Matt Kennedy

People don’t realize what “closing skills” are in sales, and they’re not “is persuasive.” Reps with closing skills CONSISTENTLY know, can choreograph and advise on how the deal gets signed and returned. And their forecast accuracy reflects those skills.

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To all SDRs or anyone entering B2B sales, read this post to avoid falling into common traps. 1. The most successful AEs I have met were the best SDRs. 2. SDRs who didn’t excel in the role and are now AEs are still struggling to generate their own pipeline. 3. AEs who skipped the SDR role, often due to an MBA or strong interview skills, fear switching jobs and roles without inbound leads. They’ve never faced the grind of building a pipeline from scratch, filled with rejections. 4. AEs who have never been an SDR majorly rely on their SDRs or Inbound leads from marketing to help them build pipeline and if any Quarter they don't get inbound or enough meetings from SDRs they sh** in their pants. 5. When these AEs become managers, they often question their team—"Where are the numbers?" or "Why isn’t there a pipeline?"—instead of guiding them on building it. Lacking experience in pipeline generation, they fail to lead by example and eventually lose the respect of their team. Learn the art and science of being an SDR and excel at this job at any cost, you will never have to look back or depend on anyone for pipeline EVER. Prospecting and Generating Pipelines is fundamental to Sales whether you are an SDR, AE, Sr Manager, or VP if you don't know how to do OUTBOUND you will continuously live a sales life of fear and anxiety. So SDRs ask yourselves do you want to be such AE and Managers in the future who depend on others to determine their performance and faith or would you like to own your job? #sales #prospecting #outbound #pipeline #sdr #ae #b2b #saas

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I was asked what is the fasted way to win new business for sales - get warm introductions in your target accounts. Here are 7 steps that I think will help you get radically more pipeline fast:🔥📈 Inboxes are overflowing, cold outreach is losing its punch. Warm introductions are the key to breaking through the noise and accelerating your sales pipeline. 1. Define Target Accounts 🎯 Zero in on accounts that align with your ideal customer profile. Know their challenges, and understand how your solution uniquely solves them. Focus on a subset you’re confident about – don’t let analysis paralysis slow you down. Key: Don’t get stuck on the first step; just go for it! 2. Identify Connectors in Your Network 🕸️ Expand your network (or automate this with platforms like https://lnkd.in/e-XsFVmR) to match up with contacts who have trusted relationships with key players in your target accounts. Look for people with deep industry and solution experience- they’ll help boost your credibility.  3. Engage with Value First 💬 When requesting an intro, lead with value. Show why the intro matters to their connection and how it benefits them. Remember, your Trusted Advisor isn’t your sales rep – they’re a facilitator of value for their network. Offer insights, unique perspectives, and collaborate in a knowledge exchange. This will set you apart as more than “just another sales rep.” 4. Personalize Your Outreach to the New Contact 🧑‍💼 After a warm into, skip the canned pitch. Reference your mutual connection, then tailor your message to your target accounts needs. Tap into your advisor’s inside knowledge on what truly matters, from active projects to key priorities. This approach makes you relevant, aware, and genuinely interesting. 5. Nurture the Relationship, Not Just the Opportunity 🤝 Warm intros open doors, but it’s the relationships that close deals. Focus on building trust, actively listening, and providing value. Even if there’s no immediate sale. 6. Don’t Forget Your Sales Process 🚀 Whether it’s Solution Selling, MEDDICC, or MEDDPICC, stick to your process to stay on track. Use your advisor’s insights to set you apart, but also to qualify out quickly – if it’s not a fit, pivot to protect your credibility and the trust of your connection. 7. Reward Your Trusted Advisor 🏆 Recognize your advisor’s role in your success! A thoughtful gesture, creative reward, or a few percentage points on the deal can make a significant impact. It shows appreciation, strengthens the partnership, and sets the stage for future collaboration. Warm introductions are your ticket to stronger connections, faster cycles, and higher close rates. Are you tapping into them? 🔑 And if you want to make this easy, check out https://lnkd.in/e-XsFVmR – the first platform designed to automate and scale your ability to find and leverage warm introductions into all of your target accounts. 🔗 #SalesTips #Sales #SDR #SalesPipeline #WarmIntroductions #ForceEquals

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New sales ops hires have no idea what they are getting into with Salesforce. Here's why: Imagine you’re building a deck. And you are given the keys to a Home Depot. You have access to unlimited equipment and supplies. But you get no instructions on what deck you are building or how to build it. This is what situation most sales ops roles are in with Salesforce. Without training in its full capabilities, admins will be stuck and overwhelmed. This is why I created the Salesforce Accidental Admin Accelerator for sales admins. I recently did a webinar on YouTube that talks about how we are helping SalesOps and sales administrators with Salesforce. You can view it here: https://lnkd.in/g297XegA

