Fermi's Paradox: Are We Alone? Plus, a Fresh Perspective on Integrated Selling!

Are we alone?

Have you ever wondered if we are alone? I mean, not in a personal way, but as a species? Ever since the US Congress hearings on aliens and UFOs, I have been thinking about it. 

In today’s email:

• 🌎 Fermi’s Paradox
• 💰 Unsiloed selling (Bonus : A simple automation that gave me the max ROI)
• 😄 Yet another meme, of course
• 🗞 What I found interesting (From the world of sales and revops)

🌎Fermi’s Paradox

Back in 1950, Enrico Fermi casually asked his physicist friends - “Where is everybody?”. Some basic Maths and common sense suggested that it is very likely that extraterrestrial life must exist somewhere. But there was no proof of alien life in 1950. It is 2023 now and we are yet to say hello to aliens. Are we really alone?

And if you are into podcasts, give a listen to this very fine episode on American Life on the very same subject.

💰Unsiloed selling

When I first started selling, I noticed how siloed it was. Marketing department worked in their silos for their KPIs handing over leads that they considered qualified, the product team worked on their KPIs handing over products that they believed will win the market; there was no feedback loop. Over the years this is changing for the better with companies starting to invest is marketing ops,sales ops, revenue ops etc.

One of the first things I did in my previous org, when heading the revenue function was to give visibility of the sales function to the entire company. Every time we won or lost a deal, we alerted the entire company on Slack with these information:

• Deal size
• Use cases the customer was interested in
• Lost reasons (if the deal was lost)
• The SDR who sourced the deal
• The AE who closed the deal

This brought everyone on board. Marketing team was excited about all this information on why we were winning or losing (better messaging), the product team jumped in whenever they saw a deal being lost due to product gaps, the sales teams were happy about the recognition. Selling stopped being siloed.

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😄 Yet another meme, of course

I know RevOps teams are misunderstood lot. But this was funny and had to be shared

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🗞What I found interesting (From the world of sales and revops)

• Clari acquired Groove resulting in a buzz about the consolidation happening in the revenue stack space. As Jim Barksdale said, “There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle." My bet is both will keep happening. I will write about it in detail later.
• I liked this lovely post by Josh Braun asking sellers to detach. We really need to stop selling ice to Eskimos.
• It is the time of events - Dreamforce (San Francisco), SaaStr (San Francisco), Inbound (Boston) and Revops Summit (San Francisco). If you are looking to get passes, now is the time. And if you are attending, do give me a shout out. Your favorite drink is on me!  🥂

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