So many B2B legends are coming to the summit:

Jill Rowley, Mark Roberge, Scott Leese, Karen Ng, Chris Walker, and more!

Come learn why nearbound is the way forward.

To say things have changed is an understatement

Leslie Douglas, Head of Sales Programming & Thought Leadership at Sell Better, describes the current landscape of B2B sales in our recent article, The State of Sales:

The market has changed a lot, but so have roles like sales.

We’ve exited a really cushy period of time where a seller was sitting with a nice stream of inbound leads. A lot of companies had some sort of PLG, they had marketing, they had an SDR, a BDR—all of these things that were feeding their pipeline.

Now, sales has become more about relationships and conversations. It has completely shifted its focus to full-cycle selling.

Everything’s slowing to a trickle. We have to set salespeople up for success in a different way. We are having to learn how to walk again.

Before, the mindset around quota attainment was that it came from many different sources. Now, those sources are decreasing or have been cut altogether and we’re forced to look for other ways to come up with the same number.

Outbound is more challenging today because it’s noisy. There are a lot of people. There are a lot of players at the table. There’s a lot more information at our fingertips and our buyers are more knowledgeable. They’re going to look in different places than they did 5, 10, 15 years ago.

We see a ton of information around intent data, and the positive impact of having an introduction or utilizing your network in a different way. Whereas before, you could just push to the masses. You could throw out that net and somebody was going to get caught in it and be interested.

But there’s just too much noise for that these days. You have to be different—and not in a cheesy way, but different in your process, the way that you approach things, and your strategy.

Read more from Leslie and other top sales leaders in The State of Sales.

Impact > personal brand

Building a network is bigger than vanity metrics like followers and clicks. It’s about situating yourself in the conversation your buyers are having with people they already trust.

In The State of Sales,
Scott Leese, CEO & Founder of Scott Leese Consulting, breaks down the importance of building a network and how it can help you rise above the noise:

There were a lot of sales trainers out there who taught cold outreach to all the people who were averse to the phone. They started writing email copy and getting really good at that.

But then there were tech solutions out there that wrote better emails and faster email sequences, so we caught up on all that.

These are the motions that sales leaders know. A lot of those sales leaders have not—in the last 10 years—spent time building their own networks. They rely on what’s familiar to them.

So, they actually can’t demonstrate this motion. These are the people who are like, “Some of us are really good at our jobs and don’t build a brand or need connections on LinkedIn.”

But, it’s not about building your brand. It’s about you becoming irrelevant because you have 700 connections on LinkedIn and you can’t teach people how to do this networking motion, this referral motion, because you have no network.

You can’t just get a network overnight. It takes a long time. So, if I were a 46-year-old sales leader who grew up cold calling and cold emailing and had no network, would I be preaching a go-to network strategy? Probably not, because I can’t execute it.

HubSpot’s masterstroke

HubSpot recently announced the integration of ChatSpot—not with a new product, but with their own
HubSpot Academy.

But this is not a feature or cheeky GPT gimmick.

Here’s the new reality: Trust comes from *helping* people reach their promised land.

Today’s paradox though is that we only trust people who’ve been to the places we’re trying to go. People like us, who’ve traveled the path we’re on.

Let’s say that you’re a newish VP of Sales and you’re wrestling with a sales math performance problem in CRM.

To clarify, this isn’t a HubSpot product problem. It’s an education and experience problem. FAQs and support docs don’t help here nor could they.

Neither can support reps. While helpful for product best practices, they’re not VPs of Sales you can trust.

But, the HubSpot Academy is replete with content and courses led or compiled from great VPs and partners.

So, here’s HubSpot’s masterstroke played out:

Let’s say you’re looking at a report on lead conversion. You see the conversion rate is dropping, but you’re hesitant to diagnose and fix—the real solution requires you to find the right issue.

How can you tell if it’s a volume problem, a quality problem, a source problem, a rep problem, etc, and coordinate with people on the team to fix it?

Well, now, you can ask ChatSpot to help. You’ll be served up expert snippets & related links from HubSpot Academy that give a few top areas to investigate, how, and approaches for fixing.

This will save you days… or weeks… or your career.

Brilliant.

Helpful.

Instant.

You weren’t just delivered a feature, you were delivered an outcome you needed.

Executives take note:

This is how you build network effects that stick. This isn’t just a user interface; it’s a user experience from another planet. It is customer-focused engineering at its finest merged with education at its best.

1+1=3.

By integrating Academy into ChatSpot where the challenge happens in product, HubSpot customers derive outsized value from this new fully integrated, cross-departmental solution.

They’re building a community, a network where interaction compounds value and increases trust.

ChatSpot wasn’t solving a product problem.

It’s not even a problem a “product” can solve.

It’s solving a customer problem.

When your customer has a challenge that a feature can’t fix and support can’t support, will you help your customer reach their promised land?

Because in today’s world, if you’re not thinking like HubSpot, your customers won’t turn to you for help.

In the Nearbound Era dominated by network effects and AI, it seems the customer obsession of Team Orange really is the new black.

You’re a wizard, Harry!

Teams aligned on nearbound might be causing a stir, but they’re saving the day in the process.

Thanks for sharing, Ketan Pandit!

Stuff you don’t want to miss!

• Join the official Nearbound Summit community brought to you by Partnership Leaders —
  Partnership leaders’ goal is to connect people interested in learning about partnerships around the world.
  

• October 18th —Firneo Partner Strategy Forum (Day 1):
  How to Fix Your Broken Partner Program—
  Learn how to fix the root cause of your partner program’s biggest challenges.
  

• October 25th —Firneo Partner Strategy Forum (Day 2):
  
  How to Prioritize the RIGHT Partners—
  Learn how to make sure you’re investing your (limited) resources in partners that will generate a meaningful.
  

• November 1st —Firneo Partner Strategy Forum (Day 3): How to Get Executive Buy-In for Partnerships—
  Learn how to secure resources & support from key stakeholders that are critical to partnership success.
  

• November 6th-9th —Nearbound Summit 2023—
  The future of GTM is Nearbound. Join us for the biggest-ever remote experience in GTM where B2B leaders across departments unite to share how they’re winning with Nearbound strategies and tactics.
  

• April 19th-20th –SaaS Connect 2023–
  It’s that time of year again! Get your spot early for the 11th annual partnership conference in San Francisco, hosted by Cloud Software Association.
  

The future of a nearbound tech stack

Join Simon Bouchez, CEO & Co-founder of Reveal (and the man who invented nearbound!) at the Nearbound Summit.

He will explore the nearbound tech stack and the future of connected solutions and shared data.