How to Refine Your Prospect List Using ‘Best of’ Rankings The Fortune 500, The Global 2000, The Most Innovative Companies. These are just a few of the lists that publications and established organizations publish to rank companies. The rankings are based on everything from business performance to company culture to diversity. While being ranked on one of these lists is a huge testament to the employee and leadership team’s hard work, it’s also a good way for sales teams to narrow down their prospect list. If your prospect lists have hundreds of companies, consider looking at notable ranking lists to narrow your focus. 
From Startup Investors David Skok of Matrix Partners describes how to design a great sales process, analyze the buyer's journey, and shorten the time to customer conversion from trials, freemium and open source products, in "Optimize Your Funnel By Getting Inside Your Buyer’s Head" (84 slides) Rodrigo Martinez of Point Nine Capital reflects on why exceptional investments are equal to taking risks and being right and being contrarian, in “Breaking (Bad) Mantras” Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures outlines a few things both founders and investors should do to make fundraising go a lot smoother, in “Some Rules for Fundraising” Chip Hazard of XFactor Ventures and Flybridge Capital breaks down the volume, quality, and breadth of opportunities that have come into XFactor two weeks after its launch, in “A Fortnight of Female Founders” Compound Ventures writes about giving grants for those building decentralized apps on their protocol, in “From Venture Investing to Intellect Investing”
From Startup Operators Lauren Schulte of Flexfits describes how their focus on mission, vision and values led to their early success, in “Choose Love Over Fear: How We Grew to $4M in Under 1 Year” Jason Evanish of Get Lighthouse believes the first step to fixing a problem is to identify it and its causes, and looks at why this happens at an early stage of company growth, in “Why Everything Breaks When You Reach 25 Employees” Nis Frome of Alpha finds ‘misalignment’ between product and sales is almost always benign, except when it comes to the critical feature of reporting, in “Your Product’s Most Important Feature Isn’t Getting the Attention It Rightfully Deserves” Elad Gil of Color Genomics expands on why he thinks just as Netscape's IPO marked the real kick off for the Internet era, 2017 will be the starting point for broad involvement of venture, hedge funds, and eventually average consumers in cryptocurrencies and related protocols and assets, in “Cryptocurrency's Netscape Moment” Terry Lee of Panacea shares why meditation is the most important part of his day and why it should be part of every leader's daily routine, in “How Meditation Makes Me a Better Leader” Must-Reads From Today's Raise The Bar
Janet Choi of Customer.io breaks down top-performing SaaS retention emails at CloudApp, AdRoll, and CoSchedule, in “Customer Retention” Max Andersson of King Kong reviews how HelloFresh is doing in the Australian market, in “A Rare Peek Inside HelloFresh’s $880 Million Growth Strategy [Case Study]” Raise the Bar is our other daily newsletter that brings you real insights from sales, marketing, and growth leaders. No click-bait or time-wasting articles.
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