth. Once these goals are agreed upon, it is the responsibility of the sales team to translate them into measurable, achievable actions.
To help your sales team succeed, don’t establish just one big, audacious sales goal. Instead:
Make and meet smaller goals quickly. More frequent rewards for these smaller goals boost confidence and productivity.
Build to that larger sales goal incrementally.
Building and maintaining a network of sales goals are not always easy tasks. You don’t want your team’s approach to be excessively generalized, nor do you want to zap their motivation by giving them a bewildering array of unrelated figures to chase. Consider the organization’s broader objectives and your unique team when creating your sales goals.
The key to successful sales goal selection is to align your goals with your current resources — financial resources, human resources, and your available tech stack. As we’ll see shortly, success in chasing after ambitious sales goals often comes down to how good your tools are.
10 Sales Goal Examples for Your Sales Team
Sales goals can take many forms — from satisfying fundamental targets like monthly recurring revenue (MRR) increases or reducing churn, to considerable, more granular goals aimed at improving aspects of your actual sales process (e.g. how much time your team spends with customer data or how much sales coaching they’re getting per month).
While having a number of goals may help your team focus and find greater variety in their work, having too many can lead to confusion and spreading your resources too thin.
We’ve split our sales goal examples into a series of larger sales goals to occupy your full team’s attention, with a few to improve practices and conditions within your team. You’ll learn the fundamentals of how to set sales goals, how different goals work together, and how to strike a balance between large-scale goals and process-oriented sales goals.
Large-Scale Sales Goal Examples
We’ll refer to following sales goals examples as “large scale” because their primary impact is on your bottom-line — by targeting them as sales goals, you’ll bring in more revenue, increase your profitability, and/or find more opportunity for growth.
1. Increasing Your Monthly or Annual Revenue
Revenue targets are the fundamental sales goal example — this KPI should be one of every company’s primary sales goals. A typical sales goal example here: increase month-over-month/year-over-year revenues by 10%.
Company A has found excellent consistency in matching and then exceeding their target revenue increase.
You can set targets for revenue growth as monthly or annual goals, or both. You will most likely set an overall revenue sales goal for your entire team, but you may also find it helpful to break this down into separate sales goals for each of your reps, particularly if your sales team has a very broad experience profile.
Why it’s important: Revenue is the lifeblood of your company. To ensure profitability and the potential for continued growth, a sales goal based on revenue is vital in any scheme of sales objectives you’re trying to create, and it will interact with any and all other sales goals that you set.
How to Meet This Goal
The likelihood of any goal being met can be increased simply by prioritizing it, and revenue goals should always be at or near the top of the heap. Emphasize to your team that more time should be apportioned to meeting their revenue goals than any other.
Because a revenue sales goal is so important but also requires tremendous effort, take steps to prevent your team from feeling overwhelmed. Set activity goals for each rep to make the task seem more manageable. These can include the following:
How many demos each of them should look to arrange during a weekly period.
How many calls each rep should aim to make per day to meet quota. Use available data to qualify your quotas. For instance, it takes 106 dials for an SDR to get 1 scheduled meeting.
Some other good activity goals, such as the number of leads your reps are qualifying, are sales goals of their own, which we’ll cover later.
A highly functional CRM system also improves your team’s chances of meeting many goals. When chasing a revenue-based sales goal, where many variables and stages are involved, it’s vital. With the right CRM system, your rep can track their goals with ease, and maintain clear awareness of the status of current prospects.
2. Reducing Customer Churn
Keeping your customers is synonymous with keeping your company afloat — and if, as is so often the case nowadays, your sales team takes on account management responsibilities as well, then keeping churn low should be another top-priority sales goal.
Customer churn is the number of customers who leave your business during a certain period. A typical sales goal example here: reduce monthly customer churn to <1%.
Why it’s important: Particularly if you are a SaaS company and your revenue is subscription-based, maintaining a low churn percentage is the difference between life and death for your company. Churn compounds quickly, and any churn rate that sits consistently above 1% will lead to an eventual stunting of your growth.
For non-SaaS companies — for whom the term “customer retention” may be preferred to “churn” — the statistic is still important to keep an eye on, particularly as the likelihood of selling to the customers you already have (60-70%) is so much higher than is the case with new customers (5-20%).
How to Meet This Goal
Meeting a broader sales goal around churn means being able to recognize and deal with the various types of churn.
One of the most common types is so-called delinquent churn. Here, customers’ subscriptions end because the card they use for payment has expired without them noticing. The risk of delinquent churn can be difficult to predict and even harder to reverse, which is why bespoke tools can come in handy.
Account churn is where customers find they can’t get the value from your product that they require. There’s no reason for them to continue with their subscription, so they leave. Account churn is the most specifically sales-related of the churn types. If you’re seeing lots of account churn, it might mean you’re targeting customers who don’t really have a need for your product.
User churn, which can be high even when revenue or account growth is healthy, is related to your product. You may not be organizing the right features in the right packages, or your product just might not be sticky enough in its current iteration.
To combat user churn, work collaboratively with your financial department to gain an understanding of customer cohorts, and identify the key moments of churn. If your sales team manages user accounts, then ensure communication channels with product development are open.
3. Increase Units Sold and Boost Profit Margins
If your company doesn’t deal with recurring revenue, then some of the most effective sales goal examples are also the simplest: units and margins. Units pertain to the number of times your product is sold; margins concern the amount of profit generated from each of your sales, often expressed as a percentage. A typical sales goal example here: increase units sold/profit margins by 10%.
Why These Are Important: The importance of shifting more units of your product is fairly self-explanatory — they help you build up the company’s wider revenue/growth target. Units also give you important information about which of your products is generating the most profit for your company, and if the price your company sells at is variable, then it can be very easily optimized.
Margins are equally important. They govern how easily you’re covering your costs with each sale and how much of that money can then be reinvested; if you’re meeting margin targets effectively, then both your pricing points and your prospect evaluation are sound. If you’re not, you might want to rethink how you’re packaging your product and who you’re pitching it towards.
How to Meet This Goal
Selling more units will require your sales team to increase activity and chase more leads. One of the best things you can do for a sales team chasing a unit-based sales goal is to help them get rid of the menial, time-consuming tasks that don’t matter — there are AI tools that specialize in this.
If your reps have margin-based sales goals, and your sales approach relies on negotiating on prices, then ensure that you’ve researched your benchmark pricing against industry norms. Give your sales team better training to lead persuasively on sales calls.
For margin-based sales goals, if you find that you’re actually realizing less than you originally forecast, be flexible and alter your goal, making changes to your other sales objectives to compensate if necessary. For example, if you’re finding it difficult to make margin goals on single sales, consider bumping up your units-sold sales goal to compensate for the shortfall, or shift emphasis toward bringing in that extra value from customer lifetime value instead.
Speaking of which . . .
4. Boost Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value involves the cash value a given customer contributes to your company over the length of their subscription with you.
Again, if your sales team handles the accounts they sell for, then increasing the total value each customer spends over their life cycle can make for an excellent sales goal. A typical sales goal example here: increase customer lifetime value by 10-20% YoY.
Why it’s important: As we noted above, making money from a customer you already have is considerably cheaper and easier than drawing the same value with new business. It costs up to five times as much to get equivalent sales with a new customer as with a current one, so drawing on your existing base really pays.
How to Meet This Goal
If your team is targeting a percentage increase in the lifetime value for existing customers, then they should aim to upsell (get customers to upgrade their current deal) and cross-sell (convince them to invest in an adjacent product or service). When helping reps form their schedule, ensure that there’s plenty of time apportioned for communicating with existing customers — sending emails with upgrade information, scheduling calls — to find out what would make upgrading worthwhile for them.
Again, the value of a good CRM and the right tools cannot be underestimated. Not every customer will present as an upsell opportunity — you’re looking for customers who have needs that match your product and who are already avid users of what they’ve got. Identifying these kinds of overlaps at scale will be extremely tough and time-consuming without the right tools.
A lifetime-value sales goal can dovetail well with a churn-reduction sales goal, so consider pairing them for mutual optimization. You can use churn-related data concerning at-risk customers and their product use habits and turn this into a direct opportunity for upselling.
5. Increase Number of Leads Qualified
There’s more to the sales cycle than just closing deals and building up revenue; keeping your pipeline well-stocked with fresh prospects is a vital part of your sales team’s job. So, building an objective around it can be highly effective. A typical sales goal example here: increase the number of leads qualified per month by 18%.
Why it’s important: Making sure you have the right number and quality of leads determines your team’s likelihood to close deals that are high in potential customer lifetime value. A sales goal based on leads qualified is an investment in your business’s future.
How to Meet This Goal
Meeting sales goals is often a question of letting your sales reps make better use of their time. As with customer lifetime value, meeting a leads-qualified sales objective rewards devotion. Apportion time during your sales team’s day for prospecting (an hour a day should do the trick). The purpose of this is to flush out high-quality leads. A lower volume of high-quality leads, where customers have higher WTP and a real need for your product, is better than a huge volume of junk leads.
