SBI, The Growth Advisory

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.

Our guest today is Gabe Larson, the VP of InsideSales Labs for InsideSales.com. Having spent five years as the VP of Inside Sales, Gabe provides a behind-the-scenes look at building and operating one of the best sales development rep teams that we've ever had the benefit of examining. InsideSales.com has experienced tremendous growth and the Sales Development Representative has played a significant role by filling the funnel with quality opportunities. Listen as Gabe and I demonstrate how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities that will drive revenue growth for your company. If you prefer to watch a HD Video of the interview, click here. So why this topic? Marketing is going to contribute to about 30% of the pipeline, which means the sales needs to generate the remaining 70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. So, lead quality and lead to opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep. Gabe reveals, “Prospecting has become an interesting concept, especially in the tech space. How do you build that go to market strategy when it comes to structure? We've broken it down into three key areas: small business, medium business, and enterprise business. But to facilitate a bigger pipeline, we jumped on the train, and now have, what I consider to be one of the biggest innovations in sales in the last decade, and that is that sales development team.” We begin with Gabe proving a sense of place by outlining the InsideSales.com sales organization and the various roles involved in prospecting for new customers. We then dive into the business case for the investment in building the Sales Development team of SDRs. In the middle segment of the show Gabe describes the prospecting process, the steps of engagement and how to make it easy to execute with technology. We wrap up this segment by discussing the marketing support required to empower the SDR team, and how the SDR team support the marketing efforts to drive your buyers to your content and events. The SDR career track is a hotly debated topic among sales leadership, and we discuss the career opportunities the SDR role provides for the sales force. Gabe explains: "There is a career track, and that's the great thing about stratification. You can come in as a mid-market SDR and move into an inbound rep, hone your skill, get the practice, and then move into that enterprise role. That's sometimes a year, a couple of years, but at that point, you're a pretty good prospector. Then if you want to jump into the closer role, you have the SMB track, the mid-market and enterprise. Very rarely do we push people obviously, from sales development into enterprise. But it was fantastic to move them into a mid-market or to an SMB type of role." We summarize the show by describing the top metrics that indicate success and/or failure of the prospecting process. Make sure to take the time to listen to the full postcast. The level of execution that Gabe describes will have sales leaders taking notes on how to execute and run a high performance SDR team.

Joining us for today’s show is Walt Megura, Vice President of Emerging Industry Segments and Channels for Ericcson. Walt is here to share his experience in creating new beachheads in verticals that provide future long-term growth to Ericsson. Today we are going to demonstrate how to ensure you have the right sales strategy and talent to enter new markets. Why is this an important topic? To grow revenue, companies are moving into adjacent spaces. Assumptions made during the planning process make or break the success of the entry into new markets. The selling motion that has worked so beautifully for you in other markets may or may not work in new markets. In this first segment we discuss how to ensure you have the right sales strategy and talent to enter new markets. To begin, Walt shares an overview of the business challenges faced as Ericcson sought to enter new markets. For each new market, Walt describes how you determine the value of your solution to the market. In other words, how did you validate that the ambition to enter the new market is supported by the capabilities of your solution? Walt then describes the strategies to enter new markets and outlines the different types of strategies. Did you have an effectiveness (focus on penetration of the market with land & expand), or an efficiency strategy (profitable business)? In the second segment we discuss how to assess sales talent and what is required for success in each of the markets you want to enter. How were the sales hiring profiles different that the proven profile of the core business? How do you evaluate existing sales talent, who has been successful in other markets for the new markets? We wrap up the show by describing the points of differentiation to look for in each new market and how these factors impact the sales strategy. The variance in sales cycles and buying dynamics will influence how you structure your sales force and the strategy you deploy. In summary, Walt's interview provides a valuable context to help you avoid the trap of simply applying a proven approach from your core markets. Increase your probability of success by matching your sales strategy and talent to the new market. To evaluate your sales strategy for the new market, consider leveraging an interactive calculator that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate your Sales Strategy against SBI’s emerging best practices.

