SBI, The Growth Advisory

You want to hit your numbers and still have a life outside of the office? This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, we’re joined by Phil Aaronson, the director of sales enablement at Oracle, to discuss how he maintains a healthy work/life balance while still hitting his numbers year after year. We start our conversation by looking at how a sales enablement leader can set healthy boundaries within his or her organization, and we share tips on managing and maintaining reasonable expectations. We go on to identify project management roles and responsibilities that are often misaligned between the sales leadership and sales enablement teams, which leads to repetition and grind. We also talk through strategy development and the controversy around writing a sales enablement charter into your sales enablement strategy and discuss if there’s merit to the approach. Next, we discuss something that’s very hot right now: the idea of writing a sales playbook to prove your worth. We conclude by talking with Phil about his opinions on watermarks, certification and gamification as tools to keep your team honed-in on their goals.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, Mike Balow, the executive vice president of sales at Cypress Semiconductor, joins us to discuss job security, something that may seem like a myth for a sales executive. However, with 29 years of employment across only four companies, the three-year sales executive lifespan is a trend Mike’s managed to buck, and today he’s here to help you do the same. We begin our conversation by discussing how to establish yourself with a new company, a process that starts with evaluating a potential employer’s hiring practices, culture and values and ends with bringing in the right people to round out your team. We also discuss spotting which sales planning and hiring practices to bring with you to a new organization and which ones to leave in your back pocket. Mike also discusses how he applies the skills he developed as an engineer to his role as a sales executive, such as applying pre-thinking and in-depth planning to functions such as designing a sales plan or product launch. We also discuss how to negotiate common challenges, such as resource management, sales planning and growth expectations, and look at how to build a strong tenure by developing strong partnerships with your business units. We also look at the key elements of a product launch that lends itself to sales. The conversation was wrapped up by talking about the first things you can do, right now, to cement your position and push your company towards its goals.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Steve Byars, the CHRO of the AMX division of Harman International, about how to help a CEO understand if he or she has the right sales and marketing leadership team. In our first segment, Steve discusses understanding what a great sales and marketing executive talent looks like and the list to double check when seeking the right sales leader for your team. Next, we evaluate how to know if the person leading the sales and marketing strategy teams has the particular skill set to manage the goals needed at a specific point in time, as well as, how to manage competency learning curves. In our last segment, Steve shares ways to design a compensation program for a best-in-class marketing and sales leaders that your CEO will love and approve of.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Mark Turner, SVP and GM of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region for Genesys, about how to set up a sales strategy to avoid going from hero to goat overnight due to poor sales forecasting and pipeline management. In our first segment, Mark discusses what his experience has been like being a part of and witnessing 120 end-of-quarter cycles in the software business, and we touch on the three different flavors of surprise that come at every end of quarter. Next, Mark shares with us his team’s best practices in running effective quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and the role the sales operations team must play in order to achieve end-of-quarter sales strategy success. In our last segment, we recap our sales forecasting and pipeline management processing discussion with Mark and share a few takeaways that can be implemented into action and your sales strategy immediately.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Greg Head, the chief marketing officer at InfusionSoft about how to quantify the value a marketing campaign can have on business. In our first segment, Brian shares how to assess if marketing is generating enough demand to fill the top of the funnel and how to draw the line between what project marketing will do and how much sales is responsible for in filling their sales funnel by leads and prospects. Next, we examine the sales and marketing departments a little closer and discuss how much outbound versus inbound should be responsible for lead generation in order to stay profitable in sales revenue growth. We also look at the impact content marketing has on your overall brand marketing strategy. In our last segment, we discuss how, from a small business standpoint, to choose an external service provider and how to make sure that your selection is generating enough benefit to warrant your expense.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Brian Walker, CEO of Herman Miller about finding and sustaining strategic alignment from the CEO’s chair all the way to the customer. In our first segment, Brian discusses some steps he’s taken to drive sales strategy from his role as CEO. The beginning of the processes includes annually narrowing down a set of four to five business strategies presented to the company to see all the way through. From there, each will be outlined in a detailed one-page document in order to understand the situational analysis of the project you’ve decided to take on in order to achieve overall business alignment. Next, Brian shares what has helped him run a strategy where strategic alignment exists along the product and sales team, and the role the CEO plays in keeping the product team, the marketing department and the operations group aligned. In our last segment, we ask Brian to send us off with some advice from his approach to leading a sales team as a CEO.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Paula Shannon, the chief sales officer and executive vice president of Lionbridge Technologies, about how to keep your team invested in a sales strategy as the year progresses. In our first segment, Paula shares what she feels is the right level of detail that a sales leaders should be requesting from their direct reports to gauge execution. A part of Paula’s company sales strategy consists of a weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence of strategic reporting on sales strategy and a lot of focus on the details of day-to-day sales pipeline management. Next, Paula discusses how she keeps her CEO, CFO and the whole team on board throughout the year by executing a strategic sales strategy. Paula explains how she believes proof lies in the data and how she and her team focus on studying the historic data available to them to identify trends that later translate to a sales forecasting strategy. In our final segment, Paula helps us understand the delicate balance that lies in being both customer focused and company focused when change arises.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with, Stuart Kerst, vice president of sales operations at Hewlett Packard (HP), about how to increase the available selling time of a sales team to move the needle in an optimized sales process. In our first segment, we look at the industry standard of how much time a sales person should spend selling versus non-selling, and then we ask Stuart to share his point of view on how he believes sales reps should spend the 2000 hours available to them. Stuart walks us through technology’s role and how automation helps achieve the ideal balance. Stuart also touches on the role CPQ takes in the strategy development to support these strategic opportunities. Next, we focus on the root of the sales cycle productivity issue and how Stuart was able to increase the customer face time. Stuart shares with us how it begins with their annual process that includes a customer satisfaction review with their salespeople to find out where the pain points lie. In our last segment, we discuss how to reduce misalignment between the sales and marketing by aligning metrics of tracked data and how sales ops can say no to the field and not lose political capital.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we speak with Rick Balkind, the head lead of the sales enablement department for Pegasystems, about the intricacies of building and managing a sales enablement team. We discuss everything from the lead-generation process, RFP response team, new sales rep onboarding program, the design of a sales process, implementation of a sales methodology, and enablement of the sales management team. In our first segment, Rick shares with us how to ensure new programs and initiatives are being adopted in Q2-Q4, which numbers should be tracked to make sure sales enablement is impacting the business quarter-to-quarter and why it’s important to grow a sales pipeline in order to support growth. Next, Rick discusses how the sales management role of sales enablement developed over time and how a cross-functional evolvement team became of it. Rick then walks us through the content of their quarterly meetings. In our last segment, Rick breaks down his strategy development behind measuring an account workflow in assuring the pipeline development takes place as planned. Every quarter, each sales representative must create an account plan, which will later be scored. We end our segment by hearing Rick’s vision of the future of sales enablement.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Tim Huffmyer, the CFO of BlackBox Network Services, about reallocating a sales and marketing budget as the year unfolds. In our first segment, Tim discusses how to establish expectations for your stakeholders at the beginning of the year. He then details how he and his team reallocate the budget as the year progresses and things change. Next, Tim walks us through a hypothetical corporate strategy case study focused on head count planning, how that aligns with a P&L statement and the obstacles that come with it. In our final segment, Tim shares with us how he measures the market and the return on his sales and marketing strategy.