I decided to write No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls. because I saw many of my marketing and sales colleagues struggling to connect with customers and future customers in a meaningful way. I knew that it was time to shake up how we do things—and so I put down on paper everything I've learned about modern revenue operations through data, tech, and true account-based engagement.

The response has been … wow! I've heard from so many of you that the book provided the roadmap you needed to change the direction of your companies. That you've been able to ditch the old, tired tactics that were pushing customers away instead of drawing them closer. And that the book has helped your teams get aligned on a modern, strategic approach to sales and marketing.

I've also heard from several readers that you wanted to learn more—specifically from the sales perspective. Because after all, though I work closely with sales and was a seller in the past, I'm not in the trenches day to day. So for this, the newest chapter of No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls., I'm handing over the mic to my friend and colleague Mark Ebert, chief revenue officer (CRO) at 6sense. He's one of the best at understanding modern selling principles—and putting them into practice to lead one of the most effective, productive, and happy sales teams I've ever worked with.

The CRO Perspective: A New Era of Selling

Selling has transformed dramatically since I got my start 17 years ago. Back then, the sellers I knew (myself included) took pride in the grind mentality. Working 14- or 15-hour days, seven days a week wasn't just the norm, it was a badge of honor. I felt like a hero when I would single-handedly prospect, work, and close a deal the hard way. Taking a deal from beginning to end all on my own felt like the greatest accomplishment of all. The harder I worked to get the sale, the sweeter the success.

I'd bet a lot of us who are now CROs or CSOs grew up in the same culture. We learned to value the first-to-the-office, last-to-leave, limit-pushing mentality. But selling has come a long way since the Glengarry Glen Ross days, and the teams we're now leading are not interested in that type of grind.

The shift has been underway for years now, but Covid accelerated it. After two-plus years of being grounded, working from home, and unable to visit customers, sellers are reassessing their values and priorities, and they're getting serious about work-life balance. That means they want to work smarter, not harder. They want to hit their numbers without killing themselves to do it. There's a bigger focus on mental health and balance, as well as a recognition from sales leaders that productivity only comes from sellers who are mentally fit and ready to perform.

Some things haven't changed, of course. Sales is still a really hard job. Success still depends on talent, dedication, and really hard work. But we now have tools, strategies, and data available to us today that can make that work pay off.

I'm not suggesting we ease up on our goals or expectations. The opposite, actually. Sellers still need to hit their numbers, and as sales leaders, we still need to hold them to the same high standards we've always expected. I'm arguing that the path to running a high-performing team is vastly different than it used to be. We now have data and tech at our disposal that can increase efficiency and attainment in ways that would have seemed like science fiction even 10 years ago. And as sales leaders, it's our responsibility to provide the toolset to enable sellers to work as efficiently as humanly possible.

In this chapter, I share my vision of modern sales leadership. I believe that with the right data, tools, leadership tactics, and strategy, CROs can set up their teams—and their companies—for growth and a more predictable path to building pipeline.

Lighting Up the Dark Funnel™

A big difference in how we successfully sell today gets to the core of how modern B2B buying happens. Buyers now conduct most of their research online (nearly 70 percent, according to Forrester), and they do so anonymously. They also do their research so thoroughly that many have come to some kind of buying decision before ever explicitly engaging with us.

Buyers visit dozens—or even hundreds—of online resources across the Internet, mining information from industry publications, blogs, social networks, influence outlets, and review sites like G2 and TrustRadius.

In addition to this external research, buyers are also anonymously exploring your website. Since this traffic has historically been hard to de-anonymize, most revenue teams have simply ignored it and relied instead on website forms to cajole visitors into handing over their contact information.

But as Latané has explained, buyers are increasingly hesitant to identify themselves to us just for a free ebook. In fact, only 2–5 percent of all B2B website visits result in a form fill. We know that there are far more legitimately interested buyers surfing your site than that—after all, they're visiting for a reason.

Unless you know what buying teams are doing—both on your website and off—you're never quite sure which stage they might be at in the buying process, or how that might align with your sales funnel. That's even true for those elusive form fillers. They might have just filled out a form on your website for the first time, but do you really know where they were before that, or what they know already?

The good news is that as buyers do their research, they leave behind a goldmine of digital breadcrumbs that can help us better serve them—but only if we have the ability to pick up and examine those crumbs.

This breadcrumb trail exists in what we call the Dark Funnel™, a data realm full of signals about buyers’ interests and intent—the kind of data that can help us move accounts through the sales funnel. These signals are brimming with incredibly useful and actionable intent data that sellers can use to provide more relevant value and sell more effectively.

The great potential of the Dark Funnel™ lies in combining those countless, disparate intent signals spread across the Internet into a cohesive picture. This picture can empower your revenue team to navigate prospects through the sales funnel with confidence and answer important questions:

• How many companies are in market for what you offer?
• Where should your sales and sales development teams invest their energies?
• What stage of the buying journey are buyers in?

When you can't see into the Dark Funnel™, you run the risk of missing deals you could have won or coming in so late to deals that your sellers can't effectively compete. You can even alienate buyers by totally misunderstanding them.

Some of the insights that exist in the Dark Funnel™ include the following:

• The duration of an organization's buyer journey
• The size of the buying team
• The sources where those team members get their information
• The financial situation their company might be in, which informs their ability or need to purchase new solutions
• The technological condition they're in, which tells you if their tech stack is compatible with your solution

In addition to information about where the buyer is right now, the Dark Funnel™ also holds insights about where they're going next, so you can predict and prepare for an upcoming need.

For instance, did a potential customer just make a purchase that's in the same ecosystem your product is in? If so, now is probably a good time to engage. On the other hand, if they just signed a two-year contract with your competitor, it would be valuable for your team to know, so they can work the account from other angles and perhaps prioritize elsewhere in the short term. In strategic sales, buyers may decide to switch 12+ months before the renewal is up, which means that's go-time to start turning the ship around.