Come up with a discrete process to nurture leads within the pipeline; again, integrate tools that can help you make this a smooth, streamlined process.
6. Increase Win Rates
Increasing win rates is good for your bottom line — but it’s also an excellent sales goal for bringing the best out of your individual sales reps. Win rates are a fickle thing — a flawlessly executed sales approach can still end up short of a win because of other mitigating factors. By targeting a general increase, however, you can identify your sales reps’ success in following a wider strategy and assess how well that strategy itself works.
The average win rate across all industries is 47%, with a 25% loss-to-no-decision rate. A typical sales goal example here might be to increase monthly win rates by 5%, but if you’re finding that your deals are breaking down on the cusp of success, another sales goal example might be to reduce loss-to-no-decision rates by 8%.
If you’re in a highly competitive field, a third good sales goal example might go along the lines of: reduce loss-to-competitor rates by 5%.
Why it’s important: You’ll be setting sales goals and expectations differently for every sales rep, based on skills, approach, and experience. Having a win-rate sales goal tailored to each of them helps your reps to stay on track to a personal vision of success and contribute to the wider goals at hand.
Additionally, because deals can end up in losses for no particular reason or because of competitive pressure from another company, following a win-rate sales goal can alert you to the effectiveness of your sales funnel. It can also reveal insights about the relative standing of your product (and sales approach) next to your competitors’.
How to Meet This Goal
Coach, coach, coach. If you want to target a percentage increase in win rates, focus on your reps’ weaknesses and help them improve. Give them a greater general awareness of how each phase of the sales funnel works and how they can address a prospect in each phase — how to recognize a trigger point and send the perfect follow-up email, or how to best guide a conversation during discovery.
Train your team to manage the buyer’s journey better — increasing win rates, particularly when trying to do so by cutting down no-decision losses, depends as much on when you make your approach as on what you say or how good your product is. Show your reps when the best time is to nudge a hesitant customer; move the product demo further forward in your sales cycle.
7. Lower Customer Acquisition Costs
Reducing customer acquisition costs is a worthy sales goal — one that can have an impact on both your bottom line and your sales team’s approach to internal processes (which we’ll examine further in a moment). A typical sales goal here: lower average customer acquisition cost by 8%.
Why it’s important: Customer acquisition costs refer to all the costs incurred in the process of winning new business, from sales and marketing to salaries and other overhead/expenses.
Your customer LTV must outpace your acquisition costs for your business to survive. Cutting down on CAC can also help your team meet other sales goals, such as reduced cycle times, and reduces the risk posed by churn to your business.
How to Meet This Goal
Examine your sales process to see where you’re spending the most money. Develop your buyer personas more thoroughly — are you targeting a lot of hard-to-reach prospects? Are they providing lifetime value commensurate with their costs? Generally speaking, a customer’s lifetime value should be three times their CAC. If not, you may need a change of approach, like targeting more accessible customers likely to bring in more value.
Company A’s LTV:CAC ratio is a very healthy one!
Instruct your sales reps to respond (via a follow-up email for a fresh prospect, or a call to one already in the sales funnel) to trigger events, where customers register particular interest in your product, for example by subscribing to your newsletter, sharing a blog post, or downloading a demo.
Instruct your team to use their tech stack to gauge where the most leads are coming from (e.g. emails, website landing pages, marketing content, etc.) and retarget through these areas more frequently. This is known as A/B testing and can be a lifesaver when moving away from expensive marketing channels that aren’t bringing in new customers.
Process-Oriented Sales Goal Examples
You can often make serious improvements to your sales processes by looking within; encourage your team to think of administrative and practical objectives as sales goal examples, too. Mixing well-chosen, process-oriented sales goals with broader-scope sales goals will provide a balanced set of priorities.
8. Reduce Cycle Times
Your average cycle time tells you how long it takes for your sales reps to get from lead to a deal closed-won. A sales cycle is a complex, multisegmented process, and the average length of a cycle varies both by industry and by the size of the deal involved.
Our research suggests that, in SaaS, the average sales cycle for a closed-won deal of a value greater than $20,000 is 96 days; the average sales cycle for a closed-won deal of a smaller size (<$2,000) is 14 days. A typical sales goal example here, then, would be something along the lines of: reduce cycle time by 5-8% (subject to deal type).
Why it’s important: Your cycle time ostensibly tells you everything about your sales process — how well your sales funnel is set up, how good your prospect targeting is, and how well your reps automate menial tasks to focus on selling. Reducing your cycle time will yield improvements across the board and allow your team to close deals faster.
How to Meet This Goal
Prioritize research and planning in the initial stages of your team’s sales cycle. By making this part of the cycle longer, you can make other stages shorter; you’re less likely to find yourself barking up the wrong tree with uninterested prospects, and your outreach will be more efficient.
Who you talk to at a prospect company is as important as what you say to them; try to make contact with a decision-maker at your target, and build a direct relationship. Many deals get stuck in limbo because an enthusiastic prospect doesn’t have the clearance required to sanction a subscription with you; this, by nature, leads to extended cycle times.
Automating processes will also help your team meet a number of different sales goals, and it might be most helpful for reducing cycle times, purely because it allows your team to focus more on selling.
9. Track Sales Time per Week
A very simple process-oriented sales goal example, but a potentially effective one, is gauging how much sales time your reps are logging per week. If your sales team has assumed account management responsibilities on top of the various admin and research-based tasks typically required, the time and energy they have left to give to selling will be reduced. In fact, your sales team will end up spending as little as 36% of their total time in work actually selling. A typical sales goal example here: increase weekly sales time to 50%.
Why it's important: The value of giving your team more sales time per week is self-explanatory, but by making this a sales goal, it will help you understand the flaws in your process that stop your team from having that extra time to make that extra win/qualification.
How to Meet This Goal
Embrace automation and CRM tools, as suggested elsewhere. Follow-up emails, the calculation of a sales rep’s commission and other sales cycle accounting, Excel macros, and managing data for prospects can all be delegated to automated solutions.
Learning-management software can also streamline the research process, which can be another heavy burden on a sales rep’s time. Consider establishing a knowledge-sharing database, like Tettra, where reps can easily access information on prospects banked earlier by their colleagues.
Demarcate certain periods during the week where sales gets absolute priority. Because there are hot points during a given week where most deals/progressions progress — mostly on Wednesday and Thursday — it makes sense for your team to have a stretch of quality time devoted to it.
Evaluate the ways in which your team is nurturing or qualifying leads to identify areas where methods could be made more efficient.
10. Set Activity Goals
Most of the goals we’ve looked at so far help achieve actual results, but it’s important to evaluate your reps based on pure activity, also. The yield from every month/quarter is not, unfortunately, guaranteed to be representative for all of your reps. Grading them on activity, as opposed to results, can sometimes be a more representative metric in terms of assessing their actual performance.
A typical sales goal example here: increase number of cold calls/scheduled demos/video calls by x%.
Why it’s important: A capable rep might have tough leads or indecisive prospects; times may be lean, and your rep may have had a tough period where wins were few. By evaluating a rep’s activity, you can gauge how well your process is working against real outcomes, keeping your rep motivated, approximating what they need to do to hit their targets, and maintaining the pace of activity in your pipeline.
How to Meet This Goal
Use your data. Assess customer buying habits, reassess industry benchmarks, check your progress in reducing your churn — your rep’s slow period might be down to conditions in the market, in which case, a broader change of tack is needed.
From there, evaluate your targeting. Are your buyer personas well-developed? Is this sales rep using the channels most effective for targeting these prospects? Are they trained in best practices for using them?
If, on the other hand, your rep is having individual difficulty with their activity goals, evaluate whether or not they’ve had proper coaching. Do they know how to identify prospects using their CRM? Are they clear on methods of outreach? Do they feel they have been well-trained for their role, with respect to things like best practices for phone-selling? Lowered activity from your rep is suggestive of low confidence. Nurture them!
One Goal
Another reason why sales goals are all important is that they are excellent for keeping your sales team bound together — sales goals are intended to satisfy a collective aim and yet are often set and incentivized in a way that can be excessively individualized.
The most important factor when selecting among the key sales KPIs for goals that suit you is to identify which ones are best aligned to your company’s objectives, and which ones will allow your sales team to pull together to satisfy those end results. All your sales goals should, in short, culminate in one goal: a vision of success that everyone in your sales team can share.
One of the interesting stats we have in this report is how the typical deal cycle splits up into different stages. Almost a month is spent in cold prospecting by BDRs, another 60 odd days in the discovery and late deal stages with an AE and then, with some luck, it’s years and years of meetings with customer success and account managers.
Why did we just recount this? Because earning revenue involves many different roles (let’s not forget front line managers, function leaders, and enablement). And all of these roles have different day to day goals and challenges - many of which Conversation Intelligence can solve. As an example, we recently launched the only Conversation Intelligence feature specific to SDR teams - Cold Call Central.
