Sales Pipeline Radio

Manny Medina, CEO at Outreach SaaS joins Matt Heinz to discuss:  Can You Trust Your Sales Team with Technology?  Outreach Thinks So

He's the CEO and founder of Outreach, a fantastic sales enablement and sales engagement and acceleration platform.

Manny Shares

We have a great discussion... at one point I tell Manny, "You're opening up the kimono a little bit, things that not everyone thinks about or has to experience but I appreciate you sharing..."

You'll love Manny's answer to this question: "What should companies be looking for? What should sales leaders be looking for in platforms to ensure they're getting results and ensure that it's additive to their productivity versus negative?"

You'll also hear what he thinks is one of the most common mistakes he sees sales operations teams make.

And, listen to the end to hear some great examples about a couple of their core values:  Grit and Diversity.  

About Manny Medina

Manny co-founded Outreach in 2014 and now serves as CEO. Prior to Outreach, Manny was employee number three on Amazon’s AWS team, and led the Microsoft mobile division from launch to $50M in annual revenue. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Manny is a model of vulnerable and transparent leadership to his employees, from his heartfelt weekly email to his employees, to the traditional Friday get-together where the whole company shares their highs and lows of the week. He is a proponent of saving the planet by consuming less and purchasing second-hand whenever possible (he might be the only CEO to take the stage at industry events in shirts purchased from Goodwill). Manny grew up in Ecuador and now lives with his wife and three children in Seattle.

In this episode, we talk about Dave Lorenzo's new book, "The 60 Second Sale" and a lot more!

A lot of B2B sales professionals are doing long term, complex sale efforts, "The 60 Second Sale" sounds a little like "12 minute abs." I ask Dave "Is it really that easy? Can you really do it this quickly?"

"The 60 Second Sale is about creating a condition under which, if your best client, the person who trusted you most in the business world, had a need and you called them up, it would only take you 60 seconds to close that deal. So, if you are adding value to somebody who already trusted you, you could close a deal in 60 seconds if you met those exact conditions. The book is about creating those conditions every single time. It's about taking what everybody would think of as a one-call close environment and making the relationship the one-call close."

"Another way to look at it is to take the individual moments of truth that occur throughout the day with our clients and with the evangelists who are out there recommending our services, and winning each of those individual moments of truth. So, you create an environment that is one of trust, and you make sure that you're always focused on the wants and the needs of your clients, and you can close a deal in 60 seconds."

Listen in to hear Dave's thoughts on how to build the relationship, to create those conditions and needs. He talks about the things required to create differentiation, separation in what can be competitive markets.

Check out the full transcription and recording on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 9/24/18 6am PST.  

Lisiten to Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica as he joins us to talk about the findings of the highly regarded 4 P's Report.   

For the third year in a row, Conversica commissioned an in-depth study tracking lead follow-up efforts of B2B and B2C companies across a number of different industries. In 2017, they found that a staggering 77% of companies under-touched their leads.

ABOUT OUR GUEST:  

Terry is an accomplished and award winning Internet business veteran with strong track record of driving results and growth. He founded or co-founded three companies and one division within Fortune 100 corporation. From idea to revenue generation, to profitability to exit... he is able to manage all aspects of consumer or enterprise service or product business. Focus has been on SaaS, operationally complex services which required disruptive new technology development.  He holds multiple patents for Internet services.  Alex received his MBA at Harvard Business School and his BA at Dartmouth College.

About Conversica

Conversica is the leader in conversational AI for business and the only provider of AI-driven lead engagement software for marketing and sales organizations.

The flagship Conversica® AI Sales Assistant helps companies find and secure customers more quickly and efficiently by automatically contacting, engaging, qualifying and following up with leads via natural, multi-channel, two-way conversations.

Used by more than 1,200 companies worldwide, Conversica’s sales assistants are built on a proven AI platform integrating natural language processing (NLP), natural language generation (NLG), and machine learning (ML) capabilities.

Recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, Conversica is a portfolio company of Providence Strategic Growth, Kennet Partners and Toba Capital and is headquartered in Foster City, Calif.

In this episode, find out why Melissa Madian calls herself the Chief Fabulous Officer at TMM Enablement Services.

And.... of course we talk about sales enablement... and how that morphed into customer service enablement because as she says "...essentially, there's this disconnect between sales and customer success and customer experience in that there's this function that's so hell bent on acquiring new customers, and then there's sort of this handoff between that function and the function that's designed to keep those customers and grow those customers."  

Read the full trancription on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 9/17/18 6am PST.  Also check out her blog post, "Sales Enablement: Is it Sales or Marketing?".  