Another important indicator is hiring trends. A change in leadership often signals a good time to reach out—especially leadership that's related to the product you sell. If you sell benefits software, it's valuable to know when a new CHRO comes on board. But any hiring activity can be significant, depending on your focus. For 6sense, seeing that a company is hiring a lot of BDRs is a great sign that they could soon be in the market for our solution.

Market updates can also signal that it's a good time to act. One of our customers sells data rooms. They know that companies that are engaging in merger and acquisition activity will have increased needs for secure data rooms. Being alerted to that kind of market change allows this customer to get into deals faster than the competition by predicting an upcoming need.

As modern sales leaders, it's our responsibility to provide the infrastructure that allow our sellers to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. By lighting up the Dark Funnel™ with the right revenue technology solutions, you can accurately connect those breadcrumbs back to the companies leaving them.

Being able to stay on top of all these difficult-to-track signals, and then having them seamlessly aggregated and served up to your team, gives you a competitive edge. It takes what was previously in the dark and turns it into a revenue moment.

Here are some of the types of information we find in the Dark Funnel™:

Putting Reps in a Position to Win

Uncovering the insights hiding in the Dark Funnel™ is a big part of how modern sales leaders structure their strategy and put their teams in a position to win.

CROs all have a revenue goal we need to meet, and we work backward from that number to develop our strategy. We determine our capacity plan to make sure we have enough reps to hit our target and then calculate quota based on conversion rates and historical attainment. Then we make sure we optimize territories, accounts, etc. to the field.

Traditionally, we have three main buckets to pull pipeline from when it comes to net-new business:

• Inbound. These are the hand-raisers, plus the list marketing drums up for us.
• Outbound. These are the opportunities the sales team creates for themselves through prospecting.
• Partners. These are opportunities created within our partner ecosystem.

This arrangement doesn't give CROs as much control over the plan as we wish we had, and traditional lead-based marketing has left a lot to be desired. Thankfully, that's changing as more and more CMOs adopt modern account-based engagement practices. But still, inbound is a bucket that's not in sales’ control. So we've relied very heavily on prospecting to build pipeline.

And if we're being honest, our outbound efforts aren't always reliable, either. We often decide which accounts to target based on logos and hunches. Our reps will pour hours, days, months into pursuing a big-name prospect only to hit dead end after dead end. And for modern sellers who expect to have the tools they need to make their hard work pay off, this can be more than demoralizing—it can be the path to the exit.

But for sales leaders who can see into the Dark Funnel™, they have the ability to be more data-driven and efficient with how they predictably build pipeline.

Of all the companies we could sell to, there are some that are absolutely not in-market for what we're selling, and maybe won't ever be. Others are just beginning their research. Yet others are in the middle of evaluating options. Big data and machine learning make it possible to understand where every account is in their own buyer's journey specifically for the product category that you sell. This then allows us to translate that into a score that changes over time.

These scores are a tool we can use to determine when to trigger certain sales and marketing behavior for outbound prospecting. At 6sense, we call accounts that are showing readiness to buy 6QAs (6sense Qualified Accounts).

The 6QA brings process and artificial intelligence to lead and account scoring, which to date has been largely a rules-based exercise informed by subjective human judgment.

To accurately identify accounts that are most likely to convert to opportunities, we use predictive models based on historical opportunity data, and the AI continuously learns from ongoing opportunities, intent signals, and engagement activity across channels. This is based on real data from the CRM, marketing automation platform, and 6sense's proprietary intent network that is all processed by AI and machine learning models.

These models work to actively predict what accounts are an ideal fit, when they may be ready to buy (6QA), and how well the prospecting team is doing at reaching them.

• Account Profile Fit Score. A measure of how similar a company is to your ideal customer profile (ICP), using firmographic and technographic factors. Accounts are given both a numeric score (1–100) and a classification (strong, moderate, or weak fit).
• Account Buying Stage. Where an account is in the buying journey (target, awareness, consideration, decision, or purchase). Accounts in the decision and purchase stage are considered to be a 6QA and ready for immediate sales outreach. In addition to the buyer journey stage, every account is given a correlated numerical account intent score. The higher the intent score, the further an account is in its buying journey and the more likely it is to open or progress an opportunity.
• Account Reach Score. A measure of the quality, quantity, recency, and diversity of outreach activities across personas and channels on a given account compared to those of previously won opportunities. It evaluates a prospecting team's effort so they can prioritize further engagement activities. Accounts are given a reach classification (high, low, or no reach).

There's no arbitrary point system here. The scores are driven by big data—including all that Dark Funnel™ data—and AI predictions. Subjectivity is out of the equation, meaning there's no more, “I think an ebook download is worth 2 points, and marketing thinks it's worth 3 points.”

Right from within our system, we can run backtests to prove out our assumptions about which accounts are the best to work. We can actually report back how much higher these accounts convert to open opportunities because we are reading direct from our own data in CRM.

For instance, here we can see that our conversion rates are vastly higher for strong-fit accounts and accounts that are in the purchase stage of the buying journey. So it's clear that these are the accounts we should be working—no guesswork or opinions involved. And that does wonders for sales and marketing alignment. We can agree that working more accounts is not the answer; it's all about working the right accounts.

One More Dial to Turn

With 6QAs, I can apply a formula to our entire sales motion. Based on our company's historical attainment data, I ask the following:

• How many accounts do my reps need to have in their names?
• What's our conversion rate for 6QAs?
• How many 6QAs do I need to distribute to everyone?

And I have some control over the results: I can adjust criteria for the 6QA to ensure we are working enough accounts to predictably build enough pipeline. In addition to qualifying accounts based on buying stage, intent, and fit, we can also layer on other considerations:

• Region
• Vertical
• Industry
• Solution
• Segment

So for instance, if we need more 6QAs to feed to reps in a particular segment, we can customize the criteria used to define a 6QA to include more accounts by lowering the score threshold.

We recently wanted to increase the number of tier-one accounts we were targeting, but we still wanted to engage them at the moment (and in the way) that was most likely to result in a conversion. We adjusted our qualification criteria so that tier-one accounts that were in consideration stage and were also researching us or our competitors on G2 would be identified as 6QAs, since we know that G2 research is a good indicator of readiness.

