Sales Pipeline Radio

We pack a lot into this episode as I talk to Nick Jordan, CMO at Logic Inbound.   

Among other things, I ask him what are some of the challenges you've found in trying to build a marketing community? Sometimes we try to produce marketing events, and well-meaning people don't always come out in the way that some other groups, like IT and others, might do. So why do you think that is, and what are some keys to actions when trying to build that active marketing community?

What are some of the ways you, or some of the formats of community you find the most successful? Is it lunch and learns, is it networking happy hours? Are there certain topics and formats that tend to work better in terms of getting marketers together?

Nick is all about building community amongst marketers.  Check out his answers as well as his number one growth hack for growing communities-- it's something everybody can go ahead and start implementing, as soon as they're done listening to this podcast!

More from Nick:  "I'm passionate about developing and growing businesses. A million side projects, a few startups, and one ride on a rocket ship as an early employee at BitTitan. Today I leverage my experience building businesses to help companies identify and execute on growth opportunities @ Logic Inbound."

Check out the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing Blog starting Mon. 8/13/18 6am PST.

Give a sales person a PowerPooint to help them sell and they'll screw it up everytime.  They spend hours adding to the deck's slides in increasingly small type.  They key is to give them something useful to begin with and make it easier to customize without putting the viewer to sleep. 

Listen to the expert Alli McKee walk you through steps to create a winning support system for your salespeople.

Alli McKee, Founder and CEO at Stick has a Bachelors from the University of Virginia in studio art. She has an MBA from Stanford. Her original oil paintings have been featured in a variety of publications and exhibits. She's spent almost two years in Africa creating new design thinking curriculum, and then a couple years ago she decided, "Well, what the hell, I'll just go back to the valley and I'll create a start up." 

It seems like we're focused sometimes more on the math [in marketing] or more on the quantitative and not enough on the design. Alli talks to us about the impact and importance just generally of good design in driving businesses today.

Along the way, if you don't already know, find out what a "word wall" is.

You'll also hear Alli's view on creativity:  

I think about creativity is that it's really just collecting things, collecting information, and putting it together in interesting ways. It's really not about having this creative talent, it's more having access to that inventory from which you can invent. So the way that Stick works is we're trying to give you a jumpstart on that creative process. It's built around this behavior that I've seen in real life as a designer working with business people, a lot of people, just like yourself, saying, "I'm not creative. I need help with this." But the second you give them a first draft, they always have feedback. Always. Right? So what we've tried to do is build that first draft into a tool. So you can put in your content, Stick automatically generates that first draft for you, and then enables you to act on that feedback in a few clicks in seconds rather than a two day email exchange.

Listen in to see what doing improv has to do with sales and marketing... and a lot more!

You can find the transcript and recording of this episode on the Heinz Marketing blog on Monday, 4/2/18.

On this episode Chandar Pattabhiram, CMO at Coupa Software joins us as we talk about bringing start-up agility to enterprise marketing.

But first, we talk about what Led Zeppelin has taught him about marketing!  So good.  

We also talk about customer lifetime value and a holistic way of thinking about the customer. Listen in to hear his thoughts about the increasing focus in marketing on science and the increased focus on metrics and things you can measure.  We dive into the science of storytelling and MORE!  

Check out the full transcript on our blog starting Monday, 7/30/18.  

Read the full transcription of this episode on the Heinz Marketing blog 

Highlights:

• We discuss how the buying experience is broken and why the only way to fix it is to enable more conversations
• Here's an example of how this plays out:
  • It's important to make it easy for your customers to buy
  • B2B businesses have not adapted yet.
  • Customers are still often required through a labyrinth of funnels and forms so they can talk to a sales rep
  • What can B2B do about this?
  • A sale doesn't happen without a conversation
  • Is this because of "the Amazon effect" - customers are used to getting what they want on demand, with one click. Whether it's a taxi, a meal, a piece of furniture, etc.
  • These buying expectations are carrying over to B2B purchases as well
  • You need to make it easier for your prospects to have a conversation with you - whether that's through chat or on the phone
  • And whoever gets closest to the customer wins (Netflix vs Blockbuster)
  • Reps need to get closer to prospects, faster - and organizations need tools in place to enable that, while avoiding the clatter of non-sales related conversations

Related

• Hyper Growth Marketing Sales Conferences
• com
• https://www.getmyresponsetime.com/
• https://www.reallygoodchatbots.com/

More from our guest:

Hey, I'm Dave Gerhardt. 