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Most sales leaders focus on their top performers. But your best reps will crush quota whether you help them or not. Here's the uncomfortable truth about scaling revenue... Your top 10% will succeed despite you. They'll figure out how to sell your product and close deals even if you give them zero support, no collateral, and an undefined ICP. But you can't build a scalable revenue engine on top 10% talent alone. It's just math. Even with a rigorous interview process and strong recruiting brand, our 12-month retention rate at Levelset was around 55%. And that was GOOD. The key to scaling isn't finding more unicorns. It's raising the floor for everyone else. That means writing down exactly what success looks like. Not just hoping good people will "figure it out." I learned this the hard way. For the first 4 years (or so), we closed deals almost in spite of ourselves. No real sales playbook. No defined process. Just talented people working hard. When we finally documented our exact process - from first touch to close - our ramp time plummeted and consistency shot up. The uncomfortable truth? Most founders spend way more time recruiting than preparing to train and support their hires. Your playbook doesn't need to be fancy. Start with one document: "How to Run a Demo." Make it painfully detailed. Your top reps will hate it. Your new reps will love you for it.

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Tonight in Denver's Ballpark neighborhood: "Here’s a question for all you sales leaders out there: What would your results look like if in their sales calls, your reps actually did all the stuff you coached them to do during your 1:1s? Probably pretty good 😎 You will leave this event with Better understanding of why training doesn't stick and what to do differently 4 specific guidelines to follow to create meaningful practice experiences for your team A first draft of a practice program you can actually run with your team https://lnkd.in/gjFsrpmg

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“Two-thirds of the money we’re spending right now in sales is not productive.” This is from Sam Jacobs, the CEO @ Pavilion. Good Sales Enablement can help solve this problem. Here are five things you can enable on *today* that can help solve this problem: 1/ How to expand deal sizes in your current funnel 2/ Deep dive on how to beat your #1 competitor 3/ Best practice sharing on successful outbound tactics between SDRs and AEs 4/ Enabling your CS team to find upsells and collaborate with AEs 5/ Better second-call execution (presenting solutions/demos) What else would you add to this list?

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Here is the real impact that value selling is having for revenue teams: Tom Pisello David Yockelson 🔑48% improvement in winrate 🔑35% increase in deal size 🔑25% reduction in sales cycle time BUT...... ⛔️ only 19% of reps and 19% of pipeline is using value selling today. BIGGGG opportunity here...!

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A quick tip for improving sales prospecting - clean your CRM data. Out of date and duplicate information is the biggest hurdle to sales team effectiveness. Your CRM has likely never been purged of inaccurate or duplicate info, which leads to: - Sending emails to the wrong people - Contacting people who no longer work at your organization - Confusing your lead routing technology - Preventing accurate reassignment of territories Now, instead of manually combing through your CRM, use tools built to address this specific problem. Technology can perform mass updates, remove duplicate records, and update existing CRM records with little human intervention. Healthcare companies can remove 10,000 duplicate CRM contacts in one go. This means sellers reach the right person more often and get inbound leads more quickly. How have you cleaned your CRM data?

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Me and Carson V. Heady talked about the most indispensable sales technology we used. If someone took one tool away from you… which one would be the one that makes you riot?! For me, it is Gong Why? Touches every part of the organization What’s yours? #sales #technology #tools

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The Demand Waterfall / Predictable Revenue MQL hamster wheel is cracking like cheap glass. In fact, it has been for more than 5 years. The data was clear in 2018 that this strategy of getting tons of cheap MQLs so our SDRs can cold call them results in: -Untenable customer acquisition cost (CAC) -Extreme sales/marketing alignment issues  -Low Sales productivity  -Poor Marketing ROI  -Totally breaks with scale But we were in the boom times from 2018-2022. Money was cheap and companies were operating for “growth at all costs”. Investors pushed companies to deploy massive amounts of capital to grow, regardless of the unit economics. Most companies didn’t care (or didn’t even look at the data to see) that their “MQLs” converted to customers at 0.1% (1 out of 1,000 “leads” actually become a customer). This extreme inefficiency forced companies to overhire SDRs and Sales Reps to sort through all this garbage trying to find a needle in a haystack. Marketing programs, SDR headcount, and Sales headcount costs bloated across the entire GTM. Now, it’s 2024 and there’s been a total 180-degree turn in B2B. Every company is forced to operate for “profitable, efficient growth”. -Revenue growth rates are down > 50% -NRR has consistently declined for the past 6+ quarters -CAC payback periods have more than doubled to 36 to 48+ months -Budgets are tightening -GTM teams are shrinking -More layoffs are coming -And unit economics and EBITDA margin are now the top priorities Companies are stuck making incremental optimizations to these outdated models like trying to improve the MQL:SQL conversion rate by 2% or improve outbound connect rates by 1% or lowering the cost per lead by $12. But Incremental improvements aren’t going to get the job done. This new era of profitable, efficient growth (PEG) requires a fundamentally new approach to B2B Go-To-Market. The financial metrics *require* it and we've just about reached the breaking point. #b2b #gtm #marketing #sales #gotomarket p.s. Changing from an MQL to an MQA feels like a good solution but doesn’t solve the root cause problem. It’s the exact same motion just with a different trigger to activate outbound Sales. Lots of companies and executives I talk to are scratching their heads wondering why ABM and account intent data isn’t living up to its promise.

