Ultimately, sales enablement is about efficiency and effectiveness. According to research from Highspot, 80 percent of businesses with a sales team of more than 10 people already engage in some sales enablement techniques. While that’s a good start, without creating a comprehensive strategy, they may not get the most out of it.

With that in mind, Monika Götzmann of Miller Heiman Group gives four ways to promote successful sales enablement in your organization.

Always Be Closing Sales

Joe Chernov of InsightSquared breaks down a largely under-reported phenomenon, the rise in and fragmentation of operations roles, in “Sales Ops vs Marketing Ops vs Business Ops”

Don Otvos of SalesLoft leans on his experience running sales at Yammer, App Annie, and DataHug to convey how to enable your team with great data and a repeatable sales process, in “Sales Operations”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Amrita Chandra of CrowdRiff details some examples of companies who are thinking outside the marketing department and connecting the threads of product, HR, finance, etc, in “When Marketing Lives Outside the Marketing Department”

Jessica Poteet of Tradecraft digs into why companies that build participation avenues early will see organic growth through customers’ excitement and intimacy with products, in “The Next Evolution of Marketing Mix: Growing our Company in the Me Generation”

Grow Up and To The Right

Ben Oliveri of Codementor examines how Brandon Foo of Polymail grew his product to over 25,000 active users with continuous Customer Development, in “Ongoing Iteration — MVP All the Way”

Tal Raviv of Patreon answers audience questions about what he’s learned from running growth at Patreon, in “GrowthHackers AMA with Tal Raviv, Growth & Platform at Patreon”

Raise The Bar Subscribers Get Access To Free Hypergrowth Tickets

HYPERGROWTH is a one-day event in Boston from Drift.com that will bring together leaders who have built brands, sparked movements, and found a way to unlock unprecedented growth — from businesses like Box, ClassPass, Trello and WeWork, to people like five-time Olympic medalist Nastia Liukin and November Project founder Brogan Graham.

Subscribe to Raise The Bar to get the 100% discount code.

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Thank you for reading!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Sales Ops vs Marketing Ops vs Business Ops, Inside Patreon’s Growth, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To give you a sense of fast-growing companies in industries like e-commerce, Bitcoin, green energy, healthcare, VR, fintech, and artificial intelligence, we’ve aggregated search lists showing you the power of Mattermark’s company data. You can also see the fastest growing companies in downtown Boston and California, as well as, the top companies on the Forbes Cloud 100 and the Inc. 5,000 Europe.

Check out the lists and find the prospects you want.

Always Be Closing Sales

Nicholas de Kouchkovsky of Sales Hacker releases the fourth edition of the sales technology landscape, expanded to cover the entire sales tech industry, including 32 categories and over 700 participants, in “Sales Tech Landscape 2017 — Making Sense of 700+ Players”

Kathleen Atkins of Akoonu maps the combined process of the Buyer’s Journey and Sales Process, called the Revenue Journey, in “What Path is Your Sales Team On?”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia believes Instagram DM (Direct Message) is the single biggest networking or business development opportunity of this decade, and gives his step by step guide to deriving the most value from it, in “How to Network on Instagram Direct Message”

Product Hunt provides an in-depth and the definitive guide to launching a product on Product Hunt, the key things to focus on, what to avoid doing, how to prepare in advance, and more, in “How to Launch on Product Hunt 🚀”

Grow Up and To The Right

Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers explains in detail his preferred approach for setting up and evolving growth teams and reveals the qualities of an effective growth team, in “Practical Product, Ep. #9, Demystifying Growth Hacking”

Thomas Mensink of Golden Egg Check analyzes growth strategies by throwing homepages in the ‘internet time machine’, in “Online Time Traveling — the Growth Strategies of 4 Dutch Scale-ups: Adyen, Catawiki, Coolblue & Takeaway”

How To Make Your Data Work For You

Enrich your leads with additional data from your existing workflows. Join our webinar to learn how to integrate Mattermark with other sales and marketing tools.

