A Land & Expand Reading Program for B2B Sales

Blog Comments
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How to pick tree books and branch books, demonstrated using an example of a reading program I developed for B2B sales.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/reading-program-b2b-sales/
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Great read Ced, thanks for sharing. A couple of follow up questions:

  1. I liked the idea of pairing books with articles (and other media) to deepen your understanding. How do you discover relevant articles? Is it just Google or do you do something more sophisticated?

  2. How do you capture the map of the domain you are building? That is assuming that you do and are not just holding it in your head.

Thanks!

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I’m really just listening to as many podcasts with interesting sales leaders right now (for instance, I’m currently searching to see if I can find podcasts with Rackham, or podcasts that reference the Challenger Sale). It’s not easy to find good material on sales right now; a ton of the articles out there are content marketing fluff pieces written by sales enablement/CRM software.

Plus I’m working off the assumption that an interview between professionals yields more information, especially if these professionals aren’t media-trained. So far, that’s worked out really well for when I was learning marketing.

Oh, I totally mean this metaphorically — I keep it all in my head.

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The current meta likely builds on these two ideas: first, that you may decompose the functions of a modern sales team, and staff certain functions with lower cost, lower skilled employees; second, that you may rely on increasingly sophisticated demand generation techniques to supply your salesforce with a consistent set of leads.

I agree with this. I have worked in a B2C organization before (not a tech company ) and this was the sales strategy. They used various forms of direct mail marketing (later supplemented by digital marketing) to generate leads and would pass those leads to a lower cost sales team (made up of interns and fresh college grads) who did basic lead qualification before handing them off to a salesperson for further qualification and closing. I actually built a ML model for lead scoring based on web and email activity for them.

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