Sales Talk for CEOs

Most CEOs have a hard time running one successful company. Veronica Buitron runs two!Her secrets boil down to simple, hard won lessons. First, you need a process for everything to be successful and to scale. Second, you need to trust and empower your teams.Every CEO can learn from her episode.Chapters:00:00  - Introduction2:26 - Tango Code: Redefining Software Development 003:53 - Automating Process for Scalability 10:02 - Engineering and Sales Are Both Just Solving Problems14:50 - Building Visions Together 16:30 - Shared Success 18:36 - Understanding the Sales Process at An Early Stage21:02 - Building a Sales Team Starts With A Defined Process28:11 - The CEO Sales Role32:39 - How Veronica Runs Two Companies35:12 - Implementing Agile Across the Entire Company36:20 - Trust and EmpowermentAbout Our Guest:Veronica Buitron is the Co-Founder and CEO of TangoCode a software development company and Chassis, the leading platform enabling digital marketers to automate & accelerate search and social campaigns. As a female entrepreneur, Veronica considers it essential to not only create a diverse and progressive culture within her own company but also to promote it within the tech community. These values have enabled Chassis to create the industry’s most innovative digital marketing solution automating and accelerating ROI for its clients.Chassis enables businesses to use first-party data to create a more effective marketing offering, achieving results 4X faster than using Google or Facebook. The platform promotes automation as a catalyst for marketers to be more productive and efficient in serving their clients and achieving scale.Veronica is an avid reader and enjoys speaking on diversity, innovation, and their interrelated relationship. She is a passionate business leader, a lifelong learner, a mentor to other women in technology, and a devoted role model for her three children.Social links:Veronica's LinkedInVeronica's Twitter ​​You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.comConnect with Alice on LinkedIn

Ariel came from engineering, he had been a product leader for quite a few years and then made the transition into sales. Initially when he moved into sales, he was running product marketing. And he thought sales was so easy, you just get all of the factsheets and  battle cards and the information on the features and capabilities and share that with the prospects that they will buy it. Of course, he learned quickly he was wrong. Running a sales team taught him that sales was so much more and luckily he learned before he started his company. That mindset shift is what prepared him to at first do the sales himself and then build a sales organization at Second Nature AI. He learned two very important things as he moved from founder led sales to hiring a team. First, in an early stage company you have to hire a different type of seller. They have to have passion for the product and they have to know how to do full cycle selling without all the resources of a big company.  He told me, you have to hire full cycle sellers - salespeople who don’t need the support of a large marketing and sales team.  They need to be able to adapt on the fly. So that is what he did and then he learned the second thing, you have to have inbound leads. Even with the right salespeople, if there are no leads sales don’t happen. Listen to hear the lessons that helped him grow sales. Chapters:00:00 - Artificial Intelligence That Trains Your Salesforce? 07:48 - The Genesis of Jenny AI 10:53 - The First Customers Input 15:19 - Scaling Sales and the Team 26:32 - Using Second Nature to Train and Assess Sellers 28:15 - Marketing Ahead of Sales Hires to Increase Inbound 32:55 - The Sales Feedback Loop 36:15 - The Next ChapterAbout Our Guest:Ariel Hitron is the CEO and co-founder of Second Nature. He has held various executive positions including VP of New Markets and VP of Sales and Customer Success at Kaltura. He ran global sales teams with dozens of reps, built playbooks and training sessions, and earlier in his career, developed and brought to market multiple software products, generating tens of millions of recurring revenue and used by millions of consumers.As the CEO of Second Nature, Ariel is able to merge his passion for sales, tech, and product development, by applying AI to enable large B2B sales organizations to scale up and get systematic about their sales coaching.About Second Nature:Second Nature helps salespeople have better conversations.Using AI-driven role play, sales professionals can practice in a safe space, and improve their performance and confidence by gaining real-time, personalized feedback.Social links:https://www.linkedin.com/in/arielhitron/https://www.linkedin.com/company/second-nature-ai/ ​​You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.com

