SBI, The Growth Advisory

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Paul Rosen, who is the senior vice president of sales for OnDeck Capital. Paul joined OnDeck Capital in 2012 when the company was doing $13 million in sales. Today, only three years later, the company is doing $160 million in sales and recently had a successful IPO with a market cap of $1.5 billion. On today’s podcast we will discuss how Paul was able to build a corporate strategy that helped scale business sales growth from $13 million to $160 million in three years. In our first segment, Paul talks about the sales strategy a sales leader follows to invest in capital both short-term and long-term, and how brokers helped the company’s corporate strategy in a big way when making these moves. Next, Paul shares with us how to incorporate a direct sales channel to compliment an indirect sales channel to your sales strategy, how to gain mindshare with channel partners without surpassing your corporate strategy budget, all while expanding into new geographic markets and successfully launching new products. In our last segment, Paul wraps up our conversation by sharing advice he would have given himself at the beginning of his journey of being a sales leader in a fast-growth company.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Mike Ellis of ForgeRock about how to successfully drive strategy execution through functional leadership alignment. In our first segment, Mike shares how the CTO drives successful execution of corporate strategy while staying in strategic alignment with the CEO. We discuss how to know when numbers are missed because of poor execution in sales and marketing or if it is because there's a product problem. Next, we talk with Mike about what it takes to keep the marketing strategy in strategic alignment with the overall corporate strategy and bringing that strategy to market. We then touch on the cadence in face-to-face communication and Mike offers advice to ensure the product, marketing and sales teams continuously test and adjust the assumptions in the strategy. In this segment, we also take a look at how to keep strategic alignment when you want to make a corporate strategy shift that could potentially disrupt other teams’ strategy development. In our last segment, we conclude our conversation, and Mike sends us off with three immediate actions to take if you’re a CEO who finds his teams struggling to execute corporate strategy.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Chris Marjara, the CMO of McGraw-Hill Education. McGraw-Hill Education has been publishing print textbooks for 125 years. Today, the company provides e-learning digital technology solutions to educators. Chris, who has spent 20 years marketing software solutions, was hired by McGraw-Hill to lead the marketing team through this business model transformation. With 5,000 employees in 44 countries, this is no easy task. In our first segment, we dive straight into one of the bigger challenges of the task Chris faced: the overall marketing budget and how budget planning works with a job this big. Chris outlines how to secure budget for new marketing initiatives from skeptical executives and, in turn, how to generate a return on the marketing initiatives quickly. Next, Chris discusses how to leverage analytics to accurately measure the effectiveness of the marketing budget and show the value your CMO needs to see to continue funding your marketing initiatives. We also take a look at how to detect poor performing tactics to reallocate the budget toward stronger performing tactics. In our last segment, we recap our discussion and send our listeners off with immediate tactics they can apply to their company’s marketing budget strategy.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Chris Giglio, CEO of Aderant, about how to hire the right sales executive who the CEO can develop a trusting business relationship with in order to make his or her number. In our first segment, Chris shares with us the evaluation process he and his team structured in choosing the right sales executive, how to build a trusting relationship that is transparent between the CEO and sales leader, as well as understanding what is actually happening in the market in order to understand the relationship between your sales and product teams. Next, Chris discusses how he manages to spot a good sales executive in the early stages of hiring when a sales leader is selling a product he himself knows well. Chris also delves into their company’s new design principle and how it shifted their approach to hiring the right person for the job. We also discuss how to assess the reasoning behind why a company isn’t growing. Chris shares his organization’s 360 reviews that give everyone a good look at what’s happening in the overall picture and where the real pain points exist. In our last segment, we summarize our conversation and offer a set of immediate actions you can take to implement into your executive recruiting design in order to find the right sales executive for your organization.

Between competition, emerging technologies and changing consumer behaviors, it’s hard to stay on-point as a marketer. There is no easy way to hit your marketing objectives in today’s world but, as we learn this week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, you can increase your odds of hitting your number by simplifying your processes with a marketing strategy that aligns with the strengths of your marketing team. Today we’re joined by Jane Gasdaska, general manager of U.S. products supply and distribution at Philips 66, to discuss how to do just that. We start our conversation with a broad discussion of marketing objectives, outsourcing vs. training staff and content strategy, where Jane shares her experiences with crafting a marketing strategy from the ground up, as well as switching a company from a non-digital marketing strategy to a digital one. She also discusses when to implement a new marketing strategy, rather than try to mend what’s already in place. We continue our conversation by discussing the idea of matching strategy to skills, whether by connecting your in-house teams to tasks that suite them, rounding them out specialized talent or by enterprising with boutique agencies for specialized tasks. She also provides tips on identifying the types of content that most lend themselves to outsourcing, such as social media management or content strategy & creation. We end by leaving you with some actionable advice on identifying skill gaps and filling them, so that you can get started today on hitting your number tomorrow.