As companies and revenue teams grow in size and geographic spread, they want their tech stack to also scale and easily support the growing complexity on the organization side.
Soon you have state-of-the-art IT regulations and governance controls in place. And for good reason. Businesses want to promote a culture of sharing, collaboration, and learning - but not at the cost of data security and privacy.
We knew our fast-growing and enterprise clients needed more flexibility to personalize the Chorus experience for their revenue teams. Chorus’s world-class product and engineering team rose to the occasion and delivered a deeply thought-out and nuanced version of “Permissions”.
Announcing: Chorus Roles & Permissions
With this launch, Chorus is the most ‘enterprise-ready’ Conversation Intelligence solution. We now offer the greatest level of flexibility and the most robust permissions within any CI platform. This means you can now make features accessible to specific roles as well as make recordings and data accessible to specific teams.
IT admins and sales operation managers need to be able to manage one of their go-to-market team’s most important assets: customer data. With Chorus Roles & Permissions, you can now set your revenue teams up to be successful while maintaining internal IT regulations.
With Chorus Roles & Permissions, you’ll be able to:
use the customizable settings to control the Chorus experience for end-users.
define access controls based on roles, like who can fill out scorecards.
apply data access settings to specify the records users in certain teams or territories can view and edit.
make some recordings, comments, or trackers private or accessible to some teams only.
Why Chorus Roles & Permissions Matter to You
Having roles and permissions in any technology platform sounds fairly straightforward and standard. So what makes Chorus any different? A few things:
Conversation Intelligence is used in many different ways e.g. coaching, ramping, deal process, competitive intelligence, hiring, etc. This means there’s an even greater need for a horses-for-courses approach.
Customer conversations are related to deals and dollars. Sometimes, this information needs to be protected and companies do now want everyone to have access to everything.
Feedback and coaching can sometimes be more critical and constructive. This makes it all the more important to use a 1-to-1 approach inside the platform.
Role-Based Features
Chorus provides an unparalleled level of flexible on role-based permissions. You can now control what features and capabilities are available to users in different job functions. This way you only surface actions that are most critical to the user’s role such as coaching, modifying calls, and sharing.
Some examples of how you’d use these settings:
Unlock peer-to-peer coaching for Reps, or limit access to scorecard completion to Managers or Enablement users.
Limit deletion or modification of conversation data to only users with the right level of access
Get Managers involved in developing a coaching culture by enabling them to create their own coaching initiatives specific to their teams
Control data sharing by defining who can share recordings with users outside of your organization (without a Chorus login)
Team-based Access to Recordings & Data
Having flexible data access settings ensure that cross-functional teams can share information and collaborate, while still maintaining IT regulations of data security. This also enhances handoff processes between different types of teams. Think SDR to AE, and AE to CSM.
Without these flexible, specific settings, it would be difficult to pinpoint exactly who sees what. With Chorus Roles & Permissions, data access settings are defined on the team level, so it’s clear whose data will be impacted. We enable the selection of any set of teams to be included in data access.
This flexible approach makes teams work better. Here are a few examples:
A Solutions Engineering team can get access to all of the relevant AE teams they support even though they sit on a different branch of the org chart.
Handoffs from AEs to CS teams can be easily supported by setting up data access through this flexible framework.
Individual-level Privacy Options
As a conversation intelligence platform that’s widely used to coach and onboard reps, we’re always in favor of sharing your own recordings in order to be able to learn from peers and other teams. However, we also want to be able to serve privacy needs.
With Chorus’s privacy settings you can now:
make any recording private. Think of a sales interview or an internal planning meeting that you recorded. There’s no need to make that public or a part of the team’s data. Just mark the meeting as private and it’s taken care of.
write private comments (to self or by tagging specific people) that others cannot see. This means you can leave little notes-to-self as well as leave manager-to-rep feedback in a private manner.
Enterprises and fast-growing companies can be complex organizations with distributed revenue teams and regulated IT practices. Software Admins and Sales Ops need to ensure that users are getting top value from their sales tools while remaining compliant with these internal requirements. With Chorus as your partner, you can now implement Conversation Intelligence with greater flexibility and control. Learn more about our new Roles & Permissions features here.
A classic supply chain moves from upstream to downstream, where the raw material is transformed into products, moved through logistics and distributed to final customers. A data supply chain moves in the opposite direction. The raw data is “sourced” from the customer/user. As it moves downstream, it gets processed and refined by proprietary algorithms and stored in data centers.
Traditional supply chains
The supply chain is the set of steps between the sourcing, manufacturing, distribution of a product up to the steps it takes to reach the final customer. It’s the set of step it takes to bring a product from raw material (for physical products) to final customers and how companies manage those processes.
In a traditional, and physical supply chain, we move from upstream to downstream, as we go from raw materials to the finished good, distributed in the hands of customers and consumers.
While the physical supply chain is structured by starting from sourcing, manufacturing and logistics. Distribution (intended as the finished product ready to be sold) comes at the end of this process.
There is another kind of supply chain, which for tech and AI companies is integrated within their business models, that is the data supply chain.
From physical to data supply chains
Let’s take a simple example. When Google manufactures its phone, the Pixel, while the phone is designed by Google, its manufacturing is outsourced in China (even though Google is moving it to Vietnam).
This means that up to sourcing and manufacturing, the process is outsourced, where Google instead takes control of the process as the phones produced are shipped to Google and ready to be distributed, either through its online stores, through carriers or other indirect channels.
So the whole physical supply chain might look like the following:
Yet, if we flip the perspective and look at the data side of Google, as an AI company, the whole “data supply chain” changes.
Data supply chains: flipping upside down the physical supply chain
In a data supply chain the closer the data to the customer the more we’re moving downstream. For instance, when Google produced its own physical devices. While it moved upstream the physical supply chain (it became a manufacturer) it moved downstream the data supply chain as it got closer to consumers using those devices, so it could gather data directly from the market, without intermediaries.
Where the Pixel phone moves from upstream to downstream, as we saw, it follows a classic supply chain path.
However, once the device is in the hands of customers/consumers/users, they suddenly become the sources of data, and the whole supply chain flips upside down.
A few things to notice here:
In the Google’s Pixel case, the whole data supply chain is controlled by Google.
Customers become also the sources of raw data.
As the raw data move downstream it gets refined by Google’s algorithms and it gets used for several purposes (from products’ personalization, to monetization of its assets through advertising).
That data gets stored in the Google data centers
And the Google data centers will need to source renewable energies and materials to maintain, and run its facilities, that keep the whole infrastructure going.
From traditional supply chain to AI supply chain
AI supply chains start with the sourcing of data. This flips them upside down.
Where a traditional supply chain would start with sourcing and manufacturing with a top-down approach, an AI supply chain starts bottom-up.
The source of raw data is the customer/user, as the raw data moves downstream the supply chain, it gets processed, refined and stored.
The supply chain is the set of steps between the sourcing, manufacturing, distribution of a product up to the steps it takes to reach the final customer. It’s the set of step it takes to bring a product from raw material (for physical products) to final customers and how companies manage those processes.
A classic supply chain moves from upstream to downstream, where the raw material is transformed into products, moved through logistics and distribution to final customers. A data supply chain moves in the opposite direction. The raw data is “sourced” from the customer/user. As it moves downstream, it gets processed and refined by proprietary algorithms and stored in data centers.
Distribution represents the set of tactics, deals, and strategies that enable a company to make a product and service easily reachable and reached by its potential customers. It also serves as the bridge between product and marketing to create a controlled journey of how potential customers perceive a product before buying it.
A distribution channel is the set of steps it takes for a product to get in the hands of the key customer or consumer. Distribution channels can be direct or indirect. Distribution can also be physical or digital, depending on the kind of business and industry.
In business, vertical integration means a whole supply chain of the company is controlled and owned by the organization. Thus, making it possible to control each step through customers. in the digital world, vertical integration happens when a company can control the primary access points to acquire data from consumers.
Horizontal integration refers to the process of increasing market shares or expanding by integrating at the same level of the supply chain, and within the same industry. Vertical integration happens when a company takes control of more parts of the supply chain, thus covering more parts of it.
By definition, a horizontal market is a wider market, serving various customer types, needs and bringing to market various product lines. Or a product that indeed can serve various buyers across different verticals. Take the case of Google, as a search engine that can serve various verticals and industries (education, publishing, e-commerce, travel, and much more).
A vertical or vertical market usually refers to a business that services a specific niche or group of people in a market. In short, a vertical market is smaller by definition, and it serves a group of customers/products that can be identified as part of the same group. A search engine like Google is a horizontal player, while a travel engine like Airbnb is a vertical player.
When entering the market, as a startup you can use different approaches. Some of them can be based on the product, distribution, or value. A product approach takes existing alternatives and it offers only the most valuable part of that product. A distribution approach cuts out intermediaries from the market. A value approach offers only the most valuable part of the experience.