I'm VP of Marketing at Drift and I've spent the last 7 years learning at SaaS marketing companies in Boston, including HubSpot and Constant Contact.

During that time, I've launched products that have made it to the top of Product Hunt, created a top five business podcast on Apple Podcasts, landed multiple features in the New York Times, created a deck that Andy Raskin called "The Greatest Sales Pitch I've Seen All Year," and helped create the category of Conversational Marketing.

I love building an audience and getting the right people to pay attention.

I was thrilled on this episode, "GDPR WTF And What Now?" to talk to Amy Holtzman, VP, Marketing at Splash.

In recent months we worked with Splash on a webinar and a great guide on GDPR. There's a lot to know so we're continuing the conversation.  Before getting into GDPR, we talk a bit about company culture and building a marketing team from scratch.  Really good insights! 

Check out "The Uncomplicated Guide to GDPR".

One of the things that was kind of fun about working with Splash on this is it that they definitely take a more casual approach. I think GDPR guides sometimes can be a little intimidating and can be very legalese.  This one is different.  

Listen in to this episode to hear the latest and what to do next.  You can read a full transcription of this episode on our blog starting Monday, 7/23/18.  

This episode entitled,  "How to Manage Remotely - Best Practices for Leading Remotely" is inspired by the book The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership co-authored by Kevin Eikenberry, Chief Potential Officer, The Kevin Eikenberry Group

With more and more companies going remote, they're forsaking having everybody in the office five days a week. They're letting people work remotely, and I think as an individual contributor that can be fantastic. As a manager, that can be particularly challenging.  I asked Kevin, how this topic come about and how to manage remotely and do it well.  Listen in to our great conversation below or read the transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 7/9/18.

Read the full transcription of this episode on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Monday, 7/16/18.  

Highlights:

• We discuss how the buying experience is broken and why the only way to fix it is to enable more conversations
• Here's an example of how this plays out:
  • It's never been more important to make it easier for your customers to buy
  • This is because of "the Amazon effect" - customers are used to getting what they want on demand, with one click. Whether it's a taxi, a meal, a piece of furniture, etc.
  • These buying expectations are carrying over to B2B purchases as well
  • But businesses have not adapted yet. Customers are still often forced through a maze of funnels and forms before they can talk to a sales rep
  • So what can YOU do about this?
  • You need to make it easier for your prospects to have a conversation with you - whether that's through chat or on the phone
  • Because a sale doesn't happen without a conversation
  • And whoever gets closest to the customer wins (Netflix vs Blockbuster)
  • Reps need to get closer to prospects, and do that quicker - and organizations need to have the right tools in place to enable that, while avoiding the noise of non-sales related conversations

Definitely check out: 

• Hyper Growth Marketing Sales Conferences
• Drift.com
• https://www.getmyresponsetime.com/
• https://www.reallygoodchatbots.com/

More from our guest:

Hey, I'm Dave Gerhardt. 

I'm VP of Marketing at Drift and I've spent the last 7 years learning at SaaS marketing companies in Boston, including HubSpot and Constant Contact.

During that time, I've launched products that have made it to the top of Product Hunt, created a top five business podcast on Apple Podcasts, landed multiple features in the New York Times, created a deck that Andy Raskin called "The Greatest Sales Pitch I've Seen All Year," and helped create the category of Conversational Marketing.

I love building an audience and getting the right people to pay attention.

In this episode, we talk to Category Leader, Peter Isaacson, CMO at Demandbase about How to Manage Influences, Analysts and More!  You can read the full transcription of this episode on the Heinz Marketing Blog starting Monday, 7/2/18.  

