SBI, The Growth Advisory

On this episode of SBI TV, Matt and Marc Osofsky, CEO of Aberdeen, demonstrate the importance of Market Intelligence.

The buyer is changing, and the sales channels we go to market with must do the same. Buyers are more comfortable than ever purchasing virtually. Inside Sales organizations are handling larger deals than ever before. Today Mike Huseman is here to share his experience leveraging Inside Sales to virtually drive profitable growth.

Joe Vitalone, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Razberi Technologies, demonstrates how to develop and execute a sales strategy at scale through channel partners.

Chief Marketing Officer for Caliber Collision, Greg Clark, demonstrates customer relationship management.

Our guest on SBI TV is Robin Saitz, the Chief Marketing Officer at Avecto. Robin is a transformational marketing executive who knows how to get off to a quick start in a new role. In today's show we demonstrate how to get off to a fast start in a CMO's first 90 days. If you prefer to watch a video of the interview, click here. Getting off to a fast start actually starts in the interview process. Robin interviews with the end in mind, and through the interview process she learns a great deal about the company and team. She dove deep into learning about Avecto, a cybersecurity software company that provides privileged management and application control solutions. Robin states, "I think the interview process is actually sort of like that pre-first day. It's not really counted in the first 90 days, but the interview process I think is a core part of preparing for those first 90 days. So, I like to say that I was interviewing the company as much as they were interviewing me, and it wasn't just to make the decision to join, but also, to help answer ... to get answers to questions that I had that would make my first day and the first month go well. So I insisted on meeting with a lot of people in this process, because it was a big decision for me, and it was a big decision for them." Once Robin accepted the role as CMO, she prepared for her first day and how she planned out her first 90-days before the start date. Listen as Robin describes her preparation steps. Matt summarizes Robin's first 90 days, "she articulates how she broke down short-term first 90-day initiatives to put points on the board along with more longer-term initiatives that needed to get done. Robin articulate how she broke down short-term first 90-day initiatives, kind of putting points on the board as we like to say, with more longer-term initiatives that needed to get done. Building that content strategy. Knowing it was both people and resources. Recognizing that, but willing to live with not just doing something haphazard out of the first 90 days to check a box, being thoughtful." Robin describes how to assess the marketing team and shares: "So whenever a CMO or any new leader joins a company, I think there's probably a healthy amount of skepticism, nervousness and excitement. It's like all of that. So, kind of have to like knock down the nervousness and skepticism. And so, I firmly believe it's important to understand the individual career objectives and the job satisfaction of each team member. So that's sort of like the first set of questions that I tried to hit on with my team, and I met with all of them individually. And then I also tried to understand ... I collected feedback from their peers, from folks inside marketing, folks outside of marketing." "I also assess their work output, their responsiveness, and then to the extent, metrics were available. I would look at metrics. Then the other thing that we use that we're testing, we haven't adopted it broadly at Avecto, but I used at my previous company is the Predictive Index for behavioral assessments. I said, "Hey, I'd love to pilot it with the marketing organization," and they were very cooperative with that. So everybody's taken the PI. We have an understanding of who's got a strong process orientation, who's got a high sense of urgency, who's very dominant, and that I think will help the whole organization function better."

Today we are going to demonstrate how to Go-to-Market with a new product. We will cover the topics of sufficiently covering your markets, selecting and optimizing your sales channels, and finally, pricing and packaging your products correctly. If you prefer to watch the interview in HD video on SBI TV, click here. Why are these such important topics? Traditional routes to market are being replaced with innovative ways to reach customers. So, evaluating whether you have the right channels in place for a new product launch is vital for driving revenue growth. Revenue growth driven by products that create new markets, attract new customers, and convince customers to buy more is the most valuable type of revenue growth. Download the full interview transcript in a MS Word document here. The first segment will seek to answer the question: How do you evaluate whether you have the right channels in place for a new product launch? Christopher provides examples of when he launched a new product and added new channels, and when he used an innovative route to market that gave him an advantage and resulted in a substantial revenue lift. Christopher outlines, in the second segment, how to package your new products to differentiate yourself from the competition. Christopher goes on to advise the audience on how to identify and validate the true points of differentiation in your product, and how to bring that product differentiation to life. The final segment of the show describes how to avoid these pricing mistakes when launching a new product. Price your products in a way that does not scale with customer growth and this will result in revenue leakage. Price your products in a way that is difficult for your sales channels to explain the change to your customers and watch your sales steadily decline. Christopher details his approach to determining the right pricing strategy for a product launch, pricing at different levels to different customer segments, and equipping the sales force with value-based messaging and negotiation strategies to defend the price point.

