SBI, The Growth Advisory

Joining us for today’s show is Michael Speranza, a marketing leader who knows how to create an inspiring brand that tells your strategic story. Today’s topic is Brand Strategy and Planning for the purpose of building brand preference. You can follow along by downloading SBI's annual workbook and flip to the Brand Strategy and Planning phase on pages 174 – 179 of the PDF. As the Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Marketing for IPC, Michael Speranza has guided the brand strategy of his company through a major acquisition. IPC is a global B2B provider of technology solutions for the financial service markets. IPC provides communication, networking, and information governance solutions in the FinTech space. After IPC acquired their top competitor, Michael navigated his company through the brand evolution to help make this M&A investment pay off. Michael is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of B2B brand strategy. Listen as Michael demonstrates how to create an inspiring brand that tells your strategic story. This show illustrates brand stewardship responsibilities, and is a must hear interview for anyone acquiring companies as part of their growth strategy. Why this topic today? 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. We begin today's show by outlining a 360-degree view of your customers and prospects. This involves understanding where your brand lives and how your audience might engage with your brand. Michael describes the brand audit process, that helped inform the new brand strategy, with primary research. IPC conducted in-depth interviews with customers, employees, and stakeholders, plus discovery workshops with many constituents, to identify key brand attributes of IPC and the acquired company. The brand audit step in the planning process was essential to understand the current assets and momentum. An ideal brand audit should cover all aspects of your customer and prospect engagement including: visual identity, brand, logo, content, web, print, and advertising, as an end to end program that touched every campaign. For IPC, from start to finish, this was a three month long process. Listen as Michael describes how the B2B brand is lived by 1,400 IPC employees to convey a single, compelling story that inspires customers and prospects. Michael recognizes how important it is to support the sales force and overall employee base when you relaunch a brand.

Joining us for today’s show is Mike Doobay, a Chief Executive Officer who knows a thing or two about creating new markets through product development. Our guest today has grown his company by creating new markets. He will demonstrate how to attract new customers to an existing product, and how to convince current customers to buy more of an existing product. Joining us today is Mike Doobay, the Chief Executive Officer of Affinitiv. Anyone in the automotive industry will know Affinitiv as the leader in helping OEMs and dealers retain customers, build loyalty and drive sales. Affinitiv does this through a combination of predictive analytics, integrated technology, and in-field experts. Listen as Mike demonstrates how to create new markets through the development of new products, how to attract new customers to an existing product and how to convince current customers to buy more of an existing product. Mike is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic that dives deep into the product portion of the corporate strategy. Mike’s leadership is a fascinating story of impressive growth that serves as a solid use-case to demonstrate growth through new products. The benefit to our audience of CEO’s, marketing leaders, sales leaders, and product leaders in the B2B space, is that you should be thinking about all the different ways to bring innovation to your customers to spark revenue growth. Why this topic? Not all revenue growth is equal. Some revenue growth creates more enterprise value than others. Revenue growth that comes from increasing market share for a product does not create much long-term value because competitors can easily retaliate. Revenue growth driven by increasing prices of certain products comes at the expense of the customer, who can retaliate by buying less and seeking substitute products. 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. Listen as Mike explains how the corporate strategy focused Affinitiv as a specialist to be unique and therefore drive impressive growth. Mike is competing against these much larger marketing services firms that are generalist, yet Mike’s team knows the automotive industry better than a generalist because Affinitiv is entirely focused on that industry. The corporate strategy Mike outlines tells his sales and marketing team what markets they will compete in and how they will beat the competition. When thinking about, “How am I going to grow?” you should have a command over your business. What is your market share? How do you segment your market? What’s the spend? Who has the propensity to buy? who are my competitors? What is my competitive differentiation? Mike’s demonstration is a use-case of a CEO who knows what he’s talking about, and you should aspire to be like him if you’re able to answer these key questions for your team.

