Podcasts about G2 Crowd

Amir Orad, a seasoned CEO/entrepreneur in AI/analytics, Cyber, and FinTech, has a proven track record of scaling tech companies, including Sisense, Actimize, and Cyota, achieving 9-figure revenues, profitability, and market leadership. As CEO & Chairman of Sisense, revenue grew 17X over eight years to $150M, transitioning to native cloud SaaS and achieving profitability. Sisense serves thousands of customers, recognized as a Visionary/Leader by Gartner, G2 Crowd, and Forrester. Previously, as CEO of NICE Actimize, revenue grew 10x to $200M with over 25% operating income, transitioning to a SaaS/Subscription model. Orad co-founded Cyota, growing it to $100M in bookings in six years before its acquisition by RSA Security. With expertise in mergers and acquisitions, Orad successfully integrated four acquisitions into his companies over 20 years. He's also chaired/boarded companies like AnyWord, Yotpo, SecuriThings, Ava, and BillGuard. Starting his career as a techie, Orad holds patents and is recognized as an industry thought leader in publications like the Wall Street Journal and CNBC. Based in New York, he holds an MBA from Columbia University and a B.Sc in Computer Science and Management from Tel Aviv University, receiving accolades like EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Goldman Sachs' 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uncharted1/support

Why it was selected for "CBNation Architects": In this episode, Mary Sue Dahill is the featured guest. She utilizes her unique capability to interpret technology for non-tech-savvy individuals and aids business owners in choosing the apt digital tools that can save them significant amounts of time and money. Key insights from the episode: Profile: Mary Sue Dahill is an automation expert who assists businesses in streamlining their systems, employing the right digital tools, and automating workflows, enabling them to work smarter and successfully optimize their time and money. Impact: Mary Sue's clients typically experience faster growth with more profit, largely because they eliminate the need for hiring to perform tasks that can be automated and avoid wasting money on digital tools that aren't fit for the purpose. CEO Hack: Mary Sue uses The Rocketbook for taking notes. CEO Nugget: She advises selecting a digital tool using three means: G2Crowd for software reviews, Zapier for integration information, and finally, checking the tool's health information. CEO Defined: In her understanding, being a CEO means (1) Having a vision for where the business is going, and (2) Thinking strategically about your path.   Check out our CEO Hack Buzz Newsletter--our premium newsletter with hacks and nuggets to level up your organization. Sign up HERE.  I AM CEO Handbook Volume 3 is HERE and it's FREE. Get your copy here: http://cbnation.co/iamceo3. Get the 100+ things that you can learn from 1600 business podcasts we recorded. Hear Gresh's story, learn the 16 business pillars from the podcast, find out about CBNation Architects and why you might be one and so much more. Did we mention it was FREE? Download it today!   Previous Episode: https://iamceo.co/2020/04/24/iam620-automation-expert-streamlines-businesses-systems/

