B2B Sales Guide 2024: 100+ resources for sales leaders

There’s a lot of B2B sales advice out there.

To make your life easier, we’ve curated all the best resources out there for sales leaders—from classic, timeless advice to more recent sales trends.

This will be a living, breathing guide, so add it to your bookmarks and check back regularly for more updates.

Before we dive into more advanced B2B sales resources, let’s quickly recap the basics.

What is B2B sales?

Business-to-business (B2B) describes a business relationship where one company sells products or services to another company rather than to individual consumers

Most B2B businesses fall into one of four categories:

• Supplies and consumables (e.g. office supplies or equipment)
• Wholesale and distribution
• Professional services (e.g. finance)
• Software as a service (SaaS)

B2B sales, therefore, is a selling model where a business products or services to another business.

B2B vs. B2C sales

Business-to-consumer (B2C) refers to a business that sells its product and services to everyday consumers—such as a retail store.

Compared to business-to-consumer sales, business-to-business sales typically has:

• A higher sales touch
• Higher price points
• Longer purchasing decisions
• More complex buying processes
• Multiple stakeholders
• More sales reps per customer

While most companies are either B2B or B2C, it’s still fairly common for a company to have both B2B and B2C arms. For example, internet providers sell packages both to individual consumers and businesses like hotels.

With the basics out of the way, let’s explore the key areas of B2B sales, starting with strategy.

Best B2B Sales Strategy Resources

B2B sales starts with understanding how your customer buys.

Ideal Customer Profile

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is your ideal target customer. Knowing your ICP helps you qualify buyers and spend more time on the right leads—but defining your ICP isn’t always a simple process.

1. An Often Forgotten Characteristic About Your Startup's Ideal Customer Profile (Tomasz Tunguz) - Venture Capitalist Tomasz Tunguz explains how vague ICPs can lead to over- or under-qualification of prospects. He explains that a good ICP must enable you to identify prospects quickly, easily convey what the ICP looks like to someone else so that tehy can identify prospects quickly, and easily integrate into your sales systems.

2. The Smallest ACV to Justify an Inside Sales Team at a SaaS Startup (Tomasz Tunguz) - Tunguz goes to the numbers to explain how you shouldn’t hire inside sales reps unless your average contract value is at least $3,000.

3. Five ways to build a $100 million business (Christoph Janz) - This now-legendary model explains five types of business models you can build based on average revenue per account (ARPA)—using flies, mice, rabbits, deer, and elephants.

4. Five years later: Five ways to build a $100 million SaaS business (Christoph Janz) - Christoph followed this up with an updated model for the new SaaS world—eliminating the fly and adding the whale.

5. Individuals or Teams: Who’s the Better Customer for SaaS Products? (David Sacks) - David Sacks—now venture capitalist and former CEO of Zenefits, COO of PayPal, and CEO of Yammer—explains why team accounts are where the money is in SaaS.

B2B Sales Process & Funnel

Most sales organizations follow a similar funnel from prospecting to close. Here’s a review of the typical B2B sales motion, plus a few tips for optimizing your process.

6. What Is the B2B Sales Process? (Outreach) - A great 101 guide to the B2B sales process from both the inbound and outbound perspectives.

7. How to Master The Social Media Engagement Funnel (Sales Hacker) - An actionable guide to using social media for prospecting and outreach.

8. Sales Funnel Optimization for SaaS Startups (Tomasz Tunguz) - Tunguz once again goes to the math to show why investing in improvements at the top of the sales funnel (prospecting and lead qualification) is the most cost-effective way to lower the cost of customer acquisition.

Sales & Marketing Budget

10. How Much Should A SaaS Startup Invest in Sales & Marketing? (Tomasz Tunguz) - There’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum when it comes to setting your sales and marketing budget. Tunguz looks at the typical sales and marketing spends of the top publicly traded companies and provides a handy worksheet to help you determine the right budget.

SMB vs. Enterprise

Your sales strategy will be largely impacted by whether you’re selling to SMB, enterprise, or both.

11. How to Decide When To Move Upmarket (Tomasz Tunguz) - Tunguz says that the decision whether or not to move upmarket should be based on three factors: cost to move upmarket, lead volume and unit economics, and how much the SMB and enterprise roadmaps overlap.

