Alexandra Chou

Dear fellow salespeople: If you have friends, family, clients, or colleagues in the LA area, please extend a little extra kindness right now; they’re likely not doing okay. Press pause on calling your California prospects and instead take a moment to check in with them. A quick message or thoughtful gesture can go a long way in offering support during tough times. Let's prioritize empathy and genuine connections in our work. After all, sales is not just about closing deals; it's about building relationships that matter. Stay safe, everyone 💜

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In case you missed her at the Denver Sales Enablement Summit, Seismic VP of Enablement Irina Soriano outlines the Enablement Value Chain (EVC) in a new article for Sales Enablement Collective. What is the EVC exactly? According to Irina, it's a "proven framework to align your analytics, partnerships, and enablement team operating model in a unified approach that demonstrably improves seller behavior and business outcomes." Learn more at the link:

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Our partnership with Brex now gives us unparalleled insight and breadth in SaaS purchasing reports

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Some thoughts on the "RevOps tech as a category is dead" hysteria. 1) Something can't be dead when it never really lived. The category didn't get to PMF, the end, bye. 2) Notice how it's the founders, sales, and marketing people saying the category is dead and the RevOps folk saying "well yeah, because we never needed these products"? RevOps tech in the state that it is now is created by happy ears. 3) A department can have authority and be strategic without a budget. I honestly didn't think we'd need to have this talk, but okay. RevOps isn't a standalone department, it sits over three revenue-generating teams. That means we use the budgets available to those teams to make them better. A captain's armband doesn't make you a captain, and a budget sure as 🦆 doesn't create authority or make you more strategic. 4) RevOps exists to make things efficient. Purchasing unnecessary (let's be honest) software is by default not efficient and needlessly adds operating costs. 5) Every piece of RevOps software I've seen was something I can do in less time, for free, and better with the tech I already have. The category could rise again, but the products on offer need to be - gasp - not basic. 6) Finally, as an aside - supporting vs strategic is a false dichotomy. RevOps can, and should be, both. I have no issue saying that RevOps supports Revenue teams, because that's what we do. We don't sell, we don't market, we don't look after customers. We support those that do, to do it better, faster, easier, and armed with the full context. That's both supporting and strategic in one flacon, and if you really hate the idea that your role supports somebody, it may be time to talk to a therapist.

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"So make the friendship bracelets Take the moment and taste it You've got no reason to be afraid” 🎤 “You’re On Your Own Kid” by Taylor Swift One of the most common questions I get at Gainsight (beyond “why do you have so many shoes?”) is “what have you learned about running events?” Coming off the high of having 2000 members of the #CustomerSuccess community together with us in St. Louis last week at #Pulse2024, I thought I’d share 5 things I’ve learned over 11 years of Pulse events: 🎉 Create and Execute On a Bold “Fun” Theme: So many conferences are SOOOOO boring! A big chunk of the reason is the events lack a soul. For us, the formula that’s worked is to start with a cultural concept that evokes emotions. In this case, we made Pulse 2024 all about high school and the 1980s. We then had our design dream team, led by Hayley Cromwell, execute a stunning visual experience, including high school lockers, a Breakfast Club spoof and branded jean jackets! 💪🏾 Link the “Fun” Theme to a Business Theme: We juxtaposed the humanity of the past (1980s and high school) with a human and vulnerable look at the future. Everyone naturally has excitement and anxiety about the effect AI will have on humans. We announced what we called the “Human-First AI Playbook,” including dozens of AI-powered features in our product. ❤️ Lead With Vulnerability: As many of you know, I’m a fan of bringing vulnerability to business. This shows up at Pulse in many ways. One is me doing a closing keynote about my personal journey. This time, I shared a story about adversity and uncertainty (climbing out of the Grand Canyon after just tearing my ACL in the canyon) and what it means about understanding our own work and personal futures, particularly in the face of AI. I think opening up sets the tone for others being “real” with fellow attendees. 👊🏾 Build Community: Nothing brings me more joy than seeing the #CustomerSuccess community coming together - to help each other, give advice or be a shoulder to cry on. We try to reinforce the concept that “Pulse is not a Gainsight conference, it’s a community conference.” In the first keynote, we do our annual “Pulse fist bump” (find a neighbor and give them a fist bump). Symbols like this go a long way. 😂 Moms FTW: While Andy Cohen (our celebrity guest) was funny, no one could top my mom. Quite bizarrely, my mother has become a big part of the Pulse community and regularly has been featured in the keynote. Whether walking onto the stage to give me a fist bump and tell me “you forgot your lunch” or pitching Andy Cohen on a TV idea (see below), family help to humanize the experience of a business conference. While those are my learnings, the real stars of the show were our EPIC events team, led by Lauren Olerich and Kat Leong. Best in the business, my far! What have you learned from hosting events (whether big conferences or small dinners)?

