The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO

Monthly someone asks, “When are you going to write a book”. When I ask, “Why?”, people tell me, “Because no one has written a sales leadership book with practical, solutions to real life issues in enterprise SaaS sales forces”, Why: 62% of sales reps fail, not because they couldn’t sell but because they were assigned the wrong accounts. Sales leaders don’t align skillsets to account complexity. Sales rep attrition at most SaaS companies is over 20% Sales leaders can’t recruit A players Sales Leaders don’t coach their reps on deal advancement issues Most sales leaders are “glorified scorekeepers” Most sales leader don’t motivate their sales team They’re focused on deals, not rep competency Sales forecasts are inaccurate because most reps game the CRM system. Sales team leaders lack qualification of sales stage exit criteria Many salesforces only win 50% of their proof of concepts They can’t frame a winning POC Criteria 8 of 10 executive buyers say the sales meetings they take are a waste of time. Sales reps lack the ability to sell business value. 42% of reps in enterprise sales say one of the top 3 biggest challenges is to establish urgency. Reps don’t quantify critical business pain to create a buying influence. Reps can’t find high-level business champions, only low-level coaches They can’t find pain above the noise . Many reps find pain but can’t attract a champion They’re selfishly focused on closing a sale instead of earning trust. Most reps say they feel out of control during the sales process. Reps can’t find a champion to help them control the process. 50% of reps say they can’t overcome price objections while companies struggle to increase the average deal size. Most sales reps are vending, not selling. Their reps aren’t immersed in the customer conversation. The reps are “thinking”, not “knowing” the key elements of the customer use case Top sales leaders will find the answers to these issues and more in The Qualified Sales Leader From the Publisher John is widely recognized as the only person having been the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) at five public, enterprise software companies, PTC, Geo-Tel, Ariba, BladeLogic and BMC. John’s expertise was formulated as a pre-IPO member of 4 of the 5 companies listed above. Today, John is a board member at public software companies Snowflake, MongoDB and private, pre-IPO companies Lacework, Sigma, Cybereason and Observe. In the past, John has been a board member or executive consultant to: Hubspot, Glass Door AppDynamics and Sprinklr.