OnBase: Smashing Sales and Marketing Misalignments

In this episode, we discuss top Data Management Tips and Techniques with Christopher Penn, Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai About Christopher and TrustInsights.ai Christopher is an established expert on analytics, digital marketing, and marketing technology. As a recognized thought leader, author, and keynote speaker, he has helped shape four key fields in the marketing industry. He co-founded TrustInsights,  a Marketing Data and Analytics Consulting in 2017. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “As a “Data detective”, you have to keep an open mind because you don’t know what is going to happen next!” “The serious problem today is that, if you don’t know where your data is or what quality it is in, you will have a fundamental problem. Adding  more data to this is not going to do anything.” “I follow the 6 Cs when it comes to dealing with data mismanagement issues!” “If your data is not in the format for both people and machines to use – there will be problems later on.” “People are thinking of compartmentalizing their functions and data today. They have all these ingredients that they need to optimize. But they need to first understand what the goal is that they want to achieve first.” “The problem with all the tools out there is that they are just tools. You need to have the tools but before the tools, you need to have a plan.” “It’s never a good idea to have technology for technology’s sake.” “Except for the most progressive companies, most B2B marketers are doing the same thing that they did before.” “When you talk about B2B data, things like do you know who your customer is, do you have the right analytics are all important. But companies need to get better when it comes to using all these software to understand their data.” “Companies need to get smarter about bringing in relevant third-party data to augment their efforts.” 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.

John Common discusses key B2B Marketing and Revenue Generation trends with us in this episode.   About John: John is the CEO and founder of Intelligent Demand. Throughout his career spanning over 20 years, he has focused on creating measurable revenue growth, from inside the org chart, as well as a trusted agency partner. About Intelligent Demand: Intelligent Demand is a full service revenue agency that helps clients find, keep and grow relationships with their ideal customer base. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “At Intelligent Demand, we try to be the answer to the ever evolving question: what does it take to grow real revenue and bring your brand to life.” “The master trend right now in the B2B space is Account-based Marketing or Account-based Sales. Though here at ID we like to call it Account-based Revenue.” “I’m seeing a continued rise of the Sales Development function within B2B.” “Obviously, we are seeing a renewed focus on Data that’s driven by Account-based Marketing and also the rise of privacy laws.” “B2B companies have started taking Customer Experience more seriously today.” “A common mistake I still see is people adopting technologies and tools hoping to see magic from them.” “Marketing alone cannot transform performance. Revenue growth is a team sport.” “You need deep cross-functional relationships between teams to ensure best results from any revenue generation strategy.” “Stakeholder alignment is crucial throughout a business journey.” “At the core of any strategy, always remember that not every account is equally valuable to you.” 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.

Sophie Asher,  International Product Marketing Manager at Twilio breakdowns key Product Marketing and Go-to Market trends in B2B with us in this conversation.   About Sophie: Sophie is an enterprise go-to-market specialist and product strategy leader with proven expertise in creating effective enterprise positioning. About Twilio: Twilio is a cloud communication platform that helps build SMS, Voice & Messaging applications on an API built for global scale. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “In Product Marketing today, there are a couple of different broad trends today. But the focus is increasingly shifting on being more customer-centric when driving decisions.” “I think one of the key sources of data is always around the key customer base – what trends you see in terms of HOW customers use your product, what kind of buyers they are, what industry they belong to – that helps to be a starting point when testing various hypothesis down the road.” “Interactions with your customers and keeping a tab on how they are interacting with you across your channels is always crucial.” “The role of Product Marketing Managers could increasingly evolve to becoming more involved in overall business strategy with a focus on creating better use cases and product integrations.” “Some of the biggest challenges in Product Marketing is differentiating your product in a crowded space. Particularly getting customers to believe they need your product over others.” “Product Marketers who have a broad cross-functional experience will be able to bring in better expertise with the changing dynamics.” “Tying back some of the technical benefits of a product to the customer’s benefit besides focusing on how different it is crucial to creating that valuable engagement.” “I think its important to think not only about the immediate users of your product but to also talk about the impact it can have.” “Becoming a trusted thought partner for your customer is important to ensure a good flow of communication.” “Always focus in providing content that is valuable and not always promotional.”  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.

