OnBase: Smashing Sales and Marketing Misalignments Ep 35 | Talking about Trending B2B Sales Strategies and Sales Technologies with Jim Dickie, Partner at Sales Mastery
In this episode we had Jim Dickie, Partner at Sales Mastery discuss latest trends in B2B Sales and Marketing.
About Jim:
Jim Dickie is a Co-Founder of CSO Insights and Research Fellow for Sales Mastery; an independent research firm that focuses on profiling case study examples of how firms in the B2B marketplace are leveraging sales process, CRM, AI and knowledge to optimize revenue performance. Jim has over 30 years of sales and marketing management experience. Jim began his career with IBM and Sterling Software and then went on to launch two successful software companies. Jim then went on to co-found CSO Insights, which was acquired by Miller Heiman Group.
Jim is also a contributing editor for CRM Magazine, CustomerThink, Top Sales World, and a contributing author for the Harvard Business Review. He has served as an advisor to Baylor Center for Professional Selling, William Patterson University’s Russ Berry Institute for Professional Selling, and is a lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business.
Over the past twenty years, Jim’s teams have surveyed over a thousand sales transformation initiatives. Their research has become the benchmark for understanding how the role of sales is evolving, the challenges that are impacting sales performance, and most importantly what companies are doing to address those issues. Having worked with clients spanning multiple industries, including such firms as 3M, ADP, Cisco Systems, Corning, Direct Energy, Fairchild Semiconductor, Federal Express, IBM, Accenture, VISA, Xilinx, McKesson, Unocal, as well as many small to midsize enterprises, Jim has a broad perspective into sales transformation in the B2B world.
Top ten takeaways from the episode:
- “A key question to ask in B2B Sales today is- What’s the next generation of solutions to optimize sales through better solutions.”
- “I spend part of my time looking for answer and the other part of my time sharing answers!”
- “One of the major trends we are seeing (because people have access to better data) is that marketing and sales is trying to be all things to all people.“
- “We see people spend a lot of time identifying what their ideal prospect looks like.”
- “We have to start thinking about things from our prospect’s perspective. A personalized message should talk about how you can help someone do their job better. Everyone makes a decision based on personal payback.”
- “We spend a lot of time doing an analysis to understand who we want to engage with. But we forget to identify how we can help other people do something better.”
- “We have to earn the right to engage people as Sales and Marketing people today.”
- “A lot of companies do sales cycle reviews to understand why they lost a deal. But how often do they ask themselves, ‘what did you do to lose the deal’?”
- “If Customer Support people are not part of a prospecting campaign or part of the marketing campaign, there will always be a disconnect.”
- “When we did our study, the number one thing people were focused on is AI for lead generation.”
About the podcast
Sunny Side Up is a series of 15-minute podcasts. Leaders and innovators share what they’ve learned in the B2B tech sector on topics related to marketing, product management, sales, and leadership.