Backward chaining, also called backward integration, describes a process where a company expands to fulfill roles previously held by other businesses further up the supply chain. It is a form of vertical integration where a company owns or controls its suppliers, distributors, or retail locations.
A market type is a way a given group of consumers and producers interact, based on the context determined by the readiness of consumers to understand the product, the complexity of the product; how big is the existing market and how much it can potentially expand in the future.
Psychosizing is a form of market analysis where the size of the market is guessed based on the targeted segments’ psychographics. In that respect, according to psychosizing analysis, we have five types of markets: microniches, niches, markets, vertical markets, and horizontal markets. Each will be shaped by the characteristics of the underlying main customer type.
According to the book, Unlocking The Value Chain, Harvard professor Thales Teixeira identified three waves of disruption (unbundling, disintermediation, and decoupling). Decoupling is the third wave (2006-still ongoing) where companies break apart the customer value chain to deliver part of the value, without bearing the costs to sustain the whole value chain.
Disintermediation is the process in which intermediaries are removed from the supply chain, so that the middlemen who get cut out, make the market overall more accessible and transparent to the final customers. Therefore, in theory, the supply chain gets more efficient and, all in all, can produce products that customers want.
Reintermediation consists in the process of introducing again an intermediary that had previously been cut out from the supply chain. Or perhaps by creating a new intermediary that once didn’t exist. Usually, as a market is redefined, old players get cut out, and new players within the supply chain are born as a result.
As startups gain control of new markets. They expand in adjacent areas in disparate and different industries by coupling the new activities to benefits customers. Thus, even though the adjunct activities might see far from the core business model, they are tied to the way customers experience the whole business model.
The bullwhip effect describes the increasing fluctuations in inventory in response to changing consumer demand as one moves up the supply chain. Observing, analyzing, and understanding how the bullwhip effect influences the whole supply chain can unlock important insights into various parts of it.
Dropshipping is a retail business model where the dropshipper externalizes the manufacturing and logistics and focuses only on distribution and customer acquisition. Therefore, the dropshipper collects final customers’ sales orders, sending them over to third-party suppliers, who ship directly to those customers. In this way, through dropshipping, it is possible to run a business without operational costs and logistics management.
Consumer-to-manufacturer (C2M) is a model connecting manufacturers with consumers. The model removes logistics, inventory, sales, distribution, and other intermediaries enabling consumers to buy higher quality products at lower prices. C2M is useful in any scenario where the manufacturer can react to proven, consolidated, consumer-driven niche demand.
Transloading is the process of moving freight from one form of transportation to another as a shipment moves down the supply chain. Transloading facilities are staged areas where freight is swapped from one mode of transportation to another. This may be indoors or outdoors, depending on the transportation modes involved. Deconsolidation and reconsolidation are two key concepts in transloading, where larger freight units are broken down into smaller pieces and vice versa. These processes attract fees that a company pays to maintain the smooth operation of its supply chain and avoid per diem fees.
Break bulk is a form of shipping where cargo is bundled into bales, boxes, drums, or crates that must be loaded individually. Common break bulk items include wool, steel, cement, construction equipment, vehicles, and any other item that is oversized. While container shipping became more popular in the 1960s, break bulk shipping remains and offers several benefits. It tends to be more affordable since bulky items do not need to be disassembled. What’s more, break bulk carriers can call in at more ports than container ships.
Mercredi soir, des dizaines de comptes populaires du réseau social ont été piratés, publiant un tweet sur lequel une arnaque au Bitcoin attire les internautes à donner de l'argent.
At the time, my mental model was firmly set to care about the previous model they pushed for so long – you know, the one where we counted MQLs, SALs and SQLs – and I wasn’t quite ready for this new way of thinking. I resisted for as long as I could, until I finally had to concede that the new model was, in fact, helpful in pointing out the parts of B2B marketing where there was (and is) a lot of untapped value.
At its simplest the Demand Unit Waterfall model says that in B2B, the purchasing decision is made by a group of people who come together to solve a specific business problem. Jon Miller founded Engagio based off of this premise 2 years before the release of the new waterfall. In fact, you can see how closely SiriusDecisions and Engagio are aligned on this core idea in B2B.
Let’s look at simple example: let’s consider the case of a business deciding to buy more cybersecurity software.
And, in this example, let’s say that it’s our job to sell cybersecurity software to businesses.
How can the Demand Unit Waterfall help us sell more?
Targeted Personas, Buying Groups and Product Level Engagement
For one, it says that we should focus our Sales and Marketing efforts on the people who work in that business who will be responsible for making or influencing the purchasing decision (i.e., demand units).
This is a simple and obvious statement to make but difficult to do in practice because it means really knowing our customers (and potential customers) really well.
In our example, the business we’re trying to sell to probably recognized a specific vulnerability that it’s trying to secure. It’s our job to know who in that business cares about that specific vulnerability, and how best to secure it.
Should we sell to the Security Analyst? Which one?
Would the Chief Security Office care?
Is this a technical problem that someone from IT care about?
What about the compliance department?
Answering these questions means identifying the right Personas within that business, and how they work as a Buying Group to identify solutions to their problems.
Targeting and tailoring our communication to the right person within the account is a powerful way to stand out among the competition and gain trust in our market.
Executing on this vision with your Sales and Marketing teams requires you to have the following capabilities:
Account Based Foundation: You can’t be account-based when your systems aren’t. Traditional marketing technologies are lead-based, and important information about accounts is spread across disparate systems. This is the foundation that holds everything up under the account.
Do you have the right people in your database? Where are the gaps?
Are target accounts and buying groups aware of your company and its different solutions
Do the right people and right accounts spend time with you? Where?
Once you know who the right people are in your accounts, we need to be able to understand when is the right time to sell a specific product.
It helps to know what’s top of mind for the buying group in your account: What is the urgent business problem they’re trying to solve, and how can we help them?
Which of our products or services are the people in the target account buying group currently looking at?
Configurable Journeys (NEW)
Finally, this brings us to our newest capability: a way to track the Account’s progress by customizing and measuring the buying journey.
Journey analytics define how accounts move through defined stages toward intended outcomes, and give marketers metrics to manage their process with rigor. They service as leading indicators of impact on the way to closed-won revenue.
Traditional lead funnels confuse the transition from individual leads to account-based opportunities.
It’s unclear how to measure “lead to opportunity” conversion since leads are people but opportunities are attached to the account. Furthermore, if an opportunity is created at an account with one lead attached to it, what should happen to the journey for all the other people at the account?
This was one of the key shortcomings of the older SiriusDecisions Waterfalls models – and why the “demand unit” was created!
Account funnels measure customer acquisition, just like traditional demand generation. But they can also track other important stages, too, such as customer success and expansion.
Sales cares about closing accounts, not leads. With account funnels, Marketing does, too.
Though account funnel stages vary across different businesses, this simple framework is a starting point.
We can then iterate from there by adding more advanced stages like Recycled Accounts or Disqualified Accounts.
Different account types move through journeys differently. Some accounts move faster, some slower. Certain types convert better, others worse.
To unlock this insight, drill into journey metrics by account type.
Territory and business segment: you need to know how balance and flow vary by territory and business segment, otherwise some sales reps will be “hungry” — for example, what if you need more MQAs in the Northeast?
Source: inbound accounts usually convert faster than outbound ones.
Company size: large enterprises may convert slower than small companies.
Product: if MQAs for specific products convert faster than others, consider investing.
Target vs non-target: targets aren’t thinking about you. Non-targets self select. Where do your efforts succeed and stall in each case?
Industry: which verticals move best through the funnel?
First engagement campaign: often, accounts that respond to inbound channels convert faster than outbound ones.
These insights enhance Marketing’s ability to plan and make investment decisions.
SiriusDecisions developed the Demand Unit Waterfall to move away from a purely leads-focused approach that demand gen offers, in favor of something more sophisticated, strategic, and reflective of the realities on the ground for B2B Sales and Marketing. It’s another manifestation of the move towards effective, personalized, targeted approach to focus on the right set of people and accounts for your business.
I tend to change gadgets a lot more than most people, which means when I visit friends with a laptop or tablet in-tow it’s more than likely not the same laptop or tablet I had the last time I was there.
During a recent Lyft ride, I discovered that my driver had never been to San Francisco and had just arrived that morning—I happened to be his first-ever passenger in the city. A San Diego college student visiting a friend, he’d decided to bring his car along so he could get paid driving for Lyft while discovering San Francisco and meeting some locals.
Here was a professional driver being paid to deliver me from one place in my city to another, who had no understanding of the street names, which were the best routes across town, or how traffic might change throughout the day. Yet, of course, he delivered me safely, enjoyably, and promptly to my destination without even a slight setback. He even found a better route around some construction traffic that had built up on the way.
What made it possible for this San Francisco newcomer to perform his job so well? The superpowers of augmented reality in the form of GPS navigation like Google Maps and Waze.
