Chris De Vylder

A symphony where every section plays its own tune — without coordination or rhythm — results in chaos. But, with the right conductor, everything changes. Enter Salesloft’s Revenue Orchestration Platform. It’s the maestro of revenue generation, ensuring your go-to-market teams and buyers play in perfect harmony.

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A poorly executed #customersuccess strategy will kill your #NRR for years to come. I've seen it first-hand too many times over the years. Here is how you deliver a well-executed CS strategy to drive great NRR and ultimately, business growth: 🛣️ 𝐔𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 & 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲 The first step in any customer success strategy is understanding the full & dynamic revenue & customer journey. This means not just knowing what your customers do, but why they do it. How and why did they buy your services? How do they move through their journey with you (rarely ina straight line!)? By understanding their motivations, you can better anticipate their needs and deliver solutions that truly add value. And don't forget, the old-school customer journey is not the standard anymore, you need to use the full, dynamic revenue & customer journey to get the full picture. This stretches from pre-sale to post-sale and allows for the customer to move in and out of journey phases/stages dynamically. 📈 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 Customer success is not a reactive function. It's about being proactive, anticipating customer needs, and addressing them before they become issues. You have to ensure that your strategy is aligned around, and fosters, a proactive CS culture and process that allows your team to execute effectively. This not only improves customer satisfaction, but also reduces churn, and creates more expansion opportunities. Both key factors in improving NRR. 📊 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚-𝐃𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 In the #SaaS & #CS world, we have access to a wealth of data. By leveraging this data, we can make informed decisions that drive customer success. This could be anything from identifying usage patterns to predict churn, to understanding which features drive the most value for customers and beyond. And it needs to go beyond telemetry, usage etc. Also capture, track and understand customer goals and other qualitative data points. One problem is that this data is often siloed or hard to access, so make sure you have systems (like RevSetter) that can bridge that gap and allows CSMs to effectively action the data & insights. 🤝 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫-𝐂𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 Customer success should not be the responsibility of a single department. It should be ingrained in the company culture. When everyone in the organization understands the value of customer success, it becomes a strategic priority that drives business growth. This is why the dynamic revenue & customer journey, the engagement focus, and the proactive mindset are so important. When those are present - and a strategic & customer-centric approach is adopted by the CEO & leadership - the sky is the limit. Leverage these four building blocks and your CS strategy and execution will thank you for it ✅ *** 🛎️ If you enjoy my content, follow me for more ♻️ Repost to share with your network

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Partner-Led Growth 🔗 : The Key 🔑 to Successful GTM in Technical Sales In technical enterprise SaaS sales, solid networks and strategic alliances are essential. But partnerships also have an accelerating effect on deals and sales in no-touch and low-touch GTM motions. Partner-led growth and nearbound strategies are essential components of a sustainable GTM strategy that need to be deeply integrated into the GTM motion framework. In my career as a GTM leader, I have often painfully learned how crucial this factor is for sustainable success 💡 Here are my 4 recommendations for successful partner strategy & management. 1️⃣ The Basics of Networking A strong partner network provides access to resources, knowledge, customers, and opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach. Define which type of partner you most need in jour current Growth phase. The priorities according to partner type will change over time. Build a strong partner acquisition team. Avoid mixed responsibilities. Build a partner target pipeline and segregate it by partner type. Use LinkedIn to find partners and build targeted connections ans also attend relevant industry events. 2️⃣ Strategic Connections Long-lasting partnerships with IT management consultants and integration partners are critical to managing the complexity of enterprise SaaS sales. Without these alliances, market access is delayed, which can lead to lost revenue. Structured onboarding programs and regular meetings (performance review dialogues) to set goals and monitor progress are essential. Implement clear goals and a regular performance review system. 3️⃣ Maintaining Relationships Relationships and partnerships need to be actively nurtured to remain valuable in the long term. Regular communication, sharing relevant information, and a genuine interest in the partner's goals and challenges are essential. Especially in an environment that requires high technological depth and integration, well-maintained partnerships with referrers, resellers, and technology partners are the key to success. ✅ Give more than you expect and show real added value. Avoid seeing the partner as just a lead gen machine. 4️⃣ Network ROI The ROI of networks often only becomes apparent in the long term, but the investment pays off through more business opportunities, market information, and strategic alliances. Lack of partnerships leads to significant competitive disadvantages, lack of trust, and missed sales opportunities. Develop clear metrics and KPIs to measure the success of your partnerships and conduct regular health checks. Building a strong network and integrating it into your GTM strategy is not optional, but mandatory for long-term success in the competitive SaaS landscape. If you're not a partner, you pretty much don't exist per se. How are you managing and leveraging your network for success? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Networks #GTM #Nearbound #Partnership #IndirectSales #CROMastersAi