Another example: A network security company may know that if an account increases its spending on network security in general, that's a prime time to reach out. So they could specify that whenever an account crosses the $500k per year threshold of spending on network security, the account 6QAs regardless of their other criteria.

Conversely, if we have too many accounts in a particular segment, we can dial back on the accounts we prioritize by narrowing the qualification criteria. With the high volume of accounts we have in the commercial segment, for instance, we can decide we only want sales reps to prioritize companies that are in the purchase stage. Then marketing can work the earlier stage accounts with automated plays so that the criteria for being handed over to sales is steeper. And again, we can backtest to see whether our assumptions prove to be good ones, which keeps sales and marketing on the same page at every point in the process.

This approach allows us to work with our partners in marketing to manage our sellers’ capacity and make sure they're working the absolute best accounts that they can. We've seen a 50 percent increase in our win rates with this approach—again because we're putting sellers in a position to win.

Having this list of objectively good accounts to work gives us sales leaders more control over the entire demand funnel. We now have another lever to keep our sellers fed— without having to cross our fingers and hope for good inbound leads. That's because the 6QA is a proven demand signal, based on buyers’ propensity to buy. It's not based on marketing arbitrarily scoring activities like form fills, as is the case in traditional lead-based marketing and selling.

The 6QA can make a big difference in creating a successful revenue operating model. It signals the ideal time for the handoff between marketing and sales. Before an account becomes a 6QA, marketing is examining earlier demand signals and warming the account. When the account becomes a 6QA, we know it's the optimal time for sales to reach out and get the best results. It helps optimize time across the entire revenue team.

To be clear, the 6QA is not revenue served up on a silver platter. Your sales team still needs to work it, and of course, they still need to work the entire account from the start, not just one lead (contact). And depending on your specific situation, the level of sales involvement with earlier-stage accounts will vary.

The 6QA is not a magic bullet, but it gives our reps a simple and trustworthy way to prioritize their time. Every morning they can log into their dashboards and see which accounts are most likely to be receptive to their outreach today, and they can plan their days around that.

Accounts > Leads

We know that modern buying teams for big B2B purchases include six to 10 individuals.¹ That's a big reason that the old lead-based marketing and sales strategies just don't work anymore—getting one individual on board does little for us if we need the buy-in of an entire buying team in order to close a deal.

As I explained, the 6QA is a very important signal of intent. And when we see that signal, our BDRs and AEs need to kick into gear working the entire account. In earlier chapters, we cited research that shows a single person showing activity converts less than 1 percent of the time. But when a second or third person is engaged, the activity is far more meaningful—and likelier to become an opportunity.

That's why everyone across the revenue team—marketers and sellers alike—needs to be dedicated to multithreading accounts or connecting with multiple personas across the buying team right from the start. The longer the opportunity goes on, the harder it is to engage and set meetings with multiple contacts. That's why using leads rather than accounts is so ineffective; MQLs are inherently single-threaded. I want to ensure that Latané and her team are helping us throughout the journey to get as many key buyers engaged as possible.

When marketing teams are measured or comped on how many MQLs they create, we're set up for single-threading (and sales-marketing misalignment) from the beginning. Same is true when BDRs are comped on only booking a single meeting. A more modern approach—one that ensures multithreading at every stage of the process—is to comp based on engaging multiple personas.

The idea of multithreading, of course, is not new. Sales leaders have been preaching it for years. But even though we all know how important it is, it can be pretty hard to get our teams to really buy in. I think the big reason for that is the process today is clunky and cumbersome. If we tell our sellers to engage multiple contacts but don't give them a fast and easy way to find those contacts, purchase their contact info if needed, and know about those contacts, we're making it too hard.

Here's a place where modern tech makes all the difference. We now have the ability to match specific activity with different buyer personas so our team can engage in relevant and meaningful ways. It also makes it easy for AEs to build out their accounts with quality contact data for multiple contacts so we can deliver the right messages to the right people within the buying team, at the right time.

The idea is to use tech that makes it so easy to multithread that reps almost can't not do it. Because as we know, we can preach the values of engaging multiple personas all day, but if we put up barriers to doing it, it's just not going to happen. On the other hand, if we serve it up for them, there's no excuse not to do it. They can see, “This is your next best action. This is the next persona you need to engage. Click here to instantly acquire their contact data. Click here to add them to a cadence …” In a matter of three clicks, they can easily do what we've been telling them to do forever: make multithreading a reality.

Then, as leaders, we can feel good about having given our team every tool necessary— and then holding them accountable. We can easily see which personas are being worked as well as how and by whom. When there are gaps, we can make sure they get filled.

This level of visibility is very helpful for our forecasting. Since accounts with multiple engaged personas are much more likely to close, I train my managers to track this in forecast calls. We look at a persona map that tells us at a glance—red, yellow, or green— where we're hitting our multithreading goals and where we're missing.

Using principles similar to the ones we use for our account predictive models, we can gauge whether a persona is likely an ideal buying team member and then measure how well we're engaging them. By merging historical opportunity and contact data with continuously updated engagement activity, intent signals, and enriched contact data, we can create an incredibly accurate picture of the buying team.

These models work to actively predict what personas are most important for buying decisions and how well your team is engaging with each member of the buying team.

• Contact Fit Grade. A measure of how important a persona is for closing deals and whether contacts that align to these personas exist in CRM or MAP. Uncover gaps in the buying team and acquire them when needed to accelerate deals. Contact personas are given a grade of strong, moderate, or weak profile fit.
• Contact Engagement Grade. A measure of how engaged a contact is with your brand based on a comparison to previously won opportunities. This model goes beyond arbitrary lead scoring and uses big data to understand the level of engagement or your contacts to predict success. Each known contact is given an engagement grade of A, B, C, or D.