Samantha McKenna, a former employee of On24, was recruited by LinkedIn for her mastery of building a powerful brand on the platform. She started posting on LinkedIn in 2011, leading to recognition and a promotion. After two years, she broke her 13th record and decided to pursue her passion for making a positive impact. She left LinkedIn to start her own company, #SamSales, initially intending to work part-time, but quickly realized that wasn't feasible.She is one of the rare founders who was in sales prior to starting her company but she never planned to go into sales, she thought she was going to be in finance. Starting her own business, well that might have been inevitable because both of her parents are entrepreneurs. For many who start a company sales come slowly but for Samantha sales were easy because she had already built an audience on LinkedIn. She had been providing useful content for years so once she posted that she  was now in business, the sales flooded in. (Don’t we all wish for that.)Samantha's all-women team of 11, , now does a full range of sales related advisory and services. To grow into that, she learned to delegate and rely on proactive referrals and relationship-building for long-term success. Even though she has a great sales team, Samantha is still involved in selling and managing sales.Her team does sales the easy way, they rely on proactive referrals from existing customers and partners. She taught her team to track job changes on LinkedIn and stay in touch. This usually leads to more business. They focus on building relationships for the long term.Chapters:00:00 - Intro 02:54 - Quality Over Quantity 05:15 - Samantha’s Start In Sales 10:10 - LinkedIn 1%er 16:51 - My Large Networks Gave #samsales A Running Start 20:43 - The ever evolving CEO sales role 24:01 - Referral selling 25:55 - Working in your genius zone 30:59 - What’s next?About Our Guest:Samantha McKenna, CEO of #samsales Consulting, is an award-winning sales leader, brand ambassador for LinkedIn, angel investor, board member, and highly sought-after speaker. She has broken nearly 15 sales records, believes great sales are rooted in exceptional manners, and consistently looks for opportunities to continue growing the company’s philanthropic efforts. Since 2008, Sam has worked for some of the most notable names in the Bay Area, including ON24 and LinkedIn. While with these organizations, Sam spent her time as an individual contributor in Enterprise sales before moving to scaling teams and revenue as an executive Leader.With more than 30,000 LinkedIn followers, Sam has inspired sales professionals with her tangible sales tips and actionable advice used daily by executives and teams alike. Sam has been named a Top 50 Women in Revenue and Top 20 Women in Sales Leadership, appears as one of the faces of LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s marketing campaigns, and has been named a Top Ten LinkedIn Sales Star several times over. She has a deep commitment to helping women succeed - particularly those who are military spouses - as well as individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. Sam is dedicated to shining a light on her trademark Show Me You Know Me and #givefirst mantras - and together with her team, raised over $50,000 for charity in 2021 alone with the innovative #samsales ‘Show Me You Know Me’ Charity Event. In its first 24 months, #samsales Consulting has scaled to multi-million dollar revenue and added 17 talented team members. The #samsales team serves over 100 clients, achieved312% of their first annual revenue goal, and surpassed all reason with 233% YoY growth in its second year!Connect with Samantha McKenna on LinkedInFollow Samantha McKenna on Twitter​​You can

Sean Doyle applies behavioral science to marketing and the sales funnel. His model is called Centricity and he shares important lessons about alignment between sales, marketing and customer success to move deals through the funnel. Sean says, “Deals stall in the middle of the funnel because we aren’t giving the buyer what they need to make a decision.If you are still feeding them information about your product features and benefits, they are 80% likely to decide to stick with the old, lower risk, status quo.”On the other hand, we know that if you help them make sense of the information, you are heading in the right direction together. Sometimes this takes sales, customer success and marketing together and at different points in the customer journey. This lively interview will help every CEO with strategies to help their team move more deals through the middle of the funnel to close.Chapters00:00 Strategic Versus Creative Marketing06:17 Behavioral Science: The Centricity Model13:22 Your Buyer’s Problem18:36 Marketing and Customer Success at the Closing Table24:08 Making it Easier for Customers to Buy31:00 6 Step Pipeline: Tracking Steps Versus Activity38:00 Emotional and Rational Content: Marketing and Sales balance43:40 Selling is Helping About Our Guest:Sean M. Doyle is principal at FitzMartin Inc, a leading consultancy focused on optimizing sales and marketing investments of emerging middle- market, B2B businesses. FitzMartin’s clients earn on average an ROI of $287 per $1 invested. Through a 30+ year career with over 5,500 client engagements, Sean saw the need for a repeatable, systematic, objective go-to-market model. The model, Centricity, informs sales, marketing, technology and creative decisions. His niche is helping executives identify opportunities to achieve their strategic, personal and financial objectives. Connect with Sean on LinkedInFollow Sean on TwitterResource Links:Changing for Good  ​​You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.comConnect with Alice on LinkedIn  