Our guest this week is Dan Frohnen, Vice President of Marketing at Skedulo.  

Sales/Sales Development/Marketing: The Trifecta for Successful Pipeline Development

Trifecta: any achievement involving three successful outcomes

Pipeline development is not a one department job. In order to succeed in this day in age, modern marketers need to take a seat at the revenue table and own the revenue number along with their Sales peers. That means driving pipeline, owning successes and misses, and continuing to up the game to beat competitors in this noisy world we now operate in. What’s better than one team winning … three! Join Matt and Dan as they discuss steps you can take to up your pipeline game and build the ultimate trifecta.

About the Guest Dan Frohnen

Data-driven Marketing Executive. Focused Team-Leader skilled in consistently delivering innovation, visibility, and sales for on- and off-line marketing and demand programs. Expert in building strong organizations with a 360-marketing mix / demand generation programs including market research, social media, trade shows & events, digital, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, e-mail, analysis, CRM, marketing automation, SEO / PPC, creative brainstorming, sales / market development strategy and partnerships.

Passion for conceptualizing and implementing marketing strategy, exceeding targeted projections, and leading teams for both B2B & B2C programs. Strengthens organization with out-of-the-box thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Specialties: Large Team Leadership, Lead / Demand Generation, Problem-Solving & Optimizing, Account Based Marketing (ABM), Business / Sales Development, Strategy & Analysis, Go-To-Market Strategy, International Marketing, Tactical Execution, Marketing Mix Integration, Start-Up organization, Growth, Turn-arounds, and Operations.

Listen in to hear us: 

1. Matt the host and Christine touch on Microsoft and the LinkedIn Acquisition One Year Later.  Provide context for how Microsoft and LinkedIn are partnering to drive relationship selling impact.
2. They talk about how CRM Systems no longer need to be a system of oppression.
3. Christine Discusses how Machine Learning and predictive analytics change the day to day life of the seller.
4. They talk about what an innovative solution like Microsoft Relationship Sales has in common with a well known music app (Shazam). Making the magic happen!
5. Christine offers thoughts on how the conventional sales tactics will no longer apply.
6. Zumda share how the use of new selling tools and technologies change the buying and selling experience?

(Read the transcript and listen again on the Heinz Marketing Blog.

 Download the Microsoft Ebook – Empowering the Modern Seller 

About Our Guest:  Christine Zmuda, Sr. Dir. of Sales at Microsoft.

Christine says of herself:  My passion and professional satisfaction comes from identifying market opportunities before they are mainstream. My most rewarding roles and accomplishments have centered around developing sales and market strategy for emerging businesses and scaling new acquisitions. I'm always open to learning more about technology and happy to share my own experiences of leading sales, marketing, and channel teams if it's helpful.

On a personal note, I enjoy golf, tennis, spending time with my family and embracing new experiences. My new found love is abstract painting, the bigger the canvas the better.

In this episode Jill Konrath talks about starting her business and her guiding philosophy of, "It all starts with a problem."

I'm very honored to have Jill Konrath join me to talk about her latest book, More Sales, Less Time.  

Jill Konrath’s career is defined by her relentless search for fresh strategies that actually work in today’s sales world.

Listen in to hear how someone with a Bachelors in Education ended up getting into sales, let alone becoming a keynote speaker in one of the world's preeminent sales office.

Jill shares some great insights including the inspiration behind her books. 

"It starts with a problem. It always starts with a problem and in every case and every book I've written it started with a problem that I faced.  And when I face it initially, I get really discouraged and I bat my head against the wall and say, oh I'm so stupid. I can't figure it out and then I finally realize that it's not just my problem, but other people are struggling with that issue, too. And then I go to work and it becomes like a puzzle to me and how to solve it. So, I actually dig in and wrestle with the material myself til I can figure out what works today. And then, again I guess because I do come from teaching roots it's real important for me to make it easy for people to understand.

PEOPLE ARE BUSY! 

"When people are this busy, you have to fundamentally shift how you do things in order to peak your curiosity, make them stop and listen and actually then respond to you and say, hey I'm interested in learning more."

STRIVE FOR MAXIUM IMPACT:

"One thing I always try to stress with people is that they really need to stop and think about what they're doing and they need to strive for maximum impact in every single customer interaction and that customer interaction may be a 20 second email message. Maybe a 60 word ... or 20 second phone message, a 60 word email message, you know, but what can you do to have the maximum impact and I think way too many people in sales just say, make more, do more, send more, have more meetings. But, to me the smartest thing to do is ensure that every single interaction provides some value and moves you toward things"

Keep listening to hear Jill's perspective about women in sales and a lot more! 

