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It’s amazing to consider that no matter what size customer we were pitching, or where in the world we were selling, a singular idea drove all our accomplishments: we never sold features. We sold the model and we sold the customer’s success.

the less successful product is often arguably superior. Not content to slink off the stage without some revenge, this sullen and resentful crew casts about among themselves to find a scapegoat, and whom do they light upon? With unfailing consistency and unerring accuracy, all fingers point to—the vice president of marketing. It is marketing’s fault! Salesforce outmarketed RightNow, LinkedIn outmarketed Plaxo, Akamai outmarketed Internap, Rackspace outmarketed Terremark.

Customers don't care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business.

Executives need to spend at least 25% of their time with customers, so they stay connected with “what it’s really like out there.

Our current battle: we have to save the customer from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

Customers don't care at all whether you close the deal or not. They care about improving their business. It’s easy to forget this in the heat of a sales cycle.

Happy Employees Develop Happy Customers

CRM Keeping track of conversations, agreements, deals and tasks can be done in a Customer Relationship Manager such as HighriseHQ. The free plan of this app, again by 37 signals, allows you to track up to 250 clients and build a file on your interactions with them over time. This is a great tool to use when calling a range of prospects and keen to record the interested parties. Alternatives are Salesforce, FatFreeCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho CRM and many more. Even an Excel spreadsheet can get you started, but a nice interface and interconnectivity between deals, projects and contacts is extremely useful.

A platform is a raised, level surface on which people or things can stand. A platform business works in just that way: it allows users—producers and consumers of goods, services, and content— to create, communicate, and consume value through the platform. Amazon, Apple’s App Store, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pay- Pal, YouTube, Uber, Wikipedia, Instagram, etsy, Twitter, Snapchat, Hotel Tonight, Salesforce, Kickstarter, and Alibaba are all platform businesses. While these businesses have done many impressive things, the most relevant to us is that they have created an oppor- tunity for anyone, even those with limited means, to share their thoughts, ideas, creativity, and creations with millions of people at a low cost. Today, if you create a product or have an idea, you can sell that product or share that idea with a substantial audience quickly and cost-effectively through these platforms. Not only that, but the platforms arguably give more power to individuals than corporations since they’re so efficient at identifying ulterior motives or lack of authenticity. The communities on these platforms, many of whom are millennials, know when they’re being sold to rather than shared with, and quickly eliminate those users from their con- sciousness (a/k/a their social media feeds). Now, smaller organizations and less prosperous individuals are able to sell to or share their products, services, or content with more targeted demographics of people. That’s exactly what the modern consumer desires: a more personalized, connected experience. For example, a Brooklyn handbag designer can sell her handbags to a select group of customers through one of the multitude of fashion or shopping platforms and create an ongoing dialogue with her audience through a communication platform such as Instagram. Or an independent filmmaker from Los Angeles can create a short film using a GoPro and the editing software on their Mac and then instantly share it with countless people through one of a dozen video platforms and get direct feedback. Or an author can write a book and sell it directly from his or her website and social channels to anyone who’s excited about it. The reaction to standardization and globalization has been enabled by these platforms. Customers can get what they want, from whomever they want, whenever they want it. It’s a revised and personalized version of globalization that allows us to maintain and enhance the cultural connections that create the meaning we crave in our lives.

Salesforce.com, a $1 billion software firm that has pioneered software as a service, has been making the shift from the logic of addition to the logic of multiplication. They enjoyed a decade of outstanding growth using the old idea of “throwing resources at a problem.” They addressed new customers and new demands by hiring the best technical and business talent available and deploying them on the challenges. However, a strained market environment created a new imperative for the company’s leadership: get more productivity from their currently available resources. They could no longer operate on outdated notions of resource utilization. They started developing leaders who could multiply the intelligence and capability of the people around them and increase the brainpower of the organization to meet their growth demands.

the power of each customer exchange. If the exchange was executed as well as possible—if we made the customer truly successful—we had the opportunity to transform him or her into an Apple loyalist and evangelist. This opened my eyes to the importance of customer success.

Every experience you give a journalist or potential customer must explain why you are different and incorporate a clear call to action.

like out there.” Solution: Talk to customers to get clear on what you do for them, rather than how you do it. Put this into a simple, clear one-page document you can share with the entire company. Regularly connect with customers by phone or in person.

Vala Afshar, chief marketing officer of Extreme Networks, is an interesting case study.3 Trained as an electrical engineer, Afshar joined Extreme Networks in 1996 as a software developer/quality service engineer, eventually transitioning to run the services business, becoming the chief customer support officer. In this role, Afshar became very active on Salesforce's Chatter, a private social network for business, and by 2011 had built a large internal following. As the chief information officer took note of Afshar's intracompany influence, he signed Afshar up for Twitter and gave him the mandate to interact with networks outside of the company. As Afshar prototyped his ideas in real time, he gained an external following. A publisher approached him about writing a book; his presentations on Slide-Share gained more than one million views; and he was promoted to chief marketing officer. Vala Afshar has become a thought leader, epitomizing a new breed of chief marketing officer, both highly social and highly technical—and Extreme Networks has unusually high name recognition for a $500 million company. Afshar's ability to shrink the space, getting immediate and actionable feedback, was pivotal in expanding his space into a high-profile public role. Fast feedback is also useful when it comes to identifying your distinctive strengths. Karen May, VP for people development at Google, invented a method she calls "speedback." It works like this: "partway through a training session she will tell everyone to pair off and sit knee to knee, and give them three minutes to answer one simple question: 'What advice would you give me based on the experience you've had with me here?' Participants say that it's some of the best feedback they've ever gotten."4 When we are willing to impose constraints—in this particular, instance, time—we have a better chance of identifying what is working and what needs to be changed.

