Ian Barker 👨‍🍳

To all SDRs or anyone entering B2B sales, read this post to avoid falling into common traps. 1. The most successful AEs I have met were the best SDRs. 2. SDRs who didn’t excel in the role and are now AEs are still struggling to generate their own pipeline. 3. AEs who skipped the SDR role, often due to an MBA or strong interview skills, fear switching jobs and roles without inbound leads. They’ve never faced the grind of building a pipeline from scratch, filled with rejections. 4. AEs who have never been an SDR majorly rely on their SDRs or Inbound leads from marketing to help them build pipeline and if any Quarter they don't get inbound or enough meetings from SDRs they sh** in their pants. 5. When these AEs become managers, they often question their team—"Where are the numbers?" or "Why isn’t there a pipeline?"—instead of guiding them on building it. Lacking experience in pipeline generation, they fail to lead by example and eventually lose the respect of their team. Learn the art and science of being an SDR and excel at this job at any cost, you will never have to look back or depend on anyone for pipeline EVER. Prospecting and Generating Pipelines is fundamental to Sales whether you are an SDR, AE, Sr Manager, or VP if you don't know how to do OUTBOUND you will continuously live a sales life of fear and anxiety. So SDRs ask yourselves do you want to be such AE and Managers in the future who depend on others to determine their performance and faith or would you like to own your job? #sales #prospecting #outbound #pipeline #sdr #ae #b2b #saas

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ZoomInfo Copilot is transforming the way sales teams work. Just ask Joy Rohde, Sales Director at Earnix. Leveraging customer intent data and AI, ZoomInfo Copilot helps sales teams focus on the best accounts and confidently reach out when they're ready to buy. ⏰ T-minus 24 hours until ZoomInfo Copilot is here — you don't want to miss it! #ZoomInfoCopilot

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YOUR WIN/LOSS DATA IS BS – AND THE LIGHTSPEED 2024 REPORT PROVES IT Take a close look at the Lightspeed 2024 Sales Benchmark Report. It highlights “inaction” (53%) and “economic uncertainty” (47%) as top reasons for losing deals, and “product features” (68%) plus “prior experience” (39%) for winning. But if these are the only insights in your CRM, you’re missing the strategic value hidden in your deal data. –– THE UNSTRUCTURED DATA PROBLEM –– Your GTM stack is overflowing with unstructured data — calls, meetings, emails, etc. Even if you’re using platforms for call recording and coaching, that alone DOES NOT STRUCTURE your data for strategic analysis. If you rely on reps to tag “budget” or “ghosting,” or AI-summaries, you lose critical, nuanced details that drive strategic decisions. Real Win/Loss insights require instant visibility into buyer pains, success criteria, and competitor references (straight from calls, emails etc). They also require a robust gap analysis (think MEDDICC done right), so you see exactly how far the buyer is from their ideal outcome — and how you close that distance. If this data is NOT STRUCTURED in your CRM, you’ll only see “lost due to inaction,” missing the pain you never addressed or the budget holder you never validated. –– WHY STRUCTURED DATA MATTERS –– Without it, you can't get to the real insight that can transform how you sell. Marketing can’t craft competitive messaging if they can't analyse why another vendor beat you. Sales can’t coach effectively if the excuse is always “no champion.” If this data is not structured in your CRM, it can't be actioned and monitored. Result? Your entire org is FLYING BLIND. –– THE GAP ANALYSIS (MEDDICC etc.) –– Gap analysis maps the buyer’s current state to their desired future state. If these details aren’t structured in your CRM, you’ll stay stuck with generic “budget” or “timing” excuses. –– WHY THIS DATA MUST LIVE IN CRM –– Everyone — Sales, Product, Marketing, CS — relies on the CRM for real-time insights. By structuring conversational data into MEDDICC elements, quantifying them into numbers for strength of each element and combining with activity metrics, sales can finally FORECAST, and use resources efficiently. CRM should guide the full journey (sale, retention, upsell), revealing which ICP segments thrive and which might churn — so you can tailor product, messaging, and resources. –– THE FINAL WORD –– If you’re fine with “economic uncertainty” or “prospect went silent”, keep letting unstructured data go to waste. But if you want to truly improve and use your data as a competitive advantage, you need to systematically structure and monitor deal data by leveraging Epicbrief to autonomously pull data from your existing tools like Gong or SalesLoft or similar, structure and populate data in your CRM. No UI. Zero effort from reps. Turn your data into a strategic weapon for growth. ————— Curious how Epicbrief does this? DM me. #b2b #sales