In this episode, we discuss key Growth Marketing trends with Jorge Selva, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at G2 Crowd:   About Jorge: Jorge Selva discusses his journey from the B2C to the B2B domain and shares the similarities between the two that have helped him thrive.  About G2 Crowd: G2 Crowd is one of the world’s leading peer-to-peer review websites that helps compare the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “Its been fun for me to go from B2C to B2B and explore the many similarities between the two in terms of behaviors and trends.” “Communication is a fundamental issue when it comes to key challenges among marketing and sales teams for instance.” “We focus on better ways to build out profiles of our target audience to figure out which are the best personas to target.” “One of the main drivers is figuring out how to speak to your target personas and create content accordingly.” “Tools that provide buyer intent data and tell you who is in market at the moment helps align marketing dollars.” “We use intent data and insights in alot of our nurture sequences to explain some of our benefits and how we stack up against our competitors.” “Any stage of the funnel where you can explain your product better helps move customers across their journey.” “A big first-part to ensuring optimized ROI is always to ensure that every team and system is working the way they should be.” “Keep an open communication with your sales team at all times.” “The main role in Growth Marketing is testing all the time. What worked yesterday may not work today.” 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.

In this episode, our CEO Meetul Shah discusses martech with none other than chiefmartec– Scott Brinker! About Scott and Chiefmartec: Scott is an entrepreneur, technologist, marketer, author and most famously also often referred to as the Father of the Martech Industry, especially because of his martech landscape chart! His popular chief marketing technology blog cheifmartec.com serves as a one-stop-shop for every #martech need.  Top ten takeaways from the episode: “I would have LOVED to end up somewhere in the music industry! My work is actually easy compared to them!” “I look back at the number of companies from 2011 and a large number of them have been acquired. Very clearly, consolidation happens. The natural course is – innovation cycles lead us to consolidation.” “The net number of software companies continues to increase globally. But the same pattern follows in most segments.” “Stuff like Uber didn’t even exist before. But they changed how people thought about transportation! Now transportation-as-a-service is a flooded market! Think about it. Things keep emerging and when something new emerges it makes us all think.” “I don’t know any marketer who says that everything they need they have through their tools and technologies. There is a lot of scope for innovation here.” “Everyone needs something that connects to other areas of the business in order to bridge silos.”  “People want a mix today- the smallest number of tools that at the same time help them beat their competitors! Everyone wants to be a Hero CMO!” “There is a lot happening in martech and marketing for any one company to solve entirely.” “It is crucial to have better foundational platforms.” “As software providers, it is now important to give CMOs the best of both worlds.” 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.

In this episode, Brian Hession, VP of Data Quality and Innovation at TechTarget discusses key Demand Gen and Data Quality trends that will disrupt the B2B Marketplace.   About Brian and TechTarget: Brian was the President & Founder of Oceanos (acquired by TTGT.)  Brian is a thought-leader and known to be an innovator who helps companies improve their demand generation initiatives with the aim of driving maximum revenue from it. He advises teams to ensure an optimal application of data and technology to produce better results. Under his leadership, Oceanos held a market leader position for a decade. Top ten takeaways from the episode: “I spend a lot of time collaborating with multiple teams to ensure everything is optimized.” “The trend today is connecting first-party data to third-party sources to gain a richer view of the customer and the marketplace.” “Sales and Marketing are now better equipped to create robust profiles of their target customer.” “It is always crucial to keep your contact data in good shape.” “Third-party behavioral data can help create maximum value by creating more aggressive messaging.” “More and more Teams should ensure they are helping contributing to Sales productivity.” “In today’s environment it is important to use multiple sources of data to improve decision-making. The breakthrough we are seeing is based on what insights a particular team really needs, they then work backwards to ensure they get those insights from the right data set.” “Connecting better data input to AI-powered messaging helps marketing teams to be more timely and relevant in their messaging.” “Poor contact data will sabotage anyone’s ABM process.” “Teams are moving from a more modelled persona to more relevancy in messaging and campaigns.” 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.