Our guest on SBI TV is Dan Levinschi, the Head of Marketing for PandaDoc. Dan is a revenue generating marketer who knows how to quickly transition from marketing strategy to execution. Dan and I discuss how to move from marketing strategy to execution. Dan describes his process for developing a marketing strategy, and how he interlocks the company’s corporate strategy, product strategy, and sales strategy with his own. Dan also shares his rollout strategy and how he presents it to the marketing team to ensure that each person understands the overall strategy, their role, and how their execution fits into the overall strategy. To follow along, leverage SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018 PDF Workbook and turn to the Marketing Strategy section starting on pages 236. To download the full transcript in a word document, click here. In today’s captivating show, Dan shares his method for transitioning from the planning phase to the execution phase of the marketing strategy, specifically how to ensure that the right KPI’s closed loop reporting is built into each new activity. Turn to the 13-minute mark of the video to watch Dan discuss how a marketing leader validates that progress is being made on major initiatives without micromanaging the team. Matt and Dan discuss how precisely Dan makes this happen at PandaDoc: “It is very important for me personally knowing what everyone on the team is doing without being too invasive. The number one thing that you need to have is a playbook for how your department functions. If people don’t understand how your department functions, it doesn’t matter whether they’re on your team or on a separate department, you’ll always run into the problem of people not knowing what you do essentially. You also have to build an internal Wiki page with all things marketing, just for internal for the company. Then you need to have a project management system in place. If you’re a startup on a budget, you can use something like Trello. Another thing you have to focus on are the core problems and helping your team to understand the impact of their work. Some people just go to work for a paycheck and do the minimum necessary. If they understand very well what the impact on the work is, they’ll be more motivated to work diligently. I find that when people are motivated they don’t need strict management, you can give them a lot of responsibilities and freedom and they’ll spend their time on the right things. Dan Levinschi shares his advice on encouraging the marketing team while also instilling the team with a sense of accountability. “The way we normally work is to hold open forums. I think that the best ideas are born when you have a number of viewpoints in the same room. What we do is, whenever there’s an argument about whether we should continue a project or not, the results are not there, the real question I’m asking is: “What is the immediate impact on business short term and long term?” If the impact is minimal, which you can generally quantify through specific metrics, it all comes down to revenue. Then it’s a simple argument for me to win. For example, if the impact is short term but in long term this doesn’t make any sense, maybe we should kill the project and reiterate. To summarize, I’m a performance marketer, so I believe in numbers. If you cannot prove it to me in numbers, then the argument generally ends.” Having a solid strategy in place sets a company and a department up for success. Understanding and utilizing marketing metrics in your strategic process can make the difference between success and failure. Skip to the 20-minute mark of the video to watch Dan describes how he establishes accountability with his marketing team, how he manages individual contributors, how he reports progress to the CEO, and how he measures the success of his team’s strategy.

Joining us for today’s show is Hassane El-Khoury, the CEO of Cypress, the leader of the semiconductor industry. Hassane’s mission is to establish Cypress as the global supplier of choice for innovative companies in high-growth markets. Cypress is leading the industry in growth after making the shift from commodity products to high value sales efforts. This has made it possible to focus on the higher value offerings in the Cypress product portfolio. Today we are going to demonstrate how to define which markets you will, and will not, compete in. Why is this an important topic? Being in fast-growing markets is the largest driver of revenue growth. Least important is market share growth. Yet, many executive teams tend to focus most of their attention on gaining share in their existing markets. While it is necessary to maintain, and sometimes increase, market share, changing your company’s exposure to growing and shrinking market segments should be a major focus. The first segment will seek to answer the question: How have you prioritized high-growth markets? Hassane provides an overview to validate the claim that exposing your company to rapidly developing markets is the easiest way of growing with the highest probability of success. In the second segment, Hassane outlines what traditional routes to market exist in his addressable markets, as well as innovative routes that disrupt those markets and his company’s competitors. Hassane also covers which channels he uses to target buyers, for each market segment (direct field sales, inside sales, global account management, key account management, VAR, systems integrator, e-commerce, phone, etc.). The final segment of the show describes the different areas market growth can come from, such as market expansion or taking share from your competitors. Hassane goes on to describe the current demand drivers of his company’s addressable markets.