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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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Average Contract Value by segment: Strat - $278K ENT - $180K MM - $57K Direct correlation with your expected payouts? Yes. Average OTE by segment: Strat AE - $280K See more: https://lnkd.in/gEqj9YQz ENT AE - $255K See more: https://lnkd.in/gb7GeWzW MM AE - $165k See more: https://lnkd.in/gDkDDg5w The larger the deals you're selling, the more earning potential. The more earnings potential, the higher the expectations. All open SaaS roles here: https://lnkd.in/ggz4efaD Any of these surprise you? 🦙

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Top 5 key metrics I recommend CROs use for inside sales professionals: 1. Speed of response 2. Efficiency of progression through the process 3. Number of calls per day 4. Number of positive outcomes 5. Demo sets As a CRO leader, these are five metrics that I live by. 

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We shortened our sales rep ramp time from 9 months to 4 months. It changed the slope of our revenue curve. Why? Because faster ramp time equals faster revenue growth. Think about it: Hiring is expensive. Mis-hiring is even more expensive. When you can get your salespeople to full quota in less than half the time, you're not just saving money. You're compounding your investment in sales and revenue growth. But how did we do it? We had all the right pieces in place: • Sales enablement materials • Dedicated onboarding • Call camps • Mentorship programs • Comprehensive training Yet, that wasn't enough. Something was missing. We learned that if you want to get people to ramp quickly, you have to get them to attach to the organization. People are herd animals. We fear separation. But when we feel connected, we want to do more and do better. So we got creative and developed rituals. We manufactured moments that made new hires feel like they are part of the club. It's like when student pilots cut their shirttails after their first solo flight. These moments and rituals signaled belonging. And it worked! We reduced the ramp time and our new revenue bookings accelerated. Want to learn how to do this in your organization? Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/efWpFMS3

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🚨 The uncomfortable truth about sales leadership 🚨 Sales managers obsess over data, forecasts, and quotas. Sales reps chase autonomy and quick wins. But the buyer? They just want their problems solved. See the disconnect? If your sales team isn’t leading buyers through their journey, you’re not closing deals—you’re becoming just another vendor. Let’s get real. Are we enabling reps to be buyer mentors, or are we stuck managing quotas? Drop your thoughts in the comments 👇 #SalesStrategy #BuyersJourney #CustomerCentricity #SalesTransformation #ComplexSales #HeroJourney

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Hey sales people, be careful with ‘Gong’ advice. Because you don’t work for Gong. Gong had 6 funding rounds. Each time millions of people heard about Gong. Branding Familiarity Your company probably doesn’t have that level of awareness. When Gong sales people engage most decision makers already know what they’re calling about. People with in the prospect have probably already had a discussion about Gong. Gong is a great company with great people. But the branding makes it a lot easier to sell so take the advice with a grain of salt. Have a great Friday! #sales #ifurnotgong

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Is your sales proposal process built on technical debt? 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is a recipe for obsolescence in today's fast-paced market. Just because your process isn't broken doesn't mean it's optimal. Ask yourself: - Is your process scalable? - Can it adapt to market changes? - Does it rely on tribal knowledge? - How quickly can you iterate? Remember, technical debt isn't just about technology. It's about processes that slow you down, limit your flexibility, and increase your risk. You wouldn't run your business on outdated software. Why run it on outdated processes? Don't wait for a crisis to innovate. The best time to update your process was yesterday. The second best time is now.

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Maintain a sufficient pipeline of 4 times your quota. Adequate pipeline helps to relieve the stress to perform on specific deals. Reduced stress allows you to approach sales as a competitive game and a fun challenge. Do not take success per deal personally. Treat each deal as a competitive contest you can walk away from proud of knowing you gave your best effort. Building relationships with your customers is the fun part of sales. Ask personal questions. Invest time to learn about your customers as humans. Personal relationships require empathy, time, and patience. Extra credit challenge: Getting a hug from your customer confirms you have a personal relationship. Credit to Drew Elam

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