Matt Slotnick’s Post

based on market comps, the value of reliving your college prime is now $113M guaranteed over 4 years. treasure your youth, kiddos https://lnkd.in/gtRHcSGs

What would it mean for your business if every single rep researched, prepared, strategized, and account planned like your best, and most experienced seller? There are a lot of excuses for why they don't... ❌ Don't have the time ❌ Don't have the ability ❌ Don't think it's important ...but so much of seller productivity requires that your sellers do this, in a fashion that's aligned with your top down sales strategy. If you don't come armed with a POV in this environment, you're dead in the water. Your reps probably show up without POVs a lot more often than you think. We built Poggio to fix this. You can program Poggio to feed reps the tailored insights they need, based on the behaviors of your best sellers. Come with a POV, come to win. With Poggio.

Salesforce revised its pipeline coverage ratio to 3x, shedding light on the math keeping execs up at night. How can 1 ratio blow up your entire GTM model? It's not rocket science. It's just math. Particularly, pipeline generation math. Salesforce went from 2x to 3x. You might be going from 3x to 4x, or even 4x to 5x. What does this mean? Assumptions about pipeline coverage are falling like dominos and leaving GTM orgs with a massive hole in their forecasts. When this happens, the math gets really bad, really fast. Picture this: you're a best in class GTM org like Salesforce and you've just updated your pipe coverage ratio from 2x to 3x. Needing 50% more pipeline is painful enough. But the punishment doesn't stop there. Pipeline generated by your sellers is also down. Buyers are reluctant to champion products, and budgets are tight. This leads to longer sales cycles, more discounting, and plummeting deal sizes. Across the board, reps are producing less pipeline. Ranges vary by category, but let's assume pipeline creation is down 25% for illustrative purposes. (We're going to keep the math simple, because specifics will vary by company). On a $100M new business goal, you'd previously need $200M in pipeline. At $1M in pipeline per AE, you could bring it in with a team of 200. Now you need $300M of pipeline to close that same $100M in revenue. AEs are creating $750k instead of $1M, so that same team of 200 is bringing in $150M in pipeline, only half what you need for the year. Draw out the math and you suddenly need 200 additional (fully ramped!) sellers to deliver the same $100M in revenue. That's DOUBLE the headcount. Your CEO and CFO's heads are spinning, because this wreaks absolute havoc on a company's operating model. But that's a post for another time. You can tweak the assumptions if you'd like, but it's terrifying any way you look at it. No amount of passion, skill, or dedication can overcome math. You can't escape math. The bad news? This doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. The good news? Recent advances in AI can change some of the assumptions around the people, process, and technology equation required to generate new pipeline. In the old world, the only answer would be to double headcount. In the new world, there are ways to drive enormous leverage into the equation. Scaling with people doesn't have to be the answer, you can scale people with AI like no time in history. Which means the cavalry could be on the way...

the Poggio summer 2024 gtm onsite is in full swing and in classic poggio fashion, we have… dogs, bikes, and… trusted knowledge graphs💰💰💰

Enterprise sales leaders are talking... Poggio's tailored account intelligence gives sellers the intel they need to have high quality conversations with any account in minutes. Poggio understands your value props and uses that to map your accounts, instantly identifying key stakeholders and high priority initiatives that YOUR solutions can solve. And best of all, it synthesizes a point of view for how to position value that will earn you a seat at the table. Getting attention in this economy is hard— give yourself and your team a leg up with Poggio.

It seems that EVERYONE is struggling with pipeline generation lately. So, if everyone has PG problem, does that mean no one has a PG problem? Unfortunately not... and I wouldn't advise trying that line with your CEO or Board of Directors. 😉 Which is why I've seen really excited by an emerging trend in the business cases we're building for customers at Poggio: Poggio's ability to affect IN QUARTER pipeline generation. You've already invested in people and process. It's hard (impossible?) to make major changes there within the quarter. Which is where Poggio's ease of deployment and ease of use really come into play. Overnight, your reps can access tailored account plans for any account, that pinpoint the right stakeholders and arm them with tailored messaging based on a buyer's unique pain points. There's never a silver bullet, but Poggio comes close. Your reps spend 10+ hours a week researching. With Poggio, those hours can be repurposed to time with customers, generating real, qualified pipeline. And that moves the needle for your bottom line.

