Sales Pipeline Radio

Our guest is Mark Granovsky, President and CEO of G2Planet which does Event Marketing and applies data science to a growing field. 

When people think of event marketing, they don't think of the latest and greatest and most technologically advanced campaigns in the world. I think when people think about big data, they think about marketing technology. They think about lead nurture programs. Then you have events which in many cases have kind of lagged. Talk about where event marketing is today in the 2017 B2B world and where do we need to take it to make sure that it aligns with the way that we're managing sales and marketing today.

Mark answered, "I think it has been a laggard, and I think it's quickly catching up. I know when I first got into this business one of the motivating factors was every financial officer I ever talked to was frustrated with their event spend. They didn't know what value it was bringing. Tons of money going down that channel, but they didn't really understand the benefit they were getting out of it. Early on event marketing was very logistics focused, tactical, processing names, registrants coming to an event, putting badges on people. It was kind of pretty basic meat and potatoes. As marketing analytics have evolved and people have gotten smarter about looking at data and taking data and turning it into information, the events industry and the discipline has certainly caught up. "

Matt later asked, "How should marketers should think about this in a complex sales cycle, right? I mean if you're not doing transactional sales, if you assume that the white paper didn't generate the sale, what do you recommend for marketers that maybe ... It's mid-August, but a lot of people are already thinking about 2018, to start to think from a strategy and a planning standpoint of how to do we incorporate events and event marketing technology into their mix."

Mark says, "The event marketing discipline or the portal that we call it, it really is ... It's not the head on the dog. It's the body on the dog, right? It's got to follow the marketing objectives, the campaigns, the purposes. These things are manifesting inside of the events activations, right? Whatever those corporate marketing initiatives are, bright people are sitting down and they're spending time and they're saying, "Okay. How does this manifest inside of my event activation campaigns," whatever those objectives might be. Then once the link is created from the strategy office in the house down into the activation fields, event marketing being an activation field, now we're getting into planning and activities that support meeting of those goals whatever those goals might be. "

Listen to the full replay for more insights.

Some of what Matt will be covering with Michael Pici, Director of Sales at HubSpot.

• How’d you get into sales, and when did you know it was something you wanted to pursue as a career?
• Hubspot has a highly-successful track record for sales, but you started from scratch with the sales product.  What was that like?
• What do you look for in new reps?  What attributes are most important and what others do you expect to teach/train once they start?
• What do you look for in potential new managers, especially from amongst your front-line reps?
• What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made and learned from over the past couple years?
• You’ve written lately about sales forecasting. Why do so many people get this wrong?

In this replay, we are very excited to talk with Jessica Fewless who joins us from DemandBase. We are going to be talking about the increased complexity of selling into B2B marketing; into B2B targets; the fact that the buying committee internally is getting larger, more complex. More than just picking off the right targets and speaking more precisely to the right people, organizing consensus inside of an organization to help increase sort of focus and velocity is what Matt thinks is a key part of ABM as well. He asked Jessica to talk a little bit about what that means and sort of that internal buying committee and how effective ABM can make sense of that.

Jessica told Matt,"this is really where sales can feel the most support from marketing is around this entire buyer’s committee because typically what they are going to be doing is they are going to be focusing on that person with the budget authority, need and the time light, right? That whole BAND model, because that’s a person who is going to sign the contract, right? So that is generally where their efforts are spent; one – because that’s the only person they actually have access to. So sometimes they act as a gatekeeper to the rest of that stakeholder committee but two – they only have so much bandwidth so they need to focus on that person who eventually is going to sign their contracts."

It was such a rich episode, we felt a replay was in order.

About Jessica Fewless, DemandBase

After 3.5 years at Demandbase (and 20+ years in B2B Marketing), Jessica has seen it all when it comes to Account-Based Marketing. Playing an instrumental role in Demandbase’s rollout of an ABM strategy, and educating over 1000 B2B marketers on the principles of ABM over the last 18 months, Jessica has become a resident expert. From building the right target account list and understanding the impact of ABM on marketing programs, to selling ABM within an organization and finding budget for your strategy, Jessica has worked with organizations to build, hone and measure the success of their own ABM strategies.  

If you don't know him yet, it's time to know Grant Cardone. Join us for the provocative, maybe controversial conversation with a sales legend. While you are waiting for the show, don't miss his core package of MP3 books for your commute or flights. His success is legendary, his energy infectious. You do not want to miss this.

Matt is inteviewing Nadjya Ghausi, Vice President of Marketing for Prezi. They'll take the topic of conversational sales presentations further. How a new approach to pitches can transform your engagement and results.

With a shift in approach, presenters can turn their presentations into dialogues, making them interactive and interesting enough to keep viewers tuned in while their pocket-sized screens remain in the pockets where they belong.