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Forging pipeline made easy: Salesforge 🔥 takes care of managing your sequences Mailforge - Cold Email Infrastructure 📈 & Infraforge - Private Email Infrastructure 🔷 cover email infrastructure Warmforge - Land In The Primary 🎯 boosts your deliverability Agent Frank takes on autonomous prospecting, outreach and booking meetings & more to come! Get ready for what’s next 😈

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Reducing organizational dependencies and increasing output means more efficient and faster growth 📈 I had the pleasure to sit down with Jindra and chat on the importance of enabling operation teams (#RevOps, #MOps, #CSOps, etc.) to effectively run and operate data-science projects. 🤔 Curious to dive deeper into our discussion? Check out our latest blog post, featuring the full video interview 📽 and actionable insights to fuel your journey towards operational excellence.

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🌟 Transforming your Partner Relationship Management (PRM) with Brijflow! 🌟 Partner ecosystems are the heart of growth for many high-growth SaaS companies, and it was incredibly rewarding to see our approach help this $500M ARR SaaS enterprise overcome their challenges. If you're also looking to scale your partner management with confidence, reach out—we’d love to share our insights. BrijFlow, RevOps Business Consulting #PRMTransformation #Growth #SaaS #PartnerSuccess #Automation #BusinessGrowth #ProudMoment

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Salesforce (SFDC) has been synonymous with seat-based pricing for the last 25 years. Here's why that's about to change. Like most other software companies, SFDC is investing big into AI offerings. Specifically, they're doubling down on AI *agents* (which automate tasks) rather than AI *copilots* (which assist people). One massive enterprise customer recently deflected 90% of consumer inquiries with SFDC's new AI agent. If this continues, they'll need far *fewer* support personnel. Fewer people = fewer seats = less $$ for SFDC. That's not so great for a company generating >$30B in annual revenue... much of which comes from seat licenses 😲 How SFDC will respond: usage-based pricing. CEO Marc Benioff specifically called this out during last week's earnings call. "When we look at pricing, it will be on a consumption basis. And when we think about that, we think about saying to our customers, and we have, it's about $2 per conversation." There's a lot to like about usage-based pricing: 1️⃣ Less friction for customers. They'll start adopting the product, see value, and then can scale up on their own terms. 2️⃣ No shelfware. Customers will no longer pay for folks who never (or rarely) log-in. They only pay then they get results. 3️⃣ Built-in expansion. As SFDC's AI agents get better, they'll naturally make more $$. Enthusiasm for usage-based pricing cooled off in 2023. It looks like it's due for a rebound. — 🎁 For more growth & pricing insights, subscribe to Growth Unhinged — my free weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/exTbjKaM #saas #ai #pricing

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Sharing this list of insightful B2B GTM predictions for 2025 from industry thought leaders: https://lnkd.in/grCwaaCi Thank you 6sense for curating the insights, elevating the important topics, and including me! #AI #GTM #ContentCreation #ABM #PersonalizedExperience

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So your PoCs are not converting to closed deals? Here is what you may be overlooking ... Common Scenario: You’re selling a highly disruptive product—a fresh take on an old category, maybe even creating a new category altogether. 🛠️ Yet, after several successful PoCs (proof-of-concept), those deals aren’t converting. ❌ The Fallout: Leadership is frustrated because: - “The deal wasn’t qualified.” - “We didn’t have the right stakeholders involved.” - “We never had proper criteria for success.” - “We wasted time.” - “We need a better process.” - “We need to sell better.” - “We are making excuses.” What’s Often Missed or Ignored: - The prospect wanted to learn more but only had the option to ‘contact sales’ - They asked for a trial … you didn’t give it - They wanted to self-serve a PoC … you wouldn’t (or couldn’t) let them - The champion’s PoC success criteria were unclear—after all, this product is a new concept for everyone - Your champion(s) couldn’t internally sell the value despite all your meetings, demos, and content The Lessons: - A new or disruptive product requires educating prospects on how its value is realized and measured. This is the difference between insight sales and solution sales. - Prospects often use a PoC for education, especially if no other options are available. Simply proving that your software works isn't enough to close a deal. - While you may have a sales process issue, it's more likely a broader GTM challenge spanning product, marketing, and sales. - Forcing prospects through a sales-heavy journey or into a premature sales cycle often leads to failure. Bottom Line: Selling begins the moment prospects start learning about your product—not just when they meet with sales. If your sales team is flagging blockers in the customer journey, it’s time to align your GTM efforts. Instead of attributing challenges to excuses, use this feedback to refine your approach and ensure success across product, marketing, and sales. 👉 Remember: Accusing teams of making excuses is the worst excuse of all. ... this is where ideally i'd hit 'play' on 'No Excuses' by Alice in Chains and drop the mic 🤘 🎸