12. Why SMB and Enterprise Sales Have Nothing In Common (Jason Lemkin, SaaStr) SaaStr’s founder argues that the skills needed to close SMB deals don’t overlap at all with the skills needed to close enterprise deals. Therefore, he warns about hiring successful SMB salespeople to sell for enterprise.

13. Enterprises vs SMBs - Who’s the Better Customer for B2B SaaS Startups? (David Sacks) - Sacks argues that SMBs are the better starting point for most startups, as they are more often early adopters, have simpler requirements, and are a better testing ground for experimentation.

14. How to Move Upmarket: The Guide to Enterprise Sales (Dock) - Our guide tothe key differences between traditional vs. enterprise sales, and steps you can take to close more enterprise accounts.

Freemium vs. Free Trial vs. Top-Down Model

If you’re selling a SaaS product, you’ll have to decide between a bottom-up model (freemium, or free trials) versus a top-down model.

With freemium, users are given a free basic tier, with more premium features locked behind a paywall. With free trials, users are given a glimpse of the full product for a short period of time (typically 7-30 days). These are bottom-up models where you can win your way into an organization by starting with individual users.

With a top-down model, you’re selling your product directly to decision makers.

15. Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Sales Models: What They Mean and How to Use Them (Rachel Andrea Go) - Here’s a clean breakdown of the basic differences.

16. Freemium vs Free Trial - Which is better for SaaS Startups? (David Sacks) - Sacks explains how the decision to go freemium vs. free trial is largely dependent on whether free users generate value for paying users or not, and whether you need to drive a sense of urgency to move from free to paid.

Best Sales Team Culture Resources

By sales team culture—we don’t mean going out for beers after work. Your sales team’s culture is the habits, values, and attitudes that make up your team, which all have a huge impact on how productive, happy, and engaged your team is.

Sales Culture Overview

Here are some great places to start if you’re a leader trying to define a great sales culture.

17. Sales Culture: How to Build a High Performance, Healthy Sales Team (HubSpot) - This guide explains what makes a good vs. toxic sales culture and gives actionable steps for building a healthy culture on your sales team.

18. Amp It Up! (Frank Slootman) - Now CEO of Snowflake and former CEO of Data Domain and ServiceNow explains how he drives a “performance culture” on his sales teams by focusing on compensation, increasing velocity, raising standards, and narrowing his team’s focus.

19. Creating a Sales Culture: What It Is & How It’s Done (Sales Hacker) - Dan Thompson argues that sales culture largely starts at the top, with its leadership.

Hiring B2B Salespeople

Here’s a great collection of advice on what type of people to look for and what to ask them when you’re interviewing. If you’re a salesperson yourself, these articles will help you prepare for a job interview.

20. Ultimate Guide to B2B Sales Hiring and Management (OpenView) - This compilation article has tons of great advice about conducting interviews, hiring, compensation, onboarding, and leading a sales team.

21. The Anatomy of the Perfect Sales Hiring Process (First Round Review) - Peter Kazanjy—one of the most respected minds in B2B sales—explains why he prefers to hire new, hungry grads that have demonstrated grit and success on a team rather than seasoned sales veterans.

22. Video: Recruiting Your Sales Team with Brex Chief Sales Officer Sam Blond (SaaStr) - This 30-minute video is well worth your time. Sam Blond explains why recruiting, networking, and employee happiness are the keys to building a great sales team.

Early Sales Hires

Your first few sales hires will be very different from your later hires.

23. Onboarding your first Sales Hire as an Entrepreneur (For Entrepreneurs) - Stephanie Freidman of Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft) explains her process for growing sales teams from 0 to 100 reps.

24. When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two (SaaStr) - Jason Lemkin argues that it’s better to start with two sales reps, as it will make it easier to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Hiring Sales Leaders

If you’re a founder looking to hire your first VP of sales, these articles are the best place to start.

25. What Makes a Great VP of Sales and How to Hire One (SaaStr) - This comprehensive article covers five responsibilities of a VP of sales, ten questions to ask them in an interview, how to compensate sales leaders, and more. 

26. How to Hire the Right VP of Sales for Your Startup (OpenView) - Amy Volas, Founder and CEO of Avenue Talent Partners, argues that the VP of sales is the hardest role for most founders to hire and offers tons of great advice for making that hire.

27. The Three Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Startup's Head of Sales (Tomasz Tunguz) - Mark Roberge, the former Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot, shares the best questions that founders can ask of their sales leadership candidates.

