Claim OwnershipEurope's B2B SaaS Sales Podcast
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B2B SaaS Sales is still an emerging domain in Europe. European salespeople and their leaders share actionable initiatives, best practices and insights on how you can source and close more deals faster and become a better sales professional.
For more free resources please visit
- https://www.unique.ch/ to increase sales with winning moments in every customer conversation
- https://thesalesplaybook.io/ on coaching committed B2B startups to exceed their sales goals
For more free resources please visit
- https://www.unique.ch/ to increase sales with winning moments in every customer conversation
- https://thesalesplaybook.io/ on coaching committed B2B startups to exceed their sales goals
153 Episodes
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Yokoy is on a mission - and on track - to become a FinTech unicorn.
This means growing from 50 to 250 people in record time.
Ben Bauer leads the way for DE, building his team from scratch to 30+ reps quickly.
Here are 3 things I learnt from Ben:
1️⃣ 1% bad gut feeling is 100% no in talent acquisition.
Ben only hires sales talent where his gut feelling is a 100% yes.
Even under high pressure to staff open positions quickly.
Because hiring talent that is not a fit is just too expensive.
Even if they have a stellar track record from Salesforce or Google.
2️⃣ Friendly competitive tag teams are great.
Ben currently builds SDR x AE tag teams per region.
This means 0 direct competition on target customers.
But also a natural performance-oriented contest of who does best.
3️⃣ Why Ben “joined the dark side”.
He started out in marketing but loves “being on the frontline”.
Still reading lots of psychological books like Never Split the Difference.
But applying the gained knowledge in synchronous communication.
#salessuccess #startupsales #entrepreneurship #startup #salesplaybook
Guillaume Moubeche is a true legend in B2B SaaS Sales.
Not only did he scale lemlist $10M ARR in <4 years.
He also did so with 0 external capital & stayed incredibly humble.
I am incredibly grateful for having him on our B2B Podcast recently.
Here are the 3 things from Guillaume that impressed me the most:
1️⃣ His mindset on sales Sales is all about
1. Building human relationships,
2. Helping people solve problems and
3. Impacting a million lives.
NOT money, NOT fame, NOT ego.
2️⃣ His humble hustling spirit: Guillaume just cashed out $10 million
At a lemlist valuation of $150 million.
He does not need to work anymore.
But he does.
To positively impact 1’000’000 entrepreneurs.
So he keeps building, networking, learning and paying forward every day.
3️⃣ His beginner’s mind: He still has 5-10 conversations with peers per week.
With CEOs of 100M+ ARR companies.
But also founders who are just starting out.
He is learning from everybody, with 0 ego on what he achieved.
Guillaume, it was a true honor to “share the mic” with you - stay awesome!
Stay true to your pipeline and yourself in sales.
Simple to say, not easy to do, but so important.
Was a true pleasure learning from Pascal van Dalen recently.
👉Here are 3 best things I learnt from him on our podcast
1️⃣ Focus on conversations, not pitches
The dialogue with your customer shifts if you listen.
Learn & understand first, create a pull effect, then help.
Sales is about helping people solve problems, NOT money.
2️⃣ Empathy is key for sales leaders
“Managing out of the book” is challenging, if not wrong.
Sales leaders need to close deals first themselves.
Because they otherwise do not truly understand.
3️⃣ Bring the message forward & keep learning
Pascal - still, after 10+ years in B2B SaaS Sales loves learning.
And bringing in what he learned as VP Sales to fast-growing startups.
Focusing on making his team successful.
👉 How do you see sales leadership?
Winning by Design helped transform SaaS sales "from art to science".
Yes, there might be some competitive overlap with SalesPlaybook.
Collaboration before competition is a core value - which Harold shares.
It was a true pleasure learning from him on our podcast.
Here are the 3 key insights I took from sharing the mic with him:
1️⃣ Storytelling is key:
“Sales is a numbers game”. OK, but well…
People take decisions emotionally, and then justify them rationally.
Get a clear framework for the story you tell. Then tailor it.
