This week's show is called "Actions Sales Leaders Need to Take in a Recession" and I'm joined by Steven Benson, CEO of Badger Maps. We've all been faced with headwinds this year in terms of shifting demand, shifting way people sell, opportunity and challenges. I ask Steven about the advice he has given to the outside world and how much of that have he had to apply to his own business.  Steven talks about the importance of changing your messaging to better fit with the world and the mindset customers and prospects are in, in a down economy versus a good one.  Specifically, helping companies to do more with less. And then, showing prospects exactly how much in terms of dollars, you'll be able to help them do more with less. It could be less money, manpower, resources, whatever. We went through this exercise ourselves. It's a good example, but when times are good, the sales team and the marketing team at Badger, their messages is, "Hey, we're going to... We'll help you sell 20% more with your field sales team". And we shifted that messaging to, with Badger Maps, your outside sales team can generate the same revenue, even though your team is 20% smaller. And there's a huge difference in these two things, even though it's basically saying the same thing we're going to help you do better, but then one of these messages resonates way more with prospects in a down economy than the other. This and A LOT MORE!  Listen in now and/or read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 9/28 at 6am PST.   ______________________________________________________________________ Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena

This week's show is entitled"Creating a Predictable Pipeline with Special Guest, Cheri Keith" Cheri Keith is Head of Strategy for ON24. I think a lot about making sure, even though I'm no longer in an operational marketing leadership role inside a company, I maintain that edge. I have to make sure I still understand what operational marketers are going through, what the current issues are. I ask Cheri what where her best practices doing that as an analyst and what are some of her best practices for staying sharp.   The best practice for me was really just listening as much as humanly possible ... Ask for feedback really early on. People think you have all the answers, but you won't, so you may as well just go in very early and as part of a research process, whether you're creating a technology report or something that's more model and framework based and say, "I'd love your feedback on this." . And there's lots more all about creating predictable pipeline!  Listen in now or read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 9/21/20 at 6am PST.   Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

This week's show is called "Wanna Be CMO of a B2B Travel Company Right Now?  Here’s How One is Pivoting and Winning" and her name is Wendy White, VP of Global Marketing at Egencia. As a marketing leader, not only in travel, but in B2B travel, this has been an interesting year. I ask Wendy to share a little bit about what it was like mid-March as the you-know-what started hitting the fan and what that was like internally for her.   As business leaders, we're going to have to figure out how to lead through this. I ask Wendy how she helped the team learn how to lead the customer, lead prospects, really be a voice of leadership and thought leadership to help figure out how to get through this together.   ----more---- "...bring your empathy to the fore and start putting yourself in the shoes of those customers. We asked ourselves what message is changing right now? What do clients and prospects need to hear? And we decided for us the best thing we could do was be a source of information and education." We also talk about how resiliency is super important in a leader.  This AND A LOT MORE.  Listen now and/or read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 9/7 at 6am PST.  Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

This week's show, "How Design Thinking Can Help You Sell More" features Ashley Welch, Co-Founder of Somersault Innovation. Ashley starts us out describing her business and tells us what design thinking means as it relates to effective sales teams. Somersault Innovation is a sales enablement firm who has pioneered bringing the tools, techniques, and mindsets from the world of design thinking into the sales environment to help sellers at all levels in the sales organization, and really stay customer centric, stay co-creative with their customers and then accelerate the deal cycle. ----more---- Even though many people haven't heard of it, most people have been a beneficiary of it. Design thinking is an innovation process. I ask Ashley if there are particular organizations better suited for this approach.  Also, are there some were she sees particular red flags or warning signs or signals that this approach would be particularly useful? I think the more complex a sale is the more useful this approach is.  Let's say you're selling something very simple, like water filters and you don't have a whole lot of options here, and it's not that complex in terms of the need, then you don't need to go into this, co-creative mode. You don't need to do deep discovery. Whereas if you're selling a complex, say software system, you really do need to be on the same side of the table as your customer to figure it out together. There's so much unknown. There's so much ambiguity. And that's where I think some of these tools become particularly useful. We talk a little bit about the discovery process in this approach and  how it sometimes differs from the typical list of discovery or qualification questions that a seller might use. This and a LOT MORE!  Listen in now and/or read the transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Monday, 8/31/20 at 6am PDT.  Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline contact Sheena. 

Don't miss this one.  We pack a lot of great information into a short amount of time!  Listen in now or read the transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Monday, 8/24/20 at 6am PST.  Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

This week's episode is entitled "Successful Event Pivots: Best Practices and Lessons from Will Curran"  Will is the Founder and Chief Event Einstein at Endless Events. We talk about what it's looked like the last few months as he's worked with clients to create engaging events online. Will has so much energy and enthusiasm.  I ask him how much of that is a key part of the recipe for success. "...you have to do start with really good content. You can't just come in and say like, "Oh, we'll just create a high energy experience," and not have this thought-provoking, good content, good ideas and things like that as well." ----more---- I think where the last couple of months have shifted, since in-person experiences have dissipated and now we're a hundred percent virtual, is that people are also recognizing that there needs to be production value. I think that when people are now getting so much webinar fatigue and Zoom fatigue that they don't want to sit and watch a square box with someone talking with slides right next to it, they're looking for something high energy, and exciting, and, more importantly, different, I think, than anything.    I also ask Will what are we doing today in a virtual format that he thinks will sustain when we can get back together again... and if there are certain components of great events he thinks are at the top of the list, in terms of, if you nail this, it's more likely to be a top notch event. In other words, what are some of the foundations of great virtual events right now?   Listen in now for this and a lot more and/or read the transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 8/17/20 at 6am PST. to hear Will get super tactical (Yes, start with the strategy, then move into tactics).   _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