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Originally published at Mattermark.

Sales Tech Landscape Update, Instagram DM Networking Guide, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Fortune 500, The Global 2000, The Most Innovative Companies. These are just a few of the lists that publications and established organizations publish to rank companies. The rankings are based on everything from business performance to company culture to diversity. While being ranked on one of these lists is a huge testament to the employee and leadership team’s hard work, it’s also a good way for sales teams to narrow down their prospect list. If your prospect lists have hundreds of companies, consider looking at notable ranking lists to narrow your focus.

Always Be Closing Sales

Hila Segal of Clari confirms that sales managers simply aren’t getting the visibility they need to identify risk and spend too much time chasing reps getting a handle on what’s actually going to close, in “”Dammit Jim, I’m a Sales Manager, Not a Mind Reader””

Richard Harris of Sales Hacker equates sales to cookbooks and finds salespeople are going to need the flexibility to experiment with different spices and flavors, in “It’s Not A Sales Playbook, It’s A Cookbook”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently proves how addicted we are to acquisition before demonstrating why this is an enormous problem for your bottom line, in “How To Break Your Customer Acquisition Addiction (and Why You Should)”

Janet Choi of Customer.io breaks down top-performing SaaS retention emails at CloudApp, AdRoll, and CoSchedule, in “Customer Retention”

Grow Up and To The Right

Brian Balfour of Reforge examines ‘Model Market Fit’, the concept that your market (and # of customers within your market) influence your model, in “The Model Market Fit Threshold & What it Means for Your Growth Strategy”

Max Andersson of King Kong reviews how HelloFresh is doing in the Australian market, in “A Rare Peek Inside HelloFresh’s $880 Million Growth Strategy [Case Study]”

How To Make Your Data Work For You

Enrich your leads with additional data from your existing workflows. Join our webinar to learn how to integrate Mattermark with other sales and marketing tools.

Join thousands of DOERS reading the Raise the Bar newsletter. A daily digest of timely, must-read posts on sales, marketing, and growth engineering. Don’t miss our next edition, subscribe today!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Model Market Fit Analysis, Customer Acquisition Addiction, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fundraising can be a daunting feat to overcome. In fact, people fail far more than they succeed. Of the more than 6 million startups that launch in the U.S. annually, less than 1% receive funding from angel or VC investors, according to data from Fundable. Knowing this and wanting to avoid common pitfalls, Erin Wilson of hirepool and his co-founders asked several founders what’s been key to their fundraising success. One tactical piece of advice multiple sources shared was to compile a spreadsheet filled with high-quality potential investors.

Always Be Closing Sales

Hila Segal of Clari reviews a poll of sales reps, managers, VP-level execs, and sales ops leaders about common execution challenges slowing their teams down, in “Sales Organizations and Star Trek: Parallel Universes?”

Dave Brock of Partners In Excellence wonders if we have it right when we think about the Sales Development Rep role, whom we hire, what we expect them to do, in “Rethinking the Role of the SDR”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Lynn Perkins of UrbanSitter shares how UrbanSitter has approached trust-building through product marketing and how other companies can do the same to grow fast, in “This Is How You Get People to Trust Your Product”

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, formerly of Trulia, outlines the top mistake companies make in content marketing and the process to mapping your customers’ journeys in order to create content that is actionable and impactful, in “The [Adjective] [Number] Things You Need to Know About Clickbait”

Grow Up and To The Right

Guy Marion of Autopilot examines how Autopilot, in their first 18 months, went from 0 to 2,000 customers, signed up 24,500+ free trialists, and experienced 21% month-over-month revenue growth, in “Strategies Behind Autopilot’s Growth”

Heather Marie of Shoppable chats with Nathan Latka about how minimizing expenses was important to building her $500K MRR business, in “The Top Entrepreneur, Ep. #726” (23 mins)

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Thanks for reading!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Sales Orgs and Star Trek, Mapping Customer Journeys, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We recently caught up with Michael Africk, co-founder and CEO of Inmoji, to hear his experiences growing his sales funnel by connecting with people in his network and building strong customer relationships by being transparent with campaign data and performance.

