Sales Pipeline Radio

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.

This week's episode is entitled "You’re Hired, Just in Time for a Pandemic! a lively Q & A with Chorus.ai CEO Jim Benton". Jim was new to Chorus when the pandemic hit!  Jim has a front row seat in terms of seeing how conversations have changed.  I ask him what prospects are talking about and how sales teams are pivoting some of their messages as well.  We talk about what he has seen by mining their own data and by listening to those changes and what they're finding about the way sales teams have really pivoted in this time. ----more---- Surprising to some, connect rates are at least holding steady, if not going up.  Prospects are more open to talking to sales reps, especially those who have shown they can provide some value.  It'll be interesting to see if that continues as we get into more back-to-the office or more of a hybrid work-from-home-work-from-the-office, wherever we are mode. Jim shares some of the data that supports this and how that can give some optimism to sales teams. This and a lot more!  Read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 6/29/20 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 called "Brand Management in Uncertain Times".  Our guest, Karen Leland, is the President at Sterling Marketing Group. Listen now for a lot of really great advice on brand framework, brand development, and even care and feeding of your brand, whether it's your personal brand, your team brand, your corporate brand. A lot of what we're talking about today is in her book, The Brand Mapping Strategy.  Check it out, for sure. We talk about building stronger personal, business, and team brands. I ask Karen to talk about those and how those are different and why it's important to differentiate between them. Everyone has a personal brand and in the world we're in today, I mean, think about it, there are eyeballs than ever looking at people online. I mean, especially, with where we are now. When we're working with teams to build better alignment between sales and marketing teams, we're very clear with people upfront that the cultural impact, the cultural requirements for change are critical.  We have to be able to clarify very articulately and in language, for ourselves and for other people, what exactly is our brand.  And my sense is, there's a level of regular disciplined, care and maintenance that goes along with this. I ask Karen, "What does that typically look like?" "What are the ways that people, day to day, week to week, need to think about managing their brand?" This and a lot more!  Read the full transcript on our blog starting Monday, 6/22/20 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 "Reinventing Events and Social Hackathons: Innovative Ideas with Corey McCarthy".  Corey is the CMO at Socia. I was so impressed with my recent experience at EventHack 2020.  A must see (watch it on demand) "Hacking the Future of Virtual Events". We had a great conversation about Corey's role and what Socio is, and what they had to face head on (with great success) just a couple of months ago with the onset of the pandemic. I ask her "What were some of the leadership lessons? I think that one of the key things that I've been trying to lean into is trust your gut. I think it's easy to overthink things. And I think that one of the first things that I realized is that there were no rules anymore. Anything that you thought you knew, just throw it out the window. And so we spent a lot of time trying to tap into that authenticity and being completely empathetic with our audience in a time that, they didn't even know what to do..... Transparency is the biggest thing because what I found in my experiences, ambiguity is a motivation killer. We also discuss lessons for managing a remote team.  And so much more. And as I do for many of my guests-- I ask "What's something you miss you can't wait to do again. And what's something you don't miss that will no longer be part of your new normal moving forward? Great answers. Listen in now or read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 6/8/20 at 6am PST.  

This week's episode is entitled "What’s your Noble Sales Purpose? Best Practices from Lisa McLeod".  Lisa is the founder of McLeod & More as well as the Author of Selling with Noble Purpose. We have vision and mission. We have objectives and sales. We know what we want to get done, sometimes we happen to think about what the prospect wants out of this as well, but that's different than having a noble selling purpose. Noble sales purpose-- what is it and why is it so important? When you have this clarity of purpose, it gives you a sight line into your customers. It creates urgency and it also makes you a lot more resilient because if your whole self esteem and self confidence was built on hitting your number, you're having a big problem right now. The way you find your own unique noble sales purpose is by answering three really critical questions. How do you make a difference? (How do you improve life for customers?) What impact do you have on customers? (How do you do it differently than your competition?) On your best day, what do you love about your job? And those three questions seem simple, but the answers to them are actually rather profound. And those become the story of your company. And it's a much more compelling story for a sales team and for customers, than we provide superior products and services. Like no one cares about that, at least not now. So much good stuff... Listen in now or read the full transcript on our blog starting Mon. 6/1/20 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 "Selling with Empathy and Integrity (Right Now and Always)" and we are pleased to have as our guest, Mike Schultz, President of RAIN Group and author of multiple best-selling books. His new book coming July 2020, Virtual Selling, is available for pre-order, along with other books, Rainmaking Conversations, Insight Selling. Folks, do yourself a favor, go to the website for tons of resources, research, webinars, blog posts. These guys do a great job when it comes to content. I ask Mike "What are you seeing from organizations that have been traditionally in person sellers?"   Quite frankly, the value prop you bring isn't necessarily different just because you're not in person. Because you can't see someone at a trade show doesn't mean you can't still talk to them. Mike shares five things that are really different now when it comes to virtual selling. Managing yourself Managing meetings How you set up and build relationships How you get people to make decisions and how you get them to choose you How you actually manage a team that is completely distributed  Of course in light of current times, we also talk about whether or not this pandemic will really permanently change anything.  Listen in now and/or read the transcript on our blog starting Mon. 5/25/20 6am PST. 

This week's episode is entitled "More Sleep, More Sales: The Direct, Science-based Connection Between Sleep and Revenue".  Our guest is Jeff Kahn is CEO and Co-Founder of RISE. In this current world of uncertainty, and stress, and work from home, and homeschooling from home, and all this crazy stuff, getting a better night's sleep is crazy important. Jeff has been at Rise Science now for over six years. I ask him why sleep is such a passion and why he created a business around this. It was just the simple fact for us that sleep affects, as far as I can tell, every measurable thing that we do know about human functioning, sleep has an effect on that measure. So to think about something that impacts everything that you do, impacts how long you live, and then impacts billions of people, that, it's almost unheard of. There really is nothing else that really impacts people at that scale. Right now, people are working harder. The boundaries between work and home have really kind of evaporated as we're working from home right now. Jeff gives us some examples of the impact and the correlation between good sleep and productivity, and why that's even more important right now.  Listen in to hear his answer to the question "Can you make up sleep debt?" We talk about the science of sleep. We talk about precisely how getting more sleep can help you get more sales.  Jeff also tells us how the app works. Check them out, risescience.com. Go to your favorite app store and look for Rise: Track Sleep. They have generously made the app available for free right now to help folks sort of get through this current craziness. ______________________________________________________________________________ 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.

We know when we hire well we succeed and when we hire poorly we fail.  Dan Fantasia talks about the hiring environment and hiring so managers succeed.  This episode is for Sales Managers and anyone trying to hire well.  On this episode, I talk to Dan Fantasia, President & CEO of Treeline one of the largest sales search firms in the country. I wanted to have him on to talk specifically about recruiting and the hiring market for B2B salespeople.  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 "Marketing’s Leadership Moment: Pivots and more with Kevin Marasco" Kevin is the CEO of Zenefits.  Kevin walks me through the many changes and pivots they have made in recent months.  It's a lot of change-- changing how they communicate with customers, changing their content strategy.  I ask him to talk about managing his team through all of this and as a marketing leader, how does he manage his team through it successfully?   "I think it starts with empathy and understanding the individual and where they are, and even your teams and where they are."  This and a lot more!  Listen now or read the transcript on our blog starting Mon. 5/11/20.