toddbida

[toddbida]

💡𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗱𝗼𝘄 𝗔𝗜: 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗛𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲 AI adoption is outpacing governance, and employees are quietly reshaping workflows with unsanctioned tools—“Shadow AI.” This is a loud knock on the door—a signal that official systems aren’t meeting employee needs—as well as a compliance and security risk. Organizations ignoring this phenomenon risk falling behind, while those answering the knock can turn these hidden innovations into competitive advantage. 💡 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗜𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 Shadow AI sends a clear signal: “Our needs aren’t being met.” Organizations that listen can turn these signals into actionable roadmaps for innovation. • Unmet Needs: AI for personalized outreach highlights gaps in existing systems. • Change Agents: Grassroots innovators often outpace top-down initiatives. • Testing Ground: Shadow AI provides a space for experimentation and scalable wins. 💡 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗱𝗼𝘄 𝗔𝗜 𝗶𝘀 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 Unlike previous Shadow IT trends (ie. personal devices on company networks), AI reshapes workflows, enhances productivity, and transforms decision-making. • The Risks: Compliance and data security are major challenges. • The Rewards: Strategic use unlocks efficiency and enterprise innovation. 💡 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗱𝗼𝘄 𝗔𝗜 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 To harness Shadow AI’s potential, organizations can: 1️⃣ Listen for Signals: Identify gaps employees are addressing with unsanctioned tools. 2️⃣ Sanction Smart Solutions: Replace risky tools with secure, enterprise-grade options. 3️⃣Enable Safe Experimentation: Create environments for testing and iteration. 4️⃣ Empower Employees: Provide training for responsible AI use. 💡 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Shadow AI already exists in your organization. Ignoring it risks falling behind competitors who embrace its potential. Audit your organization now to uncover Shadow AI activities and begin transforming these grassroots innovations into strategic advantages. 💡 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲?

[toddbida]

Every Seller, Every Interaction, Every Deal

As we accelerate into 2025, AI solutions are everywhere, each looking to revolutionize {fill in the blank}. What truly matters for you and your team?

Today’s sales leaders face two critical challenges:

Scarce At-Bats: Every qualified opportunity is high-stakes, and there’s no room for error. Sellers need a dedicated space to refine their skills before stepping into these moments.

Individual Variability: Every seller has unique strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. Broad-stroke solutions don’t address the specific areas where each seller needs refinement.

Yet many sales leaders still rely on outdated methods that fail to optimize. 1:1s offer broad guidance but often lack situational depth. Tools that record interactions seldom deliver actionable insights aligned with buyer needs. Role-plays with and without extended audiences are limited by time, uneven feedback, and fear of failure and humiliation. Generic training programs miss the mark on addressing individual learning styles, leaving growth potential untapped, and numbers missed.

Sellers need environments that go beyond observation and passive learning—spaces where they can actively refine, experiment, and master their craft. These systems must offer practical, actionable experiences tailored to the realities of high-stakes selling.

Addressing these challenges requires a two-pronged approach: creating an environment for sellers to master their skills and ensuring alignment with buyer needs in every interaction. Two essential shifts are required to address these challenges:

1. Building Mastery Through Practice 💡

The Problem: Sellers lack a dedicated "flywheel" space to consistently refine their approach and take ownership of their own growth. High-stakes at-bats are too rare and valuable to serve as practice sessions. Fear of failure often stifles experimentation, leaving significant growth potential untapped.

Required: Tools that foster a continuous learning environment, enabling sellers to:

Practice real-world scenarios tailored to their unique challenges.

Experiment with messaging and strategies in a safe, structured space.

Receive targeted, actionable feedback that drives rapid improvement.

The Results:

Faster onboarding and accelerated skill development.

Enhanced seller confidence in high-pressure situations.

Measurable increases in win rates through sharper execution.

2. Driving Precision with Buyer Feedback💡

The Problem: Messaging misaligned with buyer priorities can quietly derail deals, leading to stagnation and often worse. Sellers often misunderstand why deals are lost, attributing failures to external factors rather than addressing actionable gaps.

Required: Systems that collect and analyze buyer feedback, delivering insights that enable sellers to:

Identify what resonates—and what doesn’t—during engagements.

Refine messaging dynamically to align with buyer priorities.

Detect churn risks and upsell opportunities to maximize account potential.

The Results:

Improved win rates by eliminating messaging missteps.

Accelerated deal velocity through buyer-informed strategies.

