Sure, you want your clients to like you—but does that actually influence the sale? We’ll tell you, plus the latest integrations, Cali’s compliance headaches, and the hottest sales jobs around.

 

Top Stories This Week

Businesses Prepare to Spend Heavily on CCPRA Compliance (MarTech)

The California Consumer Privacy Act will kick in on the first day of 2020, and because everything is bigger in California (or something like that), this will have far-reaching implications on businesses all over the country. Very few businesses are currently compliant and, according to one recent survey, over 70 percent of businesses plan to spend at least six figures to get there. If you’re selling tech, you should watch this space closely.

Salespeople, Stop Worrying About Being Liked (HBR)

You can’t close new business if your prospects don’t like you, right? After all, that’s why sales has historically been all about wining, dining, schmoozing, and boozing. But what if you learned that 89 percent of top salespeople don’t worry about being liked—while 86 percent of underperformers do. There’s a lot to unpack in this HBR piece by the author of “Gap Selling”—and he probably doesn’t care if you like it or not.

Salesforce Finally Embedding Quip into Platform, starting with Sales and Service Cloud (TechCrunch)

Another week, another Salesforce integration announcement. This time, it’s Quip, whom Salesforce acquired in 2016 for approximately the price of both Bryce Harper and Mike Trout (or about $750 million), and the mega-platform is finally implementing Quip’s office collaboration capabilities—like word processing and spreadsheets—into their own software.

Oracle Updates Cloud Applications as SaaS Sales Builds Momentum (ZDNet)

In other news about platforms that many of us use daily, Oracle recently announced updates to many of their cloud products. Among them, the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud will integrate DataFox into the tool, which can help you at virtually every stage of the buyer journey.

Sales Velocity: What It Is & How to Measure It (HubSpot)

You already know what sales velocity is, but do you really know how to calculate it? Do you know how to optimize it? What about the role discounts play in achieving peak velocity? This article offers a very thorough breakdown of what it is and the variables that affect it. Our favorite takeaway is the value of focusing on fewer, better MQLs. A smaller pipeline isn’t always a bad thing.

 

Hot Job Listings This Week

San Francisco and NYC are major hotbeds for tech sales, but great salespeople are in demand all over. We’ve got premier sales gigs from Reston, VA to Vancouver to good ol’ Cambridge, Mass.

VP/Director-level roles

  • Bandwidth: Senior Director, Sales (Raleigh, NC)
  • Slack: Director, Sales Development (San Francisco)
  • DiscoverOrg: Vice President, Enterprise Sales (Vancouver)
  • BlueJeans: Enterprise Sales VP – West (Mountain View)

Manager-level roles

  • Avaya: Acquisition Account Manager (Chicago)
  • Digital Realty: Senior Manager, Sales Enablement (NYC)
  • Trend Micro: Inside Regional Account Manager (Irving, TX)
  • HubSpot: Account Manager – Customer Growth Specialist (Cambridge, MA)

Account executives

  • Trustwave: Senior Account Executive (Reston, VA)
  • Qubole: Account Executive (Dallas)
  • Puppet: Senior Enterprise Account Executive (Texas)
  • Partnerize: Enterprise Account Executive (San Francisco)
  • Checkr: Enterprise Account Executive (Seattle)