Nikolai Suhharnikov

Leading sales teams remotely isn't easy. Doing sales remotely is not easy either. One important thing I learned leading salespeople all over Europe over the last 5 years: You should schedule time together often. Here are a few regular sessions I usually put in our calendars: 1️⃣ Cold Calling Day (once a month): The whole team (SDRs, AEs, Operations) meets to call for one full day. Set a target for the day and see what the team can achieve together. We often booked > 25 meetings on one day. Helped us get closer to the revenue target. 2️⃣ Outreach / Cold Calling Sessions (2-3 hours, two times a week): The whole team focuses on outreach. These blockers are important for all salespeople to not losing focus on pipeline creation. You might as well be doing it with the whole team. At the beginning of the session, we usually do a warmup with some mock calls. The hardest part: Keep doing it over a long period of time. 3️⃣ Weekly Sales Team Meeting (1-1.5 hours): Everybody shares what they achieved last week (the most important advancements and new pipeline). There is usually a list of topics that need to be discussed. And knowledge should be shared (especially in early-stage companies). Everybody contributes. 4️⃣ Weekly Call Coachings (1 hour): A sales rep is sharing a recorded call with everyone beforehand. And the whole team is giving feedback on that call. By showing parts of the recording. 5️⃣ Weekly 1-on-1s with every sales rep (30 min) Agenda: 1. How are you doing? 2. What is going well / where do we have room for improvement? 3. What do you need help with? 4. Career & personal development 5. Other topics? 6️⃣ Weekly coaching on methodology with the whole sales team (60 min): Someone prepares a late-stage deal by answering the following questions: "What is the pain/ use case?" "What happens if they do not implement our solutions?" "Who is the Champion, and how do you know?" "What is their personal benefit of implementing the solution?" "Who else is involved? What does each care about? "Who is the Economic Buyer?/ Decision Board?" "What is their timeline?" "Do we understand the decision criteria for the people involved in the decision-making steps?" "What is the biggest risk of losing the deal?" Then, the team asks questions. Result: 2-3 immediate action items that help mitigate the risk of losing the deal. Learning and growing together. That is it. Anything else you are doing regularly with the whole team?

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How to retain salespeople: 1. Don't mess with their money 2. Great coaching and feedback 3. Majority of the team hitting quota 4. Opportunities for internal promotions 5. Top performers hitting 200% (or more) 6. Listen to feedback and improve things That's it. That's all you gotta do. - Mike G 👉 Get The Best Sales Newsletter delivered straight to your inbox for FREE: https://lnkd.in/g-dHTj7s

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BANT is still relevant. But most sales teams use it wrong. This cheat sheet is designed for SDRs and AEs working SMB or mid-market cycles. It’s especially useful for reps qualifying high-volume inbound leads or early-stage outbound. Use it in deals under $25K, with 1 to 2 stakeholders, and short buying processes. Each letter includes plug-and-play questions you can use live on calls. No fluff. Just field-tested phrasing and fast filters. Here’s what you’ll find inside: - Clear definitions for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. - Real questions that help you qualify in 10 minutes. - Situations where BANT works best. - Tactical tips on how to adapt it for 2025 SaaS cycles. Save this cheat sheet. It will help you avoid chasing leads that were never going to close.

