Sales Pipeline Radio

Today, in the absence of our scheduled guest, our producer Paul Roberts and I talk about B2B pet peeves. We have a great time.  JOIN US!

Just one example:  There have been books written about a predictable, repeatable, scalable engine of growth. A lot of venture capitalists have read those books and have then told their early stage companies, “If you just hire enough sales people and make enough phone calls, the math works out.” You have to start somewhere, so you start with the math and you start with the plan, but sales is never that easy. One of my pet peeves is someone who has never done sales, and never managed a pipeline, and never even carried a number say, “I read a book. Therefore, this is the way that we're going to sell,” right? I think that: A. books are great and books are important, but I think you've got to try new things. If everybody in the world just follows that book, then all of a sudden it becomes a little tough.

Listen in to hear about other B2B pet peeves....  What are yours?  Find the full transcription on our blog starting 6am PST on Monday, 6/11 and beyond.  

In this episode, listen in to Samuel Sunderaraj, VP of Sales at Skilljar.  Check out the full transcription on our blog starting Mon. 6/4.  

Samuel will answer some great questions:

What's the state of SAS sales?

What does it look like today? And for folks that are either at the front lines or managing an SAS organization, what are the keys to making SAS sales work today?

He'll also talk about how good sellers can actually be still at the forefront of the buying process, at the top of the buying process to provide that value.

He'll share about the people side of growing a sales organization. It's one thing to put numbers in a spreadsheet and say, "Well, if we call this many people, convert this many deals, we'll hit our number," but you still have people that you're managing as part of that.

Hear about the importance and some of the keys to building a sales organization, a high performing sales organization that also prioritizes the people within it.

What about managing expectations? What about the boards objectives? What about the investor objectives? How do you manage that when you're in the middle and you're leading the sales organization, having to motivate the team, but also sort of set expectations from above?

All this and a lot more!

MORE ABOUT OUR GUEST:  

Samuel Sunderaraj has the following experience in sales management:

Driving and initiating contact with senior decision-makers at Small To Enterprise Accounts (C-level)
Scaling revenue from $0m to $30Million+ in ARR
Revenue retention ($30M+)
Building sales teams from 1 to 30+
Experience in building a successful sales organization from scratch, including recruiting, hiring, and developing compensation plans.
Leading sales teams that are metrics driven & efficient
Start-up advisor 

- Building high performance sales teams that are metrics focused and scaling for growth 
- Focus on customer & company success ("customers pay the bills") 
- Sales metrics execution - managing cost of opportunity acquisition while driving top line revenue
- Territory and Market Optimization – executing to high conversions on the active funnel.
- Creating Value = sales multiple
- BOD Metrics & Analysis
- Funding (Seed, Series A-C,)

Learn more at Skilljar.com

On this episode, Brian Hansford, VP of Client Services at Heinz Marketing hosts Sam Melnick, VP of Marketing at Allocadia.  Look for the full transcription on our blog starting Monday, 5/28/18.  

In this episode we're talking about a mid-year review.  As Sam says, "It all starts with the plan. So whether you're planning for next year or whether you're looking at what's going on in real time, measuring performance in real time or if you're doing that kinda half year look back, to me, it all starts with the plan. That's your roadmap. You set out your intentions. You set out where do we wanna spend time and money. What do we expect to get out of our time and money? And now you get that chance to compare results and hopefully adjust and improve.

Brian asks Sam several great questions!  Listen in to hear Sam's replies!

• When marketers are at both the strategic levels, CMO level and even operational level, are reviewing that data, what are some of the best practices that you see with your clients and even that you recommend in how they manage their budgets against the plan and make decisions on where to invest their resources?
• What should they look at in terms of reviewing their plan? How can they look at the data that they've been collecting and analyze that performance up to this point and use that to make plan adjustments and moving forward?
• Do you feel that marketers are getting better at measuring their performance against revenue? The revenue attainment and what they're actually doing to drive results.
• What are your thoughts on that and how should marketers consider using that when adjusting for a strong second half?
• Should marketers wait for a mid-year point to measure what's working?
• How often should they analyze what's working with a marketing performance management approach and solution and make those go, no go, or any sort of adjustment decisions, pulling investments, adding investments?

More from Sam:

I am an analytically driven marketing professional who has experience as a marketing leader, industry analyst, and customer success manager at a marketing technology company. My special talent is the ability to focus on details or specifics to execute, but also step back and distill this information at a higher, more strategic level. 

