B2B Revenue Acceleration

In the highly competitive landscape of cybersecurity, channel marketing should focus on facilitating conversations and building relationships--not pushing agendas.  Raising awareness among channel partners and end users is only a challenge if your reputation isn't strong On this episode, I talk about channel marketing with Graham Smith, UK Marketing Lead for F-Secure, a cybersecurity software company.  What we talked about: 3 solutions to channel marketing challenges Why listening to channel partners is so important How to prove your value without pushing an agenda Scaling partner enablement and facilitating conversations To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.  If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here.

A good sales pitch is like good storytelling. To perfect your beginning, middle, and end, you need to answer 6 questions road-tested by Joseph Grieves, Training and Development Manager at Operatix. We talked about how to answer these questions: Who are your target persons? How would you summarize your company in 2-3 sentences? What are the biggest pains your service solves? What are the best business benefits to your solution? Who are the current clients you can mention? What value will you give during a meeting? To hear this episode and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.  If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here.  

It's an unbelievable feeling when you build your own company, have a brand, and hear people speak about your brand. You think: My digital marketing team was actually right! Then you think: I should do like 50 times more digital marketing. Well... not necessarily. I had the chance to chat with Adam Smith, Founder and Director at Damteq, about digital marketing, how to stay agile (and aligned), and future trends in marketing.  

An agile sales team is really, uh, agile. But there’s got to be more to it than that.What’s the secret sauce that allows reps to handle 400+ accounts? I sat down with Ewing Gillaspy, Outbound Sales Enablement Leader at IBM, to talk about what an agile sales team really is. “It has a relentless focus on the most value added activity on that given day,” Ewing explained. The more diverse skillset you have within your team, the more likely you have the right person executing each task. Therefore, your outputs become better.  

All companies say, “We have a culture,” but that’s not really true. Some companies are just a workplace. (Which could be why Millennials keep switching jobs--because they’re looking for an authentic culture.) I got to interview Thibaut Ceyrolle, GVP EMEA at Snowflake, about why old leadership is broken and what it means to hire based on culture. “You have companies that will focus only on execution and numbers,” he said. “You have companies that now are focusing on culture. And you have companies that can combine the two without being fake.”

Paid ads often take a big chunk out of marketing budgets. Worse yet, if you don’t do them right, your sales team may not even follow up on the leads.   Amit Lavi is Co-Founder and CEO at Marketing Envy. He’s run plenty of successful digital advertising for ABM campaigns. In this episode, he shares three reasons why he focuses on specific companies in ABM ad campaigns as well as some of his best practices for using your marketing budget on digital ads.  

Closing a deal isn’t as easy as it should be.  Some research suggests that 60% of all deals you have in the contract stage end up in the “Valley of Death,” the dark where nothing happens. The challenge, then, really has nothing to do with your competitors. Instead, it’s all about how you handle your own end of the sales process. How do you push deals all the way through to the very end? In this episode, we interview Samir Smajic, CEO and Founder at GetAccept, about a couple of ways to close out sales and avoid the Valley where deals go to die.

Do you hear that sound? That’s the rumbling of a long-overlooked source of growth for recurring revenue businesses. And it’s about to erupt.  In this episode, we ask Gainsight’s General Manager, EMEA Dan Steinman about his thoughts on the inevitable movement towards a more customer-centric approach to subscription-based business models. We chat customer success, increasing renewal rates, and more.

Cloud may be a dream for developers & vendors. But for resellers, distributors, and customers, it can often represents unwanted change. How can vendors of cloud products and services, and their channel partners, maximize their offerings and profitability in the cloud era? That’s what we asked Timm Hoyt, VP of Global Partner Sales & Alliances at Druva. On this episode we discuss cloud vendors, channel partners, margin models, overcoming change resistance, end-user experience, and more.

Everyone’s talking about ABM and how to drive alignment between marketing and sales. Usually, the conversation starts and ends in marketing. Well, this episode is about ABM. And we did invite a marketer (Sudhir Bhatti) on our podcast to discuss ABM. But we talked about it from both perspectives: marketing and sales. Specifically, this episode is about 1:1 ABM programs.  Sudhir is the Head of Marketing at CyberCube, which is a niche cyber analytics company. Specifically, they focus only on the top 100 insurance companies across North America. Here’s what Sudhir had to say about 1:1 ABM programs (and how it affects the sales team).