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VP Sales is THE MOST brutal job in tech. You own the number, but not all the problems behind it. You’re told: “We need to 8x like these AI-native startups,” but your category isn’t hot. Then one miss - and no one asks what’s broken. Just: "Do we need a new VP?" If you’re hiring (or firing) a VP Sales - read this 👇Twice. 1. You’re hired into a mess - then blamed for not fixing it fast enough. You didn’t hire the team. You didn’t choose the GTM. You didn’t greenlight PMF. But you’re expected to fix it all with sales fairy dust by the next board. VPs aren’t magicians. If the foundations are shaky, own that before expecting miracles. 2. You own the number - but not leads, pricing, or product. You’re responsible for everything. But in control of… almost nothing. And no one acknowledges that gap. Sales does NOT happen in a vacuum. Outbound takes 6mo+ to work. Competitive gaps take more time to fix. Give your VP Sales the ingredients to drive sales - or grace until they can. 3. You don’t get a quota. You get a spreadsheet that 2x’s every quarter. Reps hit 100%, and their number rolls. But your number? Doubles. All the time. Forget ramp time or lack of enablement, just "scale this now.” But real life isn’t a GSheet. Your VP’s planning assumptions aren’t excuses. Push less, listen more. Or risk breaking them. 4. You’re compared to companies with 10x resources. Your team is grinding without brand, a lead engine, or a viral product - and you’re compared to AI-native startups who make the triple-triple-double rule look easy. Let’s be clear: Sales DOES NOT create 8x YoY growth. Hot categories (Vibe Coding level WOM) and viral products (Midjourney) do. Sales just accelerate it. 5. You start solving less - and defending more. Every meeting becomes a trial. “Why are we behind?” “Is your playbook working?” “Why doesn’t this scale?” Instead of fixing issues, you’re just trying to survive the board. I get it, when a critical engine is behind, I also want answers. But what your VP needs now? To hear you believe in them. To hear ideas. To hear, “How can I help?” 6. The pressure is brutal. But the hardest part? Losing belief. You walk in confident. But by month 3, you realize it’s 10x harder than you imagined. The pipeline’s weak. The team’s junior. The motion’s broken. And slowly, you stop believing. Yes, VPs should be tough, but they're not robots. Be their mental support. Get them to see what you see - in the company and IN THEM. 7. The moment your confidence breaks - it’s game over. You can be tough. Resilient. Strategic. But once you stop believing you can fix it? It’s over. Everyone now thinks “They were good for $1M-10M, we now need a $10M-40M VP.” But the truth? People can level up. If they fit the culture, know the business, and the team runs into battle for them - back them. Help them upskill. Bring an advisor. Believe in them until they believe again. —— Don’t blame the person holding the number. Fix the system. Back them. Don’t break them.

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One of the key sales metrics Miro’s Strategic Accounts team is laser focused on is our Walk in Conversion Rate: How much of the total $ value of pipeline we have on Day 1 ends up CW by EoQ. We’ve 3X’d this metric in the past 2 years, are now consistently delivering 40%+, and have gotten it north of 60% in a couple of quarters. We put these improvements down to focusing on 5 things: ➡ A Buyer Centric Sales Process: We redesigned our sales process to align more closely with how our customers make their buying decision and included customer verified exit criteria at each stage. We ‘win the stage’ by achieving a combination of MEDDPICC and customer oriented exit criteria and we don’t skip stages. Not skipping  = more qualified opportunities, fewer deals stalling between S2-S4, increased win rates, average deal sizes, and pipeline velocity. ➡ Customer Centric Deal Qualification: The exit criteria at S1 are designed to ensure the opportunity is anchored in solving a meaningful business problem for the buyer i.e., can we articulate a customer validated problem statement grounded in the 3 Whys and a solid “I”. This helps us qualify out early and often and ensure we don’t invest time in opportunities where a) Miro - as the premium/most sophisticated offering in the market - is not the best option for the buyer and/or b) we would be trying to solve a surface level customer pain. ➡ Tightening our Operating Rhythm: Two major changes we made: 1:Introducing thrice quarterly pipeline scrubs (Week 3, 6 & 10) helps ensure we walk into each quarter with solid pipeline hygiene and 2: Introducing a standing 2.5 hour weekly Deal Review Block on Tuesday mornings, alternating week to week between Top 5 CQ & Top 5 NQ Deals. ➡ Deepening our Partnership with Professional Services: We now involve our PS team from S2 on all opportunities tied to a significant deployment. In these deployments, we’re selling PS assisted workflow transformation vs licenses and - in CoM language - this team are experts in conveying “How We Do It” and “Where We’ve Done it Before”. They help us communicate the business outcomes a scaled Miro deployment can deliver (e.g., ~60% reductions in development cycles for physical and digital products), and increase customers’ confidence in our ability to deliver these outcomes for them. ➡ Decision & Paper Process: Partnering with our Champions to co-create a Mutual Go Live Plan that maps out the steps each side needs to take to deploy the solution by a certain date. This helps us build an accurate understanding of the various steps, stakeholders, and timelines in play, and reduce the chances of a late stage stick in the spokes. Related, Miro was just listed #18 in Forbes Cloud 100. If you’re interested in being part of what we’re building, check out our current openings (link in comments)