Stronger alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Beyond Tools: The Cultural Imperative💡

Building a thriving sales culture requires intentionality—a commitment to systems and practices that empower sellers to perform at their best. The strategies outlined above are not just incremental improvements; they are the catalysts for this cultural shift:

Mastery Through Practice provides sellers with the confidence and skills to tackle high-stakes situations with precision.

Precision with Buyer Feedback ensures sellers adapt dynamically, aligning their approach with what truly matters to buyers.

These aren’t just tools—they’re enablers of a culture where sellers:

Experiment freely without fear of failure.

Leverage feedback seamlessly to refine their approach.

Consistently align their behaviors with buyer needs to drive results.

The path to a thriving sales culture starts here—with systems that equip sellers to execute at their best and deliver results on every interaction.

And...

The question is not whether your team has potential—it’s whether you’re creating the conditions for them to realize it.

💡What will you do differently to ensure every seller, every interaction, and every deal delivers 'more' in 2025?💡

[toddbida]

How do professionals get better at what they do? How do they get great?

The Olympics this month are a reminder that some of the best in the world use a coach >to be with them in their humility >recognize the fundamentals >break down their actions >identify and then rework the opportunities for gains

[toddbida]

Anyone on your sales team a competitive listener? Listening only with the intent to react? Can’t wait for a prospect to stop talking?

Shout out to our Tim Goering for this foundational riff on the Sandler Listening Ladder (aka Pain Funnel): designed and deployed to discover a prospect's compelling reasons for doing business before your sellers start telling them anything.

It's aligned on three basic questions. 

What's the challenge? 

What’d you try to do about it?

What if you do nothing? 

Most sellers interrogate in order to find a challenge they can sell to, and that’s backwards. It keeps your sellers from discovering what (if anything), will get a prospect to invest in change. Now.

So think about these three basic questions in the listening ladder, and then build the other directionally relevant questions around these three. 

So what's the challenge that you've got? 

Often a third party story will help break the ice and get them to start talking: "A CxO was telling me last week that...

If what you sell is AI to solve problems: her GTM team is handling mundane, repetitive tasks that are time-consuming and error-prone for humans, and this is distracting them from adding real value to customer relationships. Now, with any luck that’s not you…

If what you sell is no-code building blocks so your customers can shape their workflows, their way: her team was drowning in inefficiency with no top-down, single-voice-of-truth and process for managing projects, tasks, and workflows. Now, with any luck that’s not you…

If what you sell is sales training and GTM transformation: her team’s pipeline was full of anybody with a pulse, and that she was desperate to stop that madness. Now, with any luck that’s not you…

If what you sell is (fill in the blank)...

Oh…really… tell me more about that and don’t skip the details  

This gets them to see it. They hear their voice saying they’ve got the challenge, then they’ve got to own it. 

Gosh, how long you've been thinking about that? 

What’d you try to do about it already? 

Why do you think that didn't work? 

Now they own the idea that they might need help on their journey to get past this challenge.  And then the last three:

What are the consequences of doing nothing?

What could that cost you? emotionally, financially? 

Is this a big enough priority that you want to do something about it? When? 

Only when a prospect says they’ve got something you can help them with, can your sellers proceed. That's the Sandler Listening Ladder. 

Make it a great day, with a clean, qualified pipeline.

[toddbida]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 𝖠𝗀𝗎𝗌 𝖣𝖾 𝖦𝗂𝗈𝗏𝖺𝗇𝗇𝗂 (@coach.adg)

Rafa Nadal's unwavering persistence and mindset of continuous improvement is legendary...as are the outcomes of his consistency and dedication.

This reminded me of a 2021 Davis Cup tennis.com post about the humility and matter-of-fact determination of a 14 year old Nadal in 2000 ( "I will continue training"), his work ethic, and ongoing commitment to the behaviors that bring success.

The compounding power of behaviors over time is the same for professional sellers. Trust the process. More about consistent behaviors that translate into better outcomes, and the Sandler Success Triangle, in this LinkedIn post with insights from Sandler's CEO Dave Mattson.

[toddbida]

Thanks to Em Beihold and Leah Leach for a great show last night in 02138 and for spreading the word about www.activeminds.org/

Em Beihold is an empathetic voice of this generation on the mental health crisis in young adults: speaking up on the challenges and opportunities of opening the aperture...expanding the dialogue...and normalizing the broader/deeper conversation and engagement on young adult mental health issues that are rampant today.