2️⃣ Why multi-threading is so important:
Winning a 100k deal involves typically 5-10 stakeholders.
You can simply not afford to rely only on 1-2 people to “make it happen”.
Which is why “spinning multiple threads” early on is crucial.
3️⃣ “Content is King”: Content Marketing is Winning by Design’s main lead source.
Because they share often, early and most important ly freely.
Harold & his team love providing tons of value.
People who get value will pay you once they want even more value
Thanks a lot Harold for your time & insights and looking forward to by design (pun intended) collaborate on some European B2B SaaS scaleups in 2022!
Customer referrals & partnerships are one of the most underrated sales channels to scale revenue quickly - if done right!
👉Here are 3 things I learnt from Werner Decker on our podcast
1️⃣ Frame & ask for referrals early: Ask customer even before offer signature if they would be OK with you asking for 3-5 warm introductions - once you deliver on what you promise indeed.
2️⃣ Seek discomfort: Get over your anxiety and inertia to ask for an introduction, to cope with awkward silence - and to do so consistently.
3️⃣ Growth mindset: Successful partnerships require you to embody a growth mindset, maximising the "What's in for me?" for partners, NOT cost saving strategies. An example how he implemented this with a client is to keep things really simple: "If your referral signs, we pay you EUR 12k, cash, within 30 days - no % calculation, no further conditionality. (Average Contract Value was 80-100k ARR, really low churn)
How do you tackle referrals?
Patrick has done hundreds of discovery calls with customers with less than 20% talking time. Most salespeople struggle with asking the right and deepening questions and really find the meat on the bone. After listening to this episode, you will have learned several techniques that help you have better conversations with your prospect. For once, Patrick is a guest rather than the host - interviewed by Manuel.
Our Co-Host Manuel Hartmann is tested for his tactical knowledge - and withstands. If you want to learn how to finally send every follow-up as a video and how to actually get rid of the follow-ups completely, listen to this episode. Manuel and Patrick are interviewing each other for once.
Robin Schmidt built his way into cold emailing after finding out that paid advertisement works for his clients, but not his own business.
He now helps German B2B SaaS businesses setup cold email marketing at scale, aiming for 1-3% booking rates while complying with DSGVO.
Ian Koniak has over $100 million in career sales and numerous finishes at #1 nationally, including finishing #1 in the US Enterprise Select Division of Salesforce on his belt.
However, he sees a gap in coaching & training how to lead a sales life with integrity...
👉 Here are 3 actionable insights I got from him on our podcast
1️⃣ Know your numbers: “Schedule 2 appointments and do 2 appointments every day and you will be fine. That’s 40 appointments per month, if you close 25% of them that’s 10 deals. 10 deals of 4k each means you contribute 40k in new business every month.”
Ian did this for the better part of a decade selling copiers. But quickly doubling deal size...
2️⃣ Sell to executives: Ian evolved to a sales director selling 1M in 3 months by selling to fewer customers, but helping to solve business priorities “higher up”.
3️⃣ Prospect yourself in ABS (Account-Based Selling): It is the job of the sales executive to do research, reach out, orchestrate the buyer journey and more on strategic accounts.
Thanks again for sharing this Ian and all the best for your new own company!
Was haben grüne Bananen mit LinkedIn zu tun?
Die meisten Deiner Zielkunden sind noch nicht “reif zum kaufen” - aber schätzen Mehrwert.
Professionelles Lead Nurturing wird immer wichtiger. Die Tools gibt es, Wissen ist oft rar.
👉Hier sind 3 Dinge, die ich von Susann lernen durfte in unserem Podcast
(Link zur Episode im 1. Kommentar):
1️⃣ Mehrwert ist ein Muss: Niemand “tauscht ”seine Email-Adresse mehr für einen 1-Pager. Whitepaper, Reports und Case Studies müssen inhaltlich wertvoll sein.
2️⃣ Smarketing: Sales & Marketing müssen eng zusammenarbeiten. SDRs sind bei DRACOON im Marketing angesiedelt, Marketing-Mitarbeiter oft in Sales Calls dabei.