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CSMs are borrowing techniques from psychotherapy to save renewals. And it's working. The OARS framework comes from therapeutic counseling, but it's perfect for discovery calls. It builds trust faster than any sales technique because it makes prospects feel heard instead of sold to. Here's how it breaks down: - Open Questions. Stop asking "Do you like our product?" Start asking "What's the #1 thing being discussed in your boardroom right now?" Open questions force prospects to think and share real information. Closed questions get you yes/no answers that lead nowhere. - Affirmations. When customers hit milestones, acknowledge it. "You increased automation by 30% ahead of schedule" builds momentum better than moving straight to the next agenda item. - Reflections. This is the secret weapon. Repeat back what they said in your own words: Prospect: "We're drowning in support tickets and need better analysis." You: "So it sounds like you want to extract more insights from your current support system, and you're looking for solutions to do that. Did I get that right?" Reflections prove you're listening and give them a chance to clarify. Even when you're wrong, they'll correct you - which gives you better information. - Summary. End calls by pulling together everything they said, then ask: "What's the next step you think we should take?" When THEY suggest the next step instead of you telling them what to do, they're more likely to follow through. The framework works because it changes us the traditional sales approach that your clients might be used to. Instead of pitching and pushing, you're reflecting and guiding. Most reps ask a question, then immediately ask three more questions because they panic in silence. That turns discovery into an interrogation. OARS teaches you to ask one question, shut up, and let them talk. Then reflect what you heard before moving forward. Chad shared how he used this to save a six-figure renewal during a Sales Assembly session on Customer Discovery last week. The customer had been ghosting emails for weeks. Instead of pitching harder, he asked: "Is there something I should have asked you that maybe I didn't?" The response was a novel about losing faith in the product roadmap and feeling left behind by competitors. That one reflective question uncovered the real issue and saved the deal. Therapists know that people need to feel understood before they'll change their behavior. Customers need to feel understood before they'll renew their contracts.

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90% of SaaS reps overcomplicate objection handling. They’ll write 15-slide decks or “strategic” follow-up emails. But the best objection-buster I’ve ever used took one line: 👉 “Here’s how to get your CFO to approve this tool in 7 minutes flat.” That line alone turned stalled deals into signed contracts. Why? Because it gives the buyer exactly what they need (ammunition to win approval internally). We spun that same core message into multiple weapons: • “The ROI calculator CFOs can’t argue with” • “Your boss will literally thank you for sending this” • “The lazy AE’s guide to instant approvals” Different flavors, same impact: we made the champion look like a genius inside their org. The lesson? You don’t always need “new messaging.” You need the right angle for each buyer. One insight. Three angles. Pipeline unlocked.

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I’m fanatical about pipeline generation and I think the phone is the best way to generate pipeline. But I still think “org-wide call targets” are stupid for 3 simple reasons: 1) Some reps have high connect rates, some are lower 2) Some reps set meetings with 20% of prospects they talk to, some are lower 3) Some reps convert most of their meetings to opportunities, some convert fewer So how would I set a call target relevant to everyone? Set it too low, and the low-converting reps have no chance to find success while they work on improving conversion. Set it too high, and the high-converting reps are annoyed AND their conversion likely decreases, making them less efficient. So I don’t set org-wide call targets. Instead, we set org-wide outcome targets (e.g., opportunities created), and then use data to inform individual input goals to reach out those outcomes. Some of my favorite “outcomes” to track: - Initial meetings set - Number of conversations - Discovery meetings converting to opportunities My favorite way to track priority outcomes is my “Good Day Framework.” It’s my most popular framework for improving pipeline generation, and you start generating more pipeline with it today here: https://lnkd.in/g879yrCK

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