Here's just a taste of the converstation:

Matt: The easy thing to do on this conversation would be to talk about account based marketing. Demandbase is one of the leading providers of account based marketing technology to B2B companies. You guys do some amazing work in the space, but I've been particular impressed with the work you and your team have done with influencers and to create influence among third party experts in the market. So I wanted to spend a little time talking about that because I know a lot of our listeners on the sales and the marketing side, there's a lot you can do in terms of direct marketing, but every one of us we're marketing to people where there is a network of organizations, of individuals, of analysts, and others that are influencing their decision making as well. I think probably the best example of that for you guys more recently is the Forrester Wave that recently came out. Can you just kind of level set what was the wave about and how was Demandbase placed there?

Peter:  Sure. So this is a real milestone I think certainly for Demandbase but also for ABM as a category and certainly want to get into kind of category creation and the role influencers play in that. But this has been a multi-year journey for us, not just overall within ABM certainly but also with Forrester to really kind of work with them, to help them understand account based marketing, why it's getting so much traction, why customers are getting engaged in it, things like that. Really for a category to really stand as a true category, you need a lot of things to happen, but one of the key milestones certainly is Gartner doing a magic quadrant and/or Forrester doing one of their waves around the category. That's what happened. They just published it about three weeks ago. ABM platforms specifically and Demandbase thankfully was established as the clear leader up into the right for the ABM platform category. So very exciting.

Listen in for much more!

Brian Hansford, VP of Performance Management at Heinz Marketing hosted our guest, Jeffery K. Rohrs, CMO at Yext.  

Read the full transcript about Integrate Brand Experiences in B2B Marketing on our blog starting Mon. 6/25/18.  

A bit about Jeffrey and Yext:

I serve as our Global Chief Marketing Officer and we are the leading digital knowledge management platform with a mission to give companies control over their brand experience across the entire digital universe of maps, apps, search engines, voice assistance, and other intelligence services that are driving consumer-discovery decision and actions a day, so in practice, that means that a customer of ours like Arby's manages their brick-and-mortar location information, store hours, menus, other types of information that consumers are looking for on mobile devices and other services insures that that is correct. Not just across the third-party ecosystem, but also across their own website. 

Jeffrey will speak to what are some of the biggest challenges he sees in B2B marketing and sales from an integrated brand experience and from his own experience working with clients or even as a consumer or a B2B customer himself.  Brian asks "What do you see out there and what are some of your ideas and how do you approach that?"  Listen in to hear great insights.  

Another great episode!  The full transcription will be on our blog starting 6/18/18.  

I asked Patrick what are some of the keys you find to building really high performance marketing teams that can deliver results?

He said... "It's an interesting question because I think everybody comes to the notion of team a little bit differently. But I would say, particularly in marketing that, marketing is fundamentally a team sport. And not just on your team, but the extension of marketing into sales. So, there's a few different things I would call out in terms of focus on teams that I have found to be successful over time." 

"One is as a general rule when you're trying to put together a team, I would have a strong bias for athletes versus experts. Because, the pace of change across every business and across every market is so quick now, that there are a lot of people who may be an expert in a particular sub-discipline, who can't transfer those skills and can't help other members of the team. So one, I'd look for athletes not experts and people who can really work to solve the problem." 

"The second thing, when you're thinking about marketing is really having an understanding and a focus on learning to try to understand the customer in the market. And a lot of that comes out of my heritage in product marketing, but also I think there's a lot of bias that people, particularly on the sales sides of this discussion have, that marketing does a lot of hand waving, doesn't really actually understand what's going on. And so you need people across the entirety of the team to really be focused on, not just the mission of the company and trying to produce a result, but really understanding the customer in the market."

"And then the third thing I would say... specifically that helps inform teams, is look for people who have sales DNA. Because more often than not, the ... Having lived the life of somebody in sales and you had a great example, Elissa Fink was on with you a couple weeks ago from Tableau. She is a great example that proves the pieces in my mind, which is people who started early in their career or who have had experience in selling, have a lot more empathy for the realities of what it takes to generate an opportunity to get a deal done. But, also what results look like as measured by revenue, and I think all those things are important."

Listen in to hear more!

More from Patrick:   I am a growth-driven marketing, sales and business development executive in high technology focused on building high performing teams, building lasting relationships and delivering results. I am also an advisor to innovative start up companies. I run marketing, alliances and channels at Altify. We focus on making the lives of sales people better by delivering great software that help strategic sellers win the deals that matter.