Joe Crane

Calling all California employers! 🌟 As you plan for 2025, how is your business adapting to meet the evolving needs of your workforce? Staying competitive and fully staffed in today’s landscape requires new strategies—and we’re here to help. I’m thrilled to join PrideStaff and a stellar panel of industry experts for a virtual roundtable to tackle these pressing challenges. I’ll be moderating a discussion with: Stephen Avila, Plant Manager, Trillium Flow Technologies Eric Gregg, Founder + CXS, ClearlyRated Pankaj Jindal, Co-Founder, Sense Together, we’ll explore: ✅ How workforce needs in 2025 are evolving—and how to stay ahead ✅ Strategies to overcome skill gaps and attract top talent ✅ Tips for engaging and retaining workers in a competitive market ✅ Employment best practices driving success today ✅ The role of AI in shaping California’s recruitment landscape 🗓 Mark your calendar: December 11th at 10 AM PST Let’s dive into actionable insights that will position your business for success in 2025. I can’t wait to see you there! 👉 Register today: https://lnkd.in/gfNGTVC7 #PrideStaff #PrideStaffRoundtables #WorkforceChallenges #CaliforniaWorkforce #TalentStrategy2025

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People don’t realize what “closing skills” are in sales, and they’re not “is persuasive.” Reps with closing skills CONSISTENTLY know, can choreograph and advise on how the deal gets signed and returned. And their forecast accuracy reflects those skills.

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Dear fellow salespeople: If you have friends, family, clients, or colleagues in the LA area, please extend a little extra kindness right now; they’re likely not doing okay. Press pause on calling your California prospects and instead take a moment to check in with them. A quick message or thoughtful gesture can go a long way in offering support during tough times. Let's prioritize empathy and genuine connections in our work. After all, sales is not just about closing deals; it's about building relationships that matter. Stay safe, everyone 💜

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What better way to kick off the new year than with a webinar with my friend Lauren B. Jones 🐐 for the California Staffing and Recruiting Professionals Association! 🔥 We'll be providing an update on all things #AI, including interesting stats, trends, and use cases we are seeing throughout the industry. Whether you are an active CSP member or just wanting to learn more about how staffing agencies are leveraging powerful AI across their businesses, you won't want to miss this! 🤖 #staffing #recruiting #artificialintelligence #webinar

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Top H1 takeaway from QBR's about our Rev Org: "We're an ecosystem, not a hierarchy." (h/t Alexandra B.) We collaborate, everyone's voice matters, and we strive to put people in roles they love so they can be madly successful. Hearing this statement was validation that what we are building in the Revenue Org at LibraryPass is unique, and scalable, and contagious. And we have roles coming soon! So if you're interested in being part of an ecosystem, let's chat. Here's to an even better H2!

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demandDrive, the industry-leading integrated sales and marketing agency, is transforming their prospecting efforts with the help of ZoomInfo. 🤝 🏁 ☀ AJ Alonzo, Director of Marketing at demandDrive and ZoomInfo Champion, shares how ZoomInfo WebSights helps his team uncover insights about website visitors' behavior — allowing them to personalize outbound efforts and improve their prioritization processes. The result? Millions of dollars in ARR. Learn how demandDrive is turning page views into pipeline with ZoomInfo: bit.ly/4dgBN1G

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The overlooked reason why you might not be maximizing your Net Retention. Every SaaS exec I speak to wants to know the best way to increase net retention -- and they’re all trying different tactics to do it however perhaps we just need to follow the data… 2 in 10 RevOps leaders believe they have clean and actionable data in their Salesforce org, so… here are some things you can start to dig into: 🎅 What and how are you cleaning your data - manual, tools or other? Check your data foundation, specifically your account data. 🎅 Mastering your account data is where the gold lies, how are your Parent-Child data set up, how are you bringing to life your enrichment data (if you say APEX or SF Flows, I challenge you to dig more). 🎅 How does your team carves territories, how does finance managee billing, how does marketing operations route leads, and ultimately, how you build your GTM strategy. From a CRO point of view, if revenue teams want to expand and retain across your large enterprise customers, you have to bring your account data to life and align it into a process. When your team understands this in a visual way (and no, native account hierarchies or account hierarchy data is NOT the same thing) it will help resolve duplicate accounts, ensure visibility into your largest accounts, and make sure accounts are always owned by active sales reps. It also means that come territory season (which I’m sure your team is still reeling from) you can effectively reassign and mass modify directly in Salesforce. Whether you’re looking to reduce churn or sell more effectively, or even just stay consistent through different market events like mergers and acquisitions, it all starts with having clean account data. Clean, Connected SF Account Data IS the path to Higher Net Retention! Happy Holidays!