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Amen to this. Senior leaders need to get involved in the details and understand the structural and operational issues in their organizations that lead to customer churn. You hold the power to improve the quality of your product and the value of your service - you're customer facing Sales and CSM teams do not.

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Pipeline generation went down 47% in 2022 (see chart below). And 63% of companies have reported facing significant challenges with outbound in 2023. Yet, we're told there is this new magic wand, called AI, that will solve all our problems. My nuanced take (sorry, this post won't call "outbound dead" or "ai overrated") is: - Pipeline is hard to generate today *and* - AI can help, but it's not a silver bullet. One way I've been helping companies to use AI in their outbound is through creative, thoughtful "micro-campaigns" (read more here: https://lnkd.in/erSS5Kbm). Micro-campaigns are: - Small, highly-targeted lists of, say, 50-250 contacts. - These lists are generated using *very* specific filtering and/or signals (usually using AI/agents at least for certain parts). - Each list (aka "micro-campaign") is relevant this week, but won't be next month. On January 16th, I'll be hanging with the legend, Erol Toker to talk about micro-campaigns and "irresistible offers." Topics we're going to jam on: 1. Why Email Has Changed: Understand what happened last October and how to adapt. ​ 2. Crafting Irresistible Offers: Learn how to create compelling offers that target click rates and NOT JUST reply rates. ​ 3. Building Signal Stacks: Discover how to stack together your best signals to find the best time to outbound. ​ 4. Weekly Micro-Experiments: Learn how to build your team around a cadence of small, highly focused campaigns using proprietary signal stacks. We're going to brainstorm with audience members during the call. So, register and join us live for a chance to have us come up with an irresistible offer or micro-campaign for your company (Jan 16 at 9am PT): https://lnkd.in/gaRaAn2N

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Amplitude Announces Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results: - Third quarter revenue was $75.2M, up 6% year-over-year - ARR was $298M, up $8M from the end of the second quarter - We now have almost 3,500 paying customers, with 567 of those representing more than $100k or more per year Q3 was all about winning the enterprise. We are starting customer conversations differently, reaching key decision-makers, and demonstrating fast value in ways we weren’t before. The result is a higher-quality book of business, with better attach rates, longer contracts, and bigger expansions (we had multiple expansions exceeding 7 figures in Q3). Consolidation is another big theme that's been playing out for several quarters. It’s clear that our customers are looking for an all-in-one platform, and they are finding that in Amplitude. And we've continued to make our platform better. In Q3, we launched Amplitude Made Easy, our completely redesigned platform experience that takes the difficulty out of analytics. We also deepened our partnership with our friends at HubSpot, launched Web Experimentation, and acquired Command AI (fka CommandBar). To our Ampliteers, partners, and customers—we couldn’t do it without you! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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Here’s what to focus on when building global SDR teams ⬇️ With teams operating in different regions, there’s always a balancing act. You want your messaging and approaches to be aligned. But you need to lean into what works in different cultures. Here’s three key areas to consider. 🌍 Cultural nuances Your teams will want to work in different ways. Invest time to understand local etiquette, working styles etc. Understanding these and not going against them unnecessarily will immediately help things run a bit smoother. 🧪Global vs local playbook How fluid are the processes and playbooks you run. From a standard global model, are you allowing teams to adapt these, or are they rigid? A balance I like is roughly 70% global GTM function standardized with 30% leeway for regions. 🧠 Training and development Ensure that everyone across your global team has access to the same opportunities and a consistent skill level across your team. Layer this in with localized training to make it more relevant. If you want more advice on building successful global SDR teams. I spoke with Sean Hayes recently on how he’s done just that at Aircall Episode in comments.

