Sales Pipeline Radio

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.

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.