Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

It Takes a Village

An effective salesperson in today’s digitally networked, social media–driven world can no more stand alone as a solitary hunter than they can stand above everyone else as king of the revenue hill. Instead, it takes a whole revenue village—a fully connected, highly collaborative village populated by creative brand marketing specialists, demand marketing superstars, pile-driving sales development representatives, enlightened revenue leaders, and great team-oriented sales professionals—to be truly successful today.

Sales can no longer operate in the old battle-hardened silos we’ve all come to know. Under that scenario, the sales team would emerge from its silo only to take leads from marketing, and then probably drop those leads on the floor, after which it would go forth to do battle with prospects and vanquish the sale.

Far from operating as solo hunters, salespeople today must instead be hyper-connected. They need to link up with fellow sales professionals, as well as to their colleagues from marketing, research, customer support, and technology. Most importantly, they need access to the same information sources and online social networks that their prospects are almost certainly using.

The concept of salesperson as king is made even less relevant by the radical changes in the buyer/seller dynamic that we discussed in the previous chapter. Today’s buyers have instant access via the web, search, and increasingly social media to valuable information, data, reviews, ...