Thank You 💙

Happy Holidays

Dear Readers,

Firstly, as I prepare to take a pause with family and friends to reflect on what has been an eventful year, I thank you for your loyalty, your glowing adhoc feedback and for signing up and continuing to read the Zero to Twenty newsletter.

We launched in August and without any promotion whatsoever have gone from 0 subscribers to a couple of hundred with an average open rate of >50%. Not bad as a proof of concept.

As far as newsletters go we are tiny, but given I know many of you personally through past business dealings or recently via LinkedIn discussion I am in no doubt about the quality of this niche community. Quality beats quantity always, and niche is where it’s at.

That said, as you will read in my next newsletter on Dec 30th, 2022 will be all about leaning into the Zero to Twenty community and bringing it to life for you in new and different ways. You are the pioneers of sales and marketing in hyper-growth SaaS, Crypto and Web3 environments. You need and want a safe, open and thriving counsel to ensure you are successful, and it’s my intention that this community deliver that for you.

Look out for that update on Dec 30th.

Secondly, apologies for the lack of a newsletter in the last few weeks. A combination of international travel and business engagements stopped me from putting the final touches on a few pieces I have in the works. They will now be the first articles of 2022.

Part of the evolution of the Zero to Twenty ‘brand’ is designed to guarantee at least weekly consistency to the content made available to you.

Beyond that I want to open up access to me in live group sessions, creating an AMA environment for you to get your burning questions answered in real-time.

More to come on the detail and the vision of this next stage of evolution on Dec 30th

Finally, a message of support to each of you.

It never ceases to amaze me how salespeople at every level from CRO to SDR are treated as pawns by some founders and VCs who are prepared to climb a mountain of skulls in order to win.

Even if the project was critical to mankind (eg: SpaceX or mRNA research) or just revolutionary (eg: Apple or a crypto protocol such as Ethereum, Solana or Helium or Render) there’s no excuse for treating salespeople as a commodity.

If you are in an environment where this is the case, the good news is the market is white-hot, and 2022 should be about getting yourself out of that environment and into one that deeply respects the craft of sales.

The other good news is that great companies and great leaders that deeply respect sales and sales leadership are out there, and whilst they remain the exception not the norm, with a bit of patience and looking beyond the $, you will find them.

A final thought...

I’ll leave you with one final thought. Don’t be caught sleeping at the wheel…

…it’s my belief that with the advent of web3, transactional sellers (bottoms-up sales) are going to come under increasing pressure from product and marketing.

I think it’s possible that within 5 years transactional sellers, will get squeezed into either marketing or enterprise sales, and many will get squeezed out entirely.

Product quality is improving every second of every day, and the value of salespeople in a decentralized world that is adopted through communities in a bottoms-up fashion will increase the value of the marketing skillset and decrease the value of the transactional seller.

If I’m right and you’re in transactional sales today, I think you have 2 options: Move upmarket into the enterprise, or get interested and educated around demand generation and community build. Your third option is to do both.

Excited to dive deeper into this and much more on the other side.

Happy holidays y’all! ✌🏼

Wayne