Kevin Chiu

To the ADP rep who calls all the time and has me in a 15-step sequence... You should have sent this package first try. It would’ve worked better and much faster.

Here’s an analysis of what you did VS. what you should have done 👇

1) Your first email was titled “Free Coffee.” Immediately I know you are selling something. If you act like a sales rep from the second you reach out to someone, they are gonna treat you like a “sales rep.” There’s nothing wrong with being a sales rep however a majority of the buyers are being spammed and put outbound sellers on mute.

The spray n pray sellers of the world have done true professionals of this world injustice. I also don’t drink coffee, I drink tea! Point being, demonstrate to a buyer you deeply understand their pain points vs offering a free coffee out the gate.

2) Your 7th email was actually a nice “personalized” email with a video. This would have stood out, you should have moved this to Step 1. I never even saw this because after the first 6 auto-emails, I programmed by brain to archive/mute the emails. Again, this isn’t any offense to you, but I am getting 20 of these a day as are your other buyers.

You HAVE to stand out from the crowd.

3) Your emails have bolding all over the place, different format/sizing for a portion of the email, and it reads as a marketing email. You should click ‘remove formatting’ and make it basic, human, and ensure it seems “personalized” even if it’s not.

BTW, I don’t think this is your fault either. This email reads “Sales Management” all over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t even let you all edit the sequences because the sales team is too big. Sales and ops leadership should take responsibility here too for the success of their team.

4) Your direct mail with ‘Extremely Urgent’ on it had two people from my office messaging me about it. This was the MONEY shot. This type of direct mail strategy is probably not much more expensive than the coffee gift card you offered me in the beginning.

Lesson here is if you’re gonna spend money, spend money on a high-conversion process. My bet is tons of people take the coffee and run.

TLDR Takeaways?

- Personalize and stand out. Don’t do what every other sales rep does. 
- Impact > Activity 
- Direct mail works still, and execs are likely to be in their office at least 1-2 times a week.

#sales #customersuccess #salesmanagement

Salesforce should be worried. HubSpot continues to close in on them at an insane ~30% growth rate and a checkmate-like acquisition of Clearbit. Conversely, SFDC spent $15.7B on Tableau for better data visualizations & $6.5B on Mulesoft to help get data in faster due to legacy tech debt making their CRM very hard to implement.

Yet, most SFDC instances in today’s world lack any real data or insights & primarily show two things:

1) Outdated Next Steps 
2) Outdated Close Dates

(Rev Op leaders will chime in comments arguing this point, but it will be hard to refute the fact that most AEs work out of Google Sheets, Clari, Outreach, Gong, Salesloft, Apollo, Scratchpad, Dooly & only do it out of SFDC if they're being micromanaged to do so).

So why does SFDC lack the right insights for most GTM teams?

Because they failed to own the end-user workflow.

Reps want to work where the data lives. SFDC’s biggest miss of all time was being unable to close the LinkedIn acquisition & losing out to Microsoft. And Hubspot just capitalized on that with Clearbit.

HubSpot is in beast mode right now: 
♦️ $100M ARR to $2B ARR in record time 
♦️ 5/6 product lines from MKTG, Sales, Service, CMS, Ops Hub are almost all growing at 50% YoY
♦️ 60%+ of customers try free first (PLG motion stronger than SFDC)
♦️ 50/50% split roughly between new business acquisition & Customer-Led Growth (the latter gaining superior steam)
♦️ HubSpot CEO says their TAM is expanding rapidly. In the investor report, it showed they are moving more heavily into 100-1000 & 1000-2000 employee segments. SFDC should be very worried on this point

The winner of the CRM category in 5 years will be more than just field data. It will have the following:

1) End-to-end revenue management workflows. Gone are the days where tabbing between 18 products is OK, & CFOs aren't willing to spend there

2) Real customer insights in seconds around CLTV, NDR, GDR

3) Native, accurate contact data so reps aren’t spending time in other systems prospecting when they should be prospecting directly in CRM

4) The right insights on who matters in an org chart on BOTH pre-sales opportunities & post-sale renewal/expansion opportunities

5) Adminless setup through better modern infra technology, AI, LLM, GPT, and code-less tech. Many products are coming mainstream with 1-click integrations into complex sources like data warehouses such as Snowflake & Redshift, allowing non-technical users to type plain English & “query” highly complex visual charts that used to require 6-figure paid analysts

6) Signal-led sales automation and workflows for SDRs so they aren’t “cold calling” & “cold emailing.” They can leverage the right signals (job changes, product data, intent, etc) within seconds natively in the CRM to generate pipeline more effectively, and more efficiently.

It will not be surprising if SFDC is scrambling & looking internally at acquiring Apollo, Zoominfo or another data platform.

#sales #crm #saas #cs