My colleague, Jody Medich, often likes to remind people that GPS navigation is the forgotten but everyday example of augmented reality we use regularly. AR systems like these already give people superpower knowledge (as she describes it) to help them drive to new places.
Soon AR superpowers won’t just be given to drivers using GPS to navigate cities.
Anyone will be able to access the right information to perform the right set of skills, whenever and wherever they need it. We’ll be living in a world of instant and on-demand experts.
“The whole point of augmented reality is that it’s interacting with your real reality. It’s merging virtual worlds and the power of computers with the world around you. It’s also an amazing and intuitive way to deliver information on demand,” said Scott Montgomerie, CEO and co-founder of Scope AR, an enterprise augmented reality company based in San Francisco.
Scope AR is one of several enterprise augmented reality companies making AR software that gives untrained technicians the information they need to perform tasks like equipment assembly, maintenance and repair, or customer support.
Montgomerie explained the company’s approach to me in the context of assembling Ikea furniture. Most people have had the experience of struggling with the paper instructions and confusing line diagrams.
“There is this mental mapping you have to do from the line drawing to the real world which can create errors and misunderstandings. But if you saw a [piece of] Ikea furniture built right in front of you, you probably wouldn’t mess it up,” he said (Note: Someone not affiliated with Ikea built a concept of what this could look like last year).
Montgomerie explained that for many of Scope AR’s clients, if a piece of equipment in a factory goes down, typically an expert who may know how to fix it is somewhere far away. In the past, most companies resolved this by flying that expert out to the location of the problem, but quite often, that problem may need just a simple fix if you know what to do.
With Scope AR, businesses can give the average non-expert employee on-demand knowledge with intuitive AR instructions. One of their products, called Remote AR, gives companies exactly this kind of augmented reality live support.
In one anecdote, Montgomerie described a customer who manufactures fast food kitchen appliances like deep fryers and ovens for clients including Burger King and McDonald’s. If one of their appliances breaks down, there’s not typically someone on site trained to do repairs.
That company relies on general contractors to show up to locate the problem, but often these contractors have never worked with the equipment before. As a result, the first-time diagnosis rate, the rate at which a company can locate the issue on the first try, has been low.
Now, onsite contractors can diagnose the problem with the help of a trained expert. Remote experts can virtually see the problem and explain how to fix the issue quickly and on the first visit.
And the results have been remarkable. According to Montgomerie, they’re now seeing a near 100 percent success rate for first-time diagnoses.
Perhaps the most stunning example of Scope AR’s work is how they’re assisting Lockheed Martin engineers building NASA’s Orion spacecraft, a vehicle designed to travel to Mars.
Lockheed Martin engineers use the HoloLens to assemble the Orion Spacecraft. Image Credit: ScopeAR.Lockheed Martin engineers use the HoloLens to assemble the Orion Spacecraft. Image Credit: ScopeAR.
“In the old way of doing things, an engineer may start with a 3,000-page binder full of instructions for how to build a specific aspect of the spacecraft. A technician starts by going to the binder, looking up a table, finding the correct fastener, memorizing the torque setting, before then actually going in to tighten the fastener. Then quality assurance needs to come in and verify the work before they can move on,” Montgomerie explains.
That process was relatively tedious, slow, and susceptible to errors.
Now the workflow is designed with hands-free information viewed through a Microsoft HoloLens headset. In three-dimensional space with AR step-by-step instructions, the engineer can see exactly what they need to do, what the torque setting is, and where the fastener goes. They can then take a picture for quality assurance and immediately move on.
By replacing an exhaustive series of detailed paper instructions with AR instructions deployed on the HoloLens, Montgomerie said Lockheed Martin saw an 85 percent reduction in overall time for training. And, he said, Lockheed has replicated those efficiencies across a range of other manufacturing procedures with an average of 42 to 46 percent improvement.
With other major companies including Boeing, Airbus, and GE are also discovering productivity gains from augmented reality instructions, it’s likely many more manufacturing tasks will include some kind of augmented reality assistance in the future.
And for the average person at home, it’s likely not too long before you can get exactly the right information you need, layered on the real world in front of you, when and where you need it.
Before long, we’ll all be instant experts—and assembling Ikea furniture won’t seem so overwhelming.
Une intelligence artificielle créée par les chercheurs de l’Université de Californie est capable de convertir l’activité cérébrale en texte. Dans un avenir proche, cette IA pourrait s’avérer d’un précieux secours pour les personnes atteintes de mutisme.
La télépathie, à savoir la communication par la pensée, est une capacité que les Hommes cherchent à développer depuis des siècles. Grâce à l’intelligence artificielle, nous pourrions enfin toucher au but.
Joseph Makin et son équipe de chercheurs de l’Université de Californie, située à San Francisco, ont développé une IA capable de convertir l’activité cérébrale en texte. Leurs travaux sont présentés dans le journal Nature Neuroscience.
Le système a été développé en faisant appel à quatre volontaires. Des électrodes ont été implantés dans leurs cerveaux.
Il leur a ensuite été demandé de lire à haute voix 50 phrases à de multiples reprises. Il s’agissait de phrases simples, telles que » Tina Turner est une chanteuse pop » ou » les voleurs ont dérobé 30 bijoux « .
Tandis que les participants lisaient ces phrases, leur activité neuronale était enregistrée par les chercheurs. Par la suite, ces données ont été utilisées pour nourrir un algorithme de Machine Learning capable de convertir les données d’activité cérébrale correspondant à chaque phrase en une série de nombres.
Ces suites de nombres ont ensuite été injectées à un autre algorithme chargé de les convertir en séquences de mots. Au départ, les phrases générées par le système n’avaient pas de sens.
Cependant, en comparant ces séquences de mots avec les phrases lues par les participants à l’expérience, l’IA a peu à peu appris à associer les suites de nombres aux phrases avec plus de précision. Elle a aussi compris quels mots ont tendance à se suivre.
À l’issue de cette phase d’entraînement, les chercheurs ont mis le système à l’épreuve en le laissant générer du texte écrit en se basant uniquement sur l’activité cérébrale durant le discours oral.
L’intelligence artificielle en guise de prothèse phonatoire
En dépit de quelques erreurs et imprécisions, le système s’est révélé bien plus précis que les précédentes approches. Pour l’un des participants, seuls 3% de chaque phrase a eu besoin d’être corrigée en moyenne. En comparaison, le taux d’erreur moyen pour un transcripteur humain atteint 5%.
Le résultat est donc plutôt impressionnant. Cependant, les chercheurs soulignent le fait que cet algorithme n’est pour l’instant capable de prendre en charge qu’un faible nombre de phrases. En dehors de ces 50 phrases, ses performances s’estompent fortement.
Pour cause, le système repose sur l’apprentissage de phrases spécifiques, l’identification de mots à partir de l’activité cérébrale, et la reconnaissance de patterns générales en langue anglaise.
Toutefois, l’équipe s’est aperçue qu’en entraînant l’algorithme sur les données d’un participant, moins de données d’entraînement seront nécessaires pour l’utilisateur final. L’entraînement sera donc moins coûteux pour l’utilisateur final.
À terme, cette IA pourrait permettre aux patients atteints de mutisme, ou incapables de taper sur un clavier à cause d’un handicap, de communiquer par la pensée. Selon le Dr Joseph Makin, il pourrait donc s’agir d’un premier pas vers une prothèse phonatoire…
Why do so many of my salespeople fail to perform as expected? It's a loaded question. Or, is it? In our corporate sales training experience, we've seen that evaluating underperforming salespeople in the pre-hire sales assessment is crucial for success in your business.
An unofficial implementation of this paper is available here. Note that this was not made by the authors of the original paper and may contain deviations from the described technique - please judge its results accordingly! https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning
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Affinity is an AI-powered relationship intelligence platform with patented technology that structures and analyzes over a billion data points across emails, calendars, and third-party sources.
The Affinity platform helps users manage relationships across 30 million people and 7 million organizations.
Affinity’s platform harnesses the data from business communication resources like email and calendars, that people generate on a regular basis, and merges it with data pulled from sources they’ve partnered with to create a very clear view of an individual or organization’s network.
Affinity’s platform enables users to spend much more time building meaningful human relationships because they’re liberated from having to think about maintaining their CRM database.
Affinity’s patented technology structures and analyzes over a billion data points across emails, calendars, and third-party sources. The platform offers users a range of tools focused on helping them automatically manage their most valuable professional relationships, prioritize important connections, and discover untapped opportunities.
Affinity uses artificial intelligence to analyze relationship strength and illuminate the best paths to warm introductions. The platform also offers a holistic view of users’ networks in a centralized, automatically updated database without any manual upkeep. ClickZ spoke with Affinity Co-Founder and CEO, Ray Zhou, to get a better understanding of the company’s technology and Affinity’s role in a changing, technology-driven CRM landscape.
