SBI, The Growth Advisory

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we’re doing things a little differently. Rather than dishing sales strategies with a CEO or CMO, we’re joined instead by a CFO to get into the nitty-gritty of pricing strategy, the backbone of any successful product marketing campaign. Our guest today is Lauri Hanover, the CFO of Netafim; a global pioneer of the drip revolution. Together, we discuss how to improve your company’s marketing strategy by determining the perfect price in regards to your costs and product market. We start with an in-depth look at the biggest influence on a sound pricing strategy: costs. We look at how to factor for the costs of building, marketing, selling, installing and supporting your product. Next, we look at determining a product price relative to these costs along with your product strategy as well as outside influences, such as market trends and competitor pricing. We end our conversation by discussing the first steps to putting a new pricing strategy into action so you can get your company on the right path toward better pricing and probability so you can hit your mark.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, Greg Alexander, CEO of SBI, and Steve Rutledge, senior vice president of global sales operations at Genesys, discuss how to develop and execute a sales operations strategy using SBI’s revenue growth methodology. We start by discussing how to establish objectives and identify which internal processes the sales team owns and outline the biggest obstacles to success. We also hear Steve’s views on the difference between sales ops and sales enablement and how the two should work together. In our final segment we cover key takeaways and practical advice on what to do if you were put on the hot seat tomorrow and challenged with how to develop and execute a soup to nuts sales strategy.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we speak with Robin Saitz, the chief marketing officer at Brainshark, about how to integrate a marketing strategy with a corporate strategy, a product strategy and a sales strategy—something Brainshark does for thousands of companies, including half of the Fortune 100s out there. We start by discussing how Robin connects the dots between vision and mission when crafting a functional approach to corporate strategy, product strategy, sales strategy and marketing strategy. With this four-part marketing strategy laid out, we then talk about how Robin’s actually integrates her marketing strategies with a product roadmap and incorporates input from the sales organization into her marketing plan. From there, Robin shares some tips on selling a strategic marketing plan internally, from the CEO to the product leader and the sales leader. We conclude by examining the first three steps leaders need to take when developing a solid four-part marketing strategy. 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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Ted Grulikowski, vice-president of the B2B unit at Market Source, the world’s leading sales outsourcing company, about taking a new product to market by recruiting and managing a team of resellers. In our first segment, we discuss how Ted helps his clients grow their reseller revenues (2:38) & how he helps them overcome the common obstacles they face when trying to increase their revenue growth with resellers (3:30). In our second segment, we look at the process of determining an ideal reseller profile (8:10), scoring & quantifying individual reseller value (9:36), determining an efficient coverage model (10:53), recruiting resellers from competitors (12:15), avoiding channel conflict with internal sales teams when outsourcing (14:15), recruiting reseller partners (15:30) & organizing internal channel groups (17:04). In our final segment, we discuss learning from mistakes (19:20), identifying and mitigating risks when planning a growth strategy (20:25), and then outline three key takeaways that will help you achieve the sales growth you need to make your numbers in 2016 (22:40).

Today's guest on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast is Chris Bittner, the Senior Director of Global Sales and Channel Strategy at Autodesk. We asked Chris to help his peers support their company's sales strategy by discussing channel selection and channel optimization. We cover important tactics of channel management, including product channel fit, which channels the end customers what to buy from, the ideal channel partner profile, and how to deal with channel consolidation that's going on these days. By the end of our episode, you'll learn the three things you absolutely need to do to have an optimized sales channel.