Here is Michael’s perspective.

Always Be Closing Sales

Joe Leach of Leverton details his learnings and best practices for international companies when expanding sales operations to U.S. markets in “Building an American Sales Team at an International Company”

Nathan Berry of ConvertKit aims to convince early sales teams and founders to do things that don’t scale by documenting how he grew sales from $1,300 to $725,000 MRR, in “Direct Sales for Bootstrapped SaaS Startups”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Glen Allsopp of Detailed highlights how a Sketch shortcuts site picked up links from 275 different websites in “One Possible Shortcut to Content Marketing Success”

Andy Carvell of Phiture presents some guidelines to help teams figure out the minimum viable level of analytics needed to iterate on product and marketing objectives at different stages of growth in “Minimum Viable Analytics”

Grow Up and To The Right

Emily Weiss of Glossier and Amy Buechler of Y Combinator discuss what Emily has learned from growing her business, in “Insights That Grew Glossier” (27 min. podcast)

Devesh Khanal of Grow & Convert shares the story of how Patrick Campbell built Price Intelligently and ProfitWell into million dollar businesses by having a clear goal of building a scalable company, having the discipline to stick to that goal when it would have been easier not to, and the courage to experiment with business models that aren’t always popular in “Scale Over Lifestyle”

Join thousands of DOERS reading the Raise the Bar newsletter. A daily digest of timely, must-read posts on sales, marketing, and growth engineering. Don’t miss the next edition, subscribe today!

Thanks for reading!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Relationships as a Sales Lever, Minimum Viable Analytics, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No eye of newt or frog’s breath needed to brew up some pretty magical searches inside Mattermark. With our new Account Discovery Wizard, we provide you with the perfect spell to identify your future customers. Whether you’re creating your first or 16th saved search, you’ll find that you save time and resources previously spent researching prospects, so you can focus on those that truly matter.

Sales teams that use saved searches say these are three of the key benefits

Always Be Closing Sales

Aja Frost of HubSpot defines the core principles, questions, and processes of “solution selling”, in “Solution Selling: The Ultimate Guide”

Steli Efti of Close.io encourages enterprise sales teams to go all in and dedicate the next 12–18 months to enterprise success vs. trying “quick experiments”, in “Enterprise Sales for Startups”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Kelly Nyland of Spectacles (Snapchat) discusses her history into architecting massive marketing campaigns for innovative and emerging consumer hardware products, in “HackToStart, Podcast Ep. 158” (32 mins)

Doug Kessler of Velocity makes his case as to why marketers should let the salespeople and finance folks worry about maximizing profit, in “Why Revenue is the Wrong Marketing Metric”

Grow Up and To The Right

Carrie Melissa Jones of CMX takes a closer look at five ways to encourage referrals from existing community members, in “Community-Driven Referrals”

Sharan Suresh of ChargeBee explores the sphere of relationships between various SaaS metrics, in “From Unit Economics To Negative Churn: Hitchhiking To SaaS Growth”

Want to find your future customers and close more deals?

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Thanks for reading!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Inside Snapchat’s Spectacles Campaign, Solution Selling Guide, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lead (or data) enrichment can be problematic because it’s difficult to know who owns different pieces of the puzzle. It usually involves multiple individuals on the sales and marketing teams. Yet in a traditional organization, this can become disconnected as marketing focuses on filling the top of the funnel and sales focuses on the middle to bottom of the funnel, turning leads into customers. So let’s answer the question posed in the title of this article: who owns lead enrichment?