Almost every company I know is struggling to bring new business in at the pace required. Why? Well, that is an interesting question but I think by now most of us know that our methods are outdated and simply don’t work. The better questions are how do we keep new business flowing in? What should be done instead of what we continue to do that doesn’t work? I’ve always had a fascination with weeds. They are amazing. Strong, resilient, persistent and they can literally take over an area. My friend Stu Heinecke and I share that same fascination only I know he is more fascinated than me because he wrote a whole book on them called How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. Weeds have an unfair advantage and Stu wants all company leaders to understand what that is and how it can be applied to their business so that they can dominate the market. There are many strategies to gain that unfair advantage and Stu is here today to help you pick the best ones for your business. Find out why having the mindset of a weed will give your company an unfair advantage and possibly even market domination. Highlights:04:14 Having a network is very important. Being able to get introductions is very important. I mean, that works. That's a shortcut.04:37 [If you can’t get an introduction] You need to do something audacious, not just audacious, but also you need to do something that's relevant… something that has the person saying, Oh my gosh, who is this? I love the way you think.07:01 books are still a valid way to stand out, even if you haven't written one, send some of your favorite books…I’m helping you to learn…09:58 Alice Heineman says you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their pipeline.[the caption on a cartoon that Stu sent to Alice ahead of the interview]12:36 one of your [Alice Heiman] great unfair advantages is that you show up usually as a speaker at events16:14 what is it about weeds that causes them to spread and grow and dominate and makes them such tough competitors? Do they have a unified model? And it turns out they do, they leverage a fierce mindset.17:11 if a business doesn't have unfair advantages, it won't exist for long.19:20 you want your competitors looking at your unfair advantage and saying how the heck are we going to beat that?22:23 Why would we talk about a mindset when we're talking about plants? They don't have brains.23:07 You can't grow your business like a weed if you don't have the right mindset. If we're still having our salespeople sell the way they sold ten years ago, it's not going to work.24:01 I should add a couple more attributes to mindset. Emotions get in the way. Your actions should lead your emotions, not the other way around. Don’t ask ‘Do I feel like going to the gym?’ Go to the gym and then see how you feel. Do everything at scale through collaboration.28:47 Here's the really cool thing about weeds. They thrive in disrupted ground. We are coming into a recession, another word for disruption, and it’s an opportunity to thrive if you have the right mindset.31:08 One way to thrive is to eliminate any 1 to 1 leverage. If you are part of the deliverable stream, you need to fix that because you become a bottleneck to your growth. Moving toward multi-channel collaborations is another way to thrive.About Our Guest:Stu Heinecke is a bestselling business author, marketer and WSJ cartoonist. His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend

It’s been 14 years since Bob Vaez started EventMobi and he’s had considerable growth without investment from Venture Capital or Private Equity. How did he do it? It wasn’t always easy.EventMobi’s early sales model was classic founder led with Bob doing it all from mining his network for leads to closing deals. His decision to bootstrap versus take external investment meant that hiring an experienced sales leader was out of the question. Instead he hired young, hungry graduates who could listen and tell stories.His strategy worked. Growth was great, annual sales revenue soared.  Then the pandemic hit and revenue plummeted to near zero.Within a few months, Bob pivoted the in-person event platform into a virtual one.Sales rebounded and are stronger than ever with a return to in-person.Bob’s 14 year journey is a great how-to for any CEO looking to bootstrap their startup.Highlights:05:20 I had this passion for events and they would give you this tote bag full of paper and this show guide that's 300 pages. I'm like, why is this not on my phone?06:38 We were building a product that no one had ever heard of, software for events.06:57 I realized the other part of the product we have to build is a platform for planners and event organizers because their data was all over the place. 