Our guest today is Tiffany Nels, the Chief Marketing Officer for Lifesize. With 20 years of Tech B2B marketing experience, Tiffany is one of the top B2B revenue growth marketers. Tiffany played a major role in the successful demand generation efforts at Solar Winds and has the right blend of strategy and execution that B2B companies need for success. Many B2B marketers have over-rotated to demand generation tactics without enough emphasis on brand. Tiffany is going to make the case for why branding and demand generation are not parallel paths, but rather should be intertwined to give you the highest probability of making your number. Tiffany is going to demonstrate how to create an inspiring brand that tells your strategic story through Brand Strategy and Planning. Why this topic? Your competitors are making the same claims and promises as you. They are even using the same words. Brands that are built on “who you are” and “what you do” do not result in above average revenue growth. Your brand impacts revenue growth when it gets activated by the sales force and becomes uniquely relevant to your customer and prospects. Most buyers are researching and building a consideration set without speaking with the sellers. Watch as Tiffany describes her company's brand approach. Listen closely as she articulates a brand that has a crisp emotional connection to the audience. Tiffany describes the process and steps to develop the brand story. Tiffany shares, "The art of storytelling is what enables brands to grow and win by setting themselves apart. When you develop that discipline and integrate all the way through the funnel to the customer experience, then you have an incredibly sticky experience."

Did you set the quotas right to drive revenue growth? The purpose of today's show is to demonstrate how to link the company objectives to sales targets through quota setting. Leverage this use-case to evaluate how you set your quotas. John has a proven record of accomplishment of increasing profitable recurring revenues faster than his industry and his competitors in a crowded SaaS market. Our guest today is John Young, the SVP of Global Sales at NetFortris. vJohn is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with proven experience in quota setting to guide his sales team’s revenue attainment. Watch as John demonstrates how to link the company objectives to sales rep targets through quota setting. Why this topic? A company’s revenue goal needs to be intelligently allocated to divisions, regions, districts, territories, and sales reps. Unfortunately, it rarely is. Quota attainment, a metric tracked by most sales teams, often lies to executives. Reps who make quota do so because their quota expectation was based on the potential of a sales territory. Reps who miss quota do so because their quota expectation was not based on the potential of the assigned sales territory. In the first segment of the program John shares the process for quota setting, and how to link the company objectives to the individual sale rep revenue goals. The peanut butter spread approach is replaced with an intelligently allocated goal setting to achieve the company’s revenue goals across the sales team. Listen as John describes (10:53) the qualitative and quantitative inputs required to accurately assign quotas. John explains how to intelligently prioritize based on spend potential and a propensity to buy formulas play into your quota setting. We wrap up the show (18:32) by discussing how to gain buy-in internally with the sales reps and at the executive level for the quota plan. This involves also having a clear workload capacity model built indicating how many live deals, accounts, and prospects a sales rep can handle.

Joining us for today’s show is Jeff Harris, the Chief Business Development Officer for Millar. Today we are going to demonstrate how to drive revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down. Why is this an important topic? Getting an increase in sales head count is difficult. The expense cops expect all the current sales reps to be at quota before they agree to add any new heads. And when new sales people are hired there is little patience from the executive team members, who want each to generate revenue as quickly as possible. The sales enablement function exists to onboard new sales hires and to drive revenue per sales head up. Neglect sales enablement and forgo adding head count in the future. Our expert contributor is Jeff Harris, the Chief Business Development Officer for Millar, a medical device company. What makes today’s guest incredibly unique among sales leaders, is Jeff’s background as a former Chief Learning Officer. In the first segment we dive into the ideal the onboarding program for new hires. Jeff describes must-have elements of an onboarding program to quickly ramp new reps to full productivity. Jeff outlines in the second segment how to enable the sales field with tools such as use-cases and battle cards. The onboarding training walks through the essential elements required to enable new reps. These include items such as positioning statements, ideal customer profiles, marketing tools, and client references. Do you place them in a reps hands with the proper training? Driving accountability of your new hires requires a thoughtful certification program. You are investing in them, they need to reciprocate. What gets inspected gets retained, and Jeff describes the sales readiness program. The final segment of the show describes the design and delivery of an onboarding program. This includes your learning delivery process (blended learning, coaching, role playing, classroom, online) and curriculum design.