📕 Get smart with sales intelligence; Hubspot hits $1B; Simple email marketing optimizations...
Morning folks, hope all our readers facing these winter storms are staying warm and safe right now. We’ll get to the newsletter shortly, but first we’d like to highlight a few organizations which are working to support Texans in need right now. There are links with information on how you can donate or help if you’re interested.
📞 Gong and Chorus.ai are both on the cutting edge of sales intelligence. The tools record/transcribe sales calls, grade them, then offer suggestions on how to improve – down to highlighting the specific topics and phrases that leads to the most closed deals. If you haven’t strongly considered one, it’s worth checking out this piece to see how Gong uses their own product. Close.io also just launched a call coaching feature which allows managers to “whisper” to their reps during the middle of a call. We haven’t tested yet but it seems like it would make loads of sense when onboarding new reps.
☠️ Having a killer sales team alone doesn’t guarantee you success – an effective sales enablement strategy is often actually what ends up separating winning sales teams from struggling ones. So if you are looking to grade your own process, these are a few metrics which can highlight where things are going right, or potentially wrong. Keep in mind that just a few reps may be accounting for the majority of your sales (the 80/20 rule often applies here) and that’s ok. You just need to understand where success is coming from in you organization, then you can work to replicate it.
💽 Low to no code software is all the rave right now because the more your company can do without using precious development resources, the better. Groove HQ published a set of growth “hacks” (a word I regret using as I type...) which don’t even require low code tools, so there really are no excuses! Thoughtful autoresponders for email sign ups are a great example. They are easy to implement, and can be trickled in to supplement new feature announcements and other more ad hoc emails, which will give your subscriber a bit more structure along their customer journey.
📧 No matter what sort of SaaS business you work with, we bet email is one of your top, if not the top, marketing mediums. Single Grain offered a helpful refresher on the most important metrics you should be tracking within your email campaigns, as well as some relatively easy ways to improve them via optimizations. Take click through rates for example. Making your content truly relevant and personalized to the individual user (detailed Hubspot properties are a great start, you can upgrade to a full blown customer data platform when you are ready) is the best way to speak directly to your audience, which will increase your user engagement.
⏩ Hubspot (NYSE:HUBS) recently announced they beat Q4 2020 earnings expectations by 7%, and more importantly, surpassed 100,000 customers $1B in ARR. It’s an incredible benchmark for the business, and further proof that we should all be paying attention to whatever best practices and suggestions they offer! We are checking out The Sales Acceleration Formula, which was published by their former CRO, Mark Roberge. It gets pretty deep into the weeds, focusing less on big picture innovation and more on how they created a scalable path to get to where they are today.