Jake Dunlap 
The Innovative Seller 
Keeping Pace in an AI and Customer-Centric World

Practical and straightforward solutions to everyday sales challenges

In The Innovative Seller: Keeping Pace In An AI and Customer-Centric World, veteran sales leader and trainer Jake Dunlap delivers an expert playbook for sales that offers out-of-the-box and creative answers for the problems and questions that salespeople face every day. Fun and motivational, the book walks you through effective strategies for dealing with common challenges, like Linked In prospecting, sales transparency, cold calling, and others.

The author has included a comprehensive tactical appendix, so you can easily identify and locate the exact solution you need when you encounter a specific problem. You’ll also find:

* Proven, grounded, and actionable techniques you can apply immediately to improve your sales performance

* Instructive stories and anecdotes drawn from Dunlap’s decades of sales and sales training experience

* Insightful discussions of how the typical sales process and model has changed over the years and how to adapt to the new realities of the discipline

An engaging and eye-opening resource for early- and mid-career sales professionals, as well as business development and customer success practitioners, The Innovative Seller will also prove invaluable to managers and executives at quickly growing companies who seek to optimize their firms’ sales processes and results.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments ix

About the Author xiii

Chapter 1 Innovation Isn’t Hard, Breaking Old Habits Is 1

Chapter 2 Introducing the 4 Cs of Modern Sales Transformation 13

Chapter 3 The First C: Commitment to Technology and AI Proficiency: People, Process, and Technology 29

Chapter 4 The Second C: Current Outbound and GTM Strategy: Pillars 1 and 2 49

Chapter 5 The Second C: Current Outbound and GTM Strategy: Pillar 3 65

Chapter 6 The Third C: Customized Sales Experience 83

Chapter 7 Engineering Your Sales Process for Speed 97

Chapter 8 Mapping Your Sales Experience–the Early Stages 115

Chapter 9 Mapping Your Sales Experience– During the Late Stages 137

Chapter 10 Mapping Your Sales Experience– to Current Customers 153

Chapter 11 The Fourth C: Consistent Performance Optimization 169

Chapter 12 The Future of Sales: Generative AI and the Changing Role of Sales 187

Index 203

About the author

JAKE DUNLAP is the CEO and Founder of Skaled, a consultancy focused on helping global 2000 companies and start-ups grow by optimizing their sales process, people, and technology with customized, repeatable and sustainable strategies. Prior to Skaled, Jake headed Sales & Customer Success for Chartbeat. Within the first nine months of his tenure, he grew annual bookings by more than 300 percent year-over-year and nearly doubled monthly recurring revenue. Before that, Jake was the VP of Sales at Glassdoor, where he expanded the department from one to 40 employees and grew employer-direct revenue from $0 to nearly $1 million in monthly recurring revenue. Since launching Skaled in 2013, Jake has been a sought-after industry thought leader, quoted by Forbes, Inc., The New York Times, and Huffington Post.