In this podcast episode, I interview Sean Burke, the COO of Prometric, a global provider of secure test development and delivery solutions. Sean discusses the initiatives he is working on to impact the business positively, his approach to purchasing new technology, and how to increase a sales rep's likelihood of booking a meeting with him.  You can access the full transcript here.  Time Stamps Initiatives Impacting Business [00:01:00] Sean Burke discusses the initiatives that he is working on to positively impact Prometric's business. Attracting New Clients with Technology [00:01:00] J Webb asks Sean Burke about how technology is enabling Prometric's sales team to attract new clients. Buying Process [00:01:00] J Webb asks Sean Burke to walk him through Prometric's buying process and where potential clients begin their journey. Efficient Sales Play [00:09:30] Sean Burke talks about how technology is enabling the sales team to run an efficient sales play, helping clients walk through the decision-making process as efficiently as possible. Sales Campaign [00:10:32] Burke discusses how technology is used to run an effective sales campaign, either winning or getting a fast note. Revenue Prediction [00:12:36] Burke talks about the gap in technology today, specifically in the area of being able to call the shot for an entire year in advance of that year happening, and how he manually puts together formulas and spreadsheets to feed their revenue output. Auditing Sales Technology [00:17:29] Sean Burke explains how Prometric audits their sales technology every year to assess their spend, usage, and impact on the business. He also shares a tip for sales technology companies to not assume that their customers know where their product is today. Making Decisions on Sales Technology [00:20:58] J Webb asks Sean Burke about his role in making decisions on sales technology. Burke emphasizes the importance of technology delivering business value and having high usage across the team. He also shares his approach to working with vendors and building personal relationships with executives. Executive Level Alignment [00:24:59] In the evaluation stage of considering new vendors, Sean Burke highlights the importance of having executive level alignment with the vendor's team. He explains that having a personal relationship with an executive can help him understand how other amazing executives are deploying their technology and running their teams for the betterment of the outcome of the business. Escalation and Sales Opportunity [00:26:18] Sean Burke talks about how escalation is not always about complaints, but rather about knowledge sharing and best practices. He also discusses the sales opportunity that vendors miss out on by not providing dashboarding and insights to their clients. Optimizing Investment and Facilitating Meetings [00:28:40] Burke explains that he gets involved in meetings with vendors after the decision to go with them has been made. He also talks about the importance of understanding the nuances of the technology and how it is being used in the vendor's business. Challenges of Sales and Getting Attention [00:31:17] Burke discusses the challenges of getting attention as a salesperson and how most of the messages he receives go straight to his junk mail. He suggests that salespeople should gather data and insights from the buying team and deliver a powerful impact statement to get his attention. Initiating contact [00:35:13] Sean Burke discusses the challenges of initiating contact with executives and how to involve decision-makers in the buying process. Crafting a compelling story [00:37:27] J Webb and Sean Burke discuss the importance of crafting a compelling story for potential clients and how to involve the CEO or highest-ranking official in the buying process. Standing out in outreach [00:39:47] Sean Burke shares his thoughts on how to stand out in outreach and the importance of understanding a company's unique commercial challenges. Sales Methodology [00:47:39] Prometric does not subscribe to a specific sales methodology, but instead focuses on learning from win-loss analysis and talking to buyers to understand their decision-making process. Learning from Lost Deals [00:48:46] Prometric conducts win-loss analysis on all sales and uses feedback from lost deals to inform their sales process and improve their approach. Past Buyers Helping Future Buyers [00:50:35] Prometric gets past buyers to work with future buyers to help them avoid pitfalls in the sales process and improve their experience. Procurement Process [00:51:11] Sean Burke explains the procurement process at Prometric, involving financial and procurement teams, sales leadership, revenue ops team, and users of the product. Finding New Technology [00:54:35] Burke shares his approach to finding new technology, including reading, going to G2 Crowd, and googling to solve problems. Importance of Calendar [00:55:21] Burke emphasizes the importance of his calendar and how it is the most important tool in his tech stack, as it is where he makes investments in the business. He also highlights the importance of reps being on their sales leader's calendar.

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde discussed a new tool that helps young people remove explicit online images from the internet; the role of TikTok in enabling certain kinds of online vices; and the rising trend of an extortion scam that specifically targets teenage boys.TimestampsPart 1: "They create fake female accounts to target boys between the ages of 14 and 17." (1:40)Part 2: "Many teens choose to make their profiles fully public." (6:38)Part 3: "Hopefully, this new platform will prevent sextortion." (14:02)=======Productive businesses use 1Password to secure employees at scale.1Password is the world's most-loved password manager, with top ratings from G2Crowd and Trustpilot, and has been named top password manager by leading media outlets including Wired, The New York Times, and CNET.Start protecting your data today=======Organize your work and life, finally.Become focused, organized, and calm with Todoist. The world's #1 task manager and to-do list app.Start for free=======Receive $25 off orders of $149+ with code SWAPSRF at Snake River Farms!Whether you're a seasoned veteran or a beginner to beef, the pioneers of American Wagyu have got you covered with $25 off your order.Shop Delicious Meats Now=======Turn your Airtable or Google Sheets into modern business tools you need.Softr lets you stop waiting for developers. Build software without devs. Blazingly fast. Trusted by 100,000+ teams worldwide.Start building now.=======Sesame Care - Doctor appointments as low as $19.Find the best price for the highest quality physicians. Book an appointment in minutes.Get Started=======Support the show