Making relationships easier to manage
Founded in 2014, Affinity is headquartered in San Francisco and is used by over one thousand financial firms globally. They’ve also seen incredible traction in commercial real estate, investment banks and other professional services. In addition to their large portfolio of asset management firms, Affinity’s clients include top tier brands like LinkedIn and Twilio.
The Affinity platform helps users manage relationships across 30 million people and 7 million organizations. Pricing for the platform starts at $125 per user per month for small teams, with various pricing packages for enterprise customers.
Back in 2014, Affinity’s founders saw a need for businesses, large and small, to leverage their existing networks more efficiently. Ray Zhou, Affinity’s co-founder and CEO, is an engineer who dropped out of Stanford after developing Affinity’s core technology..
Says Zhou, “I, along with fellow Affinity co-founders, Shubham Goel and Joe Lonsdale, spoke with people across a variety of industries. We realized that the way companies were managing their networks and relationships was incredibly suboptimal. Data science and artificial intelligence had advanced to a tipping point in terms of changing the CRM paradigm and that’s what inspired us to start the company.”
Affinity’s founders recognized a need for streamlining how companies managed their relationships. Their goal, from the start, was to build a technology that enabled professionals and businesses to fully harness their networks.
“It’s a vision of democratization,” explains Zhou. “We want to bring the technology we created to every industry and every individual professional in the world.”
Tapping the source of business connections
Affinity was created on the premise that it’s impossible to tell who really knows who from standard sources such as LinkedIn, social media, and personal email.
“The real source of truth about people’s networks is inside their business communications,” says Zhou. “Everyone uses the same tools—emails, calendars, and phone calls to talk to each other. At Affinity, we view these tools as more than just ways for us to communicate. They’re also data sources.”
The raw data gleaned from these common tools paints a powerful picture of what business networks look like. Affinity’s platform harnesses the data from business communication resources that people generate on a regular basis and merges it with data pulled from sources they’ve partnered with to create a very clear view of an individual or organization’s network.
One of Affinity’s patented technologies is a user interface that visually demonstrates the strength of the relationship between two people. The tool does this using historical interaction data which analyzes the data then visually displays it by showing the strength of the relationship.
Affinity’s interface enables users to visualize the strength of people’s connections
Automating the CRM process
There are two key problems that Affinity solves for its customers—automating the manual process of maintaining relationships (e.g., removing data entry tasks required by CRM tools) and helping people make better decisions about how they allocate time to their network.
Says Zhou, “Our entire thesis around the problems that Affinity solves is that the meaning for CRM has been lost over time. Today we think of CRM as a database of contacts that puts the onus of keeping the data up to date on the user. The onus of figuring out what insights to be derived from that data is also on the user. Everyone assumes they need to maintain this database to drive any value from it, but it’s important to remember that CRM is a means to an end.”
Affinity’s platform, in the most ideal sense, enables a world where people are spending much more time building meaningful human relationships because they’re liberated from having to think about a database at all.
“In an ideal world, there is no database at all,” explains Zhou, “Technology is capable of understanding and capturing the activity around our relationships by harnessing the natural data streams we’re already creating through various communication sources like email. In the ideal end state, the user doesn’t need to think about a database because it’s automating itself, constructing the background for the user.”
Onboarding with Affinity
It takes like less than a week to get fully set up with Affinity. The platform integrates with a variety of different protocols that enable users to sync their email, calendar, and other accounts with a one-click login. From there, Affinity constructs and automates the user’s network.
“When you log into Affinity, you see your entire network of connections fully mapped out,” says Zhou. “I can say with pretty high confidence that there’s no other platform on the market that achieves this with Affinity’s degree of automation.”
Source: Affinity
Affinity maintains a relentless focus on usability and design. They aim to create a positive user experience that allows users to focus on the strengths of their relationships and how to leverage those relationships.
In this way, Affinity is unique from other popular relationship management and sales tools such as Salesforce, but there are also many Affinity customers who integrate Affinity with Salesforce to get a more complete view of their customer relationships.
Says Zhou, “On the relationship intelligence side, we truly believe that we have a differentiator in how we are handling the insights that we are surfacing.”
Visualizing the future of CRM
Affinity recently announced the acquisition of Nudge.ai, a relationship product specifically aimed at sales teams in a B2B landscape.
Per the release, “Nudge is a relationship intelligence platform designed to help sales professionals access new accounts, analyze deal risk, measure account health and more. Tens of thousands of B2B sales representatives rely on Nudge to find and nurture relationships in order to generate and accelerate their pipeline.”
For Affinity, the future of CRM is about reducing the many hours of time people spend each week entering information by hand into a spreadsheet, CRM system, or contact book. “All of this can be automated away,” says Zhou. “It can be done 24/7 in the background by the AI that Affinity has built.”
Affinity gives teams instant visibility into all the different paths of introduction that are available to users. It’s an alternative to all the guesswork involved in platforms like LinkedIn, enabling you to answer questions about your network—in real time—involving relationships and connections.
Affinity’s team
Says Zhou, “The reality is your team might have a relationship with the individual that you’re trying to reach out to, but you might not know this. The old school way was to send a message to everyone, e.g., ‘Does anyone know John Doe over at Goldman Sachs?’ With Affinity, you can see that Jane in Accounting has a 92% relationship score with John Doe, so you can ask Jane for an introduction instead of sending John a cold email.”
One of Affinity’s main goals is to get people to realize that the most valuable information about their business relationships is something that they already own. It’s data that every company and every team has accrued through utilizing email, calendars and other communication tools.
“As we look ahead into where we take Affinity in the longer term, we’re focused on helping other markets and industries understand the paradigm shift that technology is creating in CRM. We’re we’re trying to get people to realize that relationships are what drive the world’s most critical industries. The most powerful information that you need in order drive relationships across these verticals is something that everyone already owns. They don’t think about it as a data source. That’s the seminal challenge that we’re trying to solve.”
Dans cet article, vous apprendrez les fondations nécessaires pour devenir un Top Performer en Vente ! A votre sabre laser, que la Force soit avec vous…Luttez contre l’Empire !
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Hi PH community - hope you’re all staying safe, healthy, and optimistic in this difficult time.
Today, Anchor is releasing an all new version of our remote podcasting tool, Record with Friends, now in beta.
Like all of you, the team at Anchor is adjusting to ever evolving constraints and circumstances right now. Given the distributed world we’re now living in, we’re also hearing from our users that there’s an increased need for tools that can adapt to the current situation. So today, after working quickly over the past few weeks to expand Record with Friends’ functionality, we’re making it a little bit easier to record with others, even from a distance.
Now up to 4 people can join your podcast recording from any device, on desktop or mobile, with or without an Anchor account. And on mobile, your guests don’t need to download the Anchor app - they can record directly through their mobile web browser. This means it’s incredibly easy for anyone to join your podcast, whether that’s a friend, family member, or expert you want to have a quick conversation with for your podcast. Like Anchor’s other features, it’s available globally and 100% free to use.
We hope today’s release will make it a little bit easier for us all to talk with each other, share stories, and capture conversations to share with the world through podcasting.
Let me know if you have any questions, and stay safe!
”
– Mike Mignano
This video on 5S Methodology will take you through everything you need to know about the workplace oganization method, 5S. This video also covers a number of different topics like the basics of the 5S methodology, its benefits and the process of 5S, like Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. So now, let's jump in and learn about the 5S methodology.
Learn to develop your organizational projects with the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification online program. Aligned to the IASSC exam, this online six sigma certification integrates lean and the DMAIC methodology with case studies to provide you the skills required for an organization's growth.
About Simplilearn SIx Sigma green belt course: This Lean Six Sigma Green Belt course provides an overview of Six Sigma and the DMAIC methodology and is aligned to the leading Green Belt certifications at ASQ and IASSC. In this Lean Six Sigma Green Belt course, you will learn how to measure current performance to identify process issues and how to formulate solutions.
Six Sigma Green Belt Training Key Features: - 56 hours of high-quality blended learning - 33 PDUs offered - 4 simulation test papers, 4 real-life projects - Aligned to ASQ and IASSC
Eligibility: Lean Six Sigma professionals are in high demand due to their ability to use problem-solving techniques to reach business solutions and assuring quality control throughout the process. The Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification is ideal for Quality system managers, Quality engineers, Quality supervisors, Quality analysts and managers, Quality auditors, and any individual wishing to improve quality and process within an organization.
We are facing a global health and economic crisis few have ever experienced before. It’s clear the only way we will deal with this is by working together, helping each other.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had hundreds of calls and emails from sales managers struggling to figure things out. I have thought a lot about how I can best help sales managers step up their game in these difficult times.
As a result, I’ve decided to make the Kindle version of Sales Manager Survival Guide available as close to free as possible (If I can figure it out, I will make it available for free). I’ve marked it down to $0.99. I will keep it at this price until at least April 30, 2020.
I wrote Sales Manager Survival Guide as a pragmatic desk guide to help managers think about how to help their people perform at the highest levels possible. This is more critical now than ever before.