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Sales reps today are overwhelmed — large books of business leave little time for prospecting, making it tough to drive growth. But with ZoomInfo Copilot, five minutes is all you need to check in with existing accounts, start an expansion conversation, and engage with a new, likely-to-buy prospect. Watch our own Jake Lehman demo ZoomInfo Copilot’s prioritized accounts, signals, and buying groups features. Coupled with the AI emailer, Jake crafts high-quality personalized outreach to three companies in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. #ZoomInfoCopilot

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Tired of prospecting like it’s 1849?  ZoomInfo Copilot will mine pure gold buyer intent signals from your CRM and our best-in-class B2B data, then deliver you tailored engagement recommendations, and AI-powered personalized outreach.  It’s like hitting the go-to-market motherlode. 💰 ZoomInfo Copilot turns every seller into your best seller. T-minus 30 days! Learn more here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gRuyJYdf #ZoomInfoCopilot

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Operators are change agents - and most people hate change. Check out this segment of The Ops Drops where VP of RevOps, Julia Kim, shares how to make organizational planning lean and easy by creating tiger teams and building trust. Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/eFn7fkPb

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“Copilot helps us craft specific account- and persona-based messages. The response has been immediate. It’s a game-changer,” Toby Carrington, Seismic's Chief Business Officer. Seismic’s go-to-market teams are taking outbound sales to the next level with ZoomInfo Copilot, using AI-fueled insights to deliver targeted, timely outreach that drives better results. With Copilot streamlining prospecting, Seismic’s teams are booking more meetings, closing deals faster, and scaling innovation across their entire sales operation. 🔑 Ready to see how Copilot can accelerate your success? Learn more: bit.ly/3Dkv7mn

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To all SDRs or anyone entering B2B sales, read this post to avoid falling into common traps. 1. The most successful AEs I have met were the best SDRs. 2. SDRs who didn’t excel in the role and are now AEs are still struggling to generate their own pipeline. 3. AEs who skipped the SDR role, often due to an MBA or strong interview skills, fear switching jobs and roles without inbound leads. They’ve never faced the grind of building a pipeline from scratch, filled with rejections. 4. AEs who have never been an SDR majorly rely on their SDRs or Inbound leads from marketing to help them build pipeline and if any Quarter they don't get inbound or enough meetings from SDRs they sh** in their pants. 5. When these AEs become managers, they often question their team—"Where are the numbers?" or "Why isn’t there a pipeline?"—instead of guiding them on building it. Lacking experience in pipeline generation, they fail to lead by example and eventually lose the respect of their team. Learn the art and science of being an SDR and excel at this job at any cost, you will never have to look back or depend on anyone for pipeline EVER. Prospecting and Generating Pipelines is fundamental to Sales whether you are an SDR, AE, Sr Manager, or VP if you don't know how to do OUTBOUND you will continuously live a sales life of fear and anxiety. So SDRs ask yourselves do you want to be such AE and Managers in the future who depend on others to determine their performance and faith or would you like to own your job? #sales #prospecting #outbound #pipeline #sdr #ae #b2b #saas

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Who owns your end to end GTM system? What about the Bowtie data model? This was a key question during our two-day Revenue Architecture Summit in Santa Cruz. Marketing owns awareness. BDRs or equivalent own education. Sales owns selection. Finance oversees the mutual commit/contracting. Professional services do onboarding. CS helps with retention. Account managers focus on expansion. So do we even need somebody to own and optimize the overall #bowtie process and data model? YES! "But my marketing is great at increasing leads and sales is increasing close rates, so why worry about an overall owner?", you might say. What if the new leads are low quality and sales is rushing through the sales cycle, ultimately yielding high onboarding and ongoing churn? Whether you like it or not, revenue production is a closed loop system. Something you do on the left side of the bowtie impacts the right side and the other way around. Best to assign an unbiased data owner who does that personally have anything to gain by making the data tell any particular story. The most likely owner for the overall system, or at least for the overall data model, lives in operations or finance. We see new titles around GTM Strategy and Operations. We also see RevOps moving from CRO to COO or CFO. So hence my question: In your company, who owns the end-to-end revenue production system? Who owns data definitions and brings together your teams to decide on next actions to improve revenue production based on the data? #revenuearchitecture #bowtie #revops Photo courtesy Jill Guardia (she/her)

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Today on FiredUp!, we talk to Gong VP of GTM Enablement, Stacey Justice about how to equip sales and customer success teams with the tools they need. As you get traction, how do you scale that success to create a repeatable process that is aligned and consistent but also adapts as customer needs develop. How do you get leadership buy-in? How do you measure the effectiveness of your enablement efforts. Gong is clearly a great platform to help with that GTM alignment - so this is a chance to learn from the Stacey who is leading their enablement efforts. https://lnkd.in/g_YdV6pf

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💜 Gainsight + Champion 💜 We just released a killer new eBook together on how to drive growth through your hidden customer champions. With many of us in the midst of 2025 planning, this book dives into the incredible growth engine right in front of us: our customers. The ebook has practical insights on empowering champions and learnings from top brands using Gainsight and Champion. I just re-read it myself, and it's giving me all sorts of light bulb moments (yes my phone just happened to take a 100% organic photo right when I finished reading it. And yes that is my thinking pose.) Check it out 👇

