SBI, The Growth Advisory

On today’s show we discuss product strategy. Our guest is Peter Sheldon, the Vice President of Strategy at Magento Commerce. Magento is a leading e-commerce platform providing enterprise solutions. Before his position at Magento, Peter was one of the foremost thought leaders at Forrester on the topic of e-commerce. The goal of the call today is to think through product strategy using Magento as a use case. Your company’s go-to-market model needs to flow out of the product strategy. There are different types of product strategy: Market Expansion, Market Share and Market Exposure. Very different product strategies. Spend the time to get these right. Your go to market model for sales will be very different depending on which strategy is selected. It’s nearly impossible to build a sales and marketing strategy that makes your number every year if you don’t fully understand the product strategy. The go-to-market strategy for sales and marketing changes significantly based on how you answer these product questions. Listen to Peter bring the question of product strategy’s impact on sales and marketing to life with the Magento use case. Work with your product leader to get answers to these questions to align your strategies. Peter answers a series of questions to help sales and marketing leaders understand the impact of product strategy on the overall go to market strategy. - Is your product strategy focused on participating in overall market expansion where rising waters raise all ships? - As you compete in a mature market do you have to take market from your competitors to grow? - Are you also exploring new growing markets and how to expose your products to grow? - Do you find that the B2B market mimics the B2C world with a 2-3+ year lag time? - Is your product strategy to enter fast growing product markets and take revenue from distant companies rather than direct competitors? - Is your product strategy to define new products that are so innovative as to create an entirely new product category? - Is your product strategy to grow by persuading existing customers to buy more of a product or related product? - When adding new products requiring cross-sell/up-sell, how do you know when to use the existing sales force vs. a new sales strategy? - Is the product strategy based on new product pricing and promotion in a mature market and is therefore likely to be temporary based on competitor retaliation? - Is the product strategy to force smaller companies out of the market? - For a concentrated market, is the product strategy to cycle through market share without sustainable share gain? - Is the product strategy to execute bolt on acquisitions to complete or extend the product offering and leverage the current routes to market Listen to Peter respond to each question and highlight how to avoid the traps and the approach the market challenges.

On today's show we discuss the different types of revenue growth and their impact on company valuation. Our guest is Charlie DeLacey, the vice president of corporate development and strategy at the Kenan Advantage Group. Kenan is a $1.5 billion dollar transportation and logistics business. Charlie is responsible for driving and shaping the strategy of Kenan Advantage Group, who has experienced 10-15% growth on an annual basis. The types of growth discussed include organic and inorganic, and the different returns on capital each type of investment drives. For example, given the opportunity to grow the same amount of revenue through organic or inorganic, Charlie explains that typically organic growth will drive greater value creation. However, there are other variables such as time, capital requirements and execution risks. Charlie describes how to make the decision between organic and inorganic growth.

On this weeks’ SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we spoke with Greg Shepard, the chief strategy officer at Pepperjam. Pepperjam is a global digital marketing and performance technology firm, and Greg is responsible for evaluating trends, client feedback and internal requests to foresee opportunities for new product development. The topic of our conversation was injecting buyer behavior into the product strategy. Listen as Greg explains how he uses these insights to build and execute his product strategy. During the episode, Greg will answer questions such as: - How do you determine what buyer problems to solve, and what behaviors prove evidence of these problems? - How do you determine if your product will beat the competition in the market? - How often should you put your product in front of the buyers to get their opinion on the solution? - How do you forecast wallet share? - How do you test for product-market fit within each of your submarkets? Buyer behavior is changing constantly. And these insights must be considered when it comes to new product development. It’s your best chance to ensure you are developing products that your buyers are willing to invest time, energy and money to solve. Listen as Greg describes how he uses buyer behavior data to successfully develop his product strategy

Your sales operations team must improve the efficiency of the sales team. Instead, sales ops has become a catch all that gets assigned the work no one else wants to do. On this week’s SBI Sales and Marketing podcast we spoke with Burke Lippert, senior director of sales operations at Spok. Listen here as Burke explains how she built an effective sales ops team from the ground up. During the episode, Burke will answer questions such as: - What business outcomes should a new sales operations team strive to deliver? - What should the strategic focus areas of a new sales operations team be? - What should the forecast and pipeline management process be for a new sales ops team? - What should the processes for critical activities like territory design and quota setting be for new sales ops teams? When deployed correctly sales operations can impact revenue growth in a meaningful way. But it must be properly staffed and built. Listen as Burke discusses the best way to do this. She will explain why you should not starve this key department.