28. The Two Most Important Things To Look For When You Hire Your First VP of Sales (SaaStr) - This article argues that your VP of sales should (1) have built a successful sales team before and (2) sold at your approximate price point.

Sales Kickoff

29. How to Run a Successful Sales Kickoff (Dock) - Sales kickoffs (SKOs) set the tone for your entire fiscal year, so we’ve provided tips for running sales kickoffs in any environment—whether you have a virtual, hybrid, or in-person team.

Best Sales Skills & Coaching Resources

There’s a difference between managing and coaching a sales team. As a manager, you’re monitoring day-to-day activities, encouraging reps to hit their targets.

As a coach, you’re helping your reps develop their skills, follow best practices, and take the next step in their career.

Here are some great resources for how to help your reps become better salespeople.

Coaching

Let’s start with coaching advice.

Overall

30. The Sales Leader’s Playbook for High-Impact Coaching (Gong) - Gong’s playbook is a great place to start for sales coaching techniques.

Numbers

31. Step Up Your Sales Coaching Game — Dig Into The Numbers to Help Your Reps Level Up (First Round Review) - Karen Rhorer explains how to be a data-driven sales coach.

Competition 

32. The Better Box Strat (Seth Kramer) - Have lots of competition? Try the Better Box strategy. In this strategy, you’ll define two different boxes: one for you and one for your competitor. You’ll concede the ways in which your competitor’s box is better, earning the trust of the buyer, before ultimately making the case that yours is the better box.

Urgency

33. Must Act Now: On Creating Urgency (Seth Kramer) - Kramer defines urgency as, “how quickly the prospect's business wants to solve a specific challenge,” explaining that creating urgency is mostly about uncovering a relevant pain from a group of decision-makers that your product can actually solve.

B2B Sales Skills

Here are some specific skills that you can help your team develop.

Qualification

34. Identifying Pain is the First Step in a Sales Process — Here’s How (Mark Suster) - Suster explains why the art of teasing out a customer’s pain points is key to qualification.

Shortening the B2B Sales Cycle

35. How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle and Avoid Wasting Time (Mark Suster) - Suster explains why “calling high”—talking to the highest-level most appropriate person in an organization—is the best track to closing deals quickly.

Optimizing the B2B Sales Cycle: How to shorten each stage (Dock) - How to make incremental improvements at each stage of the sales cycle, to make big improvements to your close rate.

Scripts

36. Here are the Scripts for Sales Success — Emails, Calls and Demos That Close Deals (First Round Review) - Peter Kazanjy provides his go-to email templates, phone scripts, and demo scripts.

Intros and Demos

Discovery calls are key for qualifying your buyers, and demos are key to closing them. Here’s how to be great at both. 

37. 5 Steps for a Successful Discovery Call (Dock) - We cover the basics of holding a great initial discovery call.

38. All the PreSales Collection Demo Blogs (PreSales Collective) - For a dive deep into product demos, we highly recommend going through all of the PreSales Collective’s demo blogs.

SaaS Sales Demos: Focus on the buyer, not the product (Dock) - Learn how to give a more buyer-focused sales demo.

Culture and Mindset

39. Follow Dini Mehta on LinkedIn (Lattice) - Dini Mehta, CRO at Lattice, is a goldmine for sales culture and coaching tips.

Sales Methodologies

Sales methodologies create consistency for sales teams, both in terms of process and language. Here’s a quick breakdown of the most popular methodologies. They all have their merits, so which methodology you choose isn’t as important as sticking with one consistently.

40. The Challenger Sale (HubSpot) - A five-minute summary of The Challenger Sale, which encourages sales reps to teach prospects something valuable, tailor the sales pitch, and take control of the conversation.

41. Solution Selling (Dock) - Solution Selling, in its most basic form, is selling by connecting the customer to the solution that will best solve their problem.

42. MEDDIC Sales (Dock) - MEDDIC is a qualification framework that encourages sales reps to close more deals by spending time with the right buyers.

43. Sandler Selling System (Dock) - Sandler is one of the oldest sales methodologies still in practice. It emphasizes building a relationship and trust before guiding the highly motivated buyer towards the sale.

44. Value Selling (Dock) - Value-based selling means pitching the potential value the customer will get out of your product rather than just pitching the product itself.

