SBI, The Growth Advisory

Today’s show will demonstrate how to make marketing scientific through the use of a marketing operations department. 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. You’ll find a worksheet approach where you can start to analyze your team. 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. 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.

Today’s show will demonstrate how to generate enough leads for the sales team to exceed their revenue objectives. To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to pages 218 - 226 of the PDF to review the Lead Generation phase of the workbook. Joining us today is Chief Marketing Officer Katherine Calvert. Katherine provided leads to the sales team at Advent Software, a B2B technology company based in financial services. Advent was acquired at a premium of five times revenue, and Katherine’s role as CMO was instrumental in this success story. Katherine is the perfect CMO to demonstrate how to generate enough leads for the sales team to exceed their revenue objectives. Listen as Katherine level sets with B2B executive leaders on whether marketing is a cost center or a revenue generator? CMO’s are striving to prove marketing’s contribution to revenue is primary goal and Katherine has the right formula. Traditionally marketing has been viewed as a cost center. Shifting to a revenue generator starts with tracking the sourcing, support, and generation of company revenue. Establishing marketing as a revenue generator required Katherine to elevate the value marketing delivered to the sales organization and ultimately the company. She describes looking more deliberately at the funnel from top to bottom and where our contributions touched. Everything from total number of engagements, all the way down to the percentage of revenue that closed that was attributed to opportunities discovered by marketing. This approach established credibility with sales and made possible a partnership with sales, every quarter. Why this topic? Businesses that generate a lot of revenue from a lot of accounts need a constant stream of new leads entering the funnel. If Sales is generating leads, they are not closing deals. Marketing needs to feed the sales teams with qualified leads and get them focused on running effective sales campaigns. Failure to fill the sales team’s funnel will result in below average revenue growth. Listen as Katherine demonstrates how to generate enough leads for the sales team to exceed their revenue objectives by answering the following questions: - Rule of thumb- what % of leads a company needs to make its number should come from marketing? - What percentage of a marketing budget should be dedicated to lead gen? - How can a marketer learn the trigger events their buyer experience that put them in the market for a solution? - How can a marketer understand the information needs of a target audience? - Should there be a service level agreement in place between marketing and sales and if so what should it contain? - Please describe an optimal lead hand off process? - In your view, what is the most accurate way to measure revenue attribution? Establishing marketing as a revenue generator requires blending the right strategies with effective tactics. Let us know if you need a hand. We can set up a workshop at The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center located in Dallas, Texas. 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.

Today’s show will demonstrate how to earn brand preference by satisfying the information needs of your target prospects. To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to page 190 of the PDF to review the Content Strategy and Planning phase of the workbook. Joining us today is Rick Medina, the Director of Sales Channel Marketing at Intuit. Rick leads B2B sales channel marketing efforts to drive growth and strategic disruption in Intuit’s inside sales, retail, and VAR channels. Listen as Rick demonstrates how to earn brand preference by satisfying the information needs of your target prospects. Listen as Rick describes how Intuit creates content for B2B prospects based on the prospect's shopping journey. The messaging within the content is built to speak to the buyer persona early in the process. The types of content provided to the prospect is determined by way the buyer acts in their journey. Rick describes how is marketing team strives to walk alongside the prospects, by providing the right information at the right moment. Why this topic? Producing and distributing content for everyone means really doing it for no one. For content marketing to generate revenue, you have to know exactly what your customers need, where they need it, how often they need it, and in what form they need to consume it. Miss any of these items and your content marketing efforts will fail to contribute to revenue growth in any meaningful way. Rick wraps up the podcast with three action steps for every b2b marketer to leverage to walk alongside prospects. - The first is to have a clear strategy articulating what you want to do, why you want to do it. This helps create a shared consciousness with marketers and sales teams, and make sure that the teams work on the highest priority. - Second is to get to know your target prospects, their attitudes, their behaviors, their triggers, etc., really striving for empathy. - The third, produce a map content to the buyer's journey. Last is to measure success, and always remember to walk alongside your prospect. When they thrive, we all do. And if after listening you would like help with your content strategy, download our workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to pages 190 - 193 of the PDF to review the Content Strategy and Planning phase of the workbook.