08:10 I think honestly at the beginning for a lot of startup founders, sales is not the main concern. But in reality, you want to make sure you have product market fit and selling is the best way to determine that.13:10 EventMobi is a bootstrap company and so very different from a VC backed company.13:43 From zero to the first $500K was very experimental. I didn't know if the company was going to exist in the next few months.  After that, I couldn't do everything myself, so I had to hire someone to do online demos using WebEx14:49 We weren't really hiring traditional salespeople. We were hiring people that were empathetic. They were really good listeners and they were really good storytellers.15:12 I ran it like that until we had about 12 people on the sales team. I was still managing marketing and support with a few junior managers, and we hit 5 million. That’s when I realized it was too much for me so we promoted our first sales manager from within the sales team. That took us to $10M.17:35 I think a lot of early CEOs hire what I call full-stack salespeople - they take it from lead to renewal. This has to be divided into different roles as you grow. How you define those roles and the timing is critically important.22:46 When the pandemic hit, we went from $10M to 0 overnight because all of the confidence got canceled. We retooled our platform to support virtual and suddenly our leads grew by a factor of five.28:45 We had a two pronged strategy in terms of building the sales team. One was to promote from within. And the other was to hire staff from the industry.31:40] Customer demands are changing. They are expecting a different type of response and they have different pain points. We need to train and enable the sales team to be able to help them in a way that they can benefit from rather than let me show you 12 tools we have.32:05] Information overload is real. There's so much noise and there're so many competitors. The customers can't even remember who said what.About Our Guest:Bob has over 10 years of experience in software, semiconductor and mobile industry in various capacities from engineering to business development. He has worked for a number of small and large companies in Toronto, Canada and Silicon Valley, California such as BTE, ATI, AMD and Nvidia.Currently Bob is the CEO of EventMobi.com.EventMobi is an interactive mobile event guide app that h

Wrapping up my 3rd season and I still can’t believe I started and built a successful podcast. The thing I love most is the conversations with the CEOs. They are so willing to share their story in the spirit of helping others. Whether they are near the beginning or the end of their journey it’s always interesting to learn why they started and how they grew sales. In this Season Finale we revisit some of the main themes that are essential for every CEO to take into 2023 and beyond.Number one on the list - if you are using the sales strategies and methods that got you where you are I can guarantee they won’t get you where you want to be. Just doing more of the same doesn’t cut it. Strategies and tactics that worked just before the pandemic don’t work anymore. You need to stop and map your buyer's journey and adjust your strategy and tactics to meet that.Cold outreach yields abysmal results. No one answers the phone and no one wants your sequence of emails especially when they are all about you. Buyers who are looking for you expect to have access to your product information before engaging with your sales team. You need to understand what your customer wants, how they want to buy and meet them where they are. If buyers won’t take cold calls and they are deleting your email how do you generate leads? How do you ensure that your sales people are having plenty of conversations with people who can buy from them?The changing role of the CEO in the sales process was another recurring theme. Many of our guests are moving back to a founder led sales approach and have found huge success in being the chief lead generator. Imagine using your own network and the network of your whole senior team to make introductions for your salespeople so they don't have to go in cold. What is your role in sales currently?Tune in to this and every episode to find the answers. Highlights:01:15 A different structure for how to pursue revenue growth.02:03 How the customer wants to buy from you.03:03 So as a CEO, what are some of the things you can do to make it easier to be your customer? 04:26 Making content readily available to the people that want to buy from you.05:43 What is the CEO’s role in the sales process?07:17 Creating a conversation.08:16 A mindset shift.10:05 Increasing the effectiveness of your salesperson. You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/