I am a student of marketing and will never stop learning about and discussing marketing. Some of my favorite topics are: Marketing technology, marketing benchmarks, change management within marketing, and building high performing teams. Feel free to reach out if you want to connect around interesting ideas, projects, companies, and/or tools!

Outside of work I love skiing, basketball, and cooking. Additionally, I am a barbecue and craft beer aficionado.

A shorter episode this time (due to some technical issues) but a good one!  Read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing Blog starting Mon. 5/14/18 

We talk about the importance of:

• Hiring the right people and enabling them
• Staying focussed on the mission
• Respecting the past, respecting the future
• Continoius measurable improvement
• Chasing things that excite you and get you up in the morning

More about Elissa @elissafink

Driven by data. Leading by example. Building authentic brands and communities. And most importantly, creating customers for life. Having joined Tableau Software in 2007, Elissa Fink has served as CMO through its rise from start-up to a billion dollar enterprise. Tableau is now widely recognized as the leader in data analytics, one of the hottest technology sectors. Prior to Tableau, Elissa was EVP Marketing at IXI Corporation, a firm specializing in marketing technology and now owned by Equifax. She has also served in marketing, product management and product engineering executive positions at Tele Atlas, a multi-national map data company now owned by Tom-Tom, TopTier Software (now SAP), and Claritas (now Nielsen). She began her career selling advertising for the Wall Street Journal. Elissa holds a BA from Santa Clara University and a MBA in Marketing and Decision Systems from the University of Southern California.

Mike will touch on:

• Current focus: Cross channel orchestration is a focus for us (usermind, lytics)
• Current focus: Marketing data story from impression to closed deals
• Current focus: Refreshing our approach on predictive lead scoring with 6Sense
• Product promotion and operational tips: We will talk about how Tableau uses a product day-to-day as a marketing operations team
• Tips and advice: Learnings from the last year of building out center of excellence
  • Process, cross department accountability, how I’d prepare if I were starting today with the experience I now have
  • Thoughts on centralized approach vs decentralized
• Marketing technology and teams like marketing operations teams have allowed marketing departments to transition from the perceived “cost center” to being able to paint an end to end story of all measurable engagements throughout the buyer's journey and what sources those engagements.

More about our Guest:  Mike Braund Director, Marketing Operations at Tableau. I’ve worked at Tableau for six years. I’m newly engaged, and getting married out in Chelan this summer. I proposed on top of Table Mountain in Cape Town last September while visiting my Dad’s side of the family. I’m a huge Seahawks fan and golf addict (though I’m not good at golf yet).

If data visualization is new to you or you have interest in learning more about Tableau check out Tableau.com. Also check out Tableau's annual conference-- a one of kind experience bringing together over 15,000 data enthusiasts worldwide every year.

Our guest, Byron Matthews is the President & CEO of Milller Heiman Group.  

Check out Byron's new book, Sales Enablement:  A Master Framework to Engage, Equip and Empower a World-Class Sales Force

Highlights from this Episode:  

• Companies investing in sales enablement is up 26% from last year, with 59% of organizations that now have a sales enablement function. Yet, only 34% of organizations are achieving their sales enablement goals. (CSOi Report)
• B2B companies can assess their sales teams’ gaps and opportunities in relation to each component of sales enablement and look for the alignment (per the Clarity Model).
• Sales enablement cannot be put in a box like other functions. It is cross-functional, and orchestrates all enablement efforts across all “boxes,” including its alignment with the customer journey.
• Defining sales enablement: Sales force enablement is a strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add value in every customer interaction.

More about and from Byron:  Anyone familiar with Miller Heiman Group (brands include: Miller Heiman, Huthwaite, AchieveGlobal, Impact Learning, Channel Enablers, and CSO Insights) knows that championing the customer experience is a main tenet of their mission—and also one that I happen to share.As President and CEO of Miller Heiman Group, I bring a broad depth of experience in growing, leading and providing guidance to the best organizations globally surrounding their sales processes, as well as the leading operations that support the mission of a great sales organization.

Throughout my career, I have sought out challenges and answered demands that call for singular vision, energy and creativity. I have consulted and collaborated with industry leaders throughout the world and crafted new funnel-management solutions, compensation plans, sales methodologies, and sales-management processes, as well as developed and implemented sales-operations capabilities, sales structure, and territory design, for such Fortune 500 companies as Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, and Aflac.

Personally, I am passionate about the education of sales as a discipline. In collaboration with university faculty and administrators, I am working to drive a nationwide effort to incorporate the study of sales into graduate and undergraduate academic environments. I teach and volunteer my time as a guest lecturer for universities including Cornell and Harvard Business School and contribute to published academic and industry research on sales strategy and concepts. I also run sales boot camps and coach, train, and judge students at university sales competitions across the U.S. and participate regularly as a featured speaker at industry wide events.