The melding of mental health and music comes naturally to Beihold, who began writing at the family piano when she was just 7 years old. “Writing has always been my therapy; I was always going to be writing regardless of whether there was any success attached to it because that’s what made me feel alive and OK,” she says.

Founded 20 years ago, and now with a presence at more than 800 campuses, schools, communities, and workplaces each year, Active Minds works to reduce the stigma surrounding young adult mental mental health, creating communities of support, and saving lives. Our proven approach is unique to Active Minds – reaching 1.8 million people nationwide last year alone.

[toddbida]

Sales Coaching from The Boss: "You have to first take your mind to where you hope your ass will follow."

Bruce Springsteen's 'mental jiu-jitsu' (aka cognitive reframing) and strong work ethic was the spark for this riff on the value of digging into the 'every day' for frontline sellers. (Shout out to Billy Oppenheimer for the source post.)

The Spark

“It’s like anything else: you have to first take your mind to where you hope your ass will follow. You’ve got to imagine the person you want to be before you can become that person. But then you need to acquire the skills to actually become that person...(but)...most people ...don’t do the work to acquire the skills.” — Bruce Springsteen

On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen said, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose...The worst thing that can happen is I come out of here exactly as I am...If nothing happens, I'm going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’” With this mindset, Springsteen said, instead of panicking, he walked out of the elevator feeling confident. Hammond said, “play me something.” “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records. That was wonderful."

The Riff

HOW was Springsteen able to switch gears and get his BEHAVIOR to overrule his panic ATTITUDE to fuel his success?

Before Springsteen walked in to audition for John Hammond, he had generated a lot of evidence: “I had a lot of experience when I got signed,” he says in the video below. “I'd been playing everywhere—every fireman's fair, every bowling alley, every pizza parlor—for 8 or 9 years by that point. I'd played a thousand nights, I'd played for a lot of people, and I'd heard a lot of applause before I walked in to see John Hammond.” So when he walked in to see John Hammond, Springsteen had confidence. 

To ‘bring it home’ for your sellers: Springsteen gives us a great example of people can only manage what they can control. For your sellers that's what they do (or don’t do) every day.

Long before meeting Hammond, Springsteen had reverse engineered his ‘sales funnel’ and had taken control of his consistent every day BEHAVIOR: 'playing everywhere' all the time.

Coming off the elevator, Springsteen reminded himself he couldn’t control the outcome of the Hammond conversation, so he set aside his panic ATTITUDE and just did the 'every day' BEHAVIOR he’d become good at.

What's the behavioral plan for your sellers (or you as a sales leader) to know and DO what needs to happen every single day in order to make your success an ongoing reality?

'Find out what you're afraid of and then go do it anyway...with discipline, vitality, and guts'. 

[toddbida]

“The Mundanity of Excellence.”

Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.”

From a recent Billy Oppenheimer post:

Thirty-eight years into being a stand-up comedian, Jerry Seinfeld was asked how his daily work routine has evolved over the years. “It’s the exact same,” he said. “I do the exact same now as I did when I was 21 in 1975.” He sits down with a yellow legal pad, he said, and “my writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”

That’s your day? the interviewer asks. That’s what you’ve done every day for thirty-eight years? That, to me, sounds torturous. “It is,” Seinfeld admits. “But you know what? Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with…Find the torture you’re comfortable with, and you’ll do well.”

+++

In the early 1980s, the sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent 5 years studying swimmers at every level of ability.

In 1989, he published his research in a paper, “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Essentially, Chambliss found that Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.”

Chambliss tells the story of a group of coaches from around the world visiting a U.S. Olympic Team practice. “The visiting coaches were excited at first…then soon they grew bored, walking back and forth, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen.”

“They all have to come to see what we do,” the U.S. Olympic Team coach said. “They think we have some big secret.”

There is no secret. There is only the doing of the mundane, boring, torturous work, day after day. Find the mundane, boring, torturous work you like, as Seinfeld said, "and you’ll do well."

[toddbida]

Continuous improvement

It's either an aspirational buzzword or it's embedded in your company's mojo. It works better when culture is paired with tools to fuel a flywheel of problem-solving and optimization. 

Quantum Metric posted a related riff a while back with Andrew Glover at Netflix on the magic that happens when single-source-of-truth signals/insights are stack-ranked by value and autonomously routed/wired into next-best-actions that matter most.