Heidi Messer started Collective[i] with one goal: to bring more certainty and less volatility to sales and improve the livelihoods of every single employee.According to Heidi, sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales. Higher productivity equals more certainty, so why not improve it. If sales improves every other department has more opportunity. In order to bring more certainty and less volatility , Collective[i] focuses on two main innovations:Automate everything possible in the sales process in order to reduce seller admin work and improve CRM accuracy;Train teams on the agile sales process in order to scale revenue.This is one of the most comprehensive interviews on the modern sales process I’ve ever recorded.  Highlights:01:19 All of the time that is spent trying to fix the problems in CRM, we fix so that sellers can sell, managers can coach, and everybody else has absolute transparency into what's happening. 02:23 Nobody trusts the pipeline reviews. So let's just start with a clean capture of data into the CRM and have it done automatically. Nobody has to worry about trusting it.02:36 You know that sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales.03:16 Instead of trying to figure out what happened, we want people to focus on adapting to what's likely to happen.04:25 What was interesting about the mid 2000s is we actually saw marketing transform from being a gut based endeavor to one that was highly scientific, very adaptive and focused on optimization.06:54 We're going to own siloed data, not just within companies, but between companies. Everybody told us it wouldn't work. I'm convinced that if you haven't heard that, you don't have a good idea.07:33 Sales is the lifeblood of companies. Our entire economy depends on sales. If you can bring more certainty to sales and less volatility, you impact the livelihoods of every single person employed by a company.08:17 There's no entrepreneur I've met who isn't a great salesperson.10:21 When you start out with a new product you have to find out what's important to their (you customer’s) business? How am I going to persuade them to try this new thing? And then somehow I think what happens when you grow is you get out of that habit of thinking that way,11:12 There's a significant portion of companies that still believe sales itself is a process, meaning sales is an assembly line. It’s not, it’s more like a sport that needs a playbook and lots of practice.13:51 So imagine now you have to hire salespeople who sell to people who sell.15:53 You have to hire salespeople who are able to be trusted advisers. Do they have fundamental sales skills? Do they have enough knowledge that they can provide people with advice on how to move forward and not just explain something?16:58 I think there's a massive defining line that happened after COVID, and I don't think we're going back.17:49 There's a particular kind of sales leader who can sell innovation and there's a kind of sales leader who wants to sell the status quo.22:33 If you're a good founder, you pick advisors who are smarter than you. I want to hire an expert in something that I may not be an expert in.25:39 We have to do a better job of training our sales teams.27:13 We drink our own champagne.27:57 We switched to Agile.29:11 Agile sales describes an organization that's working perfectly in sync to adapt to changes that are happening real time in marketplaces.31:46 We automated everything that they were doing that was low value. So there's not a seller that spends more than 10 minutes a week in CRM. 32:37 We don't do annual sales conferences, we do quarterly, we call them ARCOS r

Sean Burke shares his knowledge of building high performance sales teams gained through nine startups, seven exits and billions of dollars in value creation.The first rule, you can only attract the best if you can show a definitive path to hitting quota. If you can’t show the math, why would they join your team?Next, you are building a team not a collective of individual contributors. Part of this is defining your role and the role of every part of the company in contributing to the sales team's success.And finally, you need to build metrics around each salesperson to compare and help share best practices across the team. Why is one person’s close rate higher or time to close lower?Sean goes on to talk about mentoring and the difficulty of getting people to take the essential first steps. If you follow his advice, you will never have to worry about getting a job or earning a living.And these highlights only scratch the surface of the wisdom Sean shares with us.Highlights:20:52 If you can't share with them the math of how people get to their numbers, why would they ever join your team?23:26 Every single salesperson on my team has those numbers in a customized dashboard.23:37 The sales velocity formula basically tells you, "Am I going to hit my number or not?"24:38 "Joe, here's what your close ratio is. Bill's close ratio is 10% higher. What are you guys doing differently? By the way, why is Jane's time to close 60 days shorter than yours? Why is our time to close existing business longer than new business? It should be shorter."25:31 