Sales Pipeline Radio

This 3+ minute program is extracted from a more lengthy interview.  Hear the full program here: 

Secrets to effective, high performing B2B content

Shannon Dougall, Vice President of Marketing at Uberflip is Matt's guest in this episode.  

What are you seeing in the field and trends?

Seeing overall that B2B marketers believe that content is more important than ever. 84% of B2B marketers are looking to increase their investment in content this year. 55% of marketing budgets are spent in content investment. But they are saying their content is under-performing. Why? Possible answers are:

1. Their content isn't very good.
2. The experience surrounding the content isn't performing.
3. OR they are not able to see the results to properly measure the success.

For content to be successful, it definitely needs to be engaging... it needs to be insightful, relevant and something other than what the "other guys" are producing. The content has to be action-oriented. You have to have a piece of content you expect something to happen at the end. This should be common sense, but it is often forgotten in the rush to meet the content quota and flood the venues.

Get an actionable list of insights from Shannon from the full episode. Listen now.

About our guest:

Shannon Dougall has been called, “a marketer of the future.” She is an adventurer, scientist, and artist in the field of marketing. She had been compared to a Swiss Army Knife, using her experiences and learnings towards an all-in-one type of demand generation and customer acquisition that includes storytelling, blogging, lifecycle marketing, digital marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, positioning, pre-product/product marketing, app store marketing, content marketing, growth hacking, and analytics just to name a few. Shannon’s true north is to help business’ transform to realize their true potential.

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Matt Heinz is the host of Sales Pipeline Radio on the Funnel Radio Channel.   See who you know hosting a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.

Attribution, analytics and analyzing data is today's topic. What does the report say? Does it accurately display the past and does it accurately help us predict the future?

Marketers are in a world of big data. We've gone from nothing to overload. So there is a lot to help marketers in high tech and not in high tech of how to best use the data available to them. 

"How do I interpret the data?" Perhaps a better question is, "What answers and knowledge am I seeking to move forward?"

• You need to organize the metrics to interpret the metrics. The questions of what you seek are critical.
• Do we have the fundamental metrics that the business needs to understand the health of the business?
• Within the channels of my function, how do I use metrics to ensure that my efforts are working?
• Do we have the capabilities to answer the ad-hoc questions that come up in business?

Listen to this show to get a more organized list of what you need to know first before you even pull the data.

About our guest, Jeff Day:

Jeff is a Marketing and Product Management executive with a focus on startup and high-growth technology companies. Jeff excels at applying the right mix of marketing for the right stage of the company in order to maximize growth. With 20 years of proven success with companies such as Highspot, DomainTools, Apptio, Enodo Software, HP, PolyServe and Intel, he has run all aspects of marketing and delivered industry-leading software and hardware products. He is passionate about working with high growth product companies to help drive marketing and product strategy, build happy and productive teams and maximize company success.

Some lessons from Dan McDade in this episode include:

"There's a real focus on the technology stack and companies are spending more and more on that technology stack. And to some extent, they're automating bad processes."

"...the technology solutions make it easier to get more bad leads faster to sales than ever before. "

"The total obtainable market or the serviceable obtainable market...it doesn't really matter what they call it. The total addressable market is the market that you want to sell to. And a caveat here is that most companies prospect too broadly. "

The unsung hero - lead nurturing. You'll have to tune in to hear decades of success handed to you on a platter - making it simple to understand.

About Dan McDade:

Author, sales guru, and lead generation professional Dan McDade, is our guest from Prospect-Experience and he discusses the over-looked field of prospect experience management. McDade says this failure is needlessly costing companies 10-20% of closed sales every month. McDade has a history of knowledge in the sales lead management and lead generation fields having been the CEO of PointClear for 20 plus years. He is now the managing partners of Prospect-Experience which solves the weaknesses in B2B companies he sought to repair when the leads he created for clients went begging for attention from his clients' sales and marketing people.

Unpacking insights from a bounced email to create 4 connections using ABM

Campaign refined emails are the key. Can't just put it in the byte bucket. Everyone is too busy. Lead Gnome is that solution to find the pockets of value the rest of the market is ignoring. Matt Benati didn't see any solution to accomplish what he needed, so he built it. It's looking for insights into the internal buying machines. Surprising enough you can gain a lot of insights from "out of office" messages. You will basically be given the org chart of the company. 

They looked at trigger events and campaigns around bounces. A bounced email happens when someone leaves the company. "Matt's no longer with the company, but Sally is here..." This gives you a lot of information and opportunity for an introduction and you can look for Matt at his next company, which is probably in a similar position. You can get two contacts from the one bounce. Who did Matt replace? Where did Sally leave to take Matt's old job? This is 4 contacts from one bounce. 

This is about unpacking the information in the body of the email, this is not scraping. This is human written information in the body.

This was just in the first 8 minutes. You need this replay!

About our guest, Matt Benati:

Matt Benati is the CEO and Co-founder of LeadGnome, an innovative Account Based Intelligence web service that mines email responses to deliver account-specific contacts, enhance existing leads, and provide actionable sales intelligence. Matt is a passionate believer that sales and marketing alignment, transparency, and communication optimize revenue generation, and he champions this philosophy in his teams and writings. He participates actively in the market-changing FlipMyFunnel, Account Based Marketing, and Account Based Everything communities. Matt is a contributor at the Account-Based everything hub. Matt’s previous positions include VP Marketing at LogMeIn, VP Global Marketing at Attunity and senior roles at Netezza and IBM. You can follow Matt on Twitter at @mattbenati.