3️⃣Vernetzung hilft: Wir haben alle Tools, Plattformen und Podcasts um voneinander zu lernen. Wir müssen es nur tun, die Chancen dafür sind riesig!
P.S. Dracoon is hiring BDRs and Susann has some capacity on Fridays’ to help you as a “CMO as a service”...
Patrick and I told Dominik he cannot lose a single client building customer success at LARI.
He did not - which is truly amazing over nearly 2 years, while going 3x ARR in that time.
Customer Success (CS) is still a young discipline in Europe & it was great to learn from him.
👉Here are 3 things I learnt from Dominik on our podcast (full episode in 1st comment):
1️⃣ Stay close to your customers: Domink & his team have regular conversations with all their existing customers, no matter how small to drive 100%(+) Net Revenue Retention.
2️⃣ Few CS Experts: Customer Success is still a young discipline in Europe with few people who “have been there, done that”. Talent, Curiosity & Hunger seem therefore more important than experience here.
3️⃣CS is a profit center: Like sales, Customer Success exists to drive revenue.
Dominik loves to work in a function where he exists to increase ARR instead of saving costs.
P.S. LARI is hiring a Customer Success Manager for Suisse Romandie...
No upfront cost. Unlimited income potential. Absolutely love this tagline from Uvaro.
Sales Talent Acquisition is one of the biggest challenges of B2B Startups as I see it.
There are simply not enough great sales people available on the market.
👉Here are 3 things I learnt from Joseph Fung on our podcast (full episode in 1st comment):
1️⃣ Empathy is everything: B2B Tech Sales is a lot about the ability to listen actively.
About the consistency to understand, help and communicate with customers, NOT pitching.
2️⃣ Capabilities & Experience transfer: Empathy is independent of B2BTech.
(Former) Barkeepers, nurses, chefs, flight attendants are crushing their quotas by 2-3.5x.
3️⃣ A safe environment is key: People need practice & actionable feedback, like athletes.
Having them watching videos, throwing them in the field & shouting “sell more” doesn’t cut it.
I also love Joseph’s urgent curiosity to learn from others and staying so humble as a serial entrepreneur and just raising a $12 million Series A.
Shout-out to Joseph & Team for helping to add talent to the B2B Tech salesforce!
P.S. And yes, we’re thinking about how to best partner up re North America x Europe ;-)
Video is the future of sales. For prospecting, for building trust, for more pleasant sales.
But having meaningful video conversations at scale are “a beast”.
Tolstoy is bridging the gap between authentic conversation and robust scalabability
Here’s 3 takeaways from Dov on “Sales for Video 2.0”:
1️⃣Video is about making sales human: No make-up, script, perfection required
2️⃣Conversational Video: “Videobots” help to have a dialogue instead of just a “movie”
3️⃣Ongoing dialogue: Flexibility is power to build Mutual Action Plans, Q&A & more.
Also love Dov’s “value-first” mindset of building longer-term relationships first.
Shout-out also to Thibaut for sharing “the latest and greatest” on prospecting trends.
You nudged me to connect with Dov - keep up the amazing work!
Jake Dunlap is a leader in the Sales Enablement space I’ve been following for the last 18 months. He overachieved my already high expectations as a guest for our B2B Startup Sales Podcast. Let me share 3 arguments why.
Humble Hustling: He built Skaled from the ground up to $5M annual revenue with 0 external funding. After he scaled Glassdoor’s sales team from 1 to 30+ people and $1M M!(R)R in 12 months. He made 0 fuzz about these achievements, but focused on providing value to the audience.
Value before price: Even if he surely could, their first call with prospects is all about discovery, being helpful and understanding if they could be more helpful. NOT about a 0 value-adding “interrogation” of generic qualifications.
Collaboration before Competition: We are actually quite excited about the potential of expanding our footprint to help our clients in their go-to-market Europe (SalesPlaybook <-> North America (Skaled).
