SBI, The Growth Advisory

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we speak with Terry Hicks, the chief product officer at Infusionsoft, about integrating his product strategy with his go to market strategy. We start the discussion with how Terry develops his product strategy. He’ll explain how determines what markets to compete in and what problems to solve. He’ll also discuss how to determine how your products can uniquely win against the competition, and how to determine how they should be marketed and sold. Terry will continue the discussion by next explaining how he develops his go to market strategy. He’ll explain how to develop the product positioning and pricing strategy for your products. And how to ensure the entire organization, product, sales and marketing, is ready for the new product launch. We conclude our talk by looking at the first three actions product leaders can take right now to immediately make an impact with their product strategy. Terry will explain in detail how you can successfully integrate your product and go to market strategies.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we speak with Todd Doolittle, the recently appointed head of sales operations at Concentra, about the challenges and opportunities faced by new sales ops leaders. We start the discussion with Todd’s biggest struggles experienced in the first 100 days of becoming the sales ops leader. He’ll explain how and why he prioritized his sales ops team’s efforts immediately. And he’ll go on to describe how his team gets a lot done with minimal headcount and budget. Todd will continue the discussion by describing how he deals with unrealistic expectations and timelines, and how he says no without receiving any political blow back. Todd will describe how his sales ops department is a key piece to Concentra’s overall sales strategy, and how he partners with the sales leader to accelerate the organization's rate of revenue growth. We conclude our talk by looking at the first three actions newly appointed sales operations leaders can take right now to immediately make an impact, and to be seen as a strategic part of sales and operations planning.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we discuss how to implement a sales organizational structure with Todd Skiiles, senior vice president of sales and solutions at Ryder. In our first segment, Greg and Todd discuss how to implement a hunter farmer sales organizational design. Todd shares how he decided to implement this model, and what the results of this shift in org models have been. He also explains how to assess your current sales team against new profiles in the org chart, and how to make adjustments if needed. In our second segment, Greg and Todd discuss whether or not it is necessary to make adjustments to the sales compensation plan to accommodate the new sales org design. He’ll also explain how this change effected Ryder’s overall sales strategy, specifically how it changed his team’s interactions with Ryder’s customers. In our final segment, Todd summarizes all the above information into an action plan you can apply to your sales organizational structure implementation.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we discuss how to conduct a successful product launch with Andrew Wright, vice president of design at Cypress Semiconductor. In our first segment, Greg and Andrew discuss launch planning. Andrew shares how to determine the goal of launching a new product, such as revenue expectations and how to decide on the initial set of target customers. He also explores how to set up organizational readiness, specifically with the sales team, to make sure they are ready for this product launch. He then briefly touches on who is responsible for the launch, how to figure the launch budget, what risks to take into account and how to measure the success or failure of the new product introduction. In our second segment, Greg and Andrew discuss how to execute the product launch. Andrew shares time objectives, sales enablement, reference customers and testimonials. Then he elaborates on how he measures success during and after the launch. In our final segment, Andrew summarizes all the above information into an action plan you can apply to your own product launch.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we discuss sales strategy, specifically how to lead a very large sales team in the business services industry, with Stephen Mohan, senior vice president of Republic Services. In our first segment, Stephen shares the organizational structure at Republic Services and explains why he chose this model. He also shares how his sales team integrates with the operations team and explains the pros and cons between a centralized functional sales structure versus a decentralized branch sales structure. In our second segment, we discuss the challenge associated with drawing the line between sales and customer service. Stephen talks about who owns the churn number, cross-selling and upselling at Republic Services and what their approaches are. He also discusses the role of customer service in his organization. In our final segment, we summarize everything we discussed into three actions audience members can take immediately to operate their sales strategy.