What does the data know that our sales leaders don't know, and what do our sales leaders know that the data doesn't know, and we can combine those two together to get a much more accurate forecast.26:42 I will coach anybody on my sales team, but very few people will do the things that I ask them in coaching.28:53 I can guarantee you this, anybody who takes the effort to follow my plan will never have to worry about money the rest of their life,29:06 I do deal strategy work and I will sell, my CEO will sell, everybody sells in our organization so the sales team knows that they have an absolute support mechanism.35:44 From the CEO down to the individual customer success representative we define how we're going to work with each customer.About Our Guest:Sean has devoted his career to practicing, testing, learning, measuring, failing, and triumphing in the pursuit of sales & leadership excellence. The knowledge he shares is from doing the work every day. So unlike consultants, influencers, and experts – Sean still has a number to hit and over 2,000 people across the globe who expect him to make the right leadership decisions as well as help them achieve their own life’s mission.Connect with Sean here:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanhburke/Website - seanburke.bizTwitter - https://twitter.com/seanburke

After eight years of trial and error, Daveed feels he has finally figured out the sales model for, Valens Global. He heard about the rainmaker sales model from a very successful law firm. The senior partner initiated discussions with clients that demonstrate the firm's expertise and ability to solve a particular problem. For Daveed it meant taking the lead with the customer to define the problem and the framework to solve it. His teams, often working in parallel, taking charge of delivering the solution. We love to solve problems and when we are focused on doing that the sale comes naturally. Highlights:02:01 Valens Global solves problems that involve the intersection of evolving technologies, changing global society, often changing ecology or environment, and manifest in ways that are different as patterns than they were in the past. Disinformation, for example, is one such problem set problems involving climate change, problems involving terrorists, and evolving technologies.03:53 We use simulations and games. What is different about our games is first we've invested significantly in storytelling and world building techniques. So there's a cinematic or novel quality to our games.05:30 For our university clients, we get a lot of students coming back and saying that this was the most profound educational experience that they'd had during their university career.06:36 Last year we did a racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism workshop. It was a series of workshops that used a Valens simulation tabletop exercise to anchor the conversations.08:32 Given the life and death nature of the topics that we deal with, practicing self care for your team is very important.09:09 I started Valens Global because I was tired of correctly predicting outcomes that were against the consensus opinion. Valens allowed me to productize my subject matter expertise and rise above group think consensus.21:39 Our sales model has shifted from a sales team model to a rainmaker model that I learned from a famous law firm.33:19 It’s really important to listen and learn about a customer's problem. And in many cases, we deal with big problems and we can’t afford to fail. Solving these problems is my sales model.About Our Guest:Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is an entrepreneur, practitioner, and scholar with specialized knowledge of violent non-state actors and terrorist groups. He is the founder and CEO of the private firm Valens Global, which has twice been named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s E360 list of the top small businesses in the United States. He is also on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and Duke University. Among the many projects that Daveed has undertaken for Valens Global, he led the company’s efforts to support the drafting, threat assessment, and crafting of priority actions for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, which received widespread acclaim. The New York Times, for example, editorialized that the strategy represented “a shift that is both urgently needed and long overdue.” He holds a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.About Guest Company:A few sentences about Valens Global: Valens Global was founded in 2014 on the belief that the private sector is vital to addresing key twenty-first century challenges, including advancing the national security interests of America and its allies and to saving lives by protecting the public from terrorist attacks and other threats. Valens's high-quality analysis is paired with numerous interlocking capabilities, including in physical security, training, threat assessments, detection of insider threats, and messaging. The company's goal,