InnerVentures

  • How sales is transforming in an age of artificial intelligence

    I asked the very question that is in the title of ChatGPT. The answer is pasted below. I’m doing this because of work I am doing in this area (on interrelated sales and AI topics) and the trend report I am writing. So it’s a way or working and sensemaking aloud. I wanted to see…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Features that delight – AI for better sales productivity – notes

    In this post, the first in a mini series, I want to highlight what I see as the killer App for Enterprise AI which revolves around sales experience/performance management and productivity. That’s because traditional ways of selling are under pressure and also because revenue growth is important to all companies. In particular in this first…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • The creative and supply process for artwork on this site

    At some point in the evolution of this site I added the art I created for the purpose of selling it on t-shirts (small aside – here is the real purpose I create art). Anyway, this is not so straightforward as you can imagine and I have learned a lot and made many changes on…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • SenseMaking from the Web

    Employee Success Drives Customer Success: Turning To Your Employees First Posted on April 12. Wayne McCulloch is Chief Customer Officer at WalkMe, leading all post-sales functions, including customer success, service and support. Philosophers, poets and psychologists have long offered the intuitive wisdom that personal success, with relationships or otherwise, starts by taking honest stock of…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Sales was ripe for disruption and then along came AI

    Buyers are typically two-thirds of the way through a purchase journey before even engaging a seller. That’s because they’re doing a lot of research upfront so they already know a lot about your company, your products, the features, your competitors, even the price. With such little reliance on sellers, imagine bringing the capabilities of AI…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Launching a business in a recession – 4 of 4 – Selling

    This is a post in a series of four detailing how you can start a business during a recession (find them all eventually under the startup innovation tag). I think it is a commonly held view that we are about to enter into or are already in a recession. For whatever reason you are thinking…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Microsoft Viva goes vertical – sales productivity module announced

    I have been writing a lot on Microsoft Viva lately since I work with customers on it (disclosure) and since it is an employee experience platform (EXP), I am working on a new trend report that is related: Employee Customer Experience Connection. More specifically, I have been saying in relation to my work and the…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Microsoft Teams and CRM for Sales Productivity

    Bringing CRM tools into Microsoft Teams makes sellers more collaborative with the intention of making them more productive, ultimately to drive top line growth. Microsoft where I work (disclosure) positions this as collaborative Apps that keep you in the flow of work. I’ve already written about the work I am doing with customers on this…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Less sales people more info – B2B buyers have spoken

    The featured image in this post is based on an ironic state of affairs. Salesforce, arguably the best known CRM platform on the market, first started out life positioning itself as the “no software” company (if you’re in the SaaS business you’ll know what it means). The irony is that a recent piece of Gartner…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Microsoft 365 customer questions – Sales Productivity

    I work in the business of dealing with customers questions on Microsoft 365 all the time (disclosure), either directly or indirectly. This is part of a series of posts where I share them if they can be of help to others. Where I can of course and naturally, not just the questions but the answers…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Customer success operations – some answers

    I was asked by Brook Perry from ’nuffsaid if I would be interested in contributing to an article she was working on with others to get feedback on a set of questions covering customer success operations. Being close to my heart I agreed. I’ll update this post with a link to the article once it…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Another shift the pandemic has accelerated – enterprise sales

    B2B selling was already changing before COVID-19. I’ve written before about how I think customer success practices with their emphasis on product usage is changing sales to be more data and impact driven and more receptive to the user, not just the purchasing unit. This change is not unique to enterprise software sales – think…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • The new customer success partnerships

    Customer Success teams in SaaS companies (mostly what I am focusing on here) probably like to think they are the spearhead for making customers successful (as the name suggests). In truth, its not that simple (is it ever). First a little context on the two DanelDoodle’s I shared in this post. I use the Paper…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Why selling productivity is hard and what to focus on instead

    David Sacks who founded Yammer (the original enterprise social network) alongside Adam Pisoni, knows what it takes to build a business or two. He nailed it in this tweet from the other day:

    Stephen Danelutti