In the old days of enterprise computing, companies typically paid millions of dollars to license a package of software, millions more to buy the hardware and to get the software installed properly, and then more money for yearly maintenance contracts. Think Oracle. Then came Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. The customer negotiated a price with the software supplier and paid monthly to use software that ran in the cloud. Think Salesforce. Now, we have the utilization model, with payments based on consumption. You buy credits and use them when you need them. Think Amazon’s AWS and Snowflake. We believe it’s a superior model and that someday most enterprise software will be purchased and delivered this way.

Tools for tracking what people are saying about you The following tools can be useful for tracking mentions: Moz Fresh Web Explorer, Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Mention, Ninja Outreach, Twitter Search, BuzzSumo, and Facebook. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides powerful tools for real-time analysis and monitoring of social media.

And while seeking out the opinions and perspectives of people like ourselves may lead to a more personal and familiar buying experience, what’s even more amazing is the impact those trusted sources have on conversion rates. B2B sales cycle data from Salesforce demonstrates that, when it comes to lead conversion, the interest that originates from customer and employee referrals converts to deals at rates fifty times higher than email campaigns!9 Furthermore, data from marketing automation giant Marketo indicates that leads originating from referrals convert to opportunities at rates of four times the average, and similar to the next three highest-converting lead sources combined (those being partner, inbound, and marketing-generated).10 My personal experience over the years greatly corroborates these statistics. For example, when I started my own sales practice, Cerebral Selling, I needed to have a logo designed. Around the same time, my friend had recently had a nice logo designed for his business. I asked him who he used, he told me, and I just did the same. No further research or investigation required. A short time later, I wanted to head out of town with my wife for an overnight trip to the beautiful Niagara wine region of Ontario to celebrate our anniversary. I didn’t know where to stay or which restaurant to go to, so instead of sifting through pages of online content and reviews, I asked a friend who runs a vineyard in the region. When he gave me his recommendations, I simply booked the places he told me. No questions asked. Were there better places to stay and eat? Potentially. Were there other creative design shops that could have generated equally if not more spectacular logos? More than likely. Do I care? Absolutely not! I love my logo and had a great anniversary outing, and feel secure in my decisions around both because of the feeling I received by selecting recommendations from people I trust. Both experiences are perfect examples of the prescriptive-led sales cycle we spoke about in chapter 2. This means that when it comes to your selling motion, one of the most unobtrusive, empathetic, and authentic ways to convert prospective buyers is simply to surround them with like-minded customers who love you.

Put new reps through some kind of training program that has them working in other parts of your company first, talking to customers, before they go on active sale duty. This will make them much more effective salespeople and actually ramp them faster. Slow down to speed up!

Ask Customers for suggestions on how best to serve them: Let me get Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce to weigh in on it. ‘In 2008, Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks as CEO, after being out of that role for eight years. The company had lost touch with consumers, and Schultz was determined to fix that. The first thing he did was create an app that asked customers how they thought the coffeehouses could be improved. The company consolidated the top ten responses and put them to a consumer vote. Then it implemented the top five fixes. The process engaged customers in the turnaround and helped restore revenue growth.’13

In late 2005, Salesforce was the first to launch a Long Tail software marketplace on its platform. Third-party developers could write a targeted niche application (focused on performance reviews or recruiting, for example) and it would run on Salesforce’s servers, integrating with Salesforce’s other software. The hope was that hundreds or even thousands of small developers would meet all the specialized needs of Sales-force’s customers, allowing Salesforce to concentrate on the more common needs. In other words, the tail would reinforce the head. By early 2006, there were more than two hundred applications selling on the marketplace, and Benioff confirms that the shape of the sales curves is just as predicted. “Even I was stunned,” he says. “It’s a perfect Long Tail. Textbook!

The decision to go agile at Salesforce.com grew out of a desire to create shorter more predictable releases.

Salesforce.com experienced an amazing 97% increase in the number of features delivered by establishing short, steady release cycles.

In high-productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, they fulfill it.

Providing endless options for everyone is neither possible nor the solution. Rather, the secret is to enable customers to choose what they want with smart digital customization. Look at how Uber, Salesforce, Tesla, Netflix, Amazon (especially Amazon Web Services), and others have seemingly overnight replaced business models or used digital to be efficient and effective and solve customer issues faster and better than traditional leaders. These brands are built around the philosophy of increasing customer success in a digital-first world.