Listen in for another great episode, this time with Raviv Turner, CEO at CaliberMind.  In addition to being the Co-Founder & CEO of CaliberMind, Raviv is also an angel investor and mentor at Techstars and a regular speaker at marketing & AI events.

We're talking about how he sees a disconnect between Demand (buyers) & Ops (users) of data & analytics platform.  For a full transcript, go to the Heinz Marketing blog starting 4/30/18.  

Some highlights:

• Your data strategy is your B2B growth strategy (quick overview of the paper)
• Without a clear and concise data-driven marketing strategy, B2B marketers lack the ability to effectively acquire, organize, analyze and translate customer information into actionable insights. But what does an effective B2B data-driven marketing strategy look like?
• Understanding what needs to be accomplished is the first step in developing an effective data-driven marketing strategy. For B2B data-driven marketers, a top priority is basing more decisions on data analysis.
• Most Critical Challenges? Integrating data across platforms and enriching data quality and completeness are the most critical challenges to achieving data-driven marketing success 
• Marketing data is a marketing problem! Not devs, not IT - 100% marketing
• But data is hard, data is not sexy - so marketing is pushing it out - over 90% of B2B marketers outsourcing all or part of data tasks (Ascend2)
• But high performing marketers are doing the opposite, they license data and analytics tools and train their team to bring data capabilities in house
• Most of the reasons why marketing can't prove value and impact are data related, yet we prefer to outsource this - lead qualification, ICP score, account scoring, lead routing are all data problems before they are marketing problems.
• To be successful with ABM you need - Data, Account Planning, Content, Execution and Measurement - yes ABM is a data challenge not a media challenge..
• No wonder that marketing and sales ops are spending more than 80% of their time in spreadsheet hell on marketing data wrangling, exporting/ importing, vlookups in Excel what not
• There is a disconnect between the C/VPs and Ops inside the marketing org - Demand looks at pipeline sourced/ influenced/ ops created - but Ops don't give a hoot about it, they care about operational efficiency, workflow automation, the data integrity - they want to get out of spreadsheet, but guess what? - most ops don't have the budget to solve this problem, the biggest budget is demand and that budget mostly goes to programs not to data and analytics - but guess what? Without data and analytics you can't measure programs, you can't multi-touch attribution, you can't track engagement and orchestrate demand between channels..so that's changing, according to Gartner for the first time in 2018 analytics is the biggest spend in Marketing, more than social, more than content - why? Because without data and analytic we are going to see marketers continue to lose their jobs and go home

Join us for this episode:  Sales Enablement’s Evolution from a Front Row Seat with Jim Ninivaggi,Chief Readiness Officer at Brainshark, Inc.

 Hear Jim as he talks about:

• His front row seat to the evolution of sales enablement.  How does it differ from what he saw 6 years ago?
• The “bifurcation” that is happening and how it is primarily around two key areas of sales enablement: sales readiness and sales content management. We will discuss what this means.
• We will discuss how this bifurcation is shaping the sales enablement tech landscape.
• How sales enablement is a critical component of marketing alignment in some key areas:
  • Helping in the management of content.
  • Ensuring reps can use assets effectively in their buyer interactions.
  • Helping ensure lead conversion through better initial buyer conversations.
  • Working hand-in glove with product marketing to ensure reps are ready to position enhancements and new products.
• We will wrap up by talking about the group that seems always lost in the alignment discussion – first-line managers, and how we need to think about providing assets for managers to use in coaching reps.

More about our guest:  Jim is an established thought leader and business analyst from his former role as the head of SiriusDecisions' sales enablement practice. He has researched and presented to business leaders around the world on advanced concepts in optimizing sales talent, maximizing rep productivity, world-class sales leadership and sales enablement technology. Jim has published more than 200 research briefs and engaged audiences at hundreds of conferences, forums and executive presentations.

Listen in to hear us: 

1. Touch on Microsoft and LinkedIn Acquisition One Year Later.  Provide context for how Microsoft and LinkedIn are partnering to drive relationship selling impact.
2. Talk about how CRM Systems no longer need to be a system of oppression.
3. Discuss how Machine Learning and predictive analytics change the day to day life of the seller.
4. Discuss what an innovative solution like Microsoft Relationship Sales has in common with a well known music app (Shazam). Making the magic happen!
5. Explain what conventional sales tactics will no longer apply?
6. Share how will 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, Mon. 4/09 at 6am PST).

 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.

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.