Prioritization in Action

As we've learned, modern tech and AI can tell us two very important things:

1. The best accounts to work
2. Whether we're doing the right things and engaging with the right people to open an opportunity

With that information, we can help our sellers transform how they prioritize their time. In sales, time is our greatest resource (some would argue our only resource). As sales leaders, it's our responsibility to give our people the tools they need to prioritize and structure their days to ensure the most success in the least amount of time.

By keeping your BDRs and AEs laser-focused on right-fit, in-market accounts—and by making it easy for your reps to engage multiple personas on those accounts—you can make sure they're making the best use of every single day. So instead of low-impact activities seemingly done at random, we can serve up the activities that are likely to lead to the outcomes we need.

Instead of working lots of accounts a little bit, reps can work a few accounts a lot— surrounding the accounts with the types of outreach that are proven to work.

For instance, if an account was researching your competitor yesterday, or if they anonymously visited your website, or if they were checking out your reviews on G2 or TrustRadius, that's pretty valuable information and a good indicator that they might be in market to buy. With tech that can peek into the Dark Funnel™ and see these activities, weigh their significance based on persona, recency, and frequency, and send the signal when it's time to prioritize outreach on that account, our reps can spend their time in the places with the highest likelihood of opening an opportunity.

In addition to helping your reps decide which accounts to prioritize, revenue technology also makes it incredibly easy for them to reach out to the right contacts at those accounts. It arms them with contact data as well as rich insights about what these potential customers are researching right now. That means reps can contact these accounts easily and deliver a message that is hyper-relevant and likely to resonate. They'll know what complementary and competing tech the prospect has, so they can talk about how their solution compares to (or works with) what's already in their stack.

Let's take an example from Derek Levine, who was recently promoted from AE to director of enterprise sales for 6sense:

When I see an account is in market and is researching “predictive models,” that's flashing lights because that's a huge differentiator for us. This informs me of the pain the account is researching and what I should be leading with in my LinkedIn messenger, my Drift videos, my LinkedIn voicemails, my cadences. And since I have contact information for multiple personas on the account, I can tweak these messages a bit for each contact and multithread the account from the beginning.

Note that Derek isn't doing just one thing. He's not just leaving a voicemail, checking the box, and moving on to the next account. He's coming at it from a plethora of angles. That's what I'm talking about when I say that this isn't a magic bullet—it still takes skill, effort, strategy, and tenacity on the part of our sellers.

One of the reasons he can bring his A-game to every customer outreach is that he's not trying to work a list of 500 accounts. He has a select list of the accounts most likely to convert to an opportunity, so he can take the time to get to know them and work them with highly personalized, multichannel, multi-persona outreach.

We've seen this prioritization approach work time and again for our own team and for our customers. In fact, we did an analysis² and found that within just two quarters of using this approach, customers were putting 56 percent of their effort toward in-market accounts, and those accounts were driving 79 percent of their revenue. That's a 1.4x efficiency multiplier over working accounts not identified as in-market, meaning the same revenue can be generated with 40 percent less effort (or 40 percent fewer leads!) when the revenue team focuses 100 percent of their efforts on 6sense accounts.

We saw other big benefits as well. Within the first four quarters of our customers prioritizing in-market accounts (we update this data on an ongoing basis):

• Average deal value was 2x higher.
• Win rates improved 10 percent.
• Average days to close was down 25 percent.

The improvements in both revenue maximization and revenue effectiveness make a big difference in hitting your revenue targets as efficiently as possible. For example: If deals from 100 non-6QA accounts deliver $100K in revenue, our analysis indicates deals from 100 6QA accounts will deliver $220K.

Those numbers are pretty impressive. And they're only possible because of the modern tech we have available to us. Whereas we used to prioritize based on general data like company size, revenue, and industry, we now have the ability to hone in on more relevant data—the kind that shows us an account's propensity to buy at any given point in time. These accounts are the ones with the highest conversion rates, so less effort will net greater results. It's the key to helping your reps hyperfocus their time and have the most success in a modern selling environment.

At the same time that we're staying focused on these in-market accounts and working them voraciously, we're also keeping our eye on ways to build demand throughout the funnel. Sometimes that means working accounts in earlier stages to help them to understand that they have a problem, and that we can solve it. And in strategic accounts, sellers may need work every account every day no matter what stage they're in. But understanding the urgency of the 6QA can be very helpful for helping sellers prioritize their time and energy.

WHY FOCUS ON 6SENSE QUALIFIED ACCOUNTS (6QAs)?

A 6QA is an account within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that has reached the Decision or Purchase stage (intent > 70) and has no open opportunities. An account stays in 6QA for 60 days or until an opportunity opens.

ASSIGNING AND WORKING 6QAs DIRECTLY TRANSLATES INTO OPPORTUNITIES AND REVENUE.

Old-school vs. new-school territory design

Territory design is another important aspect of sales strategy that is being transformed by modern approaches. Traditionally, territories have been static lists of accounts that salespeople work all year long—regardless of whether or not those accounts are showing intent.

In strategic sales, that list might be pretty short and made up of only big-ticket accounts. But further downmarket, reps can have hundreds, maybe even a thousand accounts in their name. And they're supposed to be working them all. Of course, that's impossible, so they instead set their eyes on the biggest logos, hoping for a big payoff. And whether those accounts are in market or not, they work them—often pouring months into accounts that will never become opportunities.

Just as big data and AI have changed how we can help reps prioritize their outreach, they've also changed the way we design territories to begin with. We're now able to bring dynamic territories into play, periodically shedding the accounts that are showing no engagement and replacing them with fresh accounts that are interested right now.

This dynamic, data-driven approach does two things: First, it allows us to narrow down the number of accounts a rep is expected to work, so they can dedicate their full attention to the ones that are likely to convert.

Second, it boosts confidence, big time. When they're only working accounts that are proven to be in-market, reps’ attainment skyrockets. And knowing that they'll be able to refresh their list with new, interested accounts every few weeks or months keeps them optimistic about future wins.