Today’s guest is a product leader who knows how to set-up the sales team for a successful product launch by developing the right product messaging. A great product alone is not enough for success. The interlock between product, marketing and sales requires collaboration to develop compelling messaging to overcome the biggest competitor for most companies, which is Do Nothing. Overcoming the status quo requires story telling, and today's guest has a launch process that will place you on the right path during pre-launch. Why this topic? Product launches fail to generate revenue when sales people and channel partners are not involved in messaging development during pre-launch preparations. When messaging is developed in isolation it is not compelling enough to get your customers to act. Stories told directly to customers by well-trained sales channels enable customers and prospects to answer “Why change?” and this stimulates latent demand while leading to exceptional revenue growth. Joining us is Toby Williams, SVP, Chief Product and Strategy Officer for Ellucian. Ellucian is the world’s leading provider of software and services for higher education institution, serving more than 2,400 institutions and 18 million students worldwide. Listen as Toby discusses how to create messaging to defeat the status quo. This starts with market problems that the solution is solving and to capture it through the customer lens. Toby is responsible for driving product management and strategy, corporate development, M&A, business development, partnerships and cloud business. In the first segment of the show, Toby provides a detailed review of the product launch process at Ellucian. We discuss ‘Why Change’ and the story required to defeat the status quo. The second segment covers messaging frameworks and ‘Why Change Now?’ Toby describes how to use the client voice and stories to tell the story. Toby and I discuss the power of leveraging the clients voice to deliver how the solution has helped their institution. Not only the buyers, but the users of the solution by positioning the users as heroes has resonated in the market. In the final segment, Toby answers this hypothetical question; If a new company hired you tomorrow with a mandate to launch new products, what would you do, in what order, and why? Toby describes a programmatic approach that creates order. Listen as Toby outlines an action plan in depth that describes the steps to launch a new product. The new benefit is cross-functional organization readiness.

Joining us for today’s show is Eric Janssen, a Chief Revenue Officer who knows how to build a team to make the number. Eric is a success story having served as the sales leader for several successful emerging growth companies. I can't think of a better guest to demonstrate how to build and develop the right team to make your number. Eric has been a long-time consumer of SBI's content and he reached out to me with a quick note thanking me for the show. I was looking for a sales leader guest from an emerging market space to come on the show, so Eric was the perfect guy. Today’s topic is focused on talent and we are going to demonstrate how to attract and retain ‘A’ player talent. This is not a trivial matter since ‘A’ players typically generate five times more revenue than ‘B’ players and 10 times more revenue than ‘C’ players. During our discussion, Eric and I leveraged the annual workbook for our conversation. Flip to the People Plan phase starting on page 285. Helping me with our demonstration is Eric Janseen, a partner and the Chief Revenue Officer for Intellitix. If you have attended a large music festival or sporting event, you have likely experienced Intellitix technology. Events as such as Tomorrowland, Coachella, and the Ryder Cup are powered by Eric’s company. Intellitix makes the guest experience more seamless for over 20 million fans a year by layering ticket-less technology into the event. They are best known for putting your ticket and wallet onto a single wearable, typically a wristband. Eric is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with experience building teams and crushing his number year after year in emerging technology companies. Why this topic? Relying on the heroic efforts of a few eventually catches up with you. When 20% of your sales team produces 80% of the revenue, something has gone wrong. The labor expense associated with the sales team incurred by the company has to be justified or headcount reduction is warranted. Tolerating under-performers and hiring mistakes and very long new hire productivity cycles all lead to missed revenue targets and typically also lead to job loss for the head of sales. Having a great product is table stakes and is not going to sell itself. For an emerging technology company the dependence on talent is high. In the first segment, we discuss Eric's business and particularly the reason why we have Eric on the show today is because he's an owner and leading the sales team of an emerging growth company. The challenges you have in an emerging growth company are very different than the challenges that you may have in a Global 2000. The second segment an overview of how Eric makes a new hire productive. Eric throws them in the field to get them out actually doing the work of helping to put one of these events together. This gives the new seller the context and expertise to speak about what it takes to the target audience. Eric and I discuss how to address poor performance in the final segment of the show. Eric outlines a development plan and how he builds ‘A’ player talent for his company.

