Our Top 12 Events for Christmas – Expert advice for tech startups 🎁

What better way to prepare for Q1 2021 than to revisit some of our best live events. We have all been thoroughly briefed on how to maintain our personal health and keep each other safe during the pandemic, but we also need to dedicate our efforts to safeguarding the health of tech startup businesses through peer-to-peer learning.

Though the UK economy had begun to recover as a result of the easing of lockdown measures, the level of GDP in the UK is still 9.7% below where it was prior to the pandemic at the end of 2019. Lots of us still face the frightening prospect of unmet revenue targets, depleted sales, and an ever-shortening runway.

Catch up on the “top 12” Sales Impact Academy broadcasts from 2020 for tech #startups and #scaleups looking for expert advice this festive season:

Mark Roberge: The Science of Re-establishing Growth

“When to scale?” and “How fast?” 

These two questions are mission-critical for startup organizations. Yet, as entrepreneurs, you may lack a rigorous approach to answering them. 

After peering inside the go-to-market machinery of hundreds of startups over the last three years, Stage 2 Capital’s Managing Director, Mark Roberge, found the following five issues the most common diagnoses for failed scale attempts.

Key points:

✔ Premature focus on top-line revenue generation in lieu of consistent customer value creation.

✔ Inadequate, non-data-driven definition of product-market-fit.

✔ Misunderstanding of go-to-market capabilities needed before hiring salespeople.

✔ Front-loading sales hires at the beginning of the year rather than pacing throughout the year.

✔ Confusing temporary competitive advantage with sustainable competitive advantage.

(Watch it here)

Chris Lochhead: Play Bigger – How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets 

Chris Lochhead – Author of Play Bigger and innovative big thinker – pushed the unfiltered message that devoting time towards a personal brand, which you’ve manufactured and presented on social media, is not the way to success. Instead of trying to be a brand, focus on being a legendary person and building an esteemed reputation.

Key points:

✔ Chris Lochhead’s 12 steps to be legendary

✔ Be Missionary not Mercenary

✔ Don’t demand a share of the market, create a market

✔ Create new demand rather than fighting for existing demand

✔ Category creation is the ultimate “growth strategy”

(Watch it in full here)

Kieran Flannagan: The Product Led Approach to Growth

We are in the middle of a massive shift in the way people use and buy their software. Kieran Flannagan – Senior VP Marketing at Hubspot – expands on the benefits of product-led growth and how to efficiently adopt the approach.

Key points:

✔ Product lead growth will change B2B marketing to B2C2B marketing. Going to market through the end-user means you can reach a lot more customers.

✔ Reconsider your organizational design for success – Create “Pods” to focus on a specific goal.

✔ Analyze your funnel bottom-up and top-down to better understand how to improve at each stage.

✔ Align teams across your business by creating a universal language using the Sparketing Model.

(Watch the full event, here)

Sam Nelson: The Agoge Sequence

Sam Nelson – SDR Leader at Outreach – has filled the knowledge gap around good practice for prioritizing your prospects and scheduling outbound touchpoints.

Sam swears by The Agoge Sequence! It lays out the number of touchpoints to have with a prospect before moving on and utilizes the ‘triple touch’ approach－this is when you email, connect on socials and call your prospect, all within the first day. Make an entrance because public enemy number one is being ignored!

Key points:

✔ Cunnigham’s Law states “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer”

✔ Personalizing the first email of your sequence will have compound interest

✔ Employing a triple touch strategy will increase visibility

✔ Prove you’re not a robot in the first line of every email

✔ When to spend personalizing, and when to save time using templates

(Watch here)

Daniel Disney: Social Selling in the New World

In this brave new world thrust upon us by Covid-19, salespeople on LinkedIn must provide consistent content and generate customer-focused and conversational messaging in order to flourish, says the Best-Selling Author and LinkedIn & Social Selling Trainer, Daniel Disney.

Key points:

✔ Consistency is key – 10mins of activity daily

✔ Your LinkedIn profile should not just be your CV

✔ Engage in conversations, don’t just use LinkedIn as a marketing platform

✔ Remember readers consume content as they scroll, not left to right

✔ Video & audio significantly increase response rates

(Watch the full on-demand event here)

How to make your Content Zig while the Industry Zags with Konrad Sanders

Konrad Sanders leads a charming team of strategic word-slingers who go by the name of The Creative Copywriter. They’re known in the biz for blending the science of strategy and psychology with the art of creative thinking, big ideas, and ‘real talk’. The goal: to help brands with brains get their words right and sell more stuff.

Konrad shares his secrets for getting results for almost a decade for clients such as TikTok, Adidas, Hyundai, Thomson Reuters, and Aggreko.

Key points:

✔ The curse of content saturation

✔ Why differentiation is a must

✔ How (and why) to truly know your audience

✔ Observing your industry, aka competitor analysis

✔ 5 ways to zig

✔ Some ground rules to follow (or else)

(Watch it here)

9 Steps to Repeatable, Scalable, and Profitable Growth + the Key SaaS Metrics to Track

In this hour-long live event, David Skok – General Partner at Matrix Partners – runs through his famous nine steps to get to repeatable, scalable, and profitable growth and all the tips he wishes he’d known when he was starting a business. He explains the biggest mistake he sees killing early-stage businesses and the key drivers that make SaaS startups successful.

