Sales Pipeline Radio

Guest host, Robert Pease,talks about predictable pipeline. Some of the point covered include: Have you built the marketing plan around the revenue plan? We really need to accelerate. Basically we need more customers. Someone who comes to your website and downloads a white paper, that's a content lead. That's not remotely sales qualified. If you don't know who you're selling to, you don't know that there's a market or that there's a need in the market for what you sell, that's going to wound you.  

  Our guest today is Joe Chernov. He's now the Chief Marketing Officer at @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media."  Scorecard - even though we're not supposed to keep score:  16 articles after spending 2 years developing a product and writing up the release. An infographic got 800 articles. Very eye-opening. Joe says, "Content marketing is what happens when a marketing department shifts its thinking from knowing that the company that signs their paychecks needs to shift to the customer signs the paycheck." That shift in mindset turned collateral into an ebook, a self-serving whitepaper into a more valuable, lengthy piece of content.     Point: The opportunity to leverage the correct content through the active sales process:   Best content ideas come from your sales people. Conversations with sales will be the source of the best ideas.  Example: They publish a issue of their "blog" once a month that includes a recap of 4-5 articles on similar content. Each month has a new theme which helps to focus the articles on that topic.    He's talking about a sales team creating an editorial calendar. You heard Matt right.   Point: Personas as a driving force for effective content.   Personas help reduce the size of your universe so that as a writer or content creator, your writing universe is smaller which helps guide the writing and allow it to be less daunting.  But, he cautions against being way too specific with a persona. "Susie Seller" is just a role in an organization. We don't need to know which college she attended or coffee brand she prefers, unless you are selling coffee.   People have a hard time comparing their content metrics to their business metrics.   The very best way to shine a light on the value of your content is to look at lead quality. Your lead or transactional content success could be measured by downloads, subscribers. These are higher value than typical leads.  You want to know did they close? Did they move deeper into the funnel than other sources? Lead Quality tops the list for this comparison and measurment.   Favorite KISS song and why: Deuce. Gene Simmons wrote it on a bus. It's about absolutely nothing.    -----------------------     Even though this is a replay, it's timely as it mentions the upcoming Dreamforce. Matt will be presenting 5 minute walk from Moscone. Take a break:     You Can’t Buy a Beer With a Hashtag: How to Translate #ABM Into Execution, Pipeline & Closed Deals - Matt Heinz Champion your way through Dreamforce –visit the B2B Champions Club! Need to step away from all the noise at Dreamforce? Look no further. Come to the B2B Champions Club – just a 5 minute walk from Moscone Center. Hear industry leading speakers as well as relax, recharge and network. Sign up to reserve your spot! Stop by anytime throughout the week for: 20+ sessions by top B2B Sales and Marketing Leaders Networking alongside industry leading peers during breakfast, lunch, and happy hours Live streaming of Marc Benioff keynote Register for the #B2BChampionsClub today!

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.