Yes, Quantum Metric fuels Netflix continuous product improvement, but their impact is even more compelling in the context of how Netflix culture organizationally aligns on, demands, and supports its team members who never cease ”Seeking Excellence” everywhere else throughout the company as well.

Excerpts from Netflix's Culture mantra https://lnkd.in/eUNs2PJb are here:

Dream Team We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Dream teams are about performance, not seniority or tenure. Honest, Productive Feedback At Netflix, positive and constructive feedback is part of everyday life—not only an annual event. Meaningful feedback can be hard to give or accept. But like any new habit, it gets easier with practice. So we help people learn to give and receive feedback through coaching and modeling the behaviors we want to see across the company. It takes courage and selflessness to ask someone what you could be doing better, or to ask yourself what feedback you have yet to share with a colleague. Both rely on trust and positive intent, which is why we invest time in developing strong professional relationships. We know this level of candor can be especially challenging for new hires, people in parts of the world or cultures where direct feedback is uncommon, and if there’s a power imbalance. But it is an important part of getting stronger, as individuals and as a company, because it’s what fuels our dream team.

Does this sound like your company? If not...carpe diem...life's too short to sub-optimize where/how you create value and make a positive impact.

--- Spark for this post: https://lnkd.in/eUYcttnk Netflix strong earnings out this past week.

[toddbida]

If you can “use the difficulty just ¼ of 1% you come out ahead”.

Sir Michael Caine announced his retirement from acting this morning (at the celebrated age of 90). I’m reminded of his powerful professional and personal mindset: shared here and initially sparked for me by a chance meeting with him many years ago.

Carpe diem…

[toddbida]

Tell a more valuable story

Required in this economic environment: relentless, selective, motivated RELEVANT outbounds to crush your quota. Nobody needs your Salesloft-generated spam. (Special thanks to the Databook team).

Pipeline may 'cure all', but only when built through persistent relevant account-based cultivation of coaches, champions, and economic buyers within each prospect. How: with prospect-relevant informed outreaches. Quality and relevance in your outreaches does not guarantee success...but will always outperfom SPAM and doing so trains you - the seller - to better build substantive connections in an otherwise noisy market.

Crucial also is the alignment of marketing and sales to back-stop & fuel frontline sellers with value-based, account-based messaging that is consistently broadcast at all touchpoints. With marketing and sales saying the same thing to prospects, sellers can better leverage differentiation and dial-in with account-based specificity on each prospect's pain points with platforms like RollWorks.

The impact: shortened sales cycles, increased deal sizes, maintained margins, better-blocked competition, and increased conversion rates.

More about account-based mareketing: its roots trace to the groundbreaking thinking of Martha Rogers and Don Peppers in the early 1990's. Gartner's 2022 Magic Quadrant maps out significant resources in the space today.

[toddbida]

Pipeline Cures All

Instructive post for sales leaders from Joe Morrissey on mindset, tool, and capability shifting sales teams to inject OUTBOUND into their DNA and daily operating rhythms.

(Outbound) can be a real shock to the inbound-driven, “create and close” culture of many growth stage startups. For most sales reps and frontline managers, building pipeline is the least fun part of the job, and very few account executives (AEs) or frontline managers will want to do the grunt work of cold outreach. As a result, just telling your sales team to “build more pipeline” can be a bit like screaming “get more goals!” at the scoreboard.

Your top sellers are already doing this...they did not become top sellers by order-taking on inbound leads. The requirement, in every kind of market is to set up the outboud flywheel mindset and practice for the rest of your driven sellers to adopt as their own. (Those sellers who don't adopt can become someone else's headache.) The following is an abbreviated wayfinding checklist from the full artcle for ensuring that your sales team is equipped to own and execute:

Create a playbook Culture alone doesn’t make an effective outbound motion. You also need an outbound playbook so your team has a clear and consistent method and message when building pipeline. One of the best ways to create a playbook is to set up a tiger team with individuals from different key GTM functions to: Prioritize: What are the top target accounts and buyer personas? Research: What should SDRs be looking for, both internally in customer and intent data and externally in annual reports and 10Q forms, when researching accounts on their list? Tools & KPIs: What, if any, new tools will the team need? What activities, by channel, will they be measured on each day, week, month, and quarter? Outbound messaging and sequences: How will you ensure messaging is relevant, timely, and targeted? AE & SDR partnership: How will AEs and SDRs work together? What information do SDRs need to provide in their pre-meeting notes for AEs? Discovery process: What does a great discovery meeting look like? What high yield questions should we ask? Qualification process: What’s the best way to uncover and test a potential champion? How will the customer determine success and what metrics will they use? Execute: What constitutes a qualified business meeting? Once you’ve outlined the playbook and reviewed all of the sections with the appropriate cross-functional stakeholders, it’s time to build the materials—messaging and sales enablement, account/prospect prioritization dashboards, account research templates, AE:SDR 1:1 templates, SDR qualification guides, and so on—to onboard and train your sales organization.