45. Account-Based Sales (HubSpot) - Account-based selling and marketing (ABM) is about taking a hyper-personalized approach to sales, dedicating entire teams and campaigns towards landing one organization or account. 

Data-Driven Sales Management

46. Data-Driven Sales Management Library (Atrium) - Atrium has tons of great resources for how to improve sales performance with data.

Best Sales Operations and Enablement Resources

Sales operations can either refer to a role, team, or processes that enable your sales team to sell more efficiently. This includes choosing the right tools, tracking the sales pipeline, and calculating commissions correctly.

Sales Operations Overview

47. The Company-Changing Magic of Sales Operations Done Right (First Round Review) - On how Datahug (since acquired by SAP), built and operated their sales operations team.

Revenue Operations

Many organizations are shifting away from a siloed sales operations model and moving more towards a more cross-functional revenue operations model.

48. Revenue Operations Guide: How to Align Your Revenue Teams (Dock) - This guide for sales leaders explains how to build a RevOps team from scratch.

49. The Guide to RevOps by Role (Go Nimbly) - In general, Go Nimbly are one of the go-to resources for RevOps thought leadership. This guide in particular is a great starter guide for anyone new to RevOps.

Lead Scoring

50. Lead & Account Scoring (MadKudu) - MadKudu (a sales and marketing data platform) has tons of good advice on lead scoring on their blog.

Pricing and Packages

Sales ops teams are often responsible for helping set pricing and packaging strategies.

51. Saas Pricing Models, Strategies, and Examples of Success (Profitwell) - This article gives a great tour of SaaS pricing strategies and common pricing models, including an overview of Slack, HubSpot, G Suite, and Zendesk’s pricing models.

52. Understanding your options: Proven pricing strategies and how they work (McKinsey) - McKinsey covers four different pricing strategies and how to choose the right one for your business.

53. Subscription Pricing Guide: 5 pricing models for startups (Sid Khaitan, Dock) - How to choose a subscription pricing model that improves customer acquisition without missing out on revenue.

Sales Compensation, Quota, and Commissions

Setting the right sales targets is key to motivating your sales team and creating accurate budgets.

54. SaaS Sales Compensation: How to Design the Right Plan (For Entrepreneurs) - David Skok gives high-level advice for how to align sales incentives with your business objectives.

55. Simple Math to Set Up a Sales Team (David Sacks) - Not sure how to set quotas and commissions? Sacks provides benchmarks for structuring quotas and compensation for your initial sales reps and managers.

56. Figuring out Quota and Commission Rates (For Entrepreneurs) - Skok explains the top-down and bottom-up approaches to determining your quotas.

57. A Common and Critical Mistake When Forecasting Next Year's Bookings (Tomasz Tunguz) - Tunguz explains why it’s better for most B2B companies to calculate expected quota attainment based on last year’s median performance by sales rep rather than the average.

Sales Tools & Tech Stack

The most important job of sales ops is owning and managing the tech stack.

58. In Search of the Perfect Sales Technology: What’s Working Today (Sales Hacker) - Leadfeeder CRO Jaakko Paalanen covers the seven types of tools that should be in your sales tech stack. He also details the tools used by Ambition, Chorus, Clari, DocSend, Intercom, and more.

59. Sales Enablement Software: How to build your sales tech stack (Dock) - Dock CEO Alex Kracov breaks down the five big sales tool categories and his favorite tools in each.

Of course, every sales tech stack starts with a CRM. Here are some of our favorites:

• HubSpot - HubSpot comes with a price tag, but it’s the most plug-and-play CRM— especially when it comes to marketing automation.
• Salesforce - Salesforce is the go-to enterprise CRM. It’s costly to set up, but it can be custom-configured for any setup, and integrates with most third-party tools (including Dock!)
• Pipedrive - Pipedrive doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as HubSpot or salesforce, but it’s a much more cost-effective solution, as it doesn’t charge per CRM contact and the price per user is much more palatable.
• Close - Close is another cost-effective CRM that’s very focused on tracking sales rep activity. Built-in calling, texting, recording, and dialing are all built into the platform.

Forecasting

60. How to Calculate Revenue Projections Accurately (Clari) - Forecasting sales is a pain point for many sales leaders, but it’s something you need to figure out to appease investors and shareholders. This guide explains why it’s problematic to be consistently over- or under-forecast, and how to get closer to accurately predicting revenue.