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Amplitude Announces Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results: - Third quarter revenue was $75.2M, up 6% year-over-year - ARR was $298M, up $8M from the end of the second quarter - We now have almost 3,500 paying customers, with 567 of those representing more than $100k or more per year Q3 was all about winning the enterprise. We are starting customer conversations differently, reaching key decision-makers, and demonstrating fast value in ways we weren’t before. The result is a higher-quality book of business, with better attach rates, longer contracts, and bigger expansions (we had multiple expansions exceeding 7 figures in Q3). Consolidation is another big theme that's been playing out for several quarters. It’s clear that our customers are looking for an all-in-one platform, and they are finding that in Amplitude. And we've continued to make our platform better. In Q3, we launched Amplitude Made Easy, our completely redesigned platform experience that takes the difficulty out of analytics. We also deepened our partnership with our friends at HubSpot, launched Web Experimentation, and acquired Command AI (fka CommandBar). To our Ampliteers, partners, and customers—we couldn’t do it without you! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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I was asked what is the fasted way to win new business for sales - get warm introductions in your target accounts. Here are 7 steps that I think will help you get radically more pipeline fast:🔥📈 Inboxes are overflowing, cold outreach is losing its punch. Warm introductions are the key to breaking through the noise and accelerating your sales pipeline. 1. Define Target Accounts 🎯 Zero in on accounts that align with your ideal customer profile. Know their challenges, and understand how your solution uniquely solves them. Focus on a subset you’re confident about – don’t let analysis paralysis slow you down. Key: Don’t get stuck on the first step; just go for it! 2. Identify Connectors in Your Network 🕸️ Expand your network (or automate this with platforms like https://lnkd.in/e-XsFVmR) to match up with contacts who have trusted relationships with key players in your target accounts. Look for people with deep industry and solution experience- they’ll help boost your credibility.  3. Engage with Value First 💬 When requesting an intro, lead with value. Show why the intro matters to their connection and how it benefits them. Remember, your Trusted Advisor isn’t your sales rep – they’re a facilitator of value for their network. Offer insights, unique perspectives, and collaborate in a knowledge exchange. This will set you apart as more than “just another sales rep.” 4. Personalize Your Outreach to the New Contact 🧑‍💼 After a warm into, skip the canned pitch. Reference your mutual connection, then tailor your message to your target accounts needs. Tap into your advisor’s inside knowledge on what truly matters, from active projects to key priorities. This approach makes you relevant, aware, and genuinely interesting. 5. Nurture the Relationship, Not Just the Opportunity 🤝 Warm intros open doors, but it’s the relationships that close deals. Focus on building trust, actively listening, and providing value. Even if there’s no immediate sale. 6. Don’t Forget Your Sales Process 🚀 Whether it’s Solution Selling, MEDDICC, or MEDDPICC, stick to your process to stay on track. Use your advisor’s insights to set you apart, but also to qualify out quickly – if it’s not a fit, pivot to protect your credibility and the trust of your connection. 7. Reward Your Trusted Advisor 🏆 Recognize your advisor’s role in your success! A thoughtful gesture, creative reward, or a few percentage points on the deal can make a significant impact. It shows appreciation, strengthens the partnership, and sets the stage for future collaboration. Warm introductions are your ticket to stronger connections, faster cycles, and higher close rates. Are you tapping into them? 🔑 And if you want to make this easy, check out https://lnkd.in/e-XsFVmR – the first platform designed to automate and scale your ability to find and leverage warm introductions into all of your target accounts. 🔗 #SalesTips #Sales #SDR #SalesPipeline #WarmIntroductions #ForceEquals

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Get up to speed on any account in 30 seconds with ZoomInfo Copilot. On the latest episode of In Your Corner, our CEO and Founder, Henry Schuck, shows how ZoomInfo Copilot is changing the game for AEs and AMs. ZoomInfo Copilot makes meeting prep and account research simple — surfacing everything you want and need to know about an account. From recent engagements and key contacts to upcoming deals, ZoomInfo Copilot's AI Account Summaries help frontline sellers prepare for any customer interaction. Have a question? Just click "Ask Copilot." See how it works. ⬇️ #ZoomInfoCopilot

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New sales ops hires have no idea what they are getting into with Salesforce. Here's why: Imagine you’re building a deck. And you are given the keys to a Home Depot. You have access to unlimited equipment and supplies. But you get no instructions on what deck you are building or how to build it. This is what situation most sales ops roles are in with Salesforce. Without training in its full capabilities, admins will be stuck and overwhelmed. This is why I created the Salesforce Accidental Admin Accelerator for sales admins. I recently did a webinar on YouTube that talks about how we are helping SalesOps and sales administrators with Salesforce. You can view it here: https://lnkd.in/g297XegA

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