Today’s show is a demonstration on how sales enablement drives greater productivity per sales person and helps you scale the sales organization. To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to page 319 of the PDF to review the Sales Enablement phase of the workbook. Joining us today is Kent Cissell, the Senior Vice President of Sales Operations at Heartland Payment Systems. Heartland serves over 300,000 businesses domestically by offering best in class payment, payroll, and POS solutions. Kent leads sales operations at Heartland and is responsible for sales enablement. Kent is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how to deploy sales enablement. Why this 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. For those sales enablement leaders measured on time to revenue. How quickly do we get these sales people to a point where they're selling enough, generating enough gross margin to cover their cost? Listen has Kent demonstrates Heartland’s investment a jump start and mentoring programs, and one on one coaching to ramp new reps. It’s the way to build sales enablement. Sales enablement is a key piece to your sales strategy. Neglect it and forgo adding sales head count in the future. Listen as Kent describes to how develop and execute a successful sales enablement strategy. And if after listening, you want to learn more, you can download our workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. It’s your step-by-step guide to a complete sales strategy, which includes a strong sales enablement program.

Today we are going to demonstrate how to capture the attention of customers and prospects with great marketing campaigns. Campaign budgets are limited and these campaigns need to generate revenue. We will demonstrate how to generate a return on the campaign dollar. Joining us today is Andrea Brody the Chief Marketing Officer of BravoSolution. BravoSolution delivers strategic procurement solutions for global organizations. The solution helps procurement organizations go beyond cost savings to include risk management, corporate social responsibility and driving innovation as part of developing new products. Listen as Andrea demonstrates how great marketing campaigns capture attention of your target audience. Performing well in the monthly operating review and quarterly business review requires campaign-driven marketing contribution. Campaign offers capture attention and deliver pipeline influence. Listen as Andrea and I discuss marketing campaign that position your product in the painkiller business, not the vitamin business.

Today’s show is a demonstration on how to organize the sales team. There’s not enough headcount, but how do I prove it? To go deeper on organization design, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to pages 282 - 284 of the PDF to review the Sales Organization Design phase of the workbook. Joining us today is Mike St. Clair, Vice President of Sales for Rentokil North America. Mike is responsible for revenue and market share growth throughout the US, Mexico and Canada for pest control, brand protection and interior landscaping. Mike is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how to organize a B2B sales team. Without enough headcount, making the case for the right quantity is required to hit your quarterly number. In addition, where and how you place your reps must be right. Listen to Mike demonstrate the seven dominant sales organizational models, and why he did, or did not, select each at Rentokil. Mike will go into depth on each model. Listen to each and identify which model you are using for your sales force today. Using Retokil as a use case validate that you have the right model, and evaluate whether alternative or hybrid approaches are better for you. Some of you are struggling with how to determine how many feet on the street you need, what type of reps you need, and which org model is the best one for you. My hope is that by demonstrating how to do this you can avoid costly mistakes. Here are the specific seven sales organization models Mike will demonstrate: • Stratification (big accounts, midsize accounts, small accounts in a pyramid) • Hunter/farmer • Geography • Product specialists • Vertical industry specialists • Role specialists • Hybrid (2 or more of the above combined) This podcast is 51-minutes of high protein clarity on how to organize the sales team. Coupled with this deep demonstration is a workbook where you can go deep with your own salesforce. Download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to page 282 of the PDF to review the Sales Organization Design phase of the workbook.

Today’s show is a demonstration on how a chief strategy officer can help a sales team. A common challenge among sales leaders is taking strategic imperatives the CEO has laid out in the strategy and translating that into an operating plan. The head of strategy can help sales leaders solve this problem. As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Sales Strategy section starting on page 258 of the PDF. Joining us is Julian Lighton, Chief Strategy Officer at Renaissance Learning. Renaissance is the leader in K-12 education technology enabling teachers, curriculum creators, and educators to drive phenomenal student growth. Julian’s experience includes leading strategy at Hitachi, Cisco, Neustar, and Rovi, which is now TiVo. Before that Julian was a partner in software and services at McKinsey. Julian is uniquely qualified demonstrate how the strategy officer can help a sales team. The greatest contribution to the sales team by the head of strategy is to hold the problem together. This involves asking, "Which is the greater priority? Therefore, what am I really supposed to be doing?” This approach keeps the problem from disintegrating and being left with five different problems. Asking these questions prevents problems that aren’t commonly defined and fractured resources working on different things. Julian describes Value Creation Planning as a framework to understand how a company generates value for its shareholders. This breaks down into a series of value drivers and underneath that a series of KPIs or metrics. For a sales leader, the top value drivers are going to be market acquisition. The includes finding new logo customers, net new customers, driving wallet share, cross-sell, up-sell and finally renewals if you're in a subscription or services business. Listen as Julian demonstrates what a sales leader really needs to understand to move each of the KPIs attached to the value drivers. Why this topic? The best sales leaders we see blend strategy and execution masterfully. The average sales leaders we see don't understand strategy, even though they think they do because they think a collection of sales tactics is a strategy. This is not their fault. Most of them have never been trained on strategy development. This is where a partnership between the sales leader and the chief strategy officer can be a great partnership and produce great results. The final segment of the show addresses the elephant in the room. Often sales leaders think strategy is disconnected from getting the job done. They're worried about hitting this month's quota. Why should a sales leader care about strategy? Listen as Julian outlines three reasons sales leaders should care about strategy.