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A question for Sales Leaders re: quotas - A friend in Medical sales just got their quota...halfway through May (almost halfway through the year). As a territory manager they hustled in 2023 and achieved 111% to quota. They were #4 in Canada and #1 in Ontario. Great, right? Wrong... As a reward, they were gifted with a 12% increase in quota not from previous year's quota, but from previous year's achievement, and to me this just doesn't make sense. 👉 This type of quota calculation rewards those who achieved 90% (or even lower ) 👉 Demotivates those high achievers - They used their relationships to get orders in before quarter/year end and those doctors won't be needing those products perhaps for 18 months 👉 Promotes #quietquitting - doing the minimum requirements of one's job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary 👉 Promotes mediocrity - the more I sell the more will be expected of me next year My friend is understandably demotivated. They are the first ones to help with any events, often being away from home on a weekly basis to help other colleagues with their events/sales. They no longer want to put in any extra work and are questioning the company and whether it may be time to leave. I would love to hear from Sales Leaders out there as to how you calculate quotas, what systems/products you use, and how you deal with employees who have questions.

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Many are asking me for interview advice Here's what I would do if I applied for an OpenText sales role I'd come prepared with either a presentation for a discovery call Or I'd come prepared with a mock cold call session Once the interview starts see if they will let you role play the discovery Don't just present slides Be present and show them you really know how to do the job Ask questions to get the interviewer (prospect) talking more Show your confidence Have a 30, 60, 90 day plan and your achievements in your back pocket as well Close every interview And just like every great sales rep, you need to follow up pretty fast

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Multi-threading... A skill that's fast becoming the most critical in a sales reps arsenal. Why? 🤔 The market is tough at the moment. 🤔 Buyers are more budget conscious. 🤔 CFOs are asking teams to reduce spend and cut back on investment. 🤔 Prospects that once had buying power and sign off capability now have to get approval from C-Suite. It sounds like an uphill battle 🏃‍♂️‍➡️⛰️ but the truth is, multi-threading is not as daunting as you might think. ⭐️ Here's some tips that have worked well for me in the last 6 months ⭐️ 🗺 Map out your accounts. Org charts are critical for multi-threading. You need to understand who your prospects are, who they report to, and who holds decision making power. Tip - LinkedIn SalesNav let's you build drag and drop org charts! 🗣️ Check with your your champion. Confirm your org chart is correct. Ask them what the process is for bringing on a new vendor. If they don't know, 🆘 they are not a true champion. 📧 Share content early. Begin introducing yourself to key stakeholders quickly. Tip - Connect on LinkedIn with a short and sweet connection request, something like "Wanted to put a face to a name following some great conversations I've been having with (champion name) re (challenge). I'll send over some content via email shortly. I look forward to hearing your thoughts." 🎺 Make sure your content is personalised, engaging, and stands out. TOP TIP - Using a tool like trumpet 🎺 (digital sales room) is a sure fire way to encourage stakeholder engagement. Upload clear and concise value props, how you can solve their businesses challenges, client case studies and more. Ask these contacts to bookmark the page as you will regular update it with content as the deal progresses. And, track their engagement, so you can meet them in the moment. So far, my prospects have been LOVING it! 📞 Pick up the phone. Once you've connected on LinkedIn and sent content, call prospects to ensure that they have seen it. Ask what questions they have and tell them about next steps. By doing the above, when it comes to negotiation these stakeholders will be informed and aware of the entire process to date, and you and your product will be top of mind 🧠 Tenured AE's in my network (I know there are a lot of you), what do you do to successfully multi-thread? P.S. You can guess what I'll be doing in the office today :😉 #multithreading #sales #digitalsalesrooms #dsr #aestrategies

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If you decide your sales team needs to help with renewals make sure they are incentivized correctly (I usually see a 70% new bookings goal and a 30% renewal / upsell goal). If you don't incentivize hunting, sales tend to farm too much and your growth will slow.

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By simplifying their Quotes, we saved over $300K for our first client at RevSolutions. If you’re a VP, you know that: Accurate quotes close deals. But getting them right is a major challenge. Sales teams often struggle with: → Inconsistent pricing, → Manual errors, and → Lengthy approval processes. These issues erode trust and can cost you business. That’s where the Q of the CPQ system comes in handy; Especially if you’ve complex pricing structures. CPQ tools make the quoting process efficient, ensuring consistency and accuracy across the board. → Automate complex pricing calculations → Standardize discounting practices → Speed up quote approval times With accurate quotes, you build trust with your clients. They know they can rely on your pricing, which makes them more likely to do business with you. Moreover, your sales team can respond faster, turning leads into customers with minimal friction. Accuracy in quoting means credibility and efficiency. How reliable are your quotes? #cpq #quote #pricing