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde spoke with JT Taylor, the Senior Director of Fraud Investigations and Operations at ID.me, a cybersecurity company valued at over $1.5 billion. The conversation touched on the nuances of synthetic identity theft; how identity verification is a tool to recognize synthetic identity theft; how identity theft ties into recent trends of prescription medication abuse; how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology can be used to enhance fraud detection; the role of social media in synthetic identity fraud; the impact of synthetic identity on brand abuse, geopolitics, and so on; best practices for fraud data strategy and information sharing; how ID.me platform fits into the future of cybersecurity… and lots more.=======Receive $25 off orders of $149+ with code SWAPSRF at Snake River Farms!Whether you're a seasoned veteran or a beginner to beef, the pioneers of American Wagyu have got you covered with $25 off your order.Shop Delicious Meats Now=======Organize your work and life, finally.Become focused, organized, and calm with Todoist. The world's #1 task manager and to-do list app.Start for free=======Productive businesses use 1Password to secure employees at scale.1Password is the world's most-loved password manager, with top ratings from G2Crowd and Trustpilot, and has been named top password manager by leading media outlets including Wired, The New York Times, and CNET.Start protecting your data today=======Turn your Airtable or Google Sheets into modern business tools you need.Softr lets you stop waiting for developers. Build software without devs. Blazingly fast. Trusted by 100,000+ teams worldwide.Start building now.=======Sesame Care - Doctor appointments as low as $19.Find the best price for the highest quality physicians. Book an appointment in minutes.Get Started=======Support the show

In this episode, co-host Akinola Ologunde provided updates on the sale of Manchester United as well as some news on Liverpool's ownership.Please send questions, comments, and suggestions to throughball10@gmail.com.Check out co-host Bidemi Ologunde's other creative outlets on LinkTree.=======Organize your work and life, finally.Become focused, organized, and calm with Todoist. The world's #1 task manager and to-do list app.Start for free=======Receive $25 off orders of $149+ with code SWAPSRF at Snake River Farms!Whether you're a seasoned veteran or a beginner to beef, the pioneers of American Wagyu have got you covered with $25 off your order.Shop Delicious Meats Now=======Productive businesses use 1Password to secure employees at scale.1Password is the world's most-loved password manager, with top ratings from G2Crowd and Trustpilot, and has been named top password manager by leading media outlets, including Wired, The New York Times, and CNET.Start protecting your data today=======Support the show

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde discussed how bosses spy on their employees; how some employees inadvertently overshare their work calendars; some innovative ways employees are outsmarting helicopter bosses; and the lengths some employees will go to, to avoid their own colleagues in the office.TimestampsPart 1: "It's not just emails that are being tallied and analyzed." (1:18)Part 2: "Small talk and weird-smelling food." (13:36)Part 3: "Activity is not the same thing as productivity." (18:04)Part 4: "Mouse jigglers are for sale on Amazon." (26:52) Part 5: "Goran the chicken guy." (32:54) =======Receive $25 off orders of $149+ with code SWAPSRF at Snake River Farms!Whether you're a seasoned veteran or a beginner to beef, the pioneers of American Wagyu have got you covered with $25 off your order.Shop Delicious Meats Now=======Organize your work and life, finally.Become focused, organized, and calm with Todoist. The world's #1 task manager and to-do list app.Start for free=======Productive businesses use 1Password to secure employees at scale.1Password is the world's most-loved password manager, with top ratings from G2Crowd and Trustpilot, and has been named top password manager by leading media outlets including Wired, The New York Times, and CNET.Start protecting your data today=======Turn your Airtable or Google Sheets into modern business tools you need.Softr lets you stop waiting for developers. Build software without devs. Blazingly fast. Trusted by 100,000+ teams worldwide.Start building now.=======Sesame Care - Doctor appointments as low as $19.Find the best price for the highest quality physicians. Book an appointment in minutes.Get Started=======Support the show