Before we had the revenue technology tools currently available to us, this dynamic approach to territory design would have been too labor-intensive to be feasible. But now, with a constantly updated view into what our prospects are doing and the AI to turn that into action, the process is pretty effortless. It's also infinitely flexible—allowing sales leaders to tailor it to their company's specific situation and to refine it in a way that makes sense for each segment.

This is another place where we need to rethink our glorification of the grind. Some sellers have a hero mentality—they think they earn a badge of honor by creating an opportunity from something ice cold. But a lot of times, that's not the fastest or easiest path to revenue. So when possible, depending on the number of accounts in your TAM and other considerations specific to your industry, focusing on fewer in-market accounts is something to consider.

Depending on your TAM and how many AEs you need to hit your revenue targets, simply knowing what you have to work with is helpful. If you have to distribute mostly cold accounts to your team because of your particular situation, that's fine. But getting clear on that can help you understand the profile of the sellers you want to hire, or how you train them to challenge the status quo.

Simply having objective data about what you have to work with is invaluable—both for CROs and our counterparts in marketing.

Getting into New Markets + Verticals

In any growing company, there will come a time when you need to find new accounts to sell to, and you'll need to find the best ways to start addressing more and more of your TAM. As always, prioritization is key here. As we've learned, being laser-focused on where you place your bets yields much greater rewards than trying to reach every possible account.

This comes into play when we're thinking about geo or vertical expansions—both expensive propositions. These endeavors are high risk, high reward, so it's essential to choose wisely. The same insights that inform our territories also take the mystery and guesswork out of deciding whether to break into new markets or verticals. With data and AI showing us which companies are in-market at any given time, we can build out segments related to industry, company size, location, etc., and learn precisely how much potential opportunity exists.

Here again it's essential to work shoulder-to-shoulder with your CMO—and it's really important that that person be someone who understands how to use data and insights strategically. I'm lucky to have that partner in Latané, who is always careful to make sure I don't just hire AEs or spin up territories without her. Just like I'm always cognizant of having enough accounts for all my sellers, so is she. Together, we need to evaluate any new market to ensure that we'll have enough accounts to support our sellers—as well as a winning strategy to help them succeed.

In the past, without modern tech to support expansions, we'd end up in one of two scenarios. The first was analysis paralysis, leading to decisions made with the proverbial dart thrown at the wall. I've seen this type of scenario play out time and again. Go-to-market planning meetings and market modeling are happening in philosophical discussions instead of data-driven, strategic ones. A company hears that their competitors are opening a Hong Kong office, and all of a sudden they're convinced they need to break into APAC. But is there actually any data supporting that move? Or is it just a gut-level fear of missing out on what your competitors are doing?

In the second scenario, teams would pour hundreds of thousands of dollars, and many months, into an involved expansion-planning process. That's the situation Jessica Klek, vice president of strategic sales at 6sense, found herself in at a previous company when she was working to build out a new vertical—without the help of technology to identify in-market accounts.

“We hired a consultant, we did a full analysis, we did our due diligence … and we spent six figures. But at the end of the day, it didn't provide the data that we needed to ramp quickly,” she says. “The accounts we identified weren't even in-market, and a lot of in-market accounts were left on the table.”

The difference was crystalized for her when she met with a 6sense rep who helped her set up audiences and segments for the new vertical she was trying to build out. Almost instantly, she had a clear picture of how many accounts were in-market in her new vertical, and the information was data-based, current, and wildly accurate—a sharp contrast to the experience she had just had working with an expensive consultant.

That type of agility is a huge advantage for fast-growth companies. The revenue teams that win consistently are the ones that keep their finger on the pulse of all the opportunities and carefully choose the best ones to pursue—quickly, not after months and months of working with consultants and poring over spreadsheets.

With an AI platform that helps us make these big decisions based on the best data and insights, we're not only more agile, we're also more confident. Because the truth is no matter how impressive that consultant's deck is, none of the recommendations they make are tested. With our modern approach, on the other hand, we can start testing our predictions before we ever hire our first AE. Marketing starts warming the new vertical or geo with display ads and social ads to test our messaging and see how it resonates. We determine whether we can progress those accounts the way we expect. And we can do all of that in a matter of weeks, not months, which allows us to stay ahead of the competition.

You can look at the data and say definitively, “Yes, there's enough opportunity here to make it worthwhile,” or “No, we'd be better off focusing on North America—the APAC market just isn't there.” And then you can let your competition spin their wheels all they want while you prioritize your resources and attention where they'll have the most impact.

The Unified Pipeline Model

We've talked about a lot of ways that data-backed, AI-powered decisioning bolsters alignment across the board. One of the most high-impact ways this alignment plays out in successful revenue teams is with a unified pipeline model.

When I talk about pipeline, I'm not just talking about marketing-sourced pipeline. I'm talking about all pipeline. In fact, Latané and I really don't care who gets credit for the pipeline since we're both focused on the same goal: revenue. That's why you'll see that we work together to plan and run spiffs to get AEs prospecting regularly. We have a culture in which everyone is expected to prospect. AEs are expected to own their book of business, not just wait for marketing to hand them accounts to work.

This isn't to say that the marketing team isn't accountable for producing pipeline. They absolutely are. But we just want to make sure they're held accountable for the right things. And just as a reminder, the MQL is not the right thing. MQLs may be one demand signal, but they're not an effective way to measure marketing's goals and success—at least not if you want to align on revenue. What's truly important for marketing to contribute is the stuff that improves average sales price, the sales velocity formula, and conversions throughout the funnel.

For three years, Latané and I worked on perfecting our unified pipeline model. Our goal was to create true co-ownership and a shared understanding of the underlying revenue assumptions. We wanted to make sure that our conversations were productive and that we were all playing from the same sheet of music. That's the only way we can identify issues in the pipeline and deal with them. After all, if we're each looking at different metrics, or if we're calculating our metrics differently, we can't see patterns together.

Our vice president of revenue operations, Kory Geyer, laid out the steps we used to align on pipeline.