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Sales Funnel Radio is hosted by Matt Heinz and sponsored by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel

We were happy this last time to have Chris Finneral,CEO & Co-Founder at SketchDeck on in an episode called, Where Design and Software Meet: Rethinking B2B Creative, Process and a Lot More. 

We talk about (among other things) this idea that the sales pipeline just appears over the horizon. I ask Chris, in his experience as a serial entrepreneur, is sales pipeline development that easy?

He says...

"It's prospecting, generating leads is always something which requires work. Even if you have something that's awesome that everyone wants, you need to really educate your market, educate the leads, and put a lot of work into that. I actually was reading a quote recently that was saying especially for startups, people always overestimate how hard it is to build the product and underestimate actually how much effort it is to acquire customers. I think that's very true. It takes a lot of work to get your pipeline and get lots of customers for your product."

Listen in below and/or read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 4/15 at 6am PDT. 

Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to: [email protected].

Host Matt Heinz discusses with Norman Behar, among other things, how to get a new sales manager up and running in 90 days or less.  Norman Behar is CEO & Managing Director at the Sales Readiness Group and co-author of:  The-High Impact Sales Manager.  

Brand-new sales managers are out to prove themselves, but few have the basic sales management skills.  Maybe, eventually, they will read enough books or stumble on some of the right questions to ask, but in the episode, Norman Behar.

This book draws on over 30 years of personal experience and our proven sales management training methodology.

What makes this book unique is that it is highly practical and provides sales managers with the systems, processes, skills, and techniques to:

• Hire the best people and hold them accountable.
• Manage sales performance by focusing on the underlying behaviors that drive results.
• Manage the sales pipeline and produce accurate sales forecasts. 
• Provide personalized sales coaching that results in better skills and hire win rates.
• Lead, motivate, and inspire their sales team.

Drive Better Performance from Your Sales Team: Sales Readiness Group

Your sales team needs training that sticks. We've designed our training to create sustainable change in sales behaviors and improve results.  Training programs are not single events, but part of an overall sales training system that will help your team produce better performance.

My guest this time is Liz Michaud, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Sales at Microsoft Dynamics 365. She shared her insights into the current trends, good and bad that they are noticing. Role specialization in particular seems to be causing an over-emphasis on teams to take on the productivity piece. This causes a loss in that personal touch and building strong relationships. We are still people buying from people. 

"Over 80% of our respondents in the study who said that they were effective at building relationships across the buying committee with multiple people, they were the ones who also said that they were effective at achieving their desired sales goals."

Naturally integrating Microsoft's CRM and LinkedIn it creates efficiency for the sales rep to get back out of the tool and get back to actively selling.Having a full picture of the buyer and their timing to be able to synchronize all the data. This looks different in each organization, depending on the tools, but it is critical in every setting.

"It is so important that a marketer knows the tactics and strategies that they're using are actually working. And you can bring in all the leads in the world, but if they're not quality, then your sales team, is going to be pretty unhappy."

Listen to the full episode.

Mark Magnacca discusses one thing that can dramatically increase a salesperson's success while in-front of a prospect. 

This five minute learning session is from the full show which can be found here:

Are you good enough? Mastering your purpose & value with Mark Magnacca

Mark is the author of "So What?" and President and Founder of Allego, Inc. 

Listen in to see why practice for sales professionals is so important and as Matt and Mark ask the question-- "Are you good enough?".

“Allego provides an intuitive just-in-time sales learning platform that boosts sales performance by harnessing the power of mobile devices to transform enablement and training through video content sharing.”

Mark Magnacca, President of Insight Development Group, Inc. and markmagnacca.com, is a recognized business building coach, keynote speaker and author of "So What? How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience" and "The Product is You." Mark's mission is to help sales professionals get greater results in less time by teaching his clients to put all of their communications, verbal and written, to the So What Test. By adopting a So What Mindset, clients learn to communicate and structure every message according the needs of the listener.

Insight Development Group specializes in training clients to create crisp, concise and compelling reasons to set themselves apart from their competitors. By creating a personal brand and effectively articulating their value proposition, clients of Insight Development Group gain a huge competitive advantage and accelerate the sales process.

So What? How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience

This concise book will help dramatically increase your effectiveness in any sales situation. Learn ten ways to apply the powerful So What Mindset in two hours or less. So What? is a seductively simple, straightforward idea that will radically change the way you communicate. Learn the skills that George Lucas, Lee Trevino and Walt Disney used to become successful. Read So What? How To Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience.  

Keenan has over 15 years of experience in sales leadership and leading sales team. But that doesn’t get him too excited. He’ll tell you it isn’t much of an accomplishment. Keenan says, “Staying above ground and not doing anything stupid enough that would prevent a company from wanting you to run their sales organization isn’t much to brag about. Staying power isn’t impressive. What is impressive is what one absorbs from their years of experience.” 

Listen in for some quick hitting tips to get you started TODAY!