On this week’s SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, we speak with Tracy Cote, the senior vice president of human resources at Genesys, about attracting and retaining top sales talent, being an easy company to buy from and sell for, and using strategic alignment to support the sales team by making it everyone’s job to sell. Tracy’s company made SBI’s list of Ten Best Companies to Sell For in 2016, and she shares exactly what they did to make their sales process so solid. In our first segment, we discuss why people want to work for Genesys. We analyze each aspect of the work environment, from the steps of the buying process to employee compensation and leadership training. Next, we discuss how they support the sales team by introducing the latest technology to upgrade both the employee and customer experience. In our second segment, we discuss curating positive strategic alignment and making sure the company’s vision permeates everything the employees do, so they are all working toward a common goal. In our final segment, we conclude with steps to take to get your company aligned and your sales department as strong and as happy as possible.

On this week’s SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we analyze SBI’s Eight Disciplines of Sales Execution with J. Scott Tapp, the EVP of global sales, marketing and field operations at PGi. Using Scott’s company as a guide, we analyze each step and apply it to a real-world B2B sales situation. In our first segment, we cover step one, connecting your B2B sales strategy from the CEO to the sales rep. We discuss how Scott ensures his company’s sales strategy is aligned from the top of the company to the bottom. In step two, we discuss how to track your reps’ daily sales execution objectives. In step three, we discuss how to achieve those objectives by encouraging proper sales behaviors. In our second segment, we continue with step four, where we break down common issues in a B2B sales strategy, and we analyze the best way to overcome or outright prevent these sales hurdles in your strategic planning process. Step five covers strategic alignment among your functional peers to aid in the success of everyone. In step six, we discuss how to take feedback from customers, employees, prospects and more, and convert that feedback into a useable sales strategy. In our final segment, we discuss step seven, where Scott details his annual planning process and his tips for a successful strategy, and step eight, which covers multi-year planning. We finish up the podcast by giving a short summary of today’s topic, and Greg shares his thoughts on the best way to successfully align your company with all eight disciplines.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast we talk shop with a different sort of guest. Rather than examining sales strategy with a sales leader or corporate strategy with a CEO, we’re joined today by a product expert, Merijn te Booij, the executive VP of product strategy at Genesys, to discuss connecting a sales strategy to the product roadmap. We begin by looking at the steps to building an effective product roadmap: performing a market scan, prioritizing market problems, involving your sales force and finding a product market fit. From there, Merijn discusses his usage of the Lean version of Agile, where one creates strategic alignment between the product organization and sales organization using cases and milestones. From there, we look at how to use your sales force to inform your decisions when determining if something should be a new product, new release or new bundle. We also break down the concept behind MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and talk through the challenges the MVP-based development cycle faces and how to avoid ideas that’ll distract your sales force from making their sales. As always, we conclude our conversation by summarizing how to put all these learnings into action, so your sales strategy can stay on track with your product roadmap and you can hit your numbers.

This week on SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we speak with Kermit Randa, CEO of PeopleAdmin, about connecting corporate strategy with execution. We start with a discussion of cascading strategy where Kermit explains the hierarchy of objectives and how it can shape your company’s values, focus and business strategy from the top down. We also review how to assign goals that help your talent see how their work on the individual level ties back to the company’s overall mission. Kermit goes on to describe how you can add flexibility to your sales plan by focusing more on your rhythm than on your calendar. We look at the four forms of feedback that are important for any company that is undergoing strategy development: customer, prospect, competitor and employee feedback. We also discuss tools for measuring and evaluating these types of feedback to help hone your sales and marketing strategies and ensure your functional leaders remain strategically aligned with your corporate strategy. We conclude our talk by looking at the first three actions you can take right now to immediately connect your corporate strategy with your execution.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with SVP of Strategy at Magento Commerce, Mark Lenhard, about how to develop a revenue growth strategy quicker than both your industry and competitors. Magento Commerce offers an open-source digital commerce solution to 250,000 companies. In our first segment, Mark covers company revenue growth relative to industry revenue growth. We discuss how to analyze the industry, its customer, the driving demand behind the growth strategy and how to determine critical success factors. Next, Mark explains the strategy in choosing the proper market groups, and later we explore the theory of three forms of strategy development advantage: product differentiation, cost and customer experience. In our last segment, Mark shares in detail three actions companies can take immediately to help increase revenue growth. Want more weekly insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe and leave us a review! Your feedback will help us improve our show and continue to bring you content that keeps you at the top of your game.