Syndicated analyst reports like Gartner and Forrester retain a high level of credibility. However, software buyers are beginning to find review platforms such as G2 Crowd and Trust radius easier to access information during their buying journey. Also, the information on these review platforms is more relatable to buyers, and trust levels are increasing. Could this be the downfall of syndicated analysts? In this conversation, Camela Thompson, the VP of Marketing at CaliberMind, discusses the decline of syndicated analysts' reports in the software buyers' journey. Show NotesConnect With:Camela Thompson: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterThe Rev Gen Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterI Hear Everything: IHearEverything.com // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde discussed several topics surrounding online dating with Nermin Amin, a return guest on the podcast (Episode 122).Some of the topics include: the good, bad, and ugly sides of online dating, featuring some of her own very interesting experiences; social anxiety and the difficulty of striking up conversations with strangers in public places; the three key elements of maintaining meaningful relationships with anyone; the risk of oversharing on social media; safety tips for anyone getting into online dating; and lots more.=======Beautiful, custom travel maps – starting at $20Atlas.co is the only map company that lets you add your custom route to your personalized map. The process is simple:- Select your trip type and add your trip- Style your map, move / edit your labels- Select your size and material type and submit your order!Pick from a selection of beautiful styles and colors that we're sure will fit any home or space. Add some text to make it truly yours!=======Insightful business news that respects your time and intelligence.The Daily Upside is a business newsletter that covers the most important stories in business in a style that's engaging, insightful, and fun. Started by a former investment banker, The Daily Upside delivers quality insights and surfaces unique stories you won't read elsewhere.Sign up here.=======Staying informed about the world doesn't have to be boring.International Intrigue is a free global affairs briefing created by former diplomats to help the next generation of leaders better understand how geopolitics, business, and technology intersect. They deliver the most important geopolitical news and analysis in

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde spoke with Robin Allen, a Security Incident Response Manager at Expedia Group.We talked about how she made the transition into cybersecurity; the four key traits that have consistently positioned her for success so far in her career; the ways she finds new tasks and responsibilities to take on without necessarily seeking a new job or a new role; her opinion on the number one thing everyone should pay attention to regarding their cyber hygiene; and lots more.=======Beautiful, custom travel maps – starting at $20Atlas.co is the only map company that lets you add your custom route to your personalized map. The process is simple:- Select your trip type and add your trip- Style your map, move / edit your labels- Select your size and material type and submit your order!Pick from a selection of beautiful styles and colors that we're sure will fit any home or space. Add some text to make it truly yours!=======Insightful business news that respects your time and intelligence.The Daily Upside is a business newsletter that covers the most important stories in business in a style that's engaging, insightful, and fun. Started by a former investment banker, The Daily Upside delivers quality insights and surfaces unique stories you won't read elsewhere.Sign up here.=======Staying informed about the world doesn't have to be boring.International Intrigue is a free global affairs briefing created by former diplomats to help the next generation of leaders better understand how geopolitics, business, and technology intersect. They deliver the most important geopolitical news and analysis in

In this episode, host Bidemi Ologunde discussed how companies are dealing with workforce dynamics after the pandemic.TimestampsPart 1: "Juniority Benefits." (1:30)Part 2: "Several things affect the willingness to work." (15:32)Part 3: "She received another seven percent pay increase after her performance review." (23:59)=======Beautiful, custom travel maps – starting at $20Atlas.co is the only map company that lets you add your custom route to your personalized map. The process is simple:- Select your trip type and add your trip- Style your map, move / edit your labels- Select your size and material type and submit your order!Pick from a selection of beautiful styles and colors that we're sure will fit any home or space. Add some text to make it truly yours!=======Insightful business news that respects your time and intelligence.The Daily Upside is a business newsletter that covers the most important stories in business in a style that's engaging, insightful, and fun. Started by a former investment banker, The Daily Upside delivers quality insights and surfaces unique stories you won't read elsewhere.Sign up here.=======Staying informed about the world doesn't have to be boring.International Intrigue is a free global affairs briefing created by former diplomats to help the next generation of leaders better understand how geopolitics, business, and technology intersect. They deliver the most important geopolitical news and analysis in