Sales Metrics

61. The Sales Monitoring Guide: Lessons for Growing Startups (Dock) - We explain why monitoring your sales metrics early on is key to understanding the health of your business. We also explore how buyer engagement metrics—a common blindspot for most sales teams—can help you better forecast your sales pipeline.

Contracts

62. 16 Sales Contract Clauses to Balance Risk and Reward (Andreessen Horowitz) - An extremely detailed breakdown of all the clauses that startups may want to include in their client contracts, including the pros and cons of each clause.

Best Sales Collateral & Product Marketing Resources

Sales content gives buyers the information they need to make an educated buying decision. But sales collateral isn’t about providing an information dump—it’s about telling a cohesive story that ties your customer’s pain points to your solution.

Sales Collateral Overview

63. Turning Sales Collateral and Content into Stories that Sell (Dock) - Our guide to how to use sales content strategically throughout the buyer journey, including tips for distributing it effectively, and how to continuously optimize your content creation process.

Messaging and Positioning

64. The Play Bigger Book (Play Bigger) - On how category creation and domination, rather than subtle product differentiation, is the best path to winning over the hearts and minds of customers.

65. The Making of a Great Strategic Narrative (Andy Raskin) - A breakdown of how Uberflip introduced the concept of the “engagement economy” into their sales deck to tell a better story about how their product changes the traditional approach to content delivery.

Sales Decks

Don’t fall into the trap of PowerPointing your clients to death. Here’s the best advice in the industry on how to make a sales deck that tells a story.

66. Building Your Best Sales Deck Starts Here (First Round Review) - Peter Kazanjy explains how speed—including speed to presentation and speed to feedback—is the most important aspect of a successful sales presentation. Then he breaks down everything you should include in your sales decks.

67. The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen (Andy Raskin) - A breakdown of Zuora’s sales deck and why it’s so effective for selling to enterprise buyers.

68. How to Create Sales Decks That Work In 2022 (Sales Hacker) - An easy-to-follow guide for creating a great sales deck, plus a few examples of effective sales decks.

Case Studies

69. How To Write B2B Case Studies That Actually Convert (Daniel Doan) - Every website has customer case studies, but very few of them drive buyers to take action. B2B copywriter Daniel Doan gives some great advice on how to craft the narrative arc of a case study.

70. The Case Study Buddy Blog (Case Study Buddy) - The entire Case Study Buddy blog is jam-packed with great tips for creating case studies.

Best Sales Motion Resources

A sales motion is the steps a company follows to sell to their prospects. Your sales motions will be largely dependent on who your customers are, their decision-making process, and the size and structure of your sales team.

SMB

Here are some tips for selling to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

71. SMB Sales Strategy: How to Sell to SMB Customers (MasterClass) - Daniel Pink’s MasterClass on SMB sales is a must-watch for any sales professional.

72. Small Business Sales: Learn How to Make SMB Sales (Salesforce) - This guide from Salesforce explains the typical business goals of SMB buyers—improving efficiency and minimizing costs rather than achieving rapid growth—and how to adapt your sales pitch to match those goals.

73. The Case for SMB Sales: Why small customers mean big sales (Dock) - Our guide to why selling to SMBs is a viable and lucrative strategy for your business, and how to do it right.

Enterprise

If you start with SMB, selling to enterprise requires a significant change to your sales motions. Enterprise comes with longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, and more complex buying processes.

74. How to Move Upmarket. The Guide to Enterprise Sales (Dock) - We break down the fundamental differences between selling to SMBs and selling to enterprise and provide actionable tips for changing how you sell to better resonate with enterprise buyers.

75. Mutual Action Plans: Ditch the spreadsheet & win more B2B sales (Dock) - Mutual action plans are step-by-step workflows for both the selling and buying teams to work through in order for an enterprise deal to go forward. Most sales teams use clunky spreadsheets to manage this process. In this guide, we explain how a user-friendly mutual action plan can go a long way to closing a deal.

Sales Pilots and Proof of Concept

For complex, technical sales, sales pilots and proof-of-concepts (PoC) will make or break whether you close deals.

76. Don't Derail the Proof of Concept! (PreSales Collective) - Prasanna Selvaraj, Box’s Staff Solutions Engineer, explains how the success of a PoC depends on your ability to tie it back to your customer’s business goals and success metrics.

77. How to Turn Sales Pilots into Smokin' Deals (HubSpot) - On how to land a sales pilot, and how to track the likelihood of deal success by paying attention to usage metrics.