Q: what does every software company on earth* have in common with the pre 2022-2023 new york knicks? 🏀 A: they have a major PG problem *based on countless conversations with revenue leaders, though probably not TECHNICALLY statistically significant

The seller productivity gap between startups and the average BigCo is only getting wider (based on convos with dozens of sales leaders) When companies hit ~$100M in revenue, they often “get serious” about the enterprise segment. This means hiring dedicated enterprise or strat teams and putting the people and processes in place to move upmarket This used to mean hiring people that have “been there, done that.” Enablement, coaching, and more so that reps can learn to speak the language of business, identify the right champions, sell to power, multi-thread, and generally sell solutions and value over speeds and feeds. In practice, this means hiring a lot of people, doing more training and enablement sessions, bringing in Force Management. A minimum of 6 months of work to hire, onboard, and enable. Even more to ramp. And that’s assuming you hired the right people and stood up the right process. With AI, you can enable your sellers OVERNIGHT to identify the right stakeholders and initiatives. The seller still has to do the work, of course, but you can tee up the intel they need, and unburden them from the tremendous amount of noise that’s related to the modern sales role. While the “incumbent” is still putting a hiring plan in place to “get serious”, the quicker-moving company can be up and running in days or weeks, beginning the behavior shift that’s needed. From there, they can determine what hires are needed, and slot them in as they go. But the foundation of leverage comes from AI-powered tooling.

“The reason I asked you to talk now is because I want to use it over the holiday. I want to just bang it all out. I want to show you what I’ve done manually, and it’s just a lot of work. I can’t tell you how excited I am to use this product. I’m almost speechless.”

The productivity gap between upstarts and incumbents has never been greater I spend all day talking to CROs, sellers, and RevOps pros Starting to see some stark patterns in how companies of different sizes are dealing with challenges: namely pipe gen and an emerging bucket of “seller productivity” (side note: starting to see more and more “seller productivity” titles emerge) The current generation of AI powered tooling provides NEW ways to solve problems. Solutions that often scale independently of people As with all new technology, incumbents are slower to react. Because they have businesses to protect, and more to lose if things go wrong But the quantum leaps in productivity of AI tools mean that smaller companies, whether 10 or 500 FTEs, can quickly plug gaps with tech, while larger ones struggle to plug gaps with people This is starting to show up in a few places in particular Pipe gen: Picture this: you have a shortfall in pipe gen, for any number of reasons. (If you’re feeling this… you’re not alone). The traditional response of a company that’s been successful in the past is to lean on what works: which usually means more hiring, and more marketing dollars. They might be flirting with new tooling, but “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” usually reigns supreme at incumbents. So you fire up the recruiting machine, hire dozens or hundreds of SDRs and BDRs, deal with the normal attrition that comes during a ramp period, and hope for the best. Maybe you pilot a few tools. But it’s hard because your data and time are valuable, and you’d rather not give those up to a newfangled startup. Meanwhile, the smaller company is trying 5 tools. Maybe their sellers have already found a few that work without you knowing– because they’re go-getters like that! One solution might work okay, one might hallucinate a little too much, a few are totally useless, but another shows some SERIOUS promise. Time saved, more meetings booked, happier sellers who are overjoyed that they’ve found a way to leverage themselves. They’re working for sales leadership that cares about their challenges and understands that the world is changing rapidly, and wants to arm them to succeed. Their leaders are receptive to finding new and better ways to do things… especially those that don’t involve their jobs being replaced. One rep now does the work of 1.5, 2, 3 sellers. And as they get better, we’re seeing even crazier ROI math. All while the incumbent is a few weeks into a massive hiring push that may or may not work out. And even if it does, investors are going to be perturbed that we’re scaling with headcount, not technology as everyone is promising. Especially considering that you yourself are probably promising the market that you can help them with AI.