Jon Ferrara, has been recognized for pioneering innovation in the customer management category. He's the founder and CEO of Nimble, an award-winning social sales, and marketing CRM for individuals and teams. It's Ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction by G2 Crowd and integrates with Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. Learn more at Nimble.com. Ferrara was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product GoldMine. In 1999, Goldmine got acquired by FrontRange and Ferrara left to pursue other interests. During those years, Ferrara continued to watch the CRM market. He saw that most of the CRM products that were serving small businesses moved upmarket (and became more costly and complex) or fell by the wayside, leaving the market underserved. Specialties: - Entrepreneurship and Product Innovation - Brand and Identity Development - Marketing and Sales Strategy - Managing Global 350+ persons Corporations

Syndicated analyst reports like Gartner and Forrester retain a high level of credibility. However, software buyers are beginning to find review platforms such as G2 Crowd and Trust radius easier to access information during their buying journey. Also, the information on these review platforms is more relatable to buyers, and trust levels are increasing. Could this be the downfall of syndicated analysts? In this conversation, Camela Thompson, the VP of Marketing at CaliberMind, discusses the decline of syndicated analysts' reports in the software buyers' journey. Show NotesConnect With:Camela Thompson: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterThe Rev Gen Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterI Hear Everything: IHearEverything.com // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jordan Crawford, CEO at Blueprint, discusses buyer intent data tools. According to G2 Crowd, there are 52 companies in the buyer intent data category. G2 Crowd classifies buyer intent as the probability that a customer will purchase a product, and buyer intent data tools capture research around actual buyer journeys and signs of their purchase intent. Today, Jordan looks at 6sense, ZoomInfo, and KickFire. Show NotesConnect With:Jordan Crawford: Website // LinkedInThe Rev Gen Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterI Hear Everything: IHearEverything.com // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jordan Crawford, CEO at Blueprint, discusses sales compensation management. As per G2 Crowd, there are 58 companies in the sales compensation management tool category. G2 classifies the best sale compensation software as one that automates the accounting and administration of commissions and incentive plans based on several customizable rules, such as employee role, tenure, or sales type. Today, Jordan looks at Captivate IQ, CallidusCloud, and Sales Cookie. Show NotesConnect With:Jordan Crawford: Website // LinkedInThe Rev Gen Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterI Hear Everything: IHearEverything.com // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jordan Crawford, CEO at Blueprint, discusses buyer intent data tools. According to G2 Crowd, there are 52 companies in the buyer intent data category. G2 Crowd classifies buyer intent as the probability that a customer will purchase a product, and buyer intent data tools capture research around actual buyer journeys and signs of their purchase intent. Today, Jordan looks at 6sense, ZoomInfo, and KickFire. Show NotesConnect With:Jordan Crawford: Website // LinkedInThe Rev Gen Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterI Hear Everything: IHearEverything.com // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jon Ferrara is a serial entrepreneur, CRM pioneer, speaker, and leader in the relationship economy, which is the foundation of social selling and modern-day sales. He's been recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Social CEOs, one of the Top 10 Social Salespeople in the World, and one of the Top 100 Marketing Influencers. Ferrara is the founder and CEO of Nimble, an award-winning social sales and marketing CRM for individuals and teams. He launched Nimble to help people nurture their personal and business relationships across email and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Nimble is ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction by G2 Crowd. He's best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the first Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs). In 1999, Goldmine was acquired by FrontRange. Ferrara is an advisor to multiple start-ups and established companies. He also donates time to local business colleges and entrepreneurial programs including the Entrepreneurial Program at USC Marshall School of Business.   Show Notes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonvferrara/ https://twitter.com/Jon_Ferrara https://www.nimble.com/ https://www.goldmine.com/