Our guest on SBI TV is Ryan Leavitt, the Chief Revenue Officer for LearnCore. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur who knows how to drive revenue growth which is the lifeblood of an emerging business. I can’t think of a better guest than Ryan to share best practices in sales prospecting to fill the funnel. Ryan and I discuss how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities. Ryan shares his knowledge of lead production, specifically what percent of leads marketing produces versus what the sales team needs to produce on their own. And how prospecting and technology platforms are used to support prospecting efforts and produce sales leads. This is a fascinating show where Ryan shares his prospecting methodology, lead cycle length, and his lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, in comparison to his competitors. Turn to the 11-minute mark of the video to watch how Ryan helps his sellers facilitate buyer investigation of their problems early in their purchasing process. Matt and Ryan discuss how precisely Mike’s team makes this happen at LearnCore: “Prospecting is all about discipline and setting goals. Your prospecting methodology won't matter if the team doesn’t put in the effort. It’ s a volume game, in which discipline is required for success. The biggest challenge of prospecting is finding the people that are going to put in that effort and are going to focus on it and be disciplined about it. What we do to find potential buyers early in the buying process on an outbound effort, is to look at queues that are common with our current clients and opportunities. And so, whether that's industries, whether that's shifting roles, whether that's mergers and acquisitions, or new product launches, those are all great ways to find the right buyers. The key question you need to answer is, “How are you going to get your 2,000 sales reps across the world to communicate the same message?” Ryan Leavitt shares his advice on thinking through marketing productivity from the view of a Chief Revenue Officer: “So, we try to look at productivity on a granular level. Sales cycle metrics are much more important when we start to dig into the industry, the lead source, and the size of decline in general. Because the sales cycles for inbound deals are going to be much shorter than the sales cycles for outbound bills. There's a reason that a potential buyer is searching there. They're educated and they're in a buying process. We need to make sure that our data is apples to apples. So, yes, sales cycle is very important, but we can't compare the sale cycle of a 500-person inbound company to a 500-person outbound company, or a 200-person company compared to a 20,000-person company. They're drastically different, but they came from the exact same lead source. So, we break it down into industry and company size, and from there we could start to optimize and look at the full picture. We look at lead conversion rates, opportunity conversion rates, sales cycle, average deal size, etc. After a period of time, we look at the success of the clients and bring it all the way back to how they came into the funnel to begin with.” Marketing is going to contribute ~30% of the pipeline, which means sales needs to generate ~70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. Lead quality and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep. Skip to the 24-minute mark of the video to watch Ryan describe what competencies he looks for in a new sales rep candidate, and how he gets the new sales reps from day one to full productivity.

Joining us for today’s show is Jennifer Bakunas, the Senior Vice President of Americas Sales for Monotype. Jennifer has a wealth of experience, from spinning up successful start-ups to running enterprise sales teams. She took over the sales leadership role at Monotype last year, and we join her at the end of one year to discuss her successful transformation of the 100-plus person sales force. Today we are going to demonstrate how a head of sales transforms a selling team to hit their growth objectives. Why is this topic so important? The honeymoon for a head of sales ends quickly. Successful SVP’s of Sales have one key thing in common. They get off to fast start with a successful transformation that starts bearing fruit in year one. In the first segment of the podcast, Jennifer seeks to answer the questions: As a new head of sales, how do you approach assessing your sales leadership talent? More specifically: How do you assess talent at the individual rep level? "How I approach talent assessment when I come to a new business, is to assess who you have, and then where the gaps are, and who you need to add. I think the best way to do that is to just dig in, sit down, and meet one-by-one with every single individual on the sales team. You get to know them. You get to know their background. You get feedback on what they feel like the performance conditions are. What's working. What's not. And then you compare that to the results, and do a stack ranking of the team, because they've all likely existed at that point under the same performance conditions." Jennifer goes on to provide an overview of her account segmentation scheme, go-to-market strategy, sales process, buyer personas, and assessment of the performance conditions of the sales force. We talk through the transformation initiatives Jennifer put into place to lay the foundation for success and how she made sure the new initiatives were adopted. Jennifer outlines in the second segment how to successfully communicate with the sales team, as the new head of sales, to keep them informed and focused on the right things. We discuss how to approach segmenting your accounts to focus on the accounts that can produce the highest revenue yield in the shortest amount of time. Next we cover the topic of ales organization design, including type of reps you need, the best organizational chart, and the number of heads. The final segment of the show describes how elite sales leaders insert themselves into pricing strategy. Jennifer describes how to approach assessing your pricing strategy and common trouble spots to look for. She specifically outlines a proven roll out strategy for your newest pricing initiative.