This week's episode is entitled "What Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Has to do with Sales, Rollow-Up and Emotional Connections" and our guest is Jeff Shore, president of Shore Consulting.  Jeff has been a sales expert, author, speaker and executive coach for more than three decades.  He's guided executives and sales teams in large and small companies across the globe to embrace their discomforts and grow in ways never thought possible. ----more---- We talk about the new book, Follow Up and Close the Sale: Make Easy (and Effective) Follow-Up Your Winning Habit. And we talk about the work he's doing around customer experience and the law and the entire customer life cycle as well. We don't get a lot of people on the show that can talk about cognitive behavioral therapy. We also talk about his background and experience around research in this area and how it relates to sales. This and a lot more!  Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

In this week's episode ("How to Personalize ABM: A Blueprint for Sales Executives") my guest is Kristina Jaramillo, President at Personal ABM. I ask her to describe her approach and what her firm does. I love the angle they're taking, we don't see it often enough. "We actually personalize everything from profiles, content, messaging, sales communications, because we want to get down to the level of the actual individual. Who is responsible within that account for different things? They're all going to have the end goal of increasing revenue for their company. But a sales rep is going to have a different goal than the SVP of Sales. Or whoever you're targeting, whatever decision making group you're targeting, they're all going to have different goals and we want to make sure to speak to all of them, so you can create that collective buy-in and change why they should be working with you versus maybe a competitor or why they even need to change at all." ----more---- We also talk a little bit about the personal account based approach and how that's different from how a lot of people think about ABM traditionally.  This and a lot more!  Listen now and check out the full transcript and recording on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 7/20/20 at 6am PST. Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.   

This week's episode is entitled "Your most important sales meetings just went virtual. How do you differentiate and still win." Join me as I talk with Tim Riestererwho is the Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions A lot of Tim's talks really center on the idea of conversations. Conversations in marketing, conversations and sales.  I ask Tim to talk a little about the origin of that as a focus area, and why the concept of conversation is so important to effective sales and marketing. "....oftentimes products sound the same, products look the same, product smell the same. And the real winner is the one who can tell the best story, the one who can articulate value." ----more---- The definition of value, and what constitutes value, has a lot of opinions and it can be very abstract. Right? And so, as long as everybody starts to understand that value is what the customer determines it to be, and the primary driver of value is in the mind of the customer, is the contrast between what they're doing today and what you're asking them to do tomorrow. They can't even perceive value if you just talk about your solution, it's features and benefits. There is no value proposition in your solution, even if you try to link it to a customer problem. "The real perception of value is being able to understand their current situation, and the change they need to make, and what that impact will be." Of course we had to also talk about the new book published earlier this year, The Expansion Sale. And it really focuses on not only keeping customers, but growing customers. I think this is a place where, thankfully, I'm seeing a lot more CMOs and organizations invest in not just winning the initial funnel, but really treating the end of the sales funnel as the middle of the revenue bow tie. Tim shares what that means and some of the other ideas that were really important in this new book. Listen in now or read the full transcript on our blog starting Monday, 7/20/20 at 6am PST.   Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions, is dedicated to helping companies improve the conversations they are having with prospects and customers to win more business. A visionary researcher, thought leader, keynote speaker, and practitioner with more than 20 years of experience in marketing and sales management, Riesterer is co-author of four books, including Customer Message Management, Conversations that Win the Complex Sale, The Three Value Conversations, and The Expansion Sale. Sales Pipeline Radio is hosted by Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.  Heinz Marketing is the sponsor of Sales Pipeline Radio.    

This week's episode is entitled "What’s Old is New (Again): Timeless (and Pandemic-Proof) Sales Advice from Joanne Black".  Joanne is the Founder of No More Cold Calling  I can't imagine a time when referrals or referrals and sales, referrals and business has been more important when channels are shrinking, budgets are shrinking. Joanne's been beating this drum for a long, long time and it's been important and prescient that entire time, and I would imagine she's hearing more from companies right now saying, "How do I build that referral culture?" I ask Joanne why she thinks it's coming up more often now and how has her answer changed or evolved over time? ----more---- Companies are really realizing they have to do more than just give lip service to referrals, to say to their sales team, "I'll just go ask for referrals." And they're finally realizing that's not working and realizing everybody in the company knows someone, but this word culture is important. Joanne shares how she was afraid to use it for years. She says, "Well, maybe afraid isn't the right word, but it's because I worked for a consulting firm and they did culture work and it took forever and cost millions of dollars. So, that's not the picture I wanted, but it's really about how do you set a strategy, have goals, have metrics, build skills, have accountability, and make sure referrals become the way people work? And Matt, I found this wonderful definition of culture: Culture is what happens when people aren't looking. Listen in now for this and a lot more.  Read the full transcript starting Mon. 7/13/20 on our blog.   Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.