Read the entire transcription on the Heinz Marketing Blog on.  

Enjoy this BONUS Episode - Q & A with Mike Schultz, President of RAIN Group

A few highlights... we talk about: 

• New research proving that cold calls and outbound still works to generate sales
• Insights into what buyers wants from sellers
• Which channels work, in what context and sequence, to create sales pipeline

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Top Performing Sales Propsecting

More about our guest:

President of RAIN Group, Mike Schultz is world-renowned as a consultant and sales expert. He is co-author of several books including the Wall Street Journal bestseller Rainmaking Conversations: How to Influence, Persuade, and Sell in Any Situation (Wiley, 2011) and Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently (Wiley, 2014). He was named the Top Sales Thought Leader globally in 2011 by Top Sales Awards.

Mike and the team at RAIN Group have worked with organizations such as Toyota, Monitor-Deloitte, Harvard Business School, Oracle, Fidelity Investments, Ryder, Quintiles, UL, Navigant Consulting, Hitachi, Lee Hecht Harrison, Lowe’s, and hundreds of others to unleash sales performance.

News outlets such as Business Week, The Globe and Mail, Inc. Magazine, MSNBC, and hundreds of others have featured Mike's original articles and white papers, and frequently quote him as an expert. Mike’s most recent research includes What Sales Winners Do Differently,Top Performance in Strategic Account Management, and theTop-Performing Sales Organization.

Along with his books, Mike has written hundreds of articles, case studies, research reports, white papers, and other publications in the areas of selling and marketing. He also writes for the RAIN Group Sales Blog. Mike is also the director of the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research.

Mike is a graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA with a B.A. in American Studies, and holds an MBA from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. Mike is currently on the faculty teaching sales at the Brandeis International Business School. Mike also enjoys fly fishing and golf, and actively studies and teaches the traditional martial arts of Seirenkai Karate and Jujitsu, holding the ranks of third degree black belt and Sensei. He lives on a lake west of Boston.

Great guest this week-- Marilyn Cox, Vice President of Marketing and CRM at The Second City.

In this episode, "Practical MarTech: How to Make Marketing Technology Work for You (Not against You)" Marilyn gives us some great lessons from improv as well as active listening for B2B sales and marketing.

The biggest thing, one of the core principles of improvisation is the idea of yes-and. So it is the idea of recognizing and building on the ideas of others. And a lot of us don't want to admit it, but we do have a knee-jerk reaction to shoot down an idea when somebody brings something up. And so the idea of yes-and is really at the root of everything we teach, and work on.

Many other improv principles are built into this. So the idea of bring a brick and not a cathedral-- that you are not having to do this by yourself. Rely on the team and the ensemble you have around you... there are just so many really fantastic ideas that help you engage and interact with not just those people internal to your organization, but also people that you are trying to reach, you're trying to communicate to, and those you are trying to better understand.

I also ask Marilyn how she built her marketing technology stack at Second City.  How do we build what we need to manage our business? and to build our own scalable predictable sales pipeline for that?--What were your priorities? When you've been given a blank slate, how do you approach that?

Read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 9/2 6am PST.  

This week Norman Behar, Founder & Managing Director at Sales Readiness Group joins us as we focus on content and best practices.

Sales Readiness Group has been around for a long time. They've been recognized as one of the top twenty sales training companies in the country by Selling Power magazine and featured as the Sales Training Company to Watch List by trainingindustry.com. Lots of accolades for the team.  They just released a new report (The Salesperson's Perspective on the Impact of Sales Training) that I'm actually pretty excited about. It isn't just about training and best practices but really showcases salespeople's perspective on the impact sales training can have.

One of the questions that often comes up from sales leaders is, "Okay, so we've done sales training in the past, but sometimes it's been effective." Sometimes it has a lasting effect, but in many cases, it doesn't necessarily have a lasting effect, and so we wanted to better understand what's really important to salespeople and what's the business impact associated with sales training. We know that companies are investing more than ever in sales training. There was a stat by Training Industry showing sales training now is estimated at a 2.5 billion dollar market globally, and it's grown by one billion over the last seven years.

So, you've got these two--I'm going to call almost mixed signals coming out. Sales leaders who are saying, "Is there really a strong correlation between great sales training and business results?" And at the same time, you have this huge increase in spending, so obviously we think companies are pretty smart. They wouldn't be spending more if it wasn't impacting their business, but we wanted to really get the sales rep's perspective and understand what is it that makes for a great training program and how does it actually impact business. And we had some pretty interesting results.  

Listen in now and find the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Monday, 8/20 at 6am PST.