Today’s topic is how to make marketing scientific through a marketing operations department. Shift from art to science to prove marketing’s contribution to revenue with scientific fact. If you would like help with making marketing scientific, visit The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. A visit to The Studio increases the probability of making your number because the sessions are built on the proven strength and stability of SBI, the industry leader in B2B sales and marketing. Joining us today is Arnaud Kraajvanger, the Vice President of Marketing Insights and Operations for Genesys. Genesys provides customer experience contact center solutions. More than 10,000 companies in over 100 countries trust the industry’s #1 customer experience platform to orchestrate seamless omnichannel customer journeys. Listen as Arnaud describes how marketing operations is in a unique position with more data than ever to have a significant impact on the business. Listen as Arnaud describes how to measure the effectiveness of the marketing team. Arnaud’s team works with all functions within marketing and develop specific KPI's for each and track the KPI’s throughout the buying cycle. To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the marketing operations phase on pages 248 – 251 of the PDF. Why this topic? Well, data is everywhere, channels are exploding, technology is changing, executives require more detailed reporting and marketing can no longer rely in intuition, and experience is no longer enough. During the show, Arnaud provides a brief overview of how each key area of marketing is tracked. For brand awareness, share of voice is tracked. From a public relations standpoint, social shares are the KPI. For analyst relations, the degree of analyst coverage and ranking compared to the position of the competition. For DemandGen KPI's there is a focus on opportunities pipeline and wins, with an emphasis for us on driving new logo pipeline. Arnaud describes how the marketing operations team is transitioning more to a revenue marketing model where it's less about just the numbers of opportunities, numbers of leads, but having everybody focused on the revenue outcome. What is the dollar value that you're generating in pipeline, open pipeline, and wins? The other DemandGen metric that is more sophisticated is influence of deals. How does marketing influence the win rate through marketing engagement?

I'm excited to introduce a Chief Executive Officer who knows how to direct his sales force to the highest opportunity revenue sources. Executive leaders of every function should prepare to take notes from today's guest who will share how to think through the highest value creation sources of revenue. In the race to make your number, sales leaders will naturally bet on every horse that can deliver a revenue dollar. Your corporate strategy can quickly erode to the easiest revenue dollars to capture, regardless of the long-term value and profitability. That's where the CEO comes in to guide his or her sales leader to the revenue dollars that create the highest value long-term. Today we're going to demonstrate how to create clarity throughout the entire company by getting everyone laser focused on the real drivers of revenue growth. Joining us today is John DiMarco, Chief Executive Officer for Cedar Document Technologies. John and I share the same Alma Mater, Georgia Tech and John is a CEO who came up through the ranks of technology development. What I found fascinating about this interview is the precision with which John breaks down revenue growth to provide clarity to his sales leader. John's Company is a provider of hosted customer communications management services to large enterprises. Cedar serves as a hub to manage all enterprise communications for how an enterprise client talks to its customers and how those customers interact back with those clients. John is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how to create clarity throughout the entire company by getting everyone laser focused on the real drivers of revenue growth. Listen as John and I dive into the into three main types of CEO-driven revenue growth strategies. We address each with examples to identify the real drivers of revenue growth from the CEO seat. John and I discuss the differences between market expansion, market exposure and market share. I list those three in order because market expansion is the quickest way to create enterprise value shareholder wealth inside of your firm. To illustrate this point, this is where the CEO knows the market so well that he or she can place the boat right over the fish. Market expansion is Cedar’s main strategy where John has recognized he’s in a market where there are tail winds and he needs to make the most of the opportunity. The market exposure example market demonstrates how John is listening to the market, seeing a movement to mobile and trying to expose his company to that new source of growth. The final strategy of market share gain doesn’t apply to Cedar since it’s an emerging market. Why this topic? Organizations that have too many objectives and priorities essentially have none. They risk accomplishing nothing of significance. A CEO strategy often does not get executed because the sales, marketing and product leaders are in their silos pursuing what they feel is important. This causes strategic misalignment and results in sub-par revenue growth. T here's a completely different sales and marketing approach required to accomplish each revenue growth strategy. Sales and marketing leaders that don’t know these details are working blind. Enjoy the dialogue of the Cedar use case to identify your growth strategies.