In this episode, we had Kate Bradley Chernis talk about the inspiration behind Lately Inc and the latest social media marketing trends that are prevalent in the B2B and Tech marketing domain.  About Kate and Lately Inc: Kate Bradley Chernis is the Founder & CEO of Lately, an AI-powered marketing dashboard that helps reinvent marketing processes to give individual marketers the power to create and scale smarter and more consistent messaging.  Kate initially created the idea for Lately out of spreadsheets for her then-client, Walmart. Well, not just Walmart but also tens of thousands of local, small business and nonprofit affiliates who were all using her spreadsheet system – because they all had the same problems – lack of coordination, widespread redundancies, no proper visibility and no organization.  Prior to starting Lately, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM.  Top ten takeaways from the episode: 1.”I was a rock and roll DJ in another life!” 2. “It was during a trying time and week that I met some Angel Investors who loved me and my idea and wanted to give me the initial fund to start this!” 3. “What was so interesting with the Walmart project is that what I created for them helped other businesses with the same kind of marketing challenges.” 4. “The spreadsheet system I created became a map for marketers. Because, in a big way, marketers have to do alot of the same thing again and again.” 5. “As social engagement tools go,  tools like Lately literally help curate and scale social media marketing in minutes. The demand for social engagement will always be there because its a channel that can help marketers with revenue. So optimizing social channels enables that effort in many ways.” 6. “While we are an AI-powered company, one of the things we often tell our customers is that our goal with AI is to help marketers with their efforts, but at the same time we tell them that they cannot remove the human element from their writing when marketing anything.”  7. “It is important to retain one-to-one elements of personalization and communication.” 8. “About 80% of what an external agency can do is what a social engagement tool can help small and medium businesses do in half the time.” 9. “Marketers now have to say the same thing differently, in different ways across multiple channels. That’s the biggest challenge today.” 10. “People spend hours writing long form content. But that content needs to be re-purposed and re-shared many times after that, that’s one of the main purposes of social media engagement tools like Lately Inc – to help marketers scale.” 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.

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.

 Jenn Steele, currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Madison Logic discusses her journey as a tech marketer and shares some interesting insights and tips on B2B marketing in this episode of Sunny Side Up.  About Jenn: Jenn is a marketing leader with considerable experience working in all major business units. She has worked in marketing roles across organizations like Amazon, Bizible and HubSpot before starting her stint as CMO at Madison Logic.  About Madison Logic: Madison Logic helps enable sales and marketing teams with relevant buying insights to ensure every buyer interaction becomes more meaningful.  Top ten takeaways from the episode: “There is no such thing as a typical day for most CMOs anymore.” “ABM is shaping up differently depending on region.” “What amuses me is that for enterprise B2B sales, ABM is ancient to some extent. I call it sales with a digital assist.” “I don’t see ABM dying, even before it had a name, it was something we had to do as companies.” “What we are trying to figure out today as an industry is what constitutes ABM.” “Most companies consider their ABM approach to be tiered out.” “There are thousands of ABM platforms out there including Madison Logic, but every one has a different feature set. As a market, we will have to decide on a feature set.” “There’s a thin line between personalization and being creepy, marketers need to address that today.” “According to me, being agile is important in marketing. Marketing can be more agile and impact more accounts at once.” “One of my favorite Sales and Marketing alignment tips- Don’t be afraid to drink with sales!” 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.

Tessa Barron, Senior Director of Brand and Communications at ON24 talks about the latest trends in the B2B and tech marketing industry and the common challenges B2B marketing and sales teams face in their everyday roles.