Welcome back to the From Vendorship → Partnership podcast, Season 2: Seller's Journey! Our guest this week is Clay Bentley, VP of Sales at Metadata. Before joining Metadata two and a half years ago, Clay led sales at G2 Crowd for four years, and previously worked as an AE at several SF-area companies and startups. He told Ross: “Startups are my thing – they get me out of bed in the morning.” Listen to the episode for insights & advice from Clay on common early stage sales mistakes, balancing priorities, and coaching your reps. About Clay & Metadata Clay is the VP of Sales at Metadata, and was formerly the VP of Sales at G2. His journey has taken him from SF → Chicago → Nashville, where he currently lives. Metadata automates paid campaign execution and strategy, eliminating manual and repetitive work for B2B Marketers. Metadata is hiring! Check out their open roles here.

Key Points: How Gil pivoted from a marketing career to starting tech company Metadata (1:12) My thoughts on innovation as a transient advantage (04:19) How Metadata is competing on innovation (06:56) Why Gil made an early marketing investment in G2 Crowd (10:46) Why Metadata opted to tap into pre-existing demand for ABM software (12:41) How Gil and Metadata are differentiating by prioritizing transparency (14:49) My thoughts on gaining customer trust through transparency (18:13) Why Gil's initial strategy did not focus on brand (20:31) My take on building brand as a sustainable asset (21:47) My view on defining your target market (24:46) Gil's predictions for the future (27:44) Wrap up (28:57) Mentioned:MetadataCategory Creation and Product-led Differentiation with Drift's David CancelG2DemandBaseTerminus6senseBigger than This by Fabian GeyrhalterTamara Grominsky on how Unbounce are pairing marketer and machine to create a new category and fend off the competitionMy Links:TwitterLinkedInWebsiteWynterSpeeroCXL

Episode #21 - Dan Kaplan - Professional Technical Interviewee with Taylor Dorsett My guest today is Dan Kaplan. He is the CTO at Nine to Five and has worked at companies like G2 Crowd, Enova, and Publicis. - Video: https://youtu.be/EkSvad0yDu8 - Audio only: https://ProfessionalTechnicalIntervieweewithTaylorDorsett.podbean.com/e/episode-21-dan-kaplan - Part Two - Technical: COMING SOON! Guest: Dan Kaplan - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkaplan88/ - Five to Nine: https://fivetonine.co/ If you enjoyed the show please subscribe, thumbs up, and share the show. Episodes released on the first four Thursdays of each month. Host: Taylor Owen Dorsett - Email: dorsetttaylordev@gmail.com - Twitter: @yodorsett - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylordorsett/ - Github: https://github.com/TaylorOD - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TaylorDorsett Editor: Dustin Bays - Email: dustin.bays@baysbrass.com - Twitter/Instagram: @Bays4Bays