Joining us for today’s show is Biju Baby, a Vice President of Global Sales Operations who knows a thing or two about supporting revenue growth. His company has seen an impressive 54 quarters of sequential revenue growth and Biju has been an instrumental part of the team the last six years. Today’s topic is back office support, how to make your company so easy to buy from and sell for that you win more deals. Biju Baby is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of back office support as the Vice President of Global Sales Operations for Equinix. A public company with revenue of $3.6 billion, Equinix builds and operate data centers for customers to connect with each other. Listen as Biju demonstrates how to be a company that's easy to buy from and a company that's easy to sell for. Why this topic? Taking days to get a pricing decision frustrates customers. Delaying the closing of a deal because of lengthy legal reviews reduces win rates. Paying a sales rep incorrectly, and late, drives up turnover. It is hard enough to grow revenues faster than the industry and competitors. Try to not add to the level of difficulty by being hard to buy from and sell for. We begin the podcast with Biju explaining the three things he recommends to evaluate how easy your company to buy from and sell for. The straight-forward advice from Biju is the starting point for you to evaluate your own company’s needs in this area. Listen as Biju explains how as you gather feedback from the sales force, how to distinguish between the signal and the noise. Listen as Biju provides a use case for how to make a company easy to buy from. This involves pushing the pricing and approval process down into the field with identified thresholds and empowering the team to make those decisions in the field. Biju explains how to hold the field accountable to make sure that the thresholds are not broken. Most companies are not comfortable taking this approach and want to control everything at headquarters. The problem is that it becomes a bandwidth problem and things take too long. Listen as Biju explains how at Equinix they trust the field with such a critical decision, but also making sure that you're following up on a quarterly basis that the thresholds don't get broken. That's a great example of how to push the pricing and approval process out into the field. Biju and I discuss the length of time it takes for an approval internally. Equinix is a global document that spans across 21 countries and operates in a country manager model, yet Biju's team can turnaround most decisions in 24-hours. Think of the advantage that would give your sales team. Listen as Biju and I discuss the steps required to put this in place. Time kills deals, yet we have all have experienced companies that make it difficult for you to award them business. If your company making it difficult to do business with you then it’s impacting your win rate. Worse, ‘A’ Player sales candidates can sniff out companies that are difficult to buy from and sell for resulting in lost talent, and retention problems. Listen to this podcast to act on making your company easy to buy from and sell for. If you would like to spend time with me on the topic of making your company easy to buy from, come see me at The Studio in Dallas. The Studio is SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. Sessions at The Studio are experiential and are designed around the principles of interactive exercises, hands-on innovation, and peer-to-peer collaboration. The Studio is a safe-haven for learning and after just a few days clients leave with confidence and clarity your revenue growth strategies and sales and marketing motions to make your number.

Today’s topic is focused on how to match the capabilities of the executive team to the objectives in the requirements in the corporate strategy. Our guest is Kelley Steven-Waiss, the Chief Human Resource Officer for HERE, the company leading the charge on autonomous driving technology. Kelley is leader who knows how to build an executive team to Make the Number. During our discussion, Kelley and I leverage the annual workbook for our conversation. Turn to the Corporate Strategy section and find the Talent phase on pages 100 – 106 of the PDF workbook. Joining us is Kelley Steven-Waiss, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at HERE Technologies. HERE was formally owned by Nokia and at the end of 2015 broke away as a separate company owned by consortium of automotive OEMs, BMW, Daimler and Audi, plus new investors, Intel, Navinfo and Tencent. Here is an open Location platform company, leading the charge on autonomous driving technology. Kelley will demonstrate how to match the capabilities of the executive team to the objectives in the requirements in the corporate strategy. Why this topic? The revenue growth objective, which is what we're about, is heavily dependent on having superstar executive talent. Field an average team, and you're going to miss the revenue growth goal. At times, this revenue growth strategy calls for a new set of competencies that the existing team might not possess. Sometimes, the competitors have a talent advantage that results in them winning more than they should, so mismatch talent and corporate strategy and suffer from significant execution problems. Listen as Kelley describes how to match the capabilities of executive talent to the objectives and requirements of a corporate strategy. We begin the show discussing what sales and marketing leaders need to be best-in-class thrive in HERE’s innovative industry. Kelley describes that the number one attribute is adaptability. The markets are moving so quickly, so the ability to adapt to different customers and market segments is required. Having high levels of business acumen comes next. Being self-aware to adjust your style based on your customer or even the sales talent underneath you. Finally, consultative selling skills, because today it's about understanding the customer's ecosystem and competitive landscape, and if you cannot connect the dots at a high level, you're not going to be as successful.