Even at $0.99, Amazon insists on paying me a $0.35 royalty. Through April 30, 100% of the royalties I receive for both the Kindle and hardcopy versions will be donated. My good friend, Jill Konrath, helped me think about how to get the best leverage out of these contributions. I will be buying gift cards from local small businesses in my community to help support them. I will donate those gift cards toLaura’s House, a fantastic organization helping battered women.
I hope Sales Manager Survival Guide is a useful resource as you and your teams think about how you best help your customers and achieve your own goals. We will only get through this by working together for our common interests.
Visit http://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more.
Philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates offers insights into the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing why testing and self-isolation are essential, which medical advancements show promise and what it will take for the world to endure this crisis. (This virtual conversation is part of the TED Connects series, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers. Recorded March 24, 2020)
The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You're welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), submit a Media Request here: http://media-requests.TED.com
What’s going to happen to SDRs and prospecting teams in the future? The sales development function is always changing. We spoke to Josh Roth to hear how he thinks prospecting teams and the role of an SDR is going to change. Here’s a hint, it’s an exciting time to be an SDR right now. Below is a quick summary of the conversation, but listen to the full interview via the YouTube video below.
Here’s how the structure of prospecting teams is going to change…
Prospecting Teams Using Marketing Skills
Morgan: You mentioned marketing. Have you had any thoughts of going back? And what are some things that you studied while you were in marketing that help you and your SDR leadership role and as an NSS sales rep?
Josh: When I started as a sales rep, I think you were still able to sell with a phone and Google. We were still at the point where if you would call a company maybe headcount is 5000, you still might be able to get the decision-maker on the phone just by saying, “Hey, I’m looking to speak to this person”. So we had a little bit more success there.
Now with all of the different gatekeepers, administrative assistants, phone systems, that can kind of block your way, the model is really shifted. What I learned was to create. You really need to create in sales development. But I would argue with sales as a whole, you have to create. You can’t just sell with a phone and Google anymore. One out of every 18 calls to a decision-maker will get answered. That statistic was as of two years ago. So I think it’s probably closer to one out of every 22 or even 25 calls now.
You’ve got to create posts on LinkedIn, do podcasts like you’re doing, really be sure to create valuable content. Don’t just repurpose stuff. I mean if you go on LinkedIn, I can’t tell you how many people are just repurposing Gary V or Grant Cardone content. Go in and create your own, talk about your own experiences, do a debate, do awards, anything that can get people saying like, “This person has experience that he or she knows what they’re talking about”. That’s what I learned in marketing that is so applicable to sales dev today. Create. Do what you got to do, but create.
The Future of Prospecting Teams
Morgan: Now let’s go into the topic of where do you see the SDR role going? Where do you see the model going? What are prospecting teams going to be like?
Josh: You know, I think that you’re gonna end up seeing reps starting to build careers as top of funnel SDRs, you’re going to see compensation that’s going to become equal to what building a career is worth as opposed to having three month ramps, six, nine, twelve month timelines as SDRs, I think you’re going to start seeing it being a two to three year career as an SDR and filtering into either account executive work or actual SDR leadership where you’re going to jump into like a BDM for example. I see from an organizational structure standpoint, where it could go.
I think the other way it could go is cycling into full-cycle reps as opposed to SDR and BDR where you have a similar title. Where an SDR and account executive, similar title, similar roles, everyone is full cycle, but typically the account executives will have a larger book of business accounts may be reassigned, whereas SDRs are going to be more up that kind of initial outreach. I think you’ll see the life cycle of SDRs just be elongated a little bit instead of kind of these 12-15 month roles, I think you’ll see them instead about two to three years.
Compensation Plans
Morgan: Are you going to see where people are going to be compensated more on pipeline that they source that’s getting close? Are people just going to stick with meeting was just scheduled and completed? That’s how they’re going comp. Do you feel like that’s going to change in the model?
Josh: I think realistically what I would like to do is kind of similar to the account executive lane. If you’re self prospecting, if your bringing in leads (I’m assuming this isn’t an outbound function) I would rather you get compensated at a higher rate than if you were just bringing in, for example, a demo request or interest level call that is through demand gen function. If you’re bringing someone that’s brand new, I want you to be compensated more. More than if someone that’s already exhibited interest or clicked through on an email. I just want to structure that a little differently from a comp standpoint.
That’s a wrap. Join us next time
If you made it this far, you’re the best. Thanks for reading and listening to this interview. We hope you gained a ton from it and will listen in next time. Don’t forget to check out our recent podcast episode highlights too.
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Dans la lutte contre le coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, apparu à Wuhan fin 2019, l’intelligence artificielle et le Big Data pourraient être les meilleurs atouts de l’humanité. Découvrez comment ces technologies sont utilisées pour endiguer l’épidémie.
Les autorités chinoises sont actuellement lancées dans une course pour endiguer la propagation du coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 à l’échelle mondiale. Alors que la maladie COVID-19 a déjà infecté plus de 70 000 personnes et réclamé 1775 vies à l’échelle mondiale, les chercheurs du monde entier mettent tout en oeuvre pour éviter la pandémie.
Dans cette bataille contre le nouveau coronavirus apparu à Wuhan, le Big Data et l’intelligence artificielle se révèlent d’un précieux secours. Ces technologies avaient déjà permis à l’entreprise canadienne BlueDot de prédire l’épidémie, mais elles peuvent aussi aider à la contenir.
Dans un communiqué, la National Health Commission (NHC) chinoise recommande aux gouvernements locaux d’utiliser » le Big Data pour suivre et détecter les cas, et prévoir le développement de l’épidémie en temps réel « .
Ainsi, les autorités sont appelées à » renforcer le lien d’informations entre la sécurité publique, le transport et les autres départements « . Elles sont notamment invitées à partager les données médicales, de communication, et celles des transports tels que les trains et les avions.
Le Big Data pour retrouver les voyageurs de Wuhan
Alors que la ville de Wuhan est en quarantaine depuis le 23 janvier 2020, plus de 5 millions de voyageurs ont quitté la ville durant le festival du Nouvel An Lunaire selon le maire. L’une des urgences est donc de retrouver ces personnes avant qu’elles ne propagent le virus dans toute la Chine et au-delà.
Afin d’y parvenir, les autorités s’appuient sur les données. Dans certains quartiers de Pékin, les résidents sont sommés de scanner un code QR pour renseigner leurs informations personnelles : numéro de téléphone, adresse postale, plaque d’immatriculation, récents voyages et mode de transport…
Il leur est aussi demandé s’ils ont » récemment » visité la province du Hubei, dont Wuhan est la capitale. Les citoyens doivent aussi préciser s’ils ont eu un contact avec une personne de cette région.
Récemment, un homme qui avait voyagé à Wuhan s’était mis en quarantaine autonome dans sa résidence située à Nanjing dans la province du Jiangsu. Il n’avait parlé de son voyage à personne, mais les autorités locales ont pu l’identifier en analysant les données de voyage depuis la ville. A sa grande surprise, des officiers ont ainsi été envoyés à son domicile afin de vérifier sa température.
Plusieurs entreprises chinoises ont aussi développé des applications permettant aux utilisateurs de vérifier s’ils ont pris le même avion ou le même train que des personnes infectées. Ces applis se basent sur des données tirées de listes publiées par les médias officiels.
L’intelligence artificielle pour détecter la fièvre
La fièvre est l’un des principaux symptômes du COVID-19. De fait, détecter la fièvre est une priorité pour les autorités chinoises afin d’identifier les infectés potentiels.
Dans la plupart des quartiers, ce sont des thermomètres traditionnels qui sont utilisés à cet effet. Cependant, les hubs de transports publics essayent également des systèmes reposant sur l’intelligence artificielle et les caméras infrarouges.
A Pékin, un système développé par Baidu (le Google chinois) scanne les voyageurs de la gare Qinghe en combinant l’infrarouge et la reconnaissance faciale. Si la température d’une personne dépasse 37,3 degrés, une alarme se déclenche et le personnel de la station effectue un deuxième test.
Selon Baidu, le système peut vérifier plus de 200 personnes par minute. Cette méthode est donc bien plus rapide que les scanners thermiques utilisés dans les aéroports.
L’entreprise chinoise Megvii spécialisée dans l’IA a elle aussi développé un système similaire. Celui-ci est utilisé dans une station de métro de Pékin. Pour créer cette technologie, plus de 100 personnes ont dû collaborer depuis leur domicile pendant les vacances du Nouvel An Lunaire.
La Chine améliore sa reconnaissance faciale face aux masques de protection
Comme évoqué auparavant, la reconnaissance faciale est utilisée par la Chine pour détecter la fièvre chez les potentiels infectés. Cependant, cette technologie se révèle inefficace durant la crise puisque les citoyens chinois portent des masques pour se protéger du virus.