Step 1: To implement a unified pipeline model, define the following:

• Which accounts to target
• Who is responsible for each stage of the buying journey
• How to measure the performance in each stage of the funnel

Step 2: Define funnel stages in an account-based model, such as the following:

• Marketing-qualified accounts
• Sales discovery
• Sales-qualified accounts
• Closed/won

Step 3: When aligning marketing and sales to focus on the right accounts:

• Define your ideal customer profile (all accounts marketing and sales jointly target) by analyzing past performance and future GTM strategy
  • Past performance includes where you have success based on firmographic and technographic characteristics
  • Future GTM strategy includes product, sales territory coverage, and revenue plans
  • Define behaviors that trigger sales activity

Step 4: When setting account-based pipeline targets and measuring performance:

• Revenue, stage duration, stage velocity, and average deal size inputs are needed to determine targets for each stage. Bring revenue leaders together regularly to review pipeline metrics and decide on early stage, mid/late stage, and sales behavior actions to take.

This is the process we used to get aligned on pipeline at 6sense. Here's what it looks like in practice.

Together, our sales leaders and marketing ops folks work backward, starting with the closed-won revenue they're aiming to create. With that final goal in mind, they look at historic conversion rates and velocity throughout the funnel, as well as the average deal size, to determine how much pipeline they need to create at each stage—or stage 0, stage 1, and stage 2.

(Note: The numbers in the following charts are based on hypothetical examples for context, not actual figures.)

We break down these goals by go-to-market segment, by month, and then by new business versus upsells. So from the very beginning, marketing and sales are on the same page in terms of what our specific goals are and how we'll know if we're on track to create enough pipeline at each stage to meet our final revenue goal.

Until recently we used a spreadsheet like the one on the next page to track all of these things, but we've since made vast improvements on the process, which I'll tell you about next.

Our Next-Gen Pipeline Model

What I've described so far explains the fundamentals of how we have created a pipeline model that aligns the entire revenue team, clearly defines assumptions, and keeps us all accountable. It has allowed us to notice when a conversion or cycle time slips below an assumption so we can focus our effort there.

But overall, this approach had one important flaw: It didn't use AI. Instead, it used the spreadsheet on the left. And that meant it not only required a lot of manual effort, but also that it was based on a fair number of educated guesses (and hand-wringing) from very smart humans. These guesses were occurring on two sides. Let me explain.

When we think about sales forecasting, that's a matter of forecasting what is going to happen based on activity. We already have the goal; it's provided by our board or our CEO.

With pipeline forecasting, on the other hand, we don't even start with an established goal. Everything I just walked you through has to happen to even determine what our goal is. So that's the first place where we're relying on educated guesses.

The second challenge is in forecasting what will be created based on those goals.

In the spreadsheet model we had been using until recently, Latané looked at how much pipeline we created every week and see what that looked like for the quarter. The first week of every month she saw how we were looking for the month. And then she'd ask herself, “Is this even the right goal? What if we overachieved last month? Does the goal change?”

Now we forecast pipeline using AI, and it has changed our world. AI solves both of the problems we were facing. First, we can put in our bookings target, and the AI gives us a rolling, accurate goal. And second, it looks back at all our historical patterns to see our underlying performance and project where we'll be at the end of the quarter.

This is critical because accurate pipeline projections are the key to future-proofing bookings. If you're going to get bad news, you want it as early as possible. AI identifies pipeline issues quickly and early so we have time to fix them. And, importantly, it points to exactly where we should invest—including which go-to-market segment needs the most attention (upsell, EMEA, commercial, manufacturing, etc.). Do we need more BDRs? ABX managers? Events? The AI tells us where to focus our joint efforts, and then tells us whether we're having our desired effect.

You can see in the sample image below that we can all work off the same dashboard, and no one is worrying about whether the pipeline is sales sourced or marketing sourced. We are simply looking objectively at where we're seeing challenges and then making the best decisions early on to correct them.

By aligning across the revenue team from the beginning of the pipeline forecasting process and carrying that collaboration through planning and inspection, we achieve a truly unified pipeline forecasting model. And that's important since if you're confident in your pipeline, you can be confident in your revenue.

Hiring + Retention

Everything we've talked about so far in this chapter is about putting reps in the position to have repeatable success while working more efficiently. While they'll still need to be talented sellers who work hard, the tools we're giving them shorten the distance between them and their commission check or an invitation to Club.

Those are things that make for happy, enthusiastic, and loyal sellers. And that makes the job of hiring and retaining top talent much easier. Especially these days, when the job market is tighter than I've ever seen it, the best sellers have their choice of places to work. If we can't prove to them that we'll put them in the best position to win, they'll go elsewhere. It's that simple.

If, on the other hand, we can show that we give our sellers the technology, tools, and support they need to prioritize their time and start making good money fast, we have a leg up on the competition when it comes to hiring and retention.

As managers, the insights we use for territory planning also give us the confidence to hire the right number of people to work the right segments and territories. We know the exact number of accounts that are in market at any given time, meaning we can know with certainty how many new sellers we can support when we're getting ready to hire.

For the sellers we're recruiting, that message really resonates. We're able to tell recruits, “I can get you ramped and winning faster than the other companies you're considering. Here are our sales numbers and attainment rates, and here's why I know the territory I'm giving you will net you that same level of success.” Knowing that they can start hitting and exceeding their quota fast is a huge motivator for sellers, and it helps us immensely in the recruiting process.

A few years ago when we were still pretty small, we decided to start a commercial team from the ground up. Without access to the information we had available, we might have started small and tested the waters by hiring one or two reps. But our technology showed us that we had a surprising number of commercial accounts visiting our site and not raising their hands—probably because we didn't have product pricing or packaging to accommodate them.

We dug further into our in-market data and found that not only was there huge potential here, but our competitors weren't serving that market. So we jumped in with both feet. Our revenue team worked together to make sure we could onboard and support the commercial segment and make them successful in a cost-efficient way—and then we poured gas on the fire. We promoted one of our enterprise account executives, Mac Conn, to head up a new team, and he hired a whole team of new reps to break into the commercial segment.

