Hey there 👋
Obvious statement: strong customer relationships are required for sustainable revenue growth.
Every sales & revenue leader knows this. (Or they should!)
From new pipeline generation, to winning new logos, to account expansion… building close relationships with your buyers puts you on the fastest path towards your ARR and NRR goals.
Not as obvious: how to prioritize building these partnerships in your sales process on a tactical level.
Buyer collaboration is the heart of what we do at Accord, and we’ve worked hard to build a buyer-first mindset & GTM motion into every step of our customer journey.
Of course we’re still always looking for ways to improve our partnerships and implement these best practices across the team as we scale…
That’s why I’m stoked for our next masterclass: Stronger Buyer Relationships = Faster Growth: Driving ARR Through Customer Partnerships, next Thursday at 1pm Eastern!
We’ll be digging into:
📈 Driving more pipeline & deals through strong buyer relationships
🗺 How to build close partnerships at every step of the customer journey
✅ Tactics for standardizing a buyer-first sales process across your team
With top revenue leaders:
- Christian Kletzl, CEO & Co-Founder at UserGems – passionate about all things pipeline generation and revenue alignment
- Mike Marg, Partner at Craft Ventures – former seller & sales leader at Dropbox, Slack, and Clearbit
- Mike Clapson, VP of Sales at Ashby – previously helped scale Slack from $8M to over $800M+ in ARR
- Ross
In this newsletter:
- Mutual Action Plan best practices ft. Salesforce, Atrium, & SalesPlaybook
- Tips for scaling your sales team from Sendoso’s Director of Sales
- How to get more value from Accord (8 things to start doing now)
🗺 How to win more deals with Mutual Action Plans
Still riding high after one of the most energizing masterclasses I've hosted yet. 💥
Partnered with the amazing Manuel Hartmann, Milena Kaul, & Christian Krause last week, who all shared 10/10 advice about using mutual action plans to close more deals, faster!
A few of my favorite takeaways from the session:
✅ If you want to get your reps to use MAPs, you need to show them what’s in it for them.
There’s tons of benefits to using mutual plans – forecasting with more confidence, getting to a yes/no faster, running your pipeline like a business, etc. When you highlight those benefits, your reps are more likely to use MAPs consistently.
✅ Unless it’s a 1-call close, almost every deal should require a Mutual Action Plan.
You want to know when you can get a “yes” or “no” from your buyer – don’t waste your time being strung along waiting for a decision.
✅ The importance of having REAL human conversations – not just pitching!
Like Milena said during the session, “Don’t forget about the MUTUAL in mutual action plan.” 💯
Get more key takeaways from the masterclass here!
🎙 On the Podcast with Nick Casale, Director of Sales at Sendoso
Had a blast jamming with Nick Casale on the podcast recently about his 5+ year journey at Sendoso: from the first sales hire at a pre-seed company, to a sales leader heading up a scaling Series C team.
Here are his 3 tips for building a repeatable sales process & training reps:
1. Balance autonomy with consistency 🦸
Every rep has their own superpower. Leave enough wiggle room in your process to help them leverage it and be themselves, while still having a consistent journey and message across your team.
2. Sales process = customer journey (listen to them!) 👂
It might seem obvious, but when you’re still figuring out your sales process, let your customers have a say in how they want to buy from you! You need to be driving, but let go of preconceived notions of what *you* think your process should be from past roles and be open to new flows.
3. Give new reps frameworks to follow 🖼
Instead of overwhelming new reps with dozens of Gong calls, pages of content, and a specific script, focus on the “why” behind your process and message. Boil your buying journey and message down into frameworks to make it easier to digest.
You can support these frameworks with a script or other content, but ensuring reps understand your “why” and the problems you solve is the #1 way to get them selling successfully, faster.
🎙 Listen to the 20-min episode for more tips on building processes, scaling teams, & mistakes to avoid in early stage sales!
💯 8 ways to get more value from Accord right now
Whether you’re already an Accord user, or just looking for best practices for collaborating with your buyers, we broke down 8 ways to get more value from Accord & up-level your Mutual Action Plans.
Below is a quick overview of the list – get the full details here! 💪
1. Use a succinct summary to align on the “why” behind the deal
2. Ace your Accord / Mutual Action Plan intro: don’t send your buyer in blind
3. Get mutual agreement on your plan (hence the “mutual” in Mutual Action Plan)
4. Refer to your shared plan & timeline at the beginning & end of each meeting
5. Link to your Accord / MAP frequently in your follow-up emails
6. Organize all your documents, links, and resources in one place for your buyer
7. Assign due dates and owners on calls to keep everyone on track
8. Less is more: make it as easy as possible for your buyer to buy!
Thanks for reading From Vendorship → Partnership 👋
💡 What do you want to see more or less of in this newsletter? Hit reply to let me know!
Ross Rich (CEO and Co-founder)
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