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"One of the best things you can do as a manager is hire people who are smarter than you". Bless Edward W. for sharing this with me. Klue is hiring SDRs in Vancouver and Toronto. I'd love to find some people are who smarter than me and hungry af to join an SDR team that prioritizes learning and development in: --> prospecting: value based prospecting pitching multiple products to multiple personas over the phone, Linkedin, and email --> real discovery: SDRs run 20-30 min discovery calls to ID pain, the impact of that pain, and pitch to that pain to excite prospects to book a demo... they then get to sit on that demo for exposure into the sales cycle --> business acumen: learning the ins and outs of a start up and B2B SaaS sales, in short, I want you to be a better seller when you leave SDR'ing at Klue Link in bio if you want to apply. Tip: pls try to stand out if you apply. If you don't showcase your personality, genuine interest, and smarts, I can assure you it won't cut through the noise. #sdr #hiring #salesdevelopmentrepresentative

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Engaging the right buyers at the right time is critical to sales success. ZoomInfo Copilot's Target Account Digests alert you when your most promising suspects are showing the right buying signals. 🔔 Get personalized daily digests — delivered via Slack or email — with AI-powered recommendations for next steps. Never miss a sales opportunity with ZoomInfo Copilot: bit.ly/3yxBNes #ZoomInfoCopilot

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I like this article by Jason M. Lemkin. Here are a few highlights : "Today, SaaS and growth are back, but it’s a new SaaS" "2021 was peak Gong-Salesforce-Outreach-ZoomInfo-Calendly etc. At least, as those tools were then." "2025 won’t be the death of the AE or even the SDR. But it may be all the investment goes into AI to supplement them, to turn them into “Mech AEs” — rather than adding tools to just make sales execs work better as humans." That's why we started building Time Machine a year ago! Just not sure if "Mech AEs" is going to catch on as a buzz word. Full article is here : https://lnkd.in/gjcT-_CB

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Salesforce has upped their game, requiring 3x pipeline coverage instead of the usual 2x. Sales Strategies Need a Refresh. But too many companies are stuck in old habits. The reason? Sales cycles are stretching out, deal sizes are shrinking, and win rates are dropping. Here's the reality: Industry average quota attainment is now below 40%. On the other hand, Salesforce is pushing for more pipeline coverage to tackle these challenges. They’re also boosting enablement, and training, and adding AI tools to support their sales teams. The biggest SaaS players accept that old sales models don't fit today's market. They're also following in Salesforce’s footsteps of more pipeline coverage as a solution. But for most companies, reducing quotas might be the best move. (depends on where they stand) However, if you can invest in generating more pipelines, it’s smart to adapt to the current sales game. Avoid the costly cycle of hiring and hoping. Instead, focus on realistic adjustments to your sales strategy. Do not stay traditional when the market is dynamic.

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Reminder to all of my CS friends... It's just as easy to take a minute and put a reminder in your calendar to follow up on the tasks from your call as it is to do the next thing on your list that is going to distract you from following up. A few CSMs on our team are fantastic at this. Immediately after calls, the notes come through to our slack integration, then you see the questions come through to the product channels from the call to follow up. Don't be the person who says they are going to follow up and then forgets. People remember all of the concerns they raise eventually. It's better to deal with it the first time than to let your client remember they brought this up and that it got dropped.

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Most sales people who try cold calling are unsuccessful - fact Messaging is a key part of being successful with cold calling - fact Most sales people are equipped with bad messaging - my opinion It’s like using bad tires and expecting to win a nascar race. Bad messaging looks like this: -We are the best in this category. -We have 10 megatons of data or any quantity of anything. -CROs come to us when they need help with growth. -What’s top of mind for you in 2025? If companies want to be successful with cold calling they need to bring their A game with every aspect. That begins with messaging. Did you like the messaging they gave you? #sales #coldcalling #messaging

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Not a sponsored post - but the new ZoomInfo co-pilot might be the coolest, least-discussed new sales enablement feature I've seen in the last few months. There are a ton of cool little AI-based point solutions in the sales world right now. None of them are attached to the hip to the best and most reliable contact data, intent data, and conversational intelligence. I talk a lot about the importance of personalization and shared values in outreach. Doing the requisite research to do that successfully is time-consuming. The new co-pilot takes away the 90% of effort sourcing the right people at the right time and allows you to focus on the humanity of your outreach. I encourage those in my network who do outbound to check it out. #zoominfo #copilot #AI #sales #enablement #intelligence

