Sales Pipeline Radio

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

Some of the questions Matt and Andy Crestodina discussed were: 

Why is SEO perceived as such a scary thing and does that perception need to persist for people to do it right?

That is an excellent question that is very rarely asked. I think SEO has kind of a reputation as kind of a shady kind of industry, with kind of a checkered past, because the people who buy SEO service, they tend to be a very low information buyer, which means that the people who provide the service can get away with some less than perfectly ethical tactics. When the people who hire you to do something have no clue what you're going to do, that creates an atmosphere, an environment where it's ripe for people that are less than perfectly standup professionals to actually succeed.

For example, people who hire SEOs often pay $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 a month, think they need to keep paying that money to keep ranking. That's never true, which means that there's a lot of SEOs that can kind of rest on their laurels and keep cashing that check, even though they might not be doing a whole bunch of stuff after the first few months, other than making the major improvements.

On the topic of writing business books: the book becomes another reformatting of your content that is ultimately intended to drive demand, qualified demand, and preference and differentiation as well, right? 

The book just barely pays for itself. I think it sold like not even 10,000 copies total over the last however many years, but in a B2B sales context, which we all are passionate about this topic of sales, it's a great leave-behind. It's sort of a $10 business card strategy. We build websites. You meet with four companies to build your website. One of them left behind a book that blows your mind with everything you need to know. It's the driver's manual for the website and that gives you a competitive advantage in sales. It's extremely effective in that way.

If I wanted to use it more for PR, I could just send it to people who I think might include me in something they're working on or invite me to their event. If I was more deliberate about trying to get sales, I could just send it to different professors who teach marketing hoping they might include it in their syllabus. But yeah, it's just another format for content. It's something that's part of a family of content.

Your job is to create traffic champions through your content. 

You want to create a couple more traffic champions because there's always a few things that have a massive disproportionate effect on your total number of visitors. If your job is to create a couple more traffic champions knowing that that's going to create just way more brand awareness for you, then you don't want to just keep making more medium quality things. You want to go make a couple more great things.

Listen to the full replay to get the rest of the insights and tactics.

About our guest, Andy Crestodina:

Andy Crestodina is a cofounder and the strategic director of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning web design company, which has completed more than 1,000 successful website projects. He is a top-rated speaker at national conferences who is dedicated to the teaching of marketing. His favorite topics include search engine optimization, social media, analytics, and content strategy. He has written more than 100 articles on content marketing topics. He lives in Chicago.

Brian Hansford hosting this episode with our guest, James Thomas, CMO of Allocadia Software. They will be focusing on MPM and will drill into how CMO’s need more discipline and rigor around managing the revenue pipeline, looking at past performance, and using the data to guide future performance. 

A bit about our guest:

Experienced Chief Marketing Officer with a demonstrated success leading award winning teams in the high tech industry. Expert in marketing management, enterprise software, Software as a Service, pricing, packaging, messaging, inbound and outbound demand generation, go-to-market strategy, and strategic partnerships.

You'll want to catch this episode live 11:30am Pacific. 8/17/2017

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.