78. The Sales POC Playbook: From Pitch to Purchase (Dock) - Tips for pitching and executing sales POCs, best practices, and a template you can start using today.

Product-Led Sales

Product-led growth (PLG) has disrupted traditional sales motions, as most SaaS companies have shifted to a bottom-up approach to sales. However, product-led sales still require a thoughtful sales strategy, and has therefore been a hot topic of conversation.

79. Why Every Product-Led Growth Company Eventually Needs Sales (Dock) - We deep dive into the rise of PLG and dispel the myth that PLG businesses don’t need sales teams. 

80. The “$20M to $500M” Question: Adding Top Down Sales (Future) - On how even the best bottom-up, PLG businesses still used top-down sales teams to fuel their next level of growth once they hit between $20-100M in ARR.

81. Your Guide to the Hottest New Role in Software: Sales-Assist (OpenView) - A great breakdown on how PLG, self-serve companies like Slack, HubSpot, Asana, Zapier, and Atlassian are using a light sales touch to nudge enterprise buyers through the buyer journey.

82. How to Pair Sales and Self-Service for Maximum Impact (OpenView) - OpenView’s VP of Growth Sam Richards shares her findings from research on how sales teams best assign free account leads to their reps.

83. The Transition: Layering sales onto a bottom-up self-serve product (Peter Kazanjy) - Kazanjy argues that “waiting too long to add sales-involvement often leads to a large opportunity cost.”

84. Pocus’s Product-Led Sales Blog (Pocus) - Everything PLG on Pocus’s blog is great, and well-worth your subscription.

Founder-Led Sales

Before hiring a sales team, most startups begin with founder-led sales (we’re one of them!). 

85. Founding Sales - The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook (Founding Sales) - This book by Peter Kazanjy is a must-read for founders in first-time sales roles. 

86. How I’ve approached founder-led sales (Alex Kracov, Co-Founder of Dock) - A deep dive into how we’ve approached the first six months of sales at Dock.

Outbound, Prospecting, and SDRs

Inbound or outbound? Inside or outside? Here are some great explorations of these classic sales questions, plus some tips for prospecting and coaching your sales development reps.

Inbound vs. Outbound

Inbound vs. outbound is a classic big-picture sales strategy question. Both of these authors argue that SaaS companies need to use a combination of both.

87. Inbound vs Outbound Sales – Which Path is Right for Your Startup? (Sales Hacker) - PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado shares why they decided to use a foundation of inbound sales for lead generation supplemented by outbound sales to better qualify leads, scale up more quickly, and find better product-market fit.

88. 4 Signs You Should Make Outbound Your Top Priority (Predictable Revenue) - Four questions to ask yourself before investing in outbound sales.

Inside vs. Outside Sales

Inside sales involves selling remotely, whereas outside sales means selling in person through face-to-face meetings. Prior to the pandemic, about 52.8% of salespeople in the US worked in the field. According to a HubSpot survey, 68% of sales teams adopted a remote or hybrid model by 2021.

89. Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales: How to Structure a Sales Team (HubSpot) - Kustomer’s Gabe Larsen explains the core similarities and differences between inside and outside sales.

90. Inside Sales Best Practices: HubSpot – A Case Study (For Entrepreneurs) - Advice from HubSpot’s VP of Sales on his learnings from running a 110-person inside sales team.

Cold Calling

91. 12 Top Tips for Better, Faster, Stronger Cold Calls (Outreach) - This article is full of actionable cold-calling tips. Our favorite is, “When doing cold calls, replace the thought that you are selling something with a mindset that you are genuinely trying to help and solve problems.”

Sales Development Reps (SDRs)

92. The Scientific Approach To Setting Sales Goals For Your SDR Team (Sales Hacker) - An eight-step checklist for VPs on how you can set goals for your SDRs.

93. Kyle Coleman’s LinkedIn - Kyle is constantly providing great content around SDRs. Give him a follow or just scroll through his feed.

Best Sales and Cross-Functional Collaboration Resources

Your sales team has lots to learn from your product, customer experience, and marketing teams—and vice versa. Here’s some great advice for breaking down silos between cross-functional teams.

94. Sales Collaboration Guide: Playing nicely with other teams (Dock) - How Sales can better collaborate with Marketing, Customer Success, Product, customers, and buyers, and among themselves to win over (and retain) modern buyers.