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Thanks to Dave Rigotti and team for a wonderful #PLGTM conference in SF. I had great discussions with sales and marketing leaders and here are some observations on how PLG has evolved. Part 1: Time to rethink PLG practice ✔ While the core idea of PLG revolves around self-service adoption and user-driven growth, the practice has evolved, and companies are recognizing the need for a hybrid approach. ✔ For a lot of practitioners, PLG means self-service and users adopt the product without sales support. In practice, PLG leads to increases S&M costs increasing CAC. So, it no more just about building a product but putting the marketing $ behind it. ✔ Enterprise buyers are researching on their own and have good information before they come to the call. Huge number of prospects want sales help in navigating the value prop but want to try out themselves. ✔ PLG does lead to execution speed driving the awareness, showing the value, decreasing sales cycles and enabling simple and faster expansion. ✔ There is a myth that only startups or B2C companies use PLG and has to be bottom-up approach. While many of the companies we know and products we use might be B2C, lot of enterprise B2B companies are PLG as well. e.g. users can simply signup and start using Calendly, Canva or Airtable. teams can start using the products like loom, figma and datadog. ✔ Bringing customers need a hybrid approach in 2024. You need to provide user value created by the product and buyer value created by sales teams. Think about product market fit and product customer fit - leading to greater number of happy customers ✔ Every KPI you are measuring should drive an outcome. If you collect data, ask "what is it used for? " and "how does it help customer or adoption?" ✔ As the PLG model continues to evolve, companies must adapt and embrace a balanced approach that leverages the power of self-service adoption while providing sales support to drive customer success and long-term growth. Thanks to David Yockelson and Dave Boyce for providing engaging discussion on the core of PLG. #productledgrowth #productledsales #salesledgrowth #startups #salesleadership #productmanagement

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SaaStrAnnual.com 2024 is ALMOST HERE!! Sep 10-12 SF Bay CEO Klaviyo CEO Bill CEO Apollo CEO Attentive CEO Vimeo CEO Ironclad CEO Jasper CBO Stripe President Brex President Plaid CPO Rubrik CPO Webflow CPO Procore CPO Loom CPO GitHub CPO Buffer CPO Onfleet CRO Rippling CRO Notion CRO GitHub CRO DeepL CRO Carta CRO Owner CRO One Paper Lane COO Checkr CMO Seismic CMO Sprout Social CMO Deepgram CTO AI Five9 CTO AI Zoom CTO Gorgias SVP Slack VPM OpenAi VPM Cohere VP Pricing Splunk VP Pricing Miro VP AI Freshworks and 100s more!! See. You. There!! It's Where the Cloud Meet

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What does 'Execution Excellence' actually mean? And why are Marc Benioff + Amit Bendov obsessed with it right now? Killer insights from Charlie Moss on how category leaders like Salesforce & Gong are resetting expectations to win despite headwinds!! 💥 “More rigor, more discipline, focused enablement, and a refined GTM strategy are a major part of their approach.” Specifically, Gong is investing in the following: - Greater accountability for the sales team + sales management - Weekly KPIs, weekly results, + monitoring key activities - Tracking every single deal with MEDDIC Achieving 'execution excellence' when it comes to running revenue teams is the WHY behind founding Accord... Ensure rigorous execution across each deal, and translating the winning strategy to the field in a way that actually works for sellers! Including tracking MEDDIC without feeling like homework, automatically updated in your CRM. Sales + CS Leaders using Accord to drive execution excellence understand what it takes for their sellers to win in 2024. Eg, we pulled data across 500+ Opps for a customers at their QBR, and saw: - 28% Win Rate across opportunities without Accord - 56% Win Rate across opportunities with Accord .... 100% increase in Win Rate when using Accord. This market isn’t about doing more with less. Its about doing the right things – consistently.

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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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Exciting times ahead

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GTM Ops leaders who understand how to maximize AI in the next 5 years will be 10x more powerful.  Meka Asonye talks with Ben Salzman on the ZI Labs pod.  Here my favorite line: “I’m very bullish on the sales stack looking very different in 5 years than it does today.” Meka said this and I completely agree with it. 18 months ago we didn’t have ChatGPT.  3 months ago we didn’t have ZoomInfo Copilot. Those that are able to adopt (and adapt) to this new environment will become irreplaceable.  Here’s how Meka is thinking about leveraging AI at First Round Capital in a very interesting way: “Normally we spend a lot of time taking decks, summarizing what’s in those decks, figuring out how much money they are raising and putting it into our CRM. We see 1000s of opportunities every single year and right now that is a manual job that individual people do.  There’s no reason that job should be manual.” Imagine a world where that automatically happens.  That’s just one use case for First Round. He also said:  “It’s still mind blowing to me that people manually update their Salesforce fields.” It is wild to think that we have ChatGPT but AEs are still manually updating fields.  We’ll see people disagree on where AI value creation will be created in the sales tech stack over the next 5 years. But… We know that the best way to capture that value as a GTM Ops leader will be to implement it in unique and creative ways. Last year, our team automatically created 35,000 account plans instead of spending 3-4 hours per account and saved $2.1M in employee time (140,000 hours at $100/hr). This year, there are 100 million account plans at your fingertips, when you leverage ZoomInfo Copilot Chat to chat with your target accounts. It’s 2024 - what’s your most unique way of leveraging AI in your tech stack? I’ll drop a link to the full episode for you in the comments.