"They will also be touching on the recent study from Harvard University researchers, which sought to answer the question, "Does a presentation's medium affect its message?" The full content of that study can be found here."

Tune in for this conversation of ideas. Prezi would like to give you a gift for listening - their Conversational Presenting eBook.

About Matt's guest, Nadjya Ghausi

As Prezi's VP of Marketing, Nadjya loves building all-star teams with the power to drive global market leadership. One of the things she values most at Prezi is the ability to combine technology, data, and innovative storytelling to develop an authentic brand.

Before joining Prezi, Nadjya held leadership roles at E2open, Salesforce.com, Agile Software, and IBM, and was a management consultant at Gemini. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with an undergrad degree in Industrial Engineering (BSIE) from the University of Michigan.

Nadjya believes the secret to staying motivated is having a list of dreams that’s always a little bit longer than her list of achievements.

We surveyed over 250 B2B sales and marketing pros to learn how they achieve and measure revenue success. Through their insights we’ve learned how B2B marketing teams are managing, optimizing and reporting their results under increasing revenue accountability.

Our research shows the best-performing companies have marketing organizations that share revenue accountability with sales teams. Companies are missing sales goals when their marketing teams don’t have revenue accountability or responsibility!  Matt is traveling, so we are fortunate to have our on VP of Client Services, Brian Hansford to host this week and go over the highlights from the report. 

Some of the points he'll be covering include:

• 64.2% of respondents report their marketing organizations have increased revenue responsibility and are achieving or exceeding revenue goals
• 71.3% of marketing organizations have increased accountability for revenue goals
• 61.8% achieve or exceed revenue goals because their marketing org has increased revenue accountability
• 63.6% experience improved sales performance their marketing org has increased revenue accountability
• 75% do not achieve revenue goals when marketing doesn’t have increased revenue accountability
• The #1 ranked success factor in achieving revenue goals is an effective marketing and sales partnership

Listen live, catch the replay or catch up on the report in the meantime here >

Matt's guest is Author of Top of Mind and he is the Co-founder and CEO of Influence & Company. Business is never “just” business. It’s always about relationships. It’s always about a human connection. When you’re viewed as a valuable, trustworthy partner, the opportunities are endless. Position yourself for success by establishing and developing content-driven relationships that keep you and your brand Top of Mind.

This will be a great conversation for you to walk away with tips and nuggets. Join us.

John Hall is the co-founder and CEO of Influence & Co., a company focused on helping brands and individuals extract and leverage their expertise to create, publish, and distribute content to gain influence, visibility, and credibility with their key audiences. In less than three years, John has grown Influence & Co. into one of the largest providers of high-quality expert content to the world’s top publications, ranking No. 72 on Forbes’ “Most Promising Companies in America” list and named Empact’s “Best Marketing and Advertising Company of 2014” at the United Nations.

John has a weekly column for Forbes and Inc. and has contributed to more than 50 publications, including Business Insider, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. He is the author of the best-selling book, 'Top of Mind'.

Best practices for tactile marketing, direct mail and more. Matt's guest today is Daniel Gaugler, CMO of PFL.com. Some of the talking points will be including:

Why is direct mail back?

What problem does PFL solve for its customers?

When people say that direct mail is old school or irrelevant, how do you typically respond?

Tell us how PFL is taking an offline channel and making it high tech.

Demonstrating ROI is a key priority for marketers. What’s the biggest mistakes marketers make when measuring the success of their campaigns?

Marketing changing rapidly over the past several years. What can marketers do to keep up?

A bit about our guest, Daneil Gaugler:

Daniel is a business-driven, entrepreneurial-minded marketer with an extensive background in: marketing automation, integrated marketing programs, direct mail, search engine marketing, eCommerce, email, and direct sales. He has a proven track record of implementing multi-channel marketing systems that leverage technology to drive awareness, acquire customers, grow sales, and improve the customer experience.

Connect with him on Twitter

Matt's guest is Morgan J Ingram. Some of the talking points they are covering include:

• How to use video to create a great connection with your prospects
• Using social to build a relationship before the call or email
• Creating a brand by utilizing content throughout proper networks
• How ABM strategies can help sales and SDRs

A bit about Morgan:

He's a sales development manager at Terminus, where he builds the sales development team professionally and personally. He also does motivational speaking by helping people remove their negative thoughts to unlock their inner potential and stress the importance of not making excuses in their life.

Some of the points Matt will be covering with Terry Flaherty and Kerry Cunningam of SiriusDecisions will include:

• Why did SiriusDecisions update the demand waterfall?
• What's a Demand Unit and why does it matter?
• What's a Demand Map and what value does it deliver?
• What are the major changes/differences that Sirius introduced in this version of the waterfall?
• What has the reaction been to the new waterfall?
• What are some of the major things to consider when implementing the Demand Unit waterfall?