Always Be Closing Sales

Ed Shelley of ChartMogul analyzes over 100 B2B SaaS Pricing pages to look at the data behind the trends, standards, and innovations, in in “B2B SaaS Pricing Pages in 2017”

Nancy Bleeke of SalesProInsider realizes she needed to look differently at sales turnover so she could make strategic decisions on whether she had a “problem” to fix or not, in “The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Sales Rep Turnover”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Hiten Shah of Quick Sprout gathers data on the traffic sources for 15 different blogs, and organizes them according to traffic volume and the different stages in a blog’s life, in “Set Your Company Up for Marketing Success by Working Backwards from 15 Million Blog Visits”

Alfred Lua of Buffer digs into the shift behind why social media is becoming an engagement channel vs. a traffic driver for most businesses, in “Why I Think Social Media Is For Branding and Engagement, Not Traffic or Revenue”

Grow Up and To The Right

Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer of Y Combinator spent time with 25 growth experts, who have worked at companies (including Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Stitch Fix, Square, Slack and Instagram, to identify best practices for establishing a growth program, in “Growth Guide: How to Set Up, Staff and Scale a Growth Program”

Laura Roeder of MeedEdgar examines the exact goal setting worksheet they used to focus MeetEdgar’s goals in the first quarter and beyond, in “How MeetEdgar Grew to $4 Million a Year with Proper Goal Setting”

Want to find your future customers and close more deals?

Join thousands of DOERS reading the Raise the Bar newsletter. A daily digest of timely, must-read posts on sales, marketing, and growth engineering. Don’t miss the next edition, subscribe today!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Lead Enrichment Operations, Y Combinator’s Growth Guide, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week, we hosted our first webinar of the year to show sales pros how to use Mattermark to find their future customers, save time by automating data collection and manual procedures, and connect with the right decision maker.

The attendees asked some great questions that others who signed up for a trial or are current customers might be curious about. Here are a few:

Always Be Closing Sales

Steve Richard of ExecVision gives you the activities, objectives, and results in metrics from the top 5% of Vorsight’s SDR team, in “Outbound Prospecting Metrics — Vorsight Benchmarks”

Chris Orlob of Gong illustrates how data and science are helping us understand the anatomy of a winning sales conversation — at every phase of the sales cycle, in “Will Technology Reduce Sales Conversations to an Exact Science?”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

David Boutin of SocialQuant digs into how Kelly Porter and Nick Johnson started a YouTube channel without being digital marketers and have achieved solid traction, in “YouTube Case Study: 65,421 Views & 4,749 Subscribers In First 3 Videos”

Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi of Love Your Customers find that Senior marketing talent is hard to find and first marketing hires have no time for mentorship or budget for resources, in “There’s a Problem with SaaS Startups and Marketing”

Grow Up and To The Right

Andrew Chen of Uber provides an analysis of why startups should theoretically be getting cheaper to build and scale, and why growth is getting costlier from increased competition, greater emphasis on paid acquisition, and bigger and bigger rounds, in “Startups Are Cheaper to Build, but More Expensive to Grow”

Connor Keppel of Phorest talks about how growth hacking was a brilliant marketing tactic when it first emerged but now too many people consider it their long term marketing strategy, in “An Obsession with Growth Hacking is Limiting the Success of Startups”

Want to find your future customers and close more deals?

Join thousands of DOERS reading the Raise the Bar newsletter. A daily digest of timely, must-read posts on sales, marketing, and growth engineering. Don’t miss the next edition, subscribe today!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Outbound Prospecting Benchmarks, YouTube Case Study, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why this list matters: The Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes cloud computing companies that are leading the pack, from HR and marketing to security and infrastructure. These companies show strong business growth in terms of revenue and funding, and likely have the budget and need for new tools and software. In particular, Forbes Cloud 100 companies with funding in the last 6 months are good prospects for sales reps to add to their list since they have new money to invest.

Here are 10 companies on the Forbes Cloud 100 list in 2017 that have received funding in the past 6 months, ranked by Growth Score.