[toddbida]

You can't forecast your way to growth

As People.ai’s Art Harding points out in a recent article, pipeline quality will strengthen forecast accuracy more than any standalone visualization or forecast data entry tool. 

Pipeline generation is a data-driven process, which when optimized, must stack-rank and convert multiple data points into serially actionable insights for:

sales leadership to inspire, coach, inspect, and hold their team accountable

sellers to consistently achieve better outcomes: higher conversion rates, larger deals, more renewals, shortened cycle times, and better margins.

No company today can afford forecasting calls filled with wishful thinking that leave people feeling like deck chairs are getting rearranged on the Titanic: some accurate data, some fantasy, all adjusted with arbitrary changes to CRM values, and re-packaged as reliable, when it's not.

The antidote: AI to drive the aggregation of disparate data points into actionable insights to accelerate GTM success. Companies like People.ai are leading the way in helping their customers get the GTM outcomes they require.

In the article, Art maps out a path forward for sales leaders to course-correct with confidence and clarity: transforming business activities like email, call notes, research, and meetings, and aggregating those disparate data silos through AI-fueled account and opportunity management tools that increase sales rep productivity, accelerate revenue growth, and maximize ROI. Better collected, better contextualized, and stack-ranked data will fuel better outcomes now, while there is still time to improve multi-threading, drive or shape future meetings, and penetrate key buying centers on every open opportunity.

..the forecast call has been the center of the world for sales leaders and sales operations, and requires teams from across the organization to consistently capture and roll up qualitative and quantitative data points about the past, present, and future.

....modernized organizations do not require sales teams to perform heavy data entry for activity capture. Instead, these forward-looking organizations ask the sales team to provide valuable context and direction about an account or contact with little more effort than a few simple points and clicks.

[toddbida]

Every Venture Backed Startup is Now Competing for Reserves 

Good read on the state of VC funding in mid-2022 from Jason Lemkin and the SaaStr team:

So much has changed in venture capital since the start of the year, and many founders don’t fully understand it.  It’s just a radically different business than it was in January.  And founders don’t really need to understand all the changes in venture capital.  But they should understand some.

One is the concept of “reserves”, which is super important to VCs, but not something founders usually need to understand in The Best of Times. Because in the Best of Times, there’s always more money to invest in top performers — and even mid-pack performers.  Money almost always comes from somewhere to write second and third checks into the winners.

But in tougher times, really in more stressful times in venture (like right now) … that money for second and third checks almost disappears.

[toddbida]

The TIME value of Dataminr.

Dataminr was co-founded a decade+ ago by a Whiffenpoofs alum and two classmates to prevent public and private organizations and the people who run them from getting blindsided by hyper-current events and be better capable, to better react, more quickly.  It’s hard to imagine a scenario in the not-too-distant future where any Fortune 5000 company would not have a lens like this to sit on top of the global chaos that is 2020 and beyond to respond better, faster, etc to issues large and small that impact their livelihood.

“ knowing about what is happening in the world faster than ever before possible, and at a scope unparalleled in human history, has a wide range of multi-dimensional use cases for corporate enterprises.” 

[toddbida]

Build coaching capability throughout all levels of your management team

As Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular pointed out in a 2019 ‘new classic’ HBR article: Rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and traditional command-and-control management practices don’t work. The role of the manager, in short, is becoming that of a coach.

This is a good reference article on how to transform your approach and model behavior to enhance the positive impact of all levels of your management team.

[toddbida]

I’m a CFO. Here’s how to sell me on digital transformation.  

ServiceNow's Gina Mastantuono details the value-based approach for charting a compelling path and accelerated time to value to secure C-Suite buy-in, sponsorship, and resource allocation. 'Incremental' and 'interesting' are not enough. 

CFOs don’t really want to hear about how upgrading some legacy IT tool will make your team marginally more efficient. We care much more about tangible business outcomes, strong ROI, and fast time to value.