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Want to hear something crazy that many companies, especially startups, struggle with? - Producing a simple, easy-to-understand, comp plan for the sales team. - Delivering that comp plan in the first weeks of the year. Many take months to get it out. - Changing that comp plan a bunch of times throughout the year. - Paying commissions on-time and accurately. - Focusing on the big picture and long-term relationship building when resolving disputes. I know a lot of this stuff isn’t easy for sales, finance and operations leaders, but it’s barebones if you want to build a winning culture.

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"There was a time when buyers were less incredulous about the decisions that they were making. Buying committees weren’t as large as they are now. Now sales and transactions are under a microscope." - Chris Turner, Sales Engineering Manager at @Salesloft On this episode of RevTalks, Chris and Rebby John, discuss changes to the sales and presales professionals’ roles, the keys to multithreading ever-expanding buying groups, getting to ROI faster in conversations, the story of “how” in sales, AI, and more. Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/e_GBVqJV

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Bay Area RevOps leaders - last call y'all! 🚨 We're getting 25+ revenue operators together next week in San Francisco, We'll start with a 90 minute brainstorming session where we tackle: ✅ What RevOps IS and SHOULD BE in every organization (hint: they're not the same thing) ✅ What’s standing in the way of a unified go-to-market operations function ✅ How to convince CEOs to respond and adapt to evolving market conditions by adopting a comprehensive revenue operations charter ✅ A path for RevOps representation in the C-Suite ✅ Current problems and issues faced by RevOps teams today and how to solve them And we'll end with a casual networking and cocktail reception 🥂 Sounds like fun, egh? 🤷 If you're around next week and want to help define the future of RevOps, then join us...deets below. 📆 Thursday August 22nd at 2pm PT 📍 Prosper Hotel, San Francisco, CA ⛓️‍💥 RSVP → https://hubs.ly/Q02Hvfj40 PS - shoutout to our sponsor Subskribe for making this event possible 🫶 #revops #revenueoperations #salesops #salesoperations #marketingops #marketingoperations #mops #sops #cxops #csops #gtmops #alltheops

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Top H1 takeaway from QBR's about our Rev Org: "We're an ecosystem, not a hierarchy." (h/t Alexandra B.) We collaborate, everyone's voice matters, and we strive to put people in roles they love so they can be madly successful. Hearing this statement was validation that what we are building in the Revenue Org at LibraryPass is unique, and scalable, and contagious. And we have roles coming soon! So if you're interested in being part of an ecosystem, let's chat. Here's to an even better H2!

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Our CEO, Tim Zheng, took the stage at SaaStr Annual in September and shared some key lessons we learned while scaling to $100M ARR. ‼️ Spoiler alert: one of our favorites is that small teams CAN move mountains. He also covers: ↳ Transitioning from a sales-led growth model to a product-led growth (PLG) business ↳ How to build a PLG business ↳ Pivoting + reinventing the business to reaccelerate growth ↳ Building a strong business in a highly competitive industry with much larger incumbent players Check out the whole talk here and let us know your favorite learning in the comments: https://lnkd.in/g8VgwfKq #SaaStrAISummit #SaaStr #SaaStrAnnual Jason M. Lemkin