Do you have a list of dream accounts to target? Many marketers strive to replace leads with opportunities for the sales team using account based marketing. We recently interviewed Leo Tucker, the senior vice president of global marketing for PGi. Listen as he discusses his approach to account based marketing. During the interview, he will discuss topics such as: - Why it’s critical for sales teams to sell to a list of targeted accounts. - Why current demand generation efforts fail to generate enough revenue. - How to improve the relationship between sales and marketing through account based marketing. - How to get personalized content and messaging in front of right buyers at the right time. If you live and die by the big deal, growing revenues faster than your industry and competitors requires a shift in your strategy. Listen here as Leo explains how to transition to account based marketing.

As a marketing leader, you must drive revenue growth by connecting corporate marketing with the field. SBI recently spoke with Tracy Hansen, the chief marketing officer at Renaissance Learning, the world leader in cloud-based assessment, teaching and learning solutions. Listen as Tracy discusses how she executes field marketing inside of Renaissance Learning. During the show, Tracy will answer question such as: - What business outcomes should the field marketing team deliver? - What should the strategic focus of the field marketing team be? - What percentage of the overall marketing budget should be dedicated to field marketing? - What role should field marketing play between corporate marketing and sales? - What types of campaigns should field marketing run? - How can field marketing best partner with sales? Ultimately, field marketing is the connective tissue between corporate and the field. Without it, marketing teams will fail to produce revenue. Listen as Tracy describes how she has successfully implemented field marketing at Renaissance learning.

Content strategy and planning is a critical piece to your marketing strategy. As a marketing leader, you must earn brand preference by satisfying the information needs of your target customers. We recently spoke with Steve Keifer, the vice president of marketing at LeaseAccelerator. Listen as Steve explains how he develops and executes his content marketing strategy. Steve has over ten years’ experience and is responsible for driving the demand for LeaseAccelerator’s SaaS solutions. During the show, he will answer questions such as: - Which customers and prospects have you prioritized and why? - What information needs do these prioritized customers and prospects have? - What content have you developed and how does it help your business? - How do you develop your content marketing team in order to successfully execute strategy? - How can you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy? For content marketing to generate revenue, you must understand what your customers need, where they need it, how often they need it and in what form. Without this information, your content marketing efforts will fails to contribute to revenue growth in a meaningful way. Listen as Steven shares his insights on how to successfully implement a content marketing strategy.

Traditional demand generation and lead management does not work for companies that are dependent on a small number of accounts that spend a lot. Instead marketing teams must replace leads with opportunities for the sales team. SBI recently spoke with Gahan Richardson, the vice president of corporate marketing at Cypress Semiconductors. Listen as Gahan explains his approach to account based marketing and how he uses it to set his sales team up for success. During the interview, Gahan will answer questions such as: - Why is it critical for your sales team to go wide and deep inside of their accounts, building many relationships? - What is the lifetime value of a key account, and why is it so much more than a typical account? - If marketing dedicates budget to a list of dream accounts, does this improve the relationship between sales and marketing? - Should you deploy multi-channel approach when launching an account based marketing program?? - Why should marketing leaders build a list of accounts, ranked best to worst, on revenue potential and propensity to buy? - What are the best ways to develop personalized content and get it in front of the right buyers and influencers? If your sales team lives and dies by the big deal, growing revenues faster than your competitors and industry will require a shift in behavior. Listen here as Gahan explains how account based marketing will help you make your number.

Getting an increase in sales head count is difficult. Additionally, when new sales people are hired, there is an expectation to generate revenue growth as quickly as possible. Essentially, sales enablement’s responsibility is to onboard new reps and drive revenue per sales head and time to productivity. SBI recently spoke with Kent Cissell, the senior vice president of sales operations at Heartland Payment Systems on this topic. Listen as Kent discusses sales enablement and why it’s key to the success of your overall sales strategy. Kent oversees a varied sales operations team which includes the traditional sales enablement function at Heartland, one of the largest payment processors in the US. During the interview, he will answer questions such as: - What are the business outcomes that the sales enablement team needs to deliver? - What is the strategic focus of the sales enablement team? - How are new sales reps onboarded, and what kind of sales readinesss program should be in place? - How is sales enablement content developed and used? 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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we speak with Dave Longaker, the Chief Revenue Officer at Rovi Corporation about how to determine the best sales organizational structure. We start the discussion by determining which of the 7 B2B sales org models is best to achieve revenue growth. Dave will discuss how to determine the types of roles, and the sales headcount need for each. Furthermore, he will explain how sales leaders should deploy their sales capacity against the market opportunity. Dave will continue by discussing how to determine which sales channels buyers want to buy from, and what level of sales specialization they are willing to pay for. And he will walk our audience through how to effectively transition from one sales organizational structure to another in order to best achieve revenue growth.