Kategorie: Allgemein
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Just read: Hacking sales
Who: Max Altschuler, one of the first hires of udemy, now CEO of Sales Hacker. Sales hacker is, well, a „Sales community“.
About the book: If it comes to explain the word „pragmatic“, take the book. Its packed with handy tips and tricks around online sales. Maybe it’s the larges link-list around online sales 🙂 It’s though structured around a very high-level sales process:
Quite a big portion of the book is around defining your total addressable market and where to find your target groups. It’s very good explained how to scrape platforms and sites to build mailing lists. I am not so sure though, if that will work so well here in Europe given the GDPR issues, nevertheless, with advanced segmentinng (and thus personalization) Altschuler argues, mails might be not seen as spam.
The book mainly covers outbound sales, and that is fine. I think its really good for building your sales muscle and to put in in the mix of your overall sales strategy.
Top ten notes and quotes from the book:
1. The main things that matter when you are managing a pipeline are the following: Total number of deals in the pipeline Average deal size Percent of deals that move from stage to stage until they are closed Average time a deal stays in the pipeline
2. Targeted leads at the top of the pipeline will provide better, faster results. These targeted leads are also known as your “low-hanging fruit.
3. There are “Seeds,” “Nets,” and “Spears.”
„Virtual assistants for outbound and online sales support“
5. Put virtual assistants in the mix and let them do the heavy lifting. (that was a good one, given we at my-vpa offer pre-trained native speaking virtual assistants for online and outbound sales.)
6. Industry and vertical are interdependent (you can be in the tech industry, but you are in different verticals, e.g. Box is in the cloud storage vertical within the technology industry)
7. Examples for triggers to reach out for prospects: Employee head count New employees recently hired Job titles and new titles added Company headquarters Public relations (PR) announcements, new product launches, funding, key hires, or partnerships Legal filings Growth rate (revenue, funding, head count)
8. Start by targeting a few junior employees and selling them on the fact that they can be champions for the product. (A good one, though I think there are different approaches: depends on your product that the top down way might be better – maybe at more expensive, long sales cycle products)
9. „Become a hero maker“, meaning make the internal champion a hero by being the guy who brings on the amazing new product and proves it out for the team.
10. Make your message simple enough for an eight-year-old to understand.