Always Be Closing Sales

David Greenwood of Anomali digs into why salespeople are more successful selling positivity over negativity, and how to plan your sales cycles carefully to avoid over-optimism in “Optimism Bias”

Kevin Thomas Tully of The Creative Agency finds understanding contextual cues prior to sharing any content with your buyers and prospects is a better way to achieve social selling success in “3 Reasons Sales Context Boosts Social Selling Effectiveness”

Expand Your Marketing Funnel

Julia Chen of Appcues looks at how five of the most popular brands lower the cognitive overhead during onboarding to understand why some CRM tools take off while others don’t in “Getting Past the Empty State: How 5 Popular CRM Tools Onboard Users”

Really Good Emails examines eleven email design trends he’s identified this year and how they compare to last year’s trends in “Email Design Trends of 2017 (so far)”

Grow Up and To The Right

Claudiu Murariu of InnerTrends reflects on seven SaaS companies they helped with data-driven decisions by answering every question they had regarding their user behavior and product usage in “Lessons from One Year of Rewarding Data-driven Decisions”

Brian Balfour of Reforge expands on how products are built to fit channels, not the other way around, the power law of distribution, and more in “Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy”

Join thousands of DOERS reading the Raise the Bar newsletter. A daily digest of timely, must-read posts on sales, marketing, and growth engineering. Don’t miss the next edition, subscribe today!

Originally published at Mattermark.

Email Design Trends 2017, Product Channel Fit Strategy, and More — Raise The Bar was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Startups Lure Salespeople with Equity as an Incentive

Salespeople are stereotypically competitive, hungry and cash-oriented, but like any employee at a startup, equity can play a role in their compensation. Information about typical salary or commission compensation structures for sales roles are easy to find. However, there is far less known about equity-based compensation for salespeople.

Tom Matta of eShares dives into the average equity compensation by role and by round, and some unorthodox incentive structures companies use to add equity as part of sales commission.

From Startup Investors

Tom Drummond of Heavybit looks at his career path from Analyst through to Partner, his approach to getting started in the Bay Area with no network, as well as how Heavybit got its start, in “Venture Confidential, Ep. #4” (38 min. podcast)

Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures advises that if you’re caught on the hamster wheel, recognizing it and trying to take some actions is the first step, in “I Only Have 7 Trips Left. On Managing Work / Life Balance, Love & Family”

Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz makes his argument that people don’t create more on PCs today and they do create more on mobile, in “Creation and Consumption”

Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital summarizes what some of the smartest people in the startup industry have said and written about Product/Market Fit, in “WTF is PMF? (Part 1 of 2)”

Medha Agarwal of Redpoint Ventures encourages founders to ask themselves why they need Machine Learning for their business, as most investors will tell you, buzzwords like “AI” and “machine learning” are sprinkled throughout company pitches these days, in “Attention All Machine Learning Founders”

From Startup Operators

Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin of theSkimm reflect on five things they once thought were insurmountable when they started their business five years ago, in “5th Time’s a Charm”

Cat George of Parallel 18 expands on the importance of design, audience, storytelling, pitch feedback, and routine, in “Resources for Perfecting a Mind-Blowing Pitch”

Anna Vital of Funders and Founders provides a visualization of the relationship between age and success, in “Too Late To Start? Life Crisis and Late Bloomers — Infographic”

Poornima Vijayashanker of Femgineer details her interview with Karen Catlin, an advocate for Women in Tech and a Leadership Coach, in “Why People Resist Mentoring and How To Make It Work”

Gregarious Narain of Before Alpha describes how each generation of his life as an entrepreneur has been about a different ecosystem and why corporate innovation is next, in “My Next Adventure: Before Alpha”

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Originally published at Mattermark.

Resources for Perfecting a Mind-Blowing Pitch, Managing Work/Life Balance, and More — Mattermark… was originally published in Mattermark on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.