Beware of the clouds 🌩️

If you’re a CRO, VP, or even L1 or L2 manager, high-level strategy is fun, but you’ve also gotta keep your feet on the ground.

Matt Cameron, CEO at SaaSy Sales and thought leader among CROs and SVPs of Sales, shared an alarming pattern he sees among leaders:

When he asks leaders to define what is happening operationally in their businesses, they usually give him one of two answers:

1. Here is the playbook/manual/process guide that everyone adheres to

2. Here is the dashboard/summary report that I use to see what is happening

The problem with those two answers is,

The playbook/manual/process guide hasn’t been looked at since the initial roll-out or onboarding.

Dashboards and summary reports tell you where to look, not what to do.

He proposes another way. 

The quickest way to maintain and build your leadership’s confidence is to know the answers to:

• Where are we currently exposed and what should we do about it?

• Where can we focus our resources for the highest impact?

Here’s an example of how he’d do that.

Write down all your leading indicators of success and then what health looks like at the 500ft level:

 

Leading indicator: Pipeline coverage of 4.5x

 

500ft level: At least 80% of the quarter is from run-rate business. Every deal is currently in a stage (validly selected) that allows time to close in this quarter.

 

Then ask yourself, how do I see if that is true, conveniently enough that I can inspect weekly if I want?

 

(You can collaborate at a sales kickoff to get alignment across leaders, regardless of function (Sales/Marketing/Product/etc)).

Jared Fuller added to the discussion: 

Most execs...don’t know where their customers are trying to go. They only know the world as they imagine it designed. Their go-to-market strategy lacks living-in-market context.

Unfortunately, reality soon calls. Their unit economics aren’t a plan. Economics just tell the truth.

Read Matt’s article on LinkedIn and check out the session recordings fromthe Nearbound Summit to learn how to help your customers reach their promised land.

The partner ecosystem journey

What are the keys to becoming a number one app partner as a startup?

CallRail’s Marc Ginsberg (CEO), Mike Stocker (VP of Partnerships), and Madelyn Wing came together at the Nearbound Summit to share how CallRail became a top app partner to HubSpot.

The work starts internally with:

1. A great team

2. Intent to build an amazing customer experience

Then, you build externally in phases.

Marc shared how he envisions the partner ecosystem journey.

During the partner ecosystem journey, three factors directly influence each other: partner tactic, value of partnership, and customer value.

Phase one: start small

CallRail built an integration with HubSpot (partner tactic) to bring efficiency to their customers (customer value) which resulted in a higher retention rate (value of partnership).

Phase two: spread the word

Once the integration was built, CallRail needed to spread the word to their customers (partner tactic). As customers learned about the new integration (customer value), they were more likely to adopt the integration.

Phase three: optimize

With all of these new customers and use cases, CallRail had the opportunity to introduce new capabilities and help customers further achieve their business goals (partner tactic). The increased effectiveness of the solution (customer value) led to growth and increased ARPU (value of partnership).

Phase four: acquisition

CallRail then focused on promoting themselves inside of the HubSpot ecosystem (partner tactic). By doing this, it made it easier for new customers to discover (customer value) the app. This led to new business (value of partnership) for CallRail.

CallRail achieved what many companies dream about—winning in a big ecosystem—because CallRail was comfortable taking the lead and doing the upfront work to go through each of these phases.

As they started driving more value to HubSpot customers, HubSpot’s teamstarted paying attention and got excited to partner on co-marketing, co-selling, and co-servicing.

Becoming a top app partner isn’t easy, but if you take one thing away from this session with Marc, Mike, and Madelyn, let it be this: as a startup, you need to be willing to do the work to win the attention and affection of your partner.

Listen to the full session and get the slides here.

Walmart’s attempt to counteract the infocalypse 🌪️

Buyers are overwhelmed with noise.

In the past, throwing more noise at your customers was industry standard. Now, the best companies realize that instead of throwing more noise at their customers, they need to protect their customers from unwanted noise.

Last week, Walmart announced it’s implementing sensory-friendly hours for shoppers in response to this.

Every day from 8 to 10 am, shoppers who get easily over-stimulated can shop in a less chaotic environment. Lights will be dimmed, and TV screens will switch to static images.

Burt Flickinger, retail expert and Managing Director of Retail Consultancy at Strategic Resource Group, commented on this news sharing,

At a time when discounters are competing more aggressively with each other for consumers’ dollars, Walmart is not only building some goodwill with its shoppers but these changes could also bring more shoppers into its stores and keep them shopping there longer.

This is an era marked by trust rather than information.

We’re going to continue seeing companies opt to decrease the noise for their customers (recall the Outreach memo).

The old path to your customer was through outbound and inbound—ads, cold calls, and cold emails. The new path to your customer is nearbound—surrounding your customer with voices they trust.

Stuff you don’t want to miss!

• Nearbound Summit 2023 Recordings—The future of GTM is Nearbound. Watch the recordings to hear how B2B leaders across departments unite with Nearbound strategies and tactics. Listen here.

• Nov 29, 2 PM EST —WTF is a System Integrator?— Join Omair Rana, Former Microsoft Director of Partner Strategy, and Scott Pollack, CEO at Firneo, and get ready to demystify System Integrators (SIs) and their pivotal role in the tech world. Register here.

• Nov 30, 1 PM - 4 PM EST —The CRO Playbook: How to fix sales in 2024— The old sales playbooks don’t work. Join GTM Partners for their Leadership Summit. CROs, CEOs, and sales leaders will unite to define how to fix sales in time for 2024 SKO. Register here.

Set the NbD apart 

We’re all impacted by the infocalypse. If you know someone who needs to read the daily, send it to them! Separate signal from noise.