SBI, The Growth Advisory

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Vincent Gatti to compare our perspectives on putting together a cohesive sales strategy. During this interview, Vincent walks us through SBI’s 5 Step Sales Strategy Methodology, demonstrating for us how he has applied his version of this to his sales process to: - Collect the needs of the market, accounts, and buyers. - Connect the CEO’s corporate strategy to his sales strategy. - Work with the product team to understand which products should be sold to what customers at what price point. - Partner with the sales and marketing departments to cover leads into revenue. - Get the HR department to help him put a team of A players on the field to win the game. If you are building your sales strategy for next year, listen to hear from one of your peers how to use the 5 Step Sales Strategy Methodology.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Amy Slater to discuss a new way to look at your annual strategic planning process. During this interview, we discuss with Amy how to translate high level corporate goals, such as revenue and EBITDA targets, into sales operations oriented goals, such as quota, sales forecasting, head count numbers, territories, sales planning, and comp plans. We use SBI’s recently released workbook titled “How to Make Your Number in 2016” to guide our conversation. Specifically, pages 217-220 which deals with the annual strategic planning process. This Q3 to Q2 “meeting rhythm” lays out how to integrate weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting cadence to execute strategic planning as a sales ops professional. As a sales ops leader implements this process a wonderful thing happens - you get your life back. Gone are the days of frantically responding to urgent requests from random executives looking for data. We walk Amy through the model, and she explains how she uses her version of it at her company. The benefit to you all is you get to see a “demo”, if you will, on how to use this tool. At the end of this show, if you want to use the SBI Workbook yourself, we let you know how to get it. If you want to flawlessly execute the annual strategic planning process, listen and hear how one of your peers has done so.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Bal Dail to discuss how achieving strategic alignment between your corporate strategy and sales strategy can lead to you hitting your number with little internal friction. Bal Dail is the Chairman and CEO of JDA Software, the provider of the broadest portfolio of supply chain solutions. During this interview, we discuss: - His opinion why very few CEOs have come up through sales and the problem this can cause when trying to make your number with an effective sales strategy. -A definition of the term “strategic alignment” and why it is critical to your success. - Ways upon which a CEO can: 1. Drive market research output into sales strategy 2. Educate the sales team on the markets to compete in, the accounts to sell to, the buyers to meet with, the products to position, and the competitors to beat. 3. Make sure the leaders of product, marketing, sales, and HR are working with strategic alignment. We use SBI’s recently released workbook titled “How to Make Your Number in 2016” to guide our conversation. Specifically, pages 51-70 which details SBI’s 8 Step Corporate Strategy Methodology. We walk through the model while Bal explains how he uses a version of it at his company. The benefit to you all is you get to see a “demo”, if you will, on how to use this tool. At the end of this show, if you want to use the SBI Workbook yourself, we let you know how to get it. If you want to make sure your sales strategy is in tune with your corporate strategy, listen to this podcast and hear how one of your peers has done so.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Kim Mitchell to discuss how understanding the employee life cycle can unlock the secrets to employee retention and maintaining employee engagement. Kim Mitchell is the Chief People Officer at Renaissance Learning, the world leader in cloud-based assessment, teaching, and learning solutions. If anybody knows how to keep a sales and marketing team happy, engaged and open to new things, it’s her. Kim explains how the relationship a member of the sales team has with the company changes over time, or even across a business cycle. The relationship starts during the recruiting stage, which is a very different relationship from when a sales person is in on boarding, at year 1, during a promotion, and at key milestones, such as the 10 year anniversary. Employee engagement goes up, or down, based on whether the employee has an emotional connection with the mission of the sales force, and the company. And the adoption of a new sales team initiative is tightly correlated with employee engagement. So, how do you drive employee engagement in the sales force? What are the secrets to employee life cycle management? Tune in and find out.

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast we take a fun approach to a series topic: how to make the most of your honeymoon period as a new VP of sales. To guide us through these treacherous waters, we’re joined by Eric Vermillion, a Senior VP of sales who also happens to be in the thick of his honeymoon period with his company, Blue Cat. To frame today’s conversation, we’ll walk through a hypothetical use case starring Vic, a made-up persona who just finished his first six months at new company as VP of sales and is now ready to launch a set of initiatives. We look at why Vic should throw out his old sales playbook in favor of a sales strategy tailored to his new products, customers, competitors and channels. We talk about how Vic can ensure his initiatives have strategic alignment with his new company’s missions and values. We also look at hiring practices and how Vic can avoid the common pitfall of trying to fix problems by throwing fresh bodies at them. Other topics we cover: knowing when to ask for help, not passing the buck, getting too wrapped up with hitting big numbers, overbuying software, sales management, avoiding unnecessary consulting and how to handle the compensation plan. Tune in, and take notes as we walk Vic (and you!) through your honeymoon period and we’ll see you on the other side!

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.