Pour remédier au problème, le South China Morning Post révèle que le gouvernement chinois a décidé d’améliorer sa technologie de reconnaissance faciale. Désormais, le système est en mesure de reconnaître les masques médicaux, mais aussi les autres obstructions telles que les barbes, les écharpes, les masques de purification d’air etc…
Pour ce faire, la Chine s’est tourné vers les travaux du chercheur Amarjot Singh de l’université de Stanford. A l’aide de son équipe, ce dernier a créé un algorithme conçu pour reconnaître les visages même s’ils sont couverts par des masques, des lunettes ou même des chapeaux.
Cet algorithme examine 14 points du visage et les connecte entre eux pour effectuer une identification. Une version de cette technologie est à présent déployée en Chine, et aide les résidences à reconnaître leurs habitants et à refuser les visiteurs même s’ils sont équipés de masques.
Lorsque l’épidémie sera terminée, l’utilisation de cette version améliorée du système de reconnaissance faciale se poursuivra en Chine. Les entreprises et les résidences pourront ainsi profiter d’une sécurité accrue.
Prédire la propagation du virus grâce aux données
Après l’épidémie de SARS au début des années 2000, ayant causé le décès de 774 personnes dans le monde, l’équipe de John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer au Boston Children’s Hospital et professeur à la Harvard Medical School, a développé l’outil Healthmap.
Grâce au Machine Learning, Cet outil agrège des informations sur les épidémies à partir d’articles d’actualité du monde entier, de réseaux sociaux, de discussions en ligne et plus encore. Le programme cherche notamment des publications mentionnant des symptômes spécifiques du virus, en provenance de zones géographiques où les médecins ont rapporté de nouveaux cas potentiels.
Le traitement naturel du langage est utilisé pour analyser les textes postés sur les réseaux sociaux et distinguer une personne commentant l’actualité d’une personne se plaignant de son état. Ces données sont ensuite organisées automatiquement et des visualisations sont générées pour démontrer la manière dont la maladie se propage.
A l’époque du SARS, les experts de la santé n’avaient pas encore accès à de tels volumes de données issues du web ou des réseaux sociaux pour suivre les épidémies. Il s’agit donc d’un atout dans la lutte contre le SARS-CoV-2.
Toutefois, même pour l’IA, il peut être difficile de faire le tri entre les données fiables et les spéculations, rumeurs, fake news et publications au sujet de symptômes d’une simple grippe. Les modèles de Machine Learning doivent être entraînés à déceler cette nuance subtile pour être réellement efficaces.
Malgré tout, cette approche s’est d’ores et déjà révélée efficace pour détecter le coronavirus. Dès le 30 décembre 2019, les données en provenance des réseaux sociaux et médias chinois ont permis de détecter un cluster de rapports sur une épidémie comparable à la grippe. L’information a été partagée à l’OMS, mais il a fallu un peu plus de temps pour confirmer la gravité de la situation.
Ainsi, Healthmap vient compléter les techniques d’agrégation de données plus traditionnelles utilisées par les organisations telles que le CDC américain ou l’OMS. Des médecins, des chercheurs et des gouvernements s’appuient sur ces données.
Désormais, Healthmap est même utilisé par le projet Early Alerting and Reporting, visant à détecter rapidement les menaces biologiques. Il s’agit d’un projet coopératif international entre les institutions de santé publique, auquel participe notamment le CDC. De même, l’initiative Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources de l’OMS utilise aussi cet outil.
En plus de permettre d’identifier de nouveaux cas, cette technique pourrait aider les experts à décrypter le comportement du virus plus rapidement qu’en se basant sur les sources médicales traditionnelles. Il est par exemple possible de déterminer l’âge, le genre et l’emplacement géographique des personnes les plus à risque.
De même, l’entreprise canadienne BlueDot, basée à Toronto, collecte des données en provenance de multiples les sources en ligne. Cette startup fondée en 2014 était parvenue à prédire l’épidémie plusieurs jours à l’avance.
À présent, elle utilise les informations des compagnies aériennes pour prédire où le virus risque de se répandre. Un précieux recours pour les compagnies aériennes et pour le personnel des services d’urgences risquant d’être les premiers à interagir avec des patients infectés.
Identifier les infectés grâce à l’IA
L’institut de recherche Damo Academy, fondé par le géant chinois de la tech et du e-commerce Alibaba, a développé un algorithme d’intelligence artificielle capable de diagnostiquer le coronavirus avec une précision de 96% à partir de tomographies.
Les chercheurs ont entraîné un modèle d’IA à partir d’échantillons de données issues de plus de 5000 cas confirmés. Désormais, cette IA peut distinguer les patients infectés par le SARS-CoV-2 de ceux atteints d’une pneumonie virale ordinaire.
L’outil a été utilisé pour la première fois au Qiboshan Hospital de Zhengzhou, dans la province de Henan. Il sera prochainement adopté par plus de 100 hôpitaux dans les provinces de Hubei, Guangdong et Anhui.
Cet algorithme pourrait permettre de réduire la pression pesant sur les hôpitaux, puisqu’il permet d’effectuer le diagnostic en seulement 20 secondes. D’ordinaire, un médecin humain a besoin de 5 à 15 minutes pour analyser la tomographie d’un cas suspect et livrer son diagnostic.
Auparavant, les chercheurs de la Damo Academy ont également développé un outil de santé publique basé sur l’IA. Celui-ci délivre des informations sur le virus, et a été déployé dès le 27 janvier 2020 par le gouvernement de la province Zhejiang. De cette façon, les citoyens peuvent obtenir des informations sur l’épidémie via une application officielle.
L’IA pour trouver un remède au COVID-2019
L’entreprise Insilico Medicine, basée à Hong-Kong, a utilisé l’IA pour créer une base de données de composés de médicaments. Afin de trouver rapidement comment guérir le COVID-2019, la firme vient d’ouvrir partiellement sa database et permet aux entreprises pharmaceutiques du monde entier de l’utiliser.
La semaine dernière, Insilico a publié sur son site la structure moléculaire de centaines de composés chimiques conçus en quatre jours pour vaincre le coronavirus. En utilisant les méthodes traditionnelles, il aurait fallu beaucoup plus longtemps.
Pour parvenir à cette prouesse, les 85 Data Scientists de l’entreprise ont exploité la puissance du Cloud Amazon et ses propres Data Centers basés aux Etats-Unis et à Taiwan. La firme demande à présent les retours de médecins chimistes et compte synthétiser et tester une centaine de composés avec ses partenaires.
Elle prévoit aussi de tester et de synthétiser entre cinq et dix composés par ses propres soins. Toutefois, pour chaque composé, l’opération requiert au bas mot 12 000 dollars et ce montant peut atteindre plusieurs dizaines de milliers de dollars. C’est la raison pour laquelle Insilico demande l’aide de partenaires industriels et d’instituts de recherche…
Empêcher les futures épidémies grâce à l’IA
Grâce à l’intelligence artificielle, les futures épidémies de coronavirus pourraient être évitées. Plusieurs entreprises travaillent à entraîner des IA pour découvrir de nouveaux médicaments.
Parmi elles, on compte la startup Exscientia Ltd basée à Oxford. Selon son CEO, Andrew Hopkins, de nouveaux traitements pourraient aller de la conception au test clinique en seulement 18 à 24 mois au cours de la prochaine décennie grâce à l’IA.
Ainsi, la startup elle-même a conçu un nouveau composé pour le traitement des troubles obsessionnels compulsifs qui est déjà prêt à être testé en laboratoire moins d’un an après la phase de recherche initiale. C’est presque 5 fois plus rapide que la moyenne.
De même, la startup Healx, basée à Cambridge, utilise le Machine Learning pour trouver de nouveaux cas d’usage aux médicaments existants. Ces deux entreprises nourrissent leurs algorithmes à l’aide d’informations en provenance de sources telles que des journaux, des bases de données biomédicales et des essais cliniques. En se basant sur ces données, les algorithmes peuvent suggérer de nouveaux traitements pour les maladies.
Selon Neil Thompson, le CSO de Healx, cette technique pourrait très bien être déployée contre une future épidémie similaire à celle du SARS-CoV-2 à condition de disposer de suffisamment de données sur la nouvelle maladie. La semaine dernière, le MIT a annoncé avoir découvert un nouveau composé antibiotique capable de tuer les superbactéries grâce à l’IA.
Malheureusement, même si l’intelligence artificielle permet de découvrir un médicament rapidement ou de trouver un nouveau cas d’usage à un médicament existant, il est nécessaire de le tester cliniquement avant de pouvoir le prescrire. Ceci peut prendre plusieurs années avant que le remède soit enfin commercialisé…
model says that in B2B, the purchasing decision is made by a group of people who come together to solve a specific business problem. Jon Miller founded Engagio based off of this premise 2 years before the release of the new waterfall. In fact, you can see how closely SiriusDecisions and Engagio are aligned on this core idea in B2B.
Affinity’s interface enables users to visualize the strength of people’s connections
Source: Affinity
Affinity’s team