Today’s topic is focused on how to transition channel partners from perpetual license to cloud-based offerings. Our guest is Steve Blum, an executive sales leader who knows how to Make the Number with channel partners. What’s unique about today’s guest is that his company, Autodesk, does most their business through partners and has done so from the beginning. Autodesk grows primarily through an indirect go-to-market selling model. I can’t think of a better guest to demonstrate how to work with channel partners as you navigate your way through major shifts in your business model. Joining us in-person in The Studio is Steve Blum, Senior Vice President of World-Wide Sales for Autodesk. Steve has been a sales leader at Autodesk the past fourteen years, with the last seven serving as the head of world-wide sales. Steve will demonstrate how to bring a channel organization along through major transformations in the business model, such as shifts from perpetual license to cloud-based offerings. If you prefer to watch the live interview in high definition video, click here. Autodesk’s channel business represents an astounding 75-80% of the total revenue, with the rest being direct. Steve is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of channel optimization. Steve’s team has a few named account organizations that calls on customers direct, but most his business coming through indirect channels. Why is sales channel optimization important? Selling to customers directly when they want to buy from partners is a surefire way to miss the revenue goal. Selling to customers through partners when they want a direct relationship with your company is equally devastating. And within the direct and indirect channel model, there are multiple sub models to consider. Coverage model decisions have never been this complicated for we live in the omni channel era. Listen as Steve outlines for our audience how to bring your channel partners along with you through major transitions of your business model. In this use-case, from selling perpetual licenses to Cloud solutions, you must think through how that’s going impact your partners. Channel partners, like most human beings, don’t like change. There’s going to be some resistance, but if you can work through it with your partners, you’re creating new revenue streams for them. New value propositions for them. And a new set of services that might make their business more competitive. Watch as Steve and I discuss the short-term and long-term vision for a business predominately driven by channel. As a public company, there are natural pressures from the street. Steve discusses his long-term view he takes to ensuring his partners are successful in a win-win that ultimately best serves the shareholders. One of the most fascinating discussions in my interview with Steve is how he prevents conflict between his direct and indirect channels. This is really built by trust that he has established with the channel and his direct team. Watch as Steve explains how to build trust that will serve as the foundation to navigate your way to making the number with an indirect and direct business model. If you would like to spend some time with me on this subject of channel strategy, come see me in Dallas at The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. A visit to The Studio increases the probability of making your number because the sessions are built on the proven strength and stability of SBI, the industry leader in B2B sales and marketing

Joining us for today’s show is Michael Speranza, a marketing leader who knows how to build brand preference with a strong B2B brand. Today’s topic is Brand Strategy and Planning. On Friday, IPC Systems launched a new brand identity following its acquisition of Etrali Trading Solutions earlier this year. Our guest today shares the use case for the brand strategy that 1400 IPC employees will use to convey a single, compelling story that inspires customers and prospects. Michael is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of B2B brand strategy. As the Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Marketing for IPC, Michael has guided the brand strategy of his company through a major acquisition. IPC is a global B2B provider of technology solutions for the financial service markets. IPC provides communication, networking and information governance solutions in the FinTech space. After IPC acquired their top competitor, Michael navigated his company through the brand evolution to help make this M&A investment pay off. Listen as Michael demonstrates how to create an inspiring brand that tells your strategic story. This show is valuable for every marketing executive with brand stewardship responsibilities, and a must watch episode for anyone acquiring companies as part of their growth strategy. Why this topic today? 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. This brand strategy use case starts with understanding the 360-degree view of your customers and prospects. This involves understanding where your brand lives and how your audience might engage with your brand. Michael describes the brand audit process that helped inform the new brand strategy with primary research. IPC conducted in-depth interviews with customers, employees, and stakeholders, plus discovery workshops with many constituents to identify key brand attributes of IPC and the acquired company. Michael states that; “We identified what we thought were the aspiration elements of the brand, and we made sure that we incorporated that cultural component to embody and create a brand that was going to be embraced by not only the joint set of employees but the joint set of customers that we're bringing together.” The brand audit covered all aspects that you would expect: visual identity, brand, logo, content, web, print, advertising as an end to end program that touched every campaign. From start to finish, this process was three months’ duration. Listen as Michael describes how the B2B brand is lived by the sales force. Michael recognizes how important it is to support the sales force when you relaunch a brand, and how the sales force conveys the brand in every interaction.