SBI, The Growth Advisory

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we’re getting into the nitty-gritty of sales management, specifically, sizing your sales force for success. We’re not tackling this topic alone though, Lee Kirkpatrick joins us today to help us through the weeds. Through his experience as CFO working for Twilio and a variety of other fast growing tech companies, Lee has become an expert in sales forecasting and sales management. In our conversation, we tackle the key topics such as measuring the return on investment from a sales team, diagnosing when misses are due to a lack sales force, stacking the size of your sales team against the distance of your goals, auditing customer acquisition cost, dividing a sales territory without losing talent and the three most urgent things you can do right now to start sizing your sales force up to the new fiscal year.

We’re on the verge of a new fiscal year, which means it’s time to get that sales enablement strategy ironed-out. To help, we’ve invited Lisa Redekop to the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast to discuss how she develops her sales enablement strategies for Gartner Group, where she acts as a CIO specialist. Using SBI’s sales enablement framework to guide our conversation, we start with looking at the first step of strategy development: determining your department’s goals and getting them into strategic alignment with the rest of your organization. Next, we look at developing a sales training program designed specific to your goals. From there, we discuss sales coaching tactics for keeping your team focused on their goals and the value of having a sales playbook to lead your sales enablement strategy. We also look at piecing together a sales enablement technology toolkit to drive efficiencies and add value. We also look at sales coaching tactics for ensuring your team continues to learn, practice and deploy new skills. We wrap up by looking at metrics for putting together a sales enablement scorecard so you can stay on track of your year-to-year goals.

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we’re joined by Cory Jones, the Vice President of Frontier Communications, to discuss lead generation strategy. With 11 billion in annual sales under his belt, Cory is a bit of an expert when it comes to lead generation and today he shares some of his secrets. We start by discussing the first step to any successful marketing campaign: buyer segmentation. We go through how to disseminate the buyer’s journey so you can see how their purchasing decisions are made. From there, we move on to planning a marketing campaign, designing programs, selecting activities and developing offers designed to hit your specific audience in the sweet spot. We also dive into evaluating channels for lead generation and creating content to nurture leads into opportunities. On the sales process side, we look at sales rep prospecting, matching the right talent to the right leads and the idea of looking at sales reps as individual marketing channels. We conclude by looking at measurement, from understanding acceptable customer acquisition costs to following the numbers to the right sales channels.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Brandon Tolany, the chief sales officer & CMO at Freescale Semiconductor, about how they hit their sales quota year after year. In this podcast, we explore how to ramp your revenue growth strategy by using market research to seize opportunities as they appear. In our first segment, we start by looking at market segmentation, the first pillar of market research. We talk about size vs. revenue growth potential and relative market per share. Next, we discuss the second activity of market research, account segmentation, from ideal customer profiles and scoring accounts to determining revenue potential across segments and allocating resources. In our last segment, we discuss the last activity of market research: segmenting the decision makers within an account. We look at the big questions: Who do you have to convince to keep your company headed toward healthy revenue growth and how does their influence ripple through one’s growth strategy?

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Tim Robertson, US Vice President of Sales and Marketing at DHL, about territory management and, more specifically, designing sales territories. In our first segment, Tim starts us off by sharing what he believe is the most fundamental part of territory management in terms of territory design, which is analyzing the performance of sales territories at DHL. This beginning stage sets us up to plan both the sales strategy and market segmentation process of designing your plan. By looking at these two channels you understand their performance metrics and can ultimately drill down to the territory level. Next, Tim discusses how he predicts the available spend of each market segment, how to acquire a specific type of customer to and how to reach a point where you can calculate how much it would cost to acquire that said customer. Tim then shares what his primary design principle is when designing sales territories. In our last segment, we wrap our territory management discussion with Tim by talking about how to balance your newfound sales territories and Tim gives us a breakdown of his team’s monthly management system that they run, and also how they rebalance and spot-check the goals and quotas for each of the sales territories at DHL.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Bill Sexton, director of sales ops at Zebra Technologies about how to design compensation plan for the upcoming year. In our first segment, Bill discusses how he performs an annual benchmark of his company’s compensation plan and how he hits them in order to make his sales quota. Bill then delves into how to find an accurate peer group to compare against and how to benchmark against those competitors. Next, Bill illustrates how he and his sales operations team establish the many types of roles in their organizational chart and how they build it into the five global plans they need. Bill also shares how his team handles the financial modeling as it relates to the managing incentive budget. In our last segment, Bill sets us up with three concrete tactics that one can use as they enter and complete the annual sales compensation plan process.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Claudine Bianchi, CMO of Percussion Software and someone who has been leading marketing teams inside of technology companies for 28 years, about how to generate a return on an R&D budget in agile marketing. In our first segment, Claudine explains why and how moving from a waterfall, traditional-based marketing strategy to an agile, progressive-based marketing strategy increased the clock speed of the marketing team, the benefits of running an agile shop and the pros and cons of product development management reporting. Next, Claudine delves into what her communication to the customer program is like and how she listens to customer. Claudia also discusses her approach to leveraging her networks to receive feedback and how much of your budget should be dedicated to marketing strategy and why. In our last segment, Claudia shares with us her strategy in measuring the effectiveness of agile marketing applied to content and how quickly she and her team are able to adjust the editorial schedules to reflect performance.

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we’re joined by Doug Landis to tackle the topic of sales coaching. Doug’s a VP of sales productivity at Box, a software collaboration company that generates an annual revenue of 250 million, in large part due to Doug’s sales training and management training. In the show, Doug gives us his sales equations, as well as tips on how to have a structured sales conversation between sales management and a rep. Afterwards, we shift gears and talk about timing: specifically, when should sales training and management training occur? We also discuss time allocation across your talent. How much time should you spend with your A-Players vs. your B-Players? What about your C-Players, are they a black hole? We conclude the show by looking at the two to three things you can do today to start giving your team the keys they need to succeed and hit their numbers.

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we’re joined by Tom Kane. Tom’s the VP of worldwide and service operations for OpenText, the 40th largest software company in the world, and today he joins us to discuss one of the most often-requested topics we receive from listeners: sales analytics. Tom talks us through the four progressive steps of sales analytics: descriptive analytics (sales analytics that describe what has already happened), diagnostic analytics (sales analytics that tell us why things are occurring), predictive analytics (sales analytics that look at what might happen) and prescriptive analytics (sales analytics that tell an organization what to do). Through these four steps, you’ll see not only why big data is king, but more importantly, how it holds court.

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, we’re joined by an outstanding guest to discuss a topic that’s a little out of our normal purview: Designing a compensation plan for a sales department. Our guest, David Loeser, is a heavy weight in the HR field with 30 years of experience helping companies like Pepsi, Continental Airlines, Quaker State, Hostess Brands and Unisys Corporation, where he’s currently the senior VP of world wide human resources. We get into the nuts and bolts of keeping your team incentivized so they can hit their numbers. We start today’s talk by discussing how to get your sales leader onboard with your compensation plan, looking at how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs stacks up to today’s world of instant gratification and endless information. We go on to talk about how to define a forward-looking, free market-based compensation strategy. We also discuss how to elevate your sales strategy by putting customer satisfaction at the heart of your compensation plan. David further explains the difference between reporting the number and making the number, a differentiation that’ll help you really understand the relationship between your sales strategy and compensation strategy, as well as how to systematize your feedback delivery. We conclude our talk by discussing the current thoughts around timing a compensation strategy and exploring the advantage of imagination vs. knowledge.