Was it risky? Well no, not really. We had the data in front of us to show us that as soon as we turned on this tap, we'd have enough accounts to keep all of our new reps fed. And we did—even as Covid hit just weeks after they came on board.

At a time when many sales teams were struggling with how and whether to reach out to people, we could use our technology to see who was still in-market and actively researching. So they were able to reach out without being insensitive—and in fact, they found they were providing a crucial service at a critical time. By having a direct line of sight into which commercial accounts were searching for ways to make up for lost pipeline, our brand-new team was able to continue smashing attainment goals, even in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime economic upheaval.

What this experience showed me is that whether we're operating in a business-as-usual environment or breaking into new markets in the midst of a pandemic, we can be confident in our ability to make our reps successful as long as we're making data-driven decisions. And that's the secret to hiring and keeping the best sales talent around.

Enablement

Attracting the best talent is, of course, the foundation of building a rock star team. But once you have that talent under your wing, how do you make sure they are set up to do their best—not just in the honeymoon phase, but for as long as they're with you?

I believe that the secret is to foster a culture of learning and growth, from the top down. That means that as leaders, we need to learn out loud. We need to share the positive experiences that are helping us grow, but maybe even more importantly, we need to be transparent about our tough learning experiences. Because our sellers are also going to experience those difficult times, and it's important that we set them up to learn from them.

That's the first step. From there, our job is to commit to providing effective, thorough, and ongoing enablement for our teams. I'm not talking about the occasional training where your team is passively watching, probably checking sports scores while a video plays. I'm talking regular, hands-on training that gets super detailed about what to do and how to do it in different scenarios.

Look at what your deal progressions look like and get very specific about what your sellers should do, each step of the way. Don't assume that they know the basics. They might not have ever learned what you think of as a basic. Or they might have learned and forgotten or grown rusty. Be super explicit about enabling the process, structure, and skills needed to progress deals.

But bear in mind what the famed sales trainer David Sandler tells us: you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar. Same is true for selling. We learn by doing, not by watching slide presentations and filling out worksheets. We help our sellers put their lessons into practice with roleplaying. A lot—weekly, even. The idea is to really activate the learning to prevent that passive, box-checking participation I mentioned earlier.

Of course, there's no one better to learn from than the people who are doing it. So at 6sense, we have our top-performing sellers share what they're doing and help lead the roleplay exercises. But again, we don't just focus on their wins. We play out what happens when things go sideways as well. For each situation, we train for the best, worst, and in-between scenarios.

I see a lot of companies underestimate and underinvest in enablement. But the fact is that these exercises build muscles. And as with any sort of exercise, commitment and consistency are key.

Clearly, I'm a big believer in also enabling sales teams with the best tech. But it's only with this culture of learning that that tech is going to be successful. Providing your reps all the right tools is only one step in the journey toward data-driven, predictable, and repeatable success. You also need to enable them to use the tools at their fingertips.

In order to get sellers to adopt any new tool, technology, or strategy, it's important to start with the “what's in it for me” message.

Toby Carrington, executive vice president of global revenue operations at Seismic, explained at a recent customer conference how their sales team adopted new technology that soon became ingrained in its day-to-day sales motions.

“We of course didn't sell this as some new draconian regime for me to measure what people were doing. We said, ‘You're going to win more, you're going to make more money, and here's how you're going to do it’”

You have to think about this when you're thinking about implementing a new strategy. “You've got to think about it down to the really granular level of how you're going to actually make sure that all this good stuff is used,” Carrington says. “You've got to get them to really understand what needs to be done for successful adoption.”

Meeting your sales team where they already are

We're all creatures of habit, which is why we sometimes resist new systems and processes. To improve adoption, it's important that the information you want sellers to see shows up in the places they're already spending their time.

Alerts can be very helpful, but they should be implemented thoughtfully. Carrington suggests “breaking it down into digestible chunks where people work—certain things on email, certain things on Slack, however they want to receive the information. You need to be where people are when they're doing their daily work, and it needs to be easy. You need to give it prime real estate.”

Call on customer success

When you bring on a big new piece of tech, there's generally a customer success team ready and willing to help you drive adoption and enablement. Take advantage of that. The fact is, no two are the same, so tailoring enablement to your specific situation is the best way to drive adoption. Sit down with the technology's customer success reps and dig into your particular strengths and challenges so you can get the product set up in a way that makes your reps see the value, fast.

Consider a tiger team

In some organizations, it makes sense to kick off a new tech purchase by enlisting a few early adopters. This should be a hand-picked team of top reps who have proven a willingness to try new things in pursuit of success. This tiger team can help you fine-tune your new processes before rolling them out to the entire team.

Share wins

Track your tiger team's results and share their successes with the rest of the team. Collect wins, collect stories, and then figure out the best way to get those in front of your whole team—maybe in your all-hands calls, a dedicated Slack channel, or a weekly email. Correlating adoption to success will give the rest of the team a clear path to the same wins.

Steve Fitz, CRO at Sumo Logic, has used this approach with his own team. “The best person to tell that story is the seller who got the benefit from it. That's the poster child of success,” he says. “You can tell that story 100 times, and adoption becomes immersive.”

These wins have a cumulative effect. While our research shows that adoption starts to pick up in the first two quarters of implementing the account-based go-to-market strategy I'm describing here, it's really in quarters three and four that wins start to rack up and adoption spreads more quickly. By the fourth quarter, our customers see a 2.2x effectiveness rate, on average. And when sellers see their peers achieving more with less effort, they're willing to shake up their old systems to yield the same results.

Track adoption

Once you've proven the value of your new technology, it's reasonable and necessary to expect your team to adopt that tech. As a leader, it's your job to invest in the tools that will put your sellers on the fastest path to success. But as modern sellers, it's their job to leverage the tools that they're given. So set that expectation with your team, and then track adoption. That way, you can celebrate the sellers who are taking advantage of the tools you're investing in while working to remove the barriers for those who are not.

Alignment Across the Revenue Team

The approach laid out in this book has countless benefits, both tangible and intangible. But the most significant change that comes from this modern sales leadership philosophy is true alignment—across the sales team, yes, but also across the entire revenue team.

