Jake Dunlap | B2B Sales Leader

@Chris_Orlob What did you actually do? Your posts say “I was at a company” or “I see this” or “I’ve analyzed x calls” when the reality is gong did it and not you. The amount of credit you take for being right place and right time is scary. How you prey on people has to be exposed.

The best salespeople see themselves as business people that happen to know how to sell. They have a fascination for business. They romanticize business. And that shows up in their discovery conversations in a way that sometimes, you just cannot teach.

@Chris_Orlob Please check this guys resume in reality vs what he claims. I just can’t anymore let people get sold on how he claims he did what he did vs his role. Never ran the whole GTM strategy ever and instead executed other people’s plans and now takes credit for it all.

I helped grow Gong from $200k to $200M ARR in 5 yrs. Customers routinely told us our sales demos were 2nd to none. 9 lessons I learned about sales demos I'll never forget: (no one does #5, yet it's the easiest)

@Chris_Orlob What about your role for the first three years when the company started to scale? Then when you went marketing as the company scaled further?

@Chris_Orlob For how long?

top 4 jobs of sales leaders: - hire the best talent you can. - define repeatable process. - build team skill capacity. - manage the pipeline. Most do the last 1 at the expense of the first 3. - Yes you want to manage the pipeline. - Yes that's what gets you paid today. - Yes that's what's most urgent. Revenue closes w/out you when you do the first 3.

@ttunguz If someone else sites Gartner as a reputable source I might lose it. They are pay to play on their quadrants and never disclose the size of the company for their sources on these type of stats. You are the man but Gartner is garbage

How much should quotas increase next year? With the end of the fiscal year approaching for many software companies, management teams are running the numbers for different scenarios. This year has been tumultuous : most startups reduced their bookings, and grinded through the first six months suffering through pipeline shocks - the result of CFO-budget pressure. For the last 3 quarters, startups have been executing on reduced targets, attempting to squeeze more juice from their Meyers. Software purchasing activity seems to be trending up, which should instill more confidence in their pipelines. Gartner projects an 8% increase in overall spend. Software spending should increase 15% - the fastest rate in the last three years. Public cloud companies have demonstrated strength in the last quarter. We should expect the advances in AI to improve sales efficiency, even if modestly. Automated email generation, automated research, automated scheduling. All of these technologies are still nascent & imperfect, but they should improve through the course of the year. Napkin-math suggests quotas should increase about 20%. A few notes on this analysis: First, not all software categories will grow 15%. Some will grow faster than others; others may contract. Second, many software companies raise prices faster than inflation to achieve NDR of 120% already, so the inflation may be already accounted for in plan that way or through the Gartner estimate. Third, AI efficiency is subjective. Fourth, the IT spending growth hasn’t translated into quota growth. Compounding the last three years’ growth would imply quotas should be 41% more than in 2021. But the dominant strategy has been to hire more reps while maintaining quotas rather than increasing quotas meaningfully - perhaps an artifact of the easy money era. Headcount reductions in the last year, which impacted every company, should increase the pipeline coverage ratios for the remaining team members. Operating at 5-6x Pipe-to-Quota, rather than the typical 2-3x ratio of the heydays, should drive more predictability within GTM teams. Combining all these factors, teams should expect a significant boost to productivity in 2024. The exact figure for each team should be a per-company determination. Management teams who execute an offensive strategy as purchasing resumes will have the opportunity to wrest significant market share wins from competitors, which should translate to disproportionate value capture.

@jasonlk Gartner promotes who pays them. Their data is biased and we have to stop looking at them and forester as credible sources.

What will 2024 look like? Per Gartner: Good News: ▶️ Global IT software spend will grow +13.8% (!) and ▶️ Cross $1 Trillion (!) for first time Less Good News for Startups: ▶️ Public Cloud spend (+20.4% in 2024) and ▶️ Price increases and more utilization at existing vendors taking biggest share ▶️ Change management fatigue by CIOs across board So the money is there. One trillion of software spend in 2024 for the first time. It's just harder than it was to get it. Add even more value to break through.

@Kazanjy @DKDINSF TikTok is an attack on US society????

Fentanyl is 100% asymmetric warfare on the US by the Chinese Communist Party. Fentanyl and Tiktok are two excellent attacks on a society that is non-coercive / permissive about self-determination. It's unclear that the US has a good response. Ozempic / Wegovy is in the process of blunting the other major attack surface. economist.com/united-states/…

@JosephKopser Ask ChatGPT 😊

As ChatGPT gets huge, what is the book you would recommend to someone who wants to go from novice to less novice on the subject of AI?

The @paramountplus app is terrible for sports. I had to switch to screencast my computer….sped it up 15 seconds So bad…

Too many sales organizations care more about closed contracts than customer impact. Buyers don't care about the "close". They care about the "impact".

Good mental health > wealth A couple thousand dollars more won’t matter if you end up quitting after 3 months anyway

The last thing I’ll do today is make a note of everything I’ve learned between Monday-Friday What did you learn this week?

Mute Slack, emails... delete them off your phone if you need to The 9-5 shouldn't spill over to your life out of the office That's a recipe for burnout 💯

For me, starting out with a big org is a no-brainer Trade in a bigger slice of the pie for more training, a better work-life balance, and infrastructure 💯

In B2B, your personal brand matters 💯

Don’t be too hard on yourself if things haven’t worked out as planned… your journey won’t be the same as anyone else’s If you’re consistent, success will come 💯

Too much short-term thinking will sabotage growth… too much long-term thinking will do the same Find time for both 💯

Share your opinions Share your experiences Share resources Give out value for free… you’ll build a reputation that allows you to make a lasting impression And don’t sleep on engagement either… I’ve learned my fair share of lessons from the comments section over the years 💯

Sell them a successful outcome, not a service The buyer doesn’t want to hear about your product They want to hear about how you’re going to solve their problem 💯