What better way to cap off the year 2023 than with some 🌶️.
Just like last week, we’ve got something special for you: a compilation of perspectives from some of the best go-to-market (GTM) leaders out there.
This week, however, is full of hot takes.
20 GTM leaders answer the question:
What is one widely held belief that revenue leaders have that you think is bull$*** or no longer serving us?
When you’re ready, let’s get into it.
GTM Leaders’ Spicy Perspectives
Highlighting 20 GTM perspectives on what widely held belief they disagree with 👇
“What is one widely held belief that revenue leaders have that you think is bull$*** or no longer serving us?”
- “Not being clear about your intention. My mind goes to being sold myself. Having sat through sales processes before, I can’t tell you the number of times I get “could we book a 15 minute intro call?” For what? What problem are you trying to solve? Or it comes off like, “let’s be friends”. And what I would tell our sales team is at this point in my life, I have enough friends.” (Mike Vichich – former Co-Founder and CEO of Wisely, current Co-Founder and CEO of Pursuit).
- “I think that some people obsess with measuring everything in marketing. I think that it’s great that we’ve gotten so data-driven, but I do think that while there is a big science part of it, there’s also a lot of art to it” (Dave Gerhardt – former Chief Brand Officer at Drift, current Founder and CEO of Exit Five).
- “The tactics that you use in SMB – focus on building products at scale, overindexing towards UX and UI, having a PLG motion behind the scenes, leading with your product, and adapting the way that you price and package, meaning giving some optionality. I think there’s this underlying belief that this doesn’t work in the enterprise. It does.” (Sean Marshall – former Senior Vice President of Sales at Klaviyo).
- “The general world of attribution and being obsessed with attribution” (Daniel Wiener – Founder of You Should Talk To).
- “B2B and D2C being super different – the belief that they are super different. And they are, don’t get me wrong. But the same principles apply, they just need to be adjusted to different contexts and nuances” (Sophie Buonasissi – Vice President of Marketing at GTMfund).
- “Being transparent with a prospect is somehow diminishing our ability to move a sales cycle forward. I mean that in the context of the value that you provide. I believe that we can be more honest and transparent upfront in a sales cycle to say, “why are you looking at our product and service?” (Zach Lawryk – previous VP of Solutions Consulting at Slack, current head of Global Solutions Consulting at Rippling).
- “The whole emphasis on outbounding” (Ang McManamon – Vice President of Sales at Crunchbase).
- “Email marketing is kind of dead. I can’t even count how many cold emails I just got this morning, let alone this week that all look and feel the same. When you layer on now AI and machines writing them for you, and the fact that email and the marginal costs to send an email is zero… I’m not buying anything, certainly not easily through a cold email these days” (Dan Reich – Co-Founder and President of DIBS Beauty).
- “Cold calling. Just look at the data” (Sam McKenna – Founder of SamSalesConsulting).
- “Spending time on building your brand as a CEO is a complete waste of time when it comes to press and stuff like that” (Melanie Fellay – CEO and Co-Founder of Spekit).
- “In a way, I think LinkedIn is dying” (Eli Rubel – CEO of MatterMade and NoBoringDesign).
- “The old way of gating content and distributing that gated content strikes me as being so outside of the way anybody wants to engage or buy” (Adam Schoenfeld – Co-Founder and CEO of Keyplay and Co-Founder of PeerSignal).
- “I’ve often said ‘a brand touch is a demand touch, a demand touch should be a brand touch.’ So stop thinking that when you’re doing demand gen and you’re building leads and you’re doing stuff for your sales team, it’s not influencing the market in terms of defining who your brand is” (Elissa Fink – former Chief Marketing Officer at Tableau).
- “You have to grind and suffer your way to success. I’m not saying it doesn’t work sometimes. Being in flow state is a lot more enjoyable – you get more done and you’re not suffering” (Kevin Bailey – Co-Founder and CEO of Dreamfuel).
- “I think often you think, ‘I don’t want to be in the weeds. I have my management team or things are going along.’ But, get in the dirt. Everyone is competing for dollars in the wallet and there aren’t many dollars to go around. So it’s who stands out, who has more impact, who’s more excited about their product, who’s passionate, who cares” (Cara Felleman – former Vice President of Sales at Vividly).
- “Once you state your price in a very factual unashamed way – shut up. This is one of the biggest mistakes we see salespeople making on millions and millions of sales calls that we’ve analyzed. They will state their price, and then three seconds later, they’ll jump in and start re-qualifying it” (Udi Ledergor – Chief Evangelist Officer at Gong).
- “I think I thought that because the sales team wanted to come back to the office the first few months, I’m representing my team’s point of view and they want to be back in the office. It’s not fun making cold calls on your kitchen table, getting hung up on, and not having a teammate to go talk to and blow off some steam with. I knew that I wanted to do this for the team. But I remember John came up to me and saying, Dini nobody wants to go back anymore” (Dini Mehta – former Chief Revenue Officer of Lattice).
- “Especially right now in this economy, I think there’s this mentality of, ‘I don’t need to hire a full marketing team. I’m ready to hire a sales team.’ You might have a sales team of 20 people, but you’re okay hiring just one marketing person and you expect them to do it all” (Nicole Wojno Smith –
Vice President of Marketing at Tackle).
- “To me, once you put a number in CRM that’s your new maximum deal size, because it gets in your head. Not always and there are exceptions, but mostly, it’s going to come in slightly smaller than what you put it in for” (Bob Elliott – former Chief Revenue Officer at Built Technologies and Forter).
- “Sometimes we constantly fill our minds with the opinions, voices, and dogmas of others. I think you really have to escape from that for several weeks or several months. It’s really important to do that because you’re sort of drowning out your own inner voice” (Pukar Hamal – Founder and CEO of SecurityPal).
👀 More for your eyeballs:
With the speed at which AI is evolving and being adopted, it’s helpful to take a step back and consider these 4 rules for working with generative AI.
👂 More for your eardrums:
If you tuned in last week, you know the drill.
You’ve read the spicy perspectives of some go-to-market leaders.
Now, if you want to hear them plus 25+ additional perspectives, pop in your headphones for the last podcast episode of 2023!
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
3 start-ups with Chrome extensions to help you stay organized in 2024:
- Magical: a productivity app that helps you save 7 hours per week. It is truly magic – it makes tasks disappear.
- OneTab: organize your browser tabs while instantly freeing up gigabytes of memory.
- Focus To-Do: get your tasks done using the pomodoro technique, helping you stay focused for the duration of a set time.
🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:
- Product Marketing Manager at Document Crunch (Remote – US)
- Director of Customer Success at OfferFit (Remote)
- Enablement Manager, Partnerships at Gorgias (Toronto, Canada)
- Onboarding Partner Manager at Gorgias (San Francisco or Toronto)
- Sales Manager – EMEA at Vanta (Dublin, Ireland)
See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.
That’s it, that’s all has a new meaning this week.
That’s it, that’s all for the YEAR – for 2023.
If there’s anything that you would like to see shared in the newsletter next year, please drop me a comment or email. Would love to hear what would be helpful for you!
2024 is a weekend away now, so I’ll catch you on the other side.
Happy New Year!
Barker ✌️