Sales and Marketing

Even though salespeople and marketers have the same goals, they typically don’t collaborate in a way that’s conducive to mutual success.

95. How to Solve Nine Common Sales and Marketing Problems (Alex Kracov) - Learnings from Alex’s time at Lattice to overcome the typical sources of tension between sales and marketing.

96. How To Align Marketing and Sales: 4 Leaders Share Why You Should Not Wait to Do So (DGMG) - This article theorizes that most marketing and sales misalignment comes from a misalignment between mindset, goals, KPIs, process, and campaigns.

Sales and Product

97. How sales and product teams can better work together (Productboard) - Actionable advice for creating stronger bonds between sales and product teams.

98. Product managers and sales: The alliance that leads to a better product (Appcues) - How sales conversations can get you closer to your users’ problems.

99. Hey product, your salespeople know something you don't (Close) - This article for tearing down silos between product and sales teams, particularly because user feedback can lead to a unicorn, and because sales teams are usually a goldmine for customer feedback.

Sales and Customer Experience

100. 3 Critical Steps for Aligning Sales to Customer Success (Gainsight) - This guide explains how the long-term success of any SaaS company is dependent on retention, expansion, and advocacy, and how a smooth relationship between sales and CX is key to all three.

Best B2B Buyer Experience Resources

The B2B buying experience used to be cold, systematic, and pushy. Now, sales teams are trying to take a more human approach to B2B selling.

101. Stop selling. Start guiding. (Alex Kracov) - How successful salespeople help buyers navigate their way to an informed decision rather than using sketchy sales tactics.

102. Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete (Harvard Business Review) - How digital, multi-channel, and rep-free buying are transforming how sales teams operate.

103. How to Give Prospects a Delightful B2B Sales Experience (HubSpot) - 12 tips for providing a positive sales experience for your prospects.

104. 8 ways to optimize the B2B buyer experience (Alex Kracov, Dock) - Alex shares what he's learned about creating a smooth buying experience at Lattice and Dock.

Additional B2B Sales Resources

Of course, there are more places to learn about B2B sales than blogs. Here are some of our favorite podcasts and communities to spark continuous learning.

Podcasts on B2B Sales

These days, podcasts tend to be the best place to hear from individual sales leaders.

105. Grow & Tell (Dock) - Dock CEO Alex Kracov talks to revenue leaders in Sales, Marketing, and Success. They’ll share pivotal stories of career, company, and campaign growth—to help us learn what it takes to build a successful company from the ground up.

106. Grit (Kleiner Perkins) - Joubin Mirzadegan of Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins hosts senior leaders from world-class organizations like Tinder, Zoom, Loom, and Calendly.

107. 20Growth (20VC) - Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, hosts a growth-focused podcast, also featuring interviews with B2B growth leaders.

108. SaaStr Podcast (SaaStr) - Hundreds of interviews with operators and investors on the topic of scaling ARR faster.

109. Demo Diaries Podcast (Reprise) - An entire podcast dedicated to giving great product demos!

110. Beyond Quota (Scratchpad) - Hosted by Pouyan Salehi and Ross Pomerantz, Beyond Quota feature guests that started in sales before growing into bigger roles.

111. 30 Minutes to President's Club (30mpc) - Nick Cegelski and Armand Farrokh share actionable tactics for reps to improve their sales.

B2B Sales Communities

If you’re looking to keep up to date on the latest trends and rub digital shoulders with the biggest thought leaders in the B2B space, online communities are the way to go.

112. Pavilion - A (paid) private community focused on high-growth performers. Their sales programs have three membership tiers for executives, managers, and analysts.

113. Sales Hacker - Sales Hacker, which started as a thought leadership publication, has evolved into the largest B2B sales community. Membership is free and the community is fairly well moderated.

114. RevGenius - RevGenius is diverse and fast-growing community for revenue professionals—including sales, marketing, customer success, and revops.

115. PreSales Collective - The PreSales Collection is the largest global community for PreSales professionals and sales engineers.

116. Modern Sales Pros - The Modern Sales Pros is a free community restricted to revenue leaders in sales management, marketing management, and sales/RevOps. Every member is vetted, so community standards are kept fairly high.

Want to add something to the guide?

Have a great B2B sales resource to add to our guide? Send me an email at alex@dock.us.