Today’s show is a demonstration on securing and retaining the right talent for a transformation. Consistent quarterly performance depends on the right talent. As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Talent phase on pages 100 – 105 of the PDF. Joining us is Sean O’Brien, the Chief Administrative Officer of PGi. The CAO title is becoming more prevalent in the C-Suite, and is used to describe an executive responsible for two or more functional areas. PGi is a global leader in collaboration software and services. Any time you want to connect with people that you are not present with, PGi is the glue to make that happen. Sean will demonstrate selecting and retaining the right talent for a transformation. You began a transformation to drive up the valuation of your company. Listen as Sean describes building vs. buying executive talent. There’s an opportunity cost to assess based on the skills gap. We discuss the approach to weighing the opportunity cost of building to fill skill gaps versus buying talent with the skills. Sean describes how to take a step back and evaluate the existing executive team. Why this topic? The revenue growth objective, during a transformation, is heavily dependent on having superstar executive talent. At times, the revenue growth strategy calls for a new set of competencies that the existing team does not possess. Mismatch talent and strategy and suffer from significant execution problems. Listen as Sean describes how to evaluate talent, both existing and new. Take a step back and look at the existing executive team as if you’re looking at them for the first time. Sean states, “in many cases, the talents, the skills, the people that were responsible for getting you to where you are today are not necessarily the ones that are going to take you forward into the future most effectively.” It’s an opportunity to re-establish that you have the right people in the right roles to take your company through that critical transformation. The final segment of the show addresses how to prevent a brain drain. This occurs when outgoing executives bring top talent with them as they exit. Sean describes concrete actions to show the retained talent that they are valued. Don’t miss the action items Sean describes. Evaluate your executive talent at a deeper level by downloading our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Talent phase on pages 100 – 105 of the PDF. To request a workshop with an expert simply sign up for a MySBI account and check the box in your preferences to request a workshop.

Today’s topic is understanding how to make the customer experience a competitive differentiator. I recently interviewed Cigna’s Vice President of Global Product Strategy and Operations, Rob Wentling. Cigna is one of the largest global health services companies in the world. Rob is accountable for creating and delivering an enterprise-wide product strategy including core product development and management processes critical in helping Cigna achieve its “Go Deep, Go Global, and Go Individual” strategy. Rob has 25 years of business experience at some of the world’s great companies such as AT&T, ADP, The Hartford Insurance Company, and now Cigna. His experience includes business unit strategy, product strategy, business development, marketing, and development. Listen as Rob and I discuss how the customer experience be a competitive advantage. Why this topic? Customer’s expectations have risen, and failure to provide an exceptional experience for each customer can result in poor revenue growth. Some customers prioritize their experience over product performance, believe it or not, when making a purchase decision. This requires a deep understanding of the customer’s journey and each touch point along the way. Mapping this customer’s journey is a difficult yet mission critical task that when done correctly can result in exceptional revenue growth.

Today’s topic is understanding how to leverage sales development reps to generate leads for the sales team. If you would like to implement an outbound marketing program with a team of SDRs, consider having one of our experts spend some time with you in workshop. To get a feel for what's covered in that workshop, download our 10th annual workbook that we use in these workshops. Joining us is Heather Young, the Vice President of Sales and Business Development for Rimini Street. Rimini Street is a leading global provider for a third-party enterprise support. This includes maintenance and support for SAP and Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion and RETEK software. Why this topic? For many B2B companies, inbound marketing is not producing enough leads for the sales team. As a result, many marketers have added a team of SDRs, sales development reps, to drive outbound marketing efforts in an attempt to meet the never-ending need for more leads.