“We will help you to double your revenue in 90 days” sounds a lot like clickbait.
Having Simon Severino from Strategysprints on the podcast was however a true pleasure as he shares our mindset of “playing long-term games with long-term people”.
Here are 3 things we learnt from the conversation with him:
1. Referral Teams require mutual commitment: He built a JVC - a Joint Venture Club to institutionalise who does what in what rhythm to make sure things actually happen and make referrals (more) predictable.
2. Lifetime Referral Fees: He embraces a 20% lifetime referral fee - which investors typically hate - with a pure-play mindset of "making a bigger cake" and building trusted, long-term partnerships and even friendships.
3. Move "2 levels above fulfilment": A founder needs to work more ON the business than IN the business and remove herself from operations.
Finn Thormeier claims to still have no clue about life after just turning 25. We heartily disagree and think he has more clues about life than 99% of 25-year olds. Especially about creating consistency in video content creation and publishing.
Stephanie Biebel and Manuel discuss with Finn about different ideation and content creation strategies and mindsets, but also the variable effort behind what it takes to publish attractive content consistently.
Aaron Ross is one of the true grandmasters of B2B Outbound Sales after building it up at Salesforce, writing Predictable Revenue and Impossible to Inevitable and more than a decade helping sales teams coach and build SDR teams.
Here are 3 things among the many more I learnt from him:
1) "Done for You" is not a silver bullet: Predictable Revenue offers both "teaching you how to fish" and "going fishing for you", but running both at the same time is hard. Also, it is a lot about expectation management.
2) Western Europe is still attractive for cold outbound: Applying state-of-the-art cold email outbound practices in the US yields <5% reply rates at scale. Applying similar practices in Europe, especially in Switzerland / DACH can get you to 20-40% reply rates quickly as the market is less mature (or crowded by 8-12 step sequences from Sales "Engagement" software).
3) A players (like Aaron) want human conversations: More Slack channels, virtual conferences and Q&A forums are not solving the puzzle of building a trusted, connected, flexible B2B Sales Acceleration partner ecosystem. Travel to meet physically is a challenge, but desirable for dedicated meetups. Until then small 2-5 people Zoom "Fireside Chats" can help.
The other not B2B sales-related feat which I find even more impressive than his sales track record is that Aaron takes care of his 9 kids as an actual father by limiting himself to 20 hours for (the better part of) the last decade, currently also across the ocean between Los Angeles and the UK.
Patrick and I loved interviewing 50+ sales leaders for our B2B Startup Sales podcast.
But we honestly never imagined to build a demand generation business out of it.
Mark did so very successfully with Speak on Podcasts to help B2B Tech Brands increase brand awareness and generate more demand by speaking on podcasts your audience listens to and trusts.
After spending 12 years in B2B sales, marketing and recruiting, Mark and I talked about the value of having conversations instead of pitches, always be connecting and why cold email is not dead at all.
Here are 3 things among the many more I learnt from him:
Always be closing is dead. It’s 2021 and ABC means always be connecting as the new decade is all about building long-term, trusted relationships, resulting in increased customer lifetime value, referrals, case studies and more
60% reply rates on cold email are still possible...if you invest the time, focus and energy to personalise your messaging and connect with human beings instead of just “spray & pray” 8-12 step sequences
Sales is about having two-way conversations and not a sales person pitching. Enough said on that (Elephants vs Lions anybody?)
Silvan successfully founded and sold GymHopper cold-calling independent gyms and closing deals quickly.
He then moved on to sell 6-figure deals for RenTouch 100% remote from Switzerland to +/- 50% US customers.
He also interviewed 150+ Swiss entrepreneurs on the Swisspreneurs podcast and shares with us his insights he gained from successful entrepreneurs such as Ariel Lüdi and Tobias Häckermann.
Dan Englander is doing truly impressive work on finding a fine line between personalization and scale in outbound sales.
We talked with him about how to execute relationship-based sales at scale, why most sales people fail due to inconsistency and also how email is still the most anti-fragile sales channel in today's noisy world.
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