David is a five-time serial entrepreneur turned VC with twelve successful exits under his belt, including HubSpot, JBoss, and AppIQ. He is best known for his blog, For Entrepreneurs, rated #1 website for entrepreneurs by Inc. Magazine.

Key points:

✔ The biggest mistake that kills startups.

✔ The key drivers that make SaaS businesses successful.

✔ Why this is urgent now.

✔ The journey to creating a repeatable sales process.

(The full on-demand event is here)

Seven Secrets to Scaling Success – From Zero to $1B in Sales at Tableau

Two of the leaders behind Tableau share the secrets that led to their massive success scaling from $0 – $1 billion in sales.

Elissa Fink and Kelly Breslin Wright – former Chief Marketing Officer and former Executive Vice President of Sales at Tableau respectively －spent over a decade at the business long before it became the data visualization giant acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion. Very few people have ever achieved such an outcome.

Key points: 

✔ The lessons learned going from $0 – $1 billion

✔ Tips for every growth phase.

✔ Leadership tips for scaling success.

✔ Sales and marketing alignment: beyond the buzzword.

(Watch here)

Ben Miller: Revenue Operations – What, Why, Who, When?

Sales leaders and marketers on occasion don’t invest enough time into supporting their RevOps team. Ben Miller, Partner at Miller Growth Advisory －told us how we can change this trend and spoke to why RevOps is so important to startups.

Key points:

✔ An environment of data-driven testing keeps you up to speed in each quarter.

✔ You can’t rely on judgement driven data.

✔ RevOps should be involved whenever you make changes or start a marketing campaign so they can measure impact.

✔ RevOps grow accountability of conversion rates through the pipeline.

✔ Invest time in data analysis if your RevOps is inexperienced.

(Understand RevOps… Watch the on-demand event here)

Pete Digs Deep: Why you Should Think Differently: Neuro Atypicality with Pete Crosby

Did you know that a cognitively diverse workforce can improve profitability?

According to the Centre of Talent and Innovation, diverse teams power 45% more growth than teams that fail to incorporate diversity. Given that 70% of startups fail, we can’t ignore this very important metric.

Pete Crosby is joined by Dr. Helen Taylor, Simon Bloom, Tanwen Crosby, and Denise Lubaway for the panel discussion.

Key Points: 

✔  Projective Identification – the basis for bias against people is we project the things we dislike about ourselves onto others.

✔  The interview process can fail to test the strengths of those with neurotypicality – have varied tests and ways of interviewing and ask your candidates for feedback.

✔  The animal part of our brain is computing millions of decisions and the human brain computes only 7 – we need to unpack our assumptions and rationalize our viewpoints of each other.

✔  There is a competitive advantage in cognitive diversity – view your team as having different brain types and actively review your processes to be compatible with biodiversity.

✔ As leaders of businesses we need to change our perceptions of autism in the workplace – Make sure you have conversations with your team on their cognitive abilities and get them to create a communications handbook.

(Watch the full event here)

US expansion: What to think about before you go with Dan Glazer, Aaron Ross, and Paul Fifield

This session is run by Daniel Glazer, an American technology lawyer, strategic business advisor, and the founding partner of US Expansion Group alongside Aaron Ross, Co-CEO of Predictable Revenue™ Inc and global keynote speaker on sales.

Aaron and Dan are joined by our Co-Founder and CEO, Paul Fifield who share their thoughts on the best approach when thinking of scaling into US markets. Expanding across the pond to the United States is something that some businesses think about at some point in their growth journey, usually when they have hit $1 million turnover or more!

Key Points: 

✔ Tech companies believe that US expansion is inevitable, but you have to think about WHY you should go there.

✔ Go early and build the product to fit the American Market OR go late when you have built a strong base in the UK and are found organically by US customers.

✔ The idea that the US provides more funding is a myth – US expansion comes first and then US funding, NOT the other way round.

✔ Present like you’re American – use dollar signs and American spelling.

✔ The UK and the rest of Europe need to change our thinking towards sales and embrace a positive culture around sales.

(Watch what happened – here)

Customer Success for the C-Suite – Why Churn Matters

Other than your culture and leadership, the number one enemy against scaling your SaaS business is churn. More now than ever it is imperative that corporate leaders set a high standard in their commitment to Customer Success. 

You Mon Tsang, the founder and CEO of ChurnZero, leads this session.

Key Points:

✔ You can see a 6%+ increase in net retention rate if you have a customer success leader.

✔ Success vs Support vs Account Management = Proactive vs Reactive vs Scheduled.

✔ Onboarding is crucial for retention – create a plan for ‘stuck’ customers.

✔ A simple health score on your account is better than none – use whatever data you have access to and track it. (Subjective & objective and internal & external data) 

✔ The bigger the company, the more complex a CS leader role. Ensure you hire the right person to handle your customer base.

(Watch here)

All of our ‘top 12’ and other top-notch events are available on-demand via our Events Page. Why not have a look and join us in the new year for high-value LIVE events.