Sales Pipeline Radio

Join Matt and Jeremy Korst. He's a mentor, the Executive VP and CMO at Avalara. Establishing an effective and actionable brand strategy is no easy task. It takes a dedicated team of strategic and creative experts who have a strong sense of customer empathy. It requires outside-in thinking, so it’s often quite valuable to bring in some external expertise to help facilitate the process. Now, while the strategy takes a tremendous effort to get right, the company-wide implementation and execution is even more important. Some of what they'll be covering includes:

1. Creating a new category.  How do you get prospects to be interested in doing something a new way.
2. The importance of brand.  How a brand strategy is much more than branding. 
   More at:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-experiences-brand-jeremy-korst/

About our guest, Jeremy Korst:

Jeremy Korst is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Avalara, a quickly growing Seattle-based SaaS company focused on transactional tax compliance for businesses of all sizes. Before Avalara, Jeremy was general manager of Microsoft’s Windows & Devices marketing group, responsible for the worldwide marketing and sales of Windows, and the highly successful launch of Windows 10.  He also serves as a mentor to the University of Washington’s entrepreneurship program. Jeremy has served on various industry boards, as well as past Chair of the Seattle Accelerator YMCA Board of Managers.

Join Matt this week with Maureen Ezekwugo, Executive Vice President of Doctor Community and RealSelf. Get pointers on how to take your sales career to the next level. Points to include:

• Where to start if you want to take your sales career to the next level
• Four traits or skills needed to make it in sales management.
• How to position yourself for the next opportunity to advance your sales career.

If you don't know Maureen yet, here's a bit about her: Entrepreneurial senior sales management and operations leader with a record of achievement and demonstrated success driving customer acquisition and multimillion-dollar sales growth in an inside sales and call center.

Join Matt as he and Rand Fishkin, The Wizard of Moz, will take away the misconception of what SEO does to affect marketing. The first thing is to blow up the myths, then understand how you can use it to your advantage, and finally how to interpret the information and apply it to more growth and success. Rand says, "My goal is just to help their audience understand SEO and web marketing. Whatever they think is most useful/important is where I'd love to assist."'ll also be talking about Moz Explorer. It's the one tool to discover and prioritize the best keywords to target. Try out it before the show: https://moz.com/explorer

Guest host, Robert Pease,talks about predictable pipeline. Some of the point covered include:

• Have you built the marketing plan around the revenue plan?
• We really need to accelerate. Basically we need more customers.
• Someone who comes to your website and downloads a white paper, that's a content lead. That's not remotely sales qualified.
• If you don't know who you're selling to, you don't know that there's a market or that there's a need in the market for what you sell, that's going to wound you.

Our guest today is Joe Chernov. He's now the Chief Marketing Officer at @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media." 

Join Matt this week with his guest, Adam Schoenfeld, CEO of Siftrock, Inc.

Adam explained, "When you send emails, marketing emails or prospecting emails on the sales side, you get a lot replies back. Auto replies, bounce backs, out of office messages and of course real people sometimes raising their hand or asking questions.

Typically, what we've found is that marketers and marketing office folks handle that manually. So we built some machine learning that [inaudible 00:02:50] all those replies, figure out what they are and then help you take action. Whether it's cleaning up your database when somebody's left the company, that's really kind of a classic example. You get that "no longer with company" response. Or servicing a new lead for the sales team when you get a referral or correctly routing a human response so that you can take action. So all those things that we do by basically more intelligently managing the reply emails that come back to your marketing campaigns."

Matt then asked about list hygiene, "Let's talk a little bit about that related to database hygiene.  People are moving all the time, we've heard that B2B database can deteriorate at a rate of three to five percent per month. Not even per year, per quarter. So to have some of that auto updated for you is significant, not just for the efficiency of your list, but for keeping yourself off of spam, block list and more."

Adam was on top of this. "Deliverability is a big thing and then making sure you're getting to the right person with the right phone number, and the right email address as all that stuff's changing around. Those email replies have a lot of information that can help with that. Automating this and integrating into the major marketing platforms like Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua et cetera saves so much time over manual processing of this information..This isn't the whole solution to keeping a clean and updated database, but it can be a big piece of that sort of broader initiative everybody's thinking about right now."

Adam's Mount Rushmore of Sales, Marketing, Start Ups:

"I'll give you a couple CEOs that have influenced me either sort of from afar or more directly. Dave Hersh, who's CEO of Jive and who is an investor in Simply Measured has influenced me a lot. While we haven't interacted a ton, maybe once at year we sit down in person. Every one interaction has just been so impactful. I'm huge fan of Gainsight right now, I think they're the gold standard in B2B marketing and Nick Mehta there is incredible. I'd put him on the Mount Rushmore.

I'm going to give a shout out to my co-founder Chris Hundley because he built this company on his own and actually closed business as a technology-centric guy. I think that's just an incredible feat to build a sustaining business all at once on your own."

Join Matt and his guest, Liz Pearce as they discuss marketing mobility.

• A lot of marketers envy your path – marketer to CEO.  How did you do it, and what recommendations would you have for other marketing leaders who want to someday run their own business?
• Have you found it hard to manage other markters, especially CMOs?  What’s key to managing them without micromanaging given your marketing background?
• You’re in a crowded market, what’s your key to differentiating and winning?
• We’ve talked before about your impressive productivity habits.  What’s working for you right now?

Liz Pearce is Chief Executive Officer at LiquidPlanner, the fast-growing Seattle-based maker of predictive project management technology. She is responsible for the company’s overall vision, strategic direction and growth. Liz is an entrepreneurial leader with more than 15 years of marketing, product management and technology leadership experience. She started her career at LiquidPlanner as Director of Marketing in 2007 before being named COO in 2011 and CEO in August of 2012.

Join host, Matt Heinz and his guest, Anthony Iannarino as they review Anthony's book, The Lost Art of Closing. He'll have some insights that will help you close more deals.

Talking Points: 

• Why did you write this book
• What’s changed about closing?
• Why so much emphasis on change?

They will also talk about CEB, changes in sales, and how sales now requires better marketing. 

Matt welcomes author and Senior Editor of the Harvard Business Review, Daniel McGinn to talk about his new book, "Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed."

A bit about the book from the author:

The book looks at the science and practice of how professionals can learn to use techniques used by Olympic and pro athletes to get in the right mindset before they perform. Chapters look at the use of pep talks, motivational music, trash talk and rivalry, techniques to boost confidence and reduce anxiety, and even drugs to help you get in the mindset to perform.

If your job involves pitching ideas, high-pressure negotiations, public speaking or presentations, or make-or-break sales calls, the techniques in the book should help people bring their A-game.

The book has only been out a few weeks, but I've started hearing from companies such as Oracle that are buying the book for their sales teams because they think the ROI for people who learn these techniques is obvious. I'm also hearing from entrepreneurs who agree with Brad Feld, who said "This book is a gift for entrepreneurs or anyone else who pitches ideas for a living."

There will likely be a Game of Thrones recap/convo. for fun!

In that light:  The host/guest names are:

Host:  Matt Heinz, First of his name, builder of sales funnels

Guest:  Josh Baez, first of his name, breaker of chains, writer of marketing copy or Ft. Josh Baez, the original persona non grata