It's no secret that alignment between sales and marketing is something between an aspiration and a pipe dream at many organizations. That's a huge problem, because when revenue teams are not aligned, they inevitably (and quickly) hit a ceiling in terms of what they can accomplish. Without true alignment, strategy suffers. Revenue suffers. The whole company suffers.

So if alignment is so important, why is it so elusive? A big reason is that sales teams don't trust the leads that marketing provides. And that's with good reason—as Latané explained earlier in the book, marketing-qualified leads are often useless—they're either arbitrarily scored and not actually based on real signals of interest or intent, or they come to the sales team so late that even if we act on them right away, we're too late to get into the deal.

Our sellers know this. They see that MQLs don't convert, and so they start to ignore them. That frustrates marketers, who begin to feel like their efforts are wasted. And from their perspective, it looks as if sales is just being lazy and not working leads the way they should.

A cycle of distrust and division is born.

Another issue is that at the highest levels, CROs and CMOs can't agree on goals, metrics of success, or even which data to use to inform decision-making. This is a major impediment to success, since research³ shows the most important thing successful, high-growth companies do is to get aligned on things like total addressable market, ideal customer profile, and so forth.

These walls between the different parts of the revenue team are real, but modern technology is starting to break them down. Part of the change we're seeing in tech is that there's more of it and it's better than it used to be. But another way tech is changing is that much of it serves the entire revenue organization. Data that used to flow to Marketing Operations or Sales Operations—and, more often than not, stop there—can now flow throughout the marketing, sales, and customer success teams. And thanks to AI, the same data can be turned into insights and action steps that are uniquely useful to people in different roles.

Revenue technology allows us to leave behind the MQL hand-off that has plagued marketing and sales teams. Instead, it offers a way for the entire revenue team to prioritize the best accounts to pursue, gain deep insights into those accounts, and work jointly to move those accounts through the buying journey. This is possible because of objective and trustworthy data that show what our buyers are doing, what they care about, and where they are in their journey.

That's a big step up from the arbitrary guesswork and lead scoring that has caused so many headaches in the past.

With this single source of truth, we can focus on the metrics that matter. In other words, not marketing-qualified leads. Instead, we want to work with our marketing counterparts to focus on metrics like conversion rates, deal size, overall qualified pipeline, win rates, and revenue.

Aligned revenue technology enables us to share a common set of metrics. And that leads to continuous conversation and collaboration between the departments on things like the following:

• Ideal customer profiles
• Go-to-market motions
• Segmentation
• Account prioritization
• Account nurturing
• Pipeline planning

As a CRO, your collaboration with the CMO is critical for all of these areas. Here is what has worked well for Latané and me:

• Collaboration around territory planning. When spinning up a new territory, Latané and I look at data to determine best places to add AEs based on previous success and business objectives.
• Consider the pod needed to support a territory. We also make sure that Latané has the team and resources to support this new territory so the AEs are set up to be successful. We've always thought about this in terms of pre-sales, but the pod also needs marketers—an ABX marketer, as well as market development representatives (MDRs) and/or BDRs.
• Use segmentation to inform ABX strategy. By creating segments and looking at their behaviors and interests, we can work together to inform our go-to-market strategies for those segments. For instance, when running a competitive takeout for big strategic accounts, we set up a segment to include the top 20 strategic accounts we wanted to book meetings with, and then monitored their activity. Were they looking at us or our competitors? What keywords and topics were they interested in? Then sales and marketing worked together to use that data and create an account-based experience that would most effectively engage these high-stakes prospects. This strategy is also very useful for renewal and retention.
• Work together on pipeline targets. Latané and I work backward from the bookings number by segment to create our pipeline targets. It doesn't matter if it's sales-sourced or marketing-sourced; we just want to feed the AEs. What does matter is the assumptions and how those are trending. We look at each segment every quarter and use the underlying trends to create targets for the next quarter.
• Account for seasonality. Historical data shows us when we can expect to see seasonal slowdowns, so we account for those in advance by working together to plan sales and marketing spiffs. For instance, we did a spiff over the summer to get us set up with enough pipeline in Q4 (more on that in the sidebar).
• Aligning our teams. Latané and I make sure our teams are working together with the same level of collaboration she and I are committed to. We have a monthly all-revenue team call, and in our sales meetings, the ABX team is aligned to an RVP. I also make sure to hold AEs and managers accountable for holding up their end of the collaboration.
• Hold ourselves accountable. We all need to be stewards of the pipeline, and each AE and manager needs to be accountable for their book of business. The best sellers think of themselves as entrepreneurs. They take advantage of everything marketing offers to help them hit their goals. But at the end of the day, they understand that it's their responsibility to hit their numbers—no one else's. As chief revenue officer (CRO) it's important to model this spirit of accountability and support for marketing's efforts and expertise.

To get accounts to the point where they're ready to cross the finish line and produce predictable revenue growth, it's essential that the entire revenue team be on the same page. And revenue technology makes that possible in ways that it never has been before.

In my experience and in our research, this collaborative approach creates a flywheel effect. As the revenue team starts to align on metrics that matter and implement a coordinated, data-based, AI-supported strategy, they start to see wins, fast. And as those early wins accumulate, trust improves. Sales and marketing teams see that their collaboration is working, and so it happens more. We develop the kind of high-level trust and collaboration across the entire revenue team that's necessary to deliver long-term, predictable revenue growth.

Tech + Strategy + Hard Work = Payoff

The ideas I've outlined here explain my take on what it means to be a modern sales organization. But sales is always going to be hard. There's not a single thing I've discussed here that is magic. There is no waving a wand and watching revenue pour in. Successful sales teams still depend on all those elements they've always relied on: hard work, talented sellers to do that hard work, and a smart strategy to keep them working in the right direction.

The difference is that we now have some pretty incredible technology to add to the toolbelt. It's one part of the equation, but it can make a huge difference in helping a talented and hard-working sales team maximize their success.