Sam and Emma catch up on the big Thanksgiving weekend's worth of news! They begin by looking forwards, running through what we might see in the upcoming Senate session, before Sam reflects on the anniversary of Mike Cernovich's attempted canceling of him (also known as Sam's birthday). Next, they move onto the state of the GOP after Lauren Boebert's increasingly Islamophobic statements about Ilhan Omar saw an absence of blowback from both sides, and cover Tulsi's sharp shift to the right as she discusses the Ahmaud Arbery case as proof of a lack of racism in the US. They wrap it up by covering the Omicron variant, the necessary steps Biden should take versus the ones he will, and how his press-release presidency has proved increasingly useless in the eyes of the American public, which they emphasize with a discussion of his Build Back Better plan and the obstruction of the Senate Parliamentarian, who was hired by his own party. They also touch on some special and not-so-special guests for the upcoming MR live show. And in the Fun Half: David from South Africa discusses global sanctions on his nation, and the absurdity of punishing a nation for having the proper infrastructure to discover new variants – which the US does not – and how this works with the Donald Trump “if we don't test, there won't be any issues” argument, as highlighted with a Jeanine Pirro guest. Alexis calls in from the non-ceded Spokane nation on recent fascist platforming going on in the area, including at the comedy club where she worked, and the MR team explores the incredible boost from the third shot, and Nick Fletcher whines to British parliament about being a man. Roy from the Country calls in to discuss the problematic connections between judges and landlords, and Eyo calls in to tackle some hard issues in the current civil war between Tigray and Ethiopia, before Sam and Emma explore the spirit of Thanksgiving coming together with the Dave Rubin Jimmy Dore reconnection, plus, your calls and IMs! Purchase tickets for the live show in Boston on January 16th HERE! https://thewilbur.com/artist/majority-report/ Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here. Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ (Merch issues and concerns can be addressed here: majorityreportstore@mirrorimage.com) You can now watch the livestream on Twitch Check out today's sponsors: sunsetlakecbd: Sunset Lake CBD & Majority Report are teaming up to turn America's most consumerist holiday into a fundraising opportunity for a great organization. Here's how it works: Visit SunsetLakeCBD.com starting November 22nd and all CBD Products will be between 30-60% OFF! Orders over $100 will receive a free jar of delicious CBD gummies - A $40 value, for free! NO PROMO CODE NEEDED PRODUCTS ARE ALREADY DISCOUNTED ON THE WEBSITE. Egnyte: All over the world, companies hit by ransomware attacks have their valuable digital files held hostage and are forced to decide whether to pay cybercriminals to get them back. EGNYTE is the first ever file system with sophisticated ransomware detection and recovery tools fully baked in. Behind the scenes, Egnyte gives companies with limited IT and security staff the power of much larger teams. With Egnyte, you'll know exactly where key documents are and who has access. Learn more about how Egnyte can protect your business from ransomware. Or see why Egnyte is rated number one for data security by real customers in G2 Crowd. Start your free trial today at egnyte.com. That's egnyte.com. LiquidIV: Cooler weather makes it easier to miss signs of dehydration like overheating or perspiration, which means it's even more important to keep your body properly hydrated. Liquid I.V. contains 5 essential vitamins—more Vitamin C than an orange and as much potassium as a banana. Healthier than sugary sports drinks, there are no artificial flavors or preservatives and less sugar than an apple. Grab your favorite Liquid I.V. flavors nationwide at Walmart or you can get 25% off when you go to liquidIV.com and use code MAJORITYREP at checkout. That's 25% off ANYTHING you order when you get better hydration today using promo code MAJORITYREP at liquidIV.com. GiveWell: When you give to charity, it can be hard to know how exactly your money will be used. If you want to help people with evidence-backed, high-impact charities, check out GiveWell! Over 50,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than 750 million dollars that will save tens of thousands lives AND improve the lives of MILLIONS more. If you've never donated to GiveWell's recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to TWO HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick PODCAST and enter “The Majority Report with Sam Seder” at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Majority Report to get your donation matched. Support the St. Vincent Nurses today as they continue to strike for a fair contract! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere, at https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel! Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! Check out The Nomiki Show live at 3 pm ET on YouTube at patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Jamie's podcast, The Antifada, at patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!) Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop

Jon Ferrara is the founder and CEO of Nimble, an award-winning social sales, and marketing CRM for individuals and teams. It's Ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction by G2 Crowd and integrates with Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. Learn more at Nimble.com. Ferrara was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product GoldMine. In 1999, Goldmine was acquired by FrontRange and Ferrara left to pursue other interests. During those years, Ferrara continued to watch the CRM market. He saw that most of the CRM products that were serving small businesses moved upmarket (and became more costly and complex) or fell by the wayside, leaving the market underserved. Shannon and Jon discuss the importance and value of knowing your customers, best practices for documenting that information to benefit both the sales team and the company as a whole. They also touched on the concept of social selling and using social media as one of your primary channels of engagement towards your current and future customers. Shannon invites Jon to share more about his experiences in developing his original CRM software solution, Gold Mine back in the late 80's. LEARN MORE ABOUT JON FERRARA: Email: jon@nimble.com Instagram: @JonFerrara Facebook: Jon_Ferrara Twitter: Jon.Ferrara  

Sam and Emma host  Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, to discuss her recent book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. Sam and Emma host  Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, to discuss her recent book, “Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula,” on how the maritime trade