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#Cosell success is built on partner reciprocity. The best way to increase inbound referrals is by actively exchanging quality outbound referrals - because they create real wins between AEs who develop trust. Trust leads to growth (heard from a recent #IDC Strategic Alliances Council). The weak link in many companies' co-selling systems is missed opportunities stemming from an inability to identify or share quality referrals in a trusted way. This is where secure automation shines. WorkSpan's co-sell automation integrates your CRM securely with cloud hyperscalers, streamlining referral identification, sharing, engaging and measuring growth. Join our virtual Cloud Sales Readiness Tour on June 26th, and learn from industry experts how automation can scale your outbound referrals and save your team valuable time. (Registration link in the comments)

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I often get asked what I think the biggest challenges are for enterprise revenue teams today. The short answer: Consistency and Repeatability. But when it comes to consistency and repeatability, we have to look at it through 3 lenses: AEs, RevOps leaders, and CROs. It means different things for a RevOps leader than it does for a CRO. AEs want to take the risk out of missing their number and get to a place where they see a path to exceeding the quota target. So how do they know they're leaning on the right information that is going to mitigate that risk and maximize their upside? That’s where an AI-powered workflow can help: ensuring AEs know what to do, when to do it, whom to do it for, and why to do it. Without that structure, it can be challenging for them to understand what is most important, and when and how to execute, ultimately impacting whether they hit their revenue number consistently. For RevOps leaders, they need to be able to identify patterns and data. Without consistency and repeatability, that’s hard to do if the people on your revenue team are all taking wildly different approaches to their day-to-day responsibilities to serve their prospects and customers. RevOps needs everyone singing from the same songbook so they can figure out what's working and what's not. With commonalities in execution behavior, the patterns of what's working and what's not will surface faster along with the data to validate the need for optimization, whether it be to the process, messaging, or training/onboarding. For CROs, they need visibility and insight into the business at scale to affect change. Forecast accuracy is certainly important, but it’s getting visibility into the forecast that is paramount: deal gaps, missed workflow, missed give/gets. If a CRO has that context, then they have the information they need to make it actionable where it matters most and can affect change. When you look at the distribution of sellers from a performance perspective, the key for many CROs is to determine how to improve the performance of their second tier cohort – those sellers that routinely achieve 75%-90% attainment. The “B players” can be incredibly detrimental to a company’s guidance.  An enterprise workflow platform allows CROs to tether the team to a common set of behaviors and insights that, when properly managed, will drive consistent improvement among your B players, ultimately changing the trajectory of a business for the positive. So consistency and repeatability for a CRO is really about adherence to the best practices and responding to the insights such that one can optimize the mix of art and science in the selling approach. A CRO isn’t going to be able to touch dozens or hundreds of deals or listen to thousands of calls, so they need a platform that can guide them as to where to focus. When the system and your RevOps team can, then the CRO knows where to focus and coach and guide. #revenueorchestration #revops #cro #revtech

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Check out the latest GTM Secrets podcast by Identity Matrix with Saad Shaikh at CAST AI! He's a RevOps guru for both enterprise and mid-market orgs. Learn what he thinks we should be doing to accelerate the sales cycle, how to structure revops, and what it takes to rock in your gtm operations. Get the full episode on YouTube, Amazon, Apple, Spotify, and more! Link in the first comment. #gtm #revenueoperations #martech

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CRO and CMO Jessica Gilmartin shares a first-hand account of how Calendly revamped their lead routing, qualification, and GTM org. #plgplays #productledgrowth #revenueengine #valueengine #saas #saasgrowth #salesfunnel #buyersjourney #buyerenablement #gtm #saasbusiness #saasstartups #saasproduct #productmanagement #revops #leadconversion #businessgrowth #scalingup #revenuegrowth #revenuestrategy #gtmstrategy #revenueboost #monetization #revenuegeneration #productgrowth #customerengagement #customeracquisition #gtmmotion #gtmplays #customerjourney #plgstrategies #plg #slg #saleseffectiveness #bestpractices #expertadvice #customerrelationship #useracquisition #userengagement #useronboarding #customervaluecreation #productvalue #successstrategy #gtmomentum #gotomarket #valuecreation #bestpractices #customerfocus #customercentricity #saassales #saasmarketing #growthlevers #growthdrivers #leadmanagement #leadcapture #leadnurturing #leadrouting

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