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Josh & I get to have insightful discussions with RevOps leaders each week. We want to give back by sharing this wisdom more broadly. We are launching our webinar series, Aim for Excellence (see what we did there?). Each episode is an interview with RevOps and GTM leaders we admire about their advice on GTM ops, strategy, and career paths. We had the great pleasure to kick this off with Katherine Zhang recently. Katherine has led RevOps teams at sizable companies like Project44, Relativity, Cognex, and Dell EMC. A few of my favorite highlights from our conversation: - A clarifying definition of RevOps that helps teams ensure they are always working on impactful initiatives - How to turn RevOps from being “order takers” into a strategic function - The importance of trusted (but not perfect!) data - How to get a seat at the table as a RevOps leader Take a listen to our discussion (links in comments) and let us know what you think!

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What a quarter. Product market fit that is like nothing I've experienced before, world class engineering talent, incredible customers, and the beginnings of a GTM machine that I am so so so proud of and excited about. Some highlights: - We blew the doors off the number. What a statement quarter by the team. 225% to plan with a clear path to doing the same thing in Q2 (and beyond). - We did a deal that would have been the biggest deal at any company I've been at up to $100M in ARR. - Healthy mix of self-serve, mid-size deals, and large deals --> on top of the above, we did 20+ NNL (including one person doing more than 10 themselves). - We are working as a team -- the culture we're building is really special. People work hard, raise the bar, want to win together, are competitive, so so smart, kind, and want to deliver a tremendous amount of value to our customers. Importantly, we are having a lot of fun doing it. - The pace and quality of our engineering is a huge differentiator. Can't overstate the positive impact of having an engineering team that is maniacally focused on building amazing experiences for our customers. - We're measuring the value we're providing. 46% more code written by developers using Codeium, 7-10X ROI, 40-70% faster onboarding of new developers, forecastably faster PR release cycles -- having an AI product / team that focuses on quantifying the impact to our customers is...the best. - We hired a lot of wonderful people. Dave Frankel, Isaac Kim, Jacob Addington, Alex Laubscher -- I am so excited you're here and so energized by what we're going to build together. Welcome! Alex Hart, Andrew Amato, Jeff Wang, Anshul Ramachandran, Varun Mohan you guys have built such an amazing GTM foundation. Very excited to be on this journey with you all -- let's go build something generational! Douglas Chen and entire wonderful engineering team -- thank you all. What you all build is incredible and I am so fired up by what we have coming in the next few months. Want to try Codeium? Check out our free tier. We're hiring in all roles -- particularly (in GTM) looking for AEs, SEs, SDRs, RevOps in Austin / Mountain View.

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Sharing RevOps co-op community best practices on something we all know is critical - designing territories to ensure the success of your sales force and, by extension, your company. The number of different strategies available make selecting the right one both challenging and critical. The team at RevOps Co-op delve deep into this topic 👇 https://gag.gl/Nm2xoO #RevOps #Data #DataQuality

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At the Gainsight conference last week, I had several folks ask me some version of "everyone used to talk about adoption....now everyone says that it's just about outcomes and ROI. What's your take?" It is and has always been about both. Can you get ROI without adoption? No. Is adoption by itself sufficient to guarantee value realization? Also no. You have to have adoption of the right capabilities that tie to customer business priorities with attached measurable outcomes. That is and has always been the formula. This is easy to say, really hard to implement and manage at scale. Which is why very few companies do it.

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Amplitude Announces Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results: - Second quarter revenue of $73.3 million, up 8% year over year - Annual Recurring Revenue of $290 million, up 8% year over year - Number of customers representing $100,000 or more of ARR in Q2 grew to 547, an increase of 10% year over year This quarter was all about meeting our customers where they are. In Q2 we took our Snowflake Native offering GA, doubled down on our open ecosystem, and unveiled a self-serve portal that makes it easier than ever to integrate with Amplitude. To our customers, partners, and Ampliteers, thank you! Your trust, partnership, and hard work is invaluable! #PLG #ProductLedGrowth #DigitalAnalytics #ProductAnalytics #Retention #Acquisition #Monetization

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