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Salesforce now needs 3x pipeline coverage compared to 2x due to: - longer sales cycle - deal size pressure due to cut backs - lower demand in general In times like these, your win rate matters more than ever. Here are 5 strategies to improve your win rate: 1) Fight pipeline bloat Don't accept: - Unqualified opportunities - Poor deal hygiene - Missing deal insights & signals - Gut-driven deal reviews 2) Simplify your sales process & exit criteria - Clear entry criteria for opportunity creation. So important! - Simple sales process everyone understands + follows - Clear process governance - Simplify exit criteria to ensure your team actually follow them 3) Operationalize your methodologies Remember: Most reps hate sales methodologies as it's "more" work‼ - Help your team understand the "why it matters" to close more deal - Understand what are the key criteria to closing deals and incorporate them - Run ongoing trainings - Train the managers and the reps - Support coaching with hard numbers to showcase success - Tie hard numbers back to leaderboards and commission success 4) Become great at multi-threading Without multi-threading most deals are dead these days‼ - Coach reps on multi-threading tactics - Managers should proactively help multi-thread - Leverage exec & board members to multi-thread further and higher in org 5) Incentivize the right behavior Combine compensation and management to change behavior‼ - E.g. comp more for e.g. higher TCVs and upfront payments - E.g. coach managers to amplify change management aspects - E.g. use CRO to communicate importance of the above - E.g. use data to showcase success This list is by no means extensive and all those topics deserve more details! What would you add? Comment 👇 — 👀 Get free RevOps content like Cheat Sheets, Salary Report - link in profile ➕ Follow me for tips on how RevOps can impact revenue growth ♻️ Share with your friends #revops #saas

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There is NO ATS/CRM that is going to get your best salespeople excited about putting their data into it. It's just a fact. Whether you use Salesforce, Bullhorn, Loxo, Tracker, Crelate, Zoho, some other tool. Your salespeople likely HATE it. Not because they don't see some advantages to using it. But because they find having to do data entry boring and annoying. Know why? Because they're not data entry people. They are customer relationship people. Good sales managers realize something. This is a fine line to walk. You do your best to get your best salespeople to put as much info in the system as possible. But you stop there and stop pushing. Because if you don't. There may come a point where your top salespeople sell less because they don't want to have to put more info in the system. Seems ridiculous? Agreed. Ridiculous that any organization would do something that would make their top salespeople want to sell less... #RaiseTheRoose

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We see 300 candidates before hiring a sales rep... And you all know the kind of reps we've had at Apex Revenue and TitanX (formerly Phone Ready Leads®) 2800-3500 dials per month per rep 650-800 connects per month per rep (thanks TitanX (formerly Phone Ready Leads®) 130-180 activated leads per month per rep 30-55 meetings per month per rep on phone only Here is our hiring process simplified: - Apply (this is either through a job ad or through a linkedin post) - Must cold call the hiring manager after that - We reject every single candidate NO MATTER how good they are. Why? I want to see how they handle rejection. If they fold like a lawn chair. Bye. If they push back or don't take 'no' as an answer we move them on. - Trial by fire day (session 1) -- Script and message handed to them. Role Play with hiring manager. Role Play with another rep on the team. Get coaching. See how they apply it. - Trial by fire day (session 2) -- Hit the phones with actual prospects. Load them up in FrontSpin, feed them scored data through TitanX (formerly Phone Ready Leads®) so they can be in a conversation within 2 minutes, use the script, see how it goes. Ask them how they feel, ask them what they didn't like, take some coaching... wash, rinse, repeat. Are they taking coaching? Are they getting better? - Culture call -- they meet with the other reps on the team to see if they fit. The candidate could rush everything but if the team rejects them, we reject them. They know what is required by their peers. - Offer call When we were running Apex, 1 single SDR was doing the output of 8-10 reps. The entire time we ran Apex we had 1 (yes, only 1) rep quit and he quit in his first week. Now, nearly every single one of the reps that we had at Apex before we pushed all of our eggs in the titanX basket are AEs, Revops leaders, #1 performers, or running their own company. Why won't most companies do this? They won't make someone cold call them They won't reject every candidate no matter what They won't role play They won't force someone to make cold calls in the bullpen in front of you They don't trust their other reps to vet the candidate... trust your team. They know what it takes.

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Last month, we made some exciting updates to ZoomInfo Copilot to help your team stay focused on building pipeline and closing deals. 🤝 From customizable insights and new buying signals to seamless CRM integrations, we’re giving your team the tools to prioritize top leads and close deals faster. Highlights include: • Customizable Account Summaries: Tailor your insights for accurate forecasting, better revenue predictability, and consistent quota attainment. • Enhanced Microsoft Dynamics Integration: Bring CRM opportunity data and buyer intent signals together for a complete view of your target accounts, empowering sellers to prioritize high-intent leads. • Real-Time Buyer Intent Signals with TechnologyAdvice: Don't waste time on cold leads — identify the accounts actively researching your solutions. • New Campaign Account Reached Signal: Align sales and marketing with live data on campaign engagement, ensuring consistent and impactful messaging. Ready to save time, build stronger relationships, and drive revenue? Log in to start taking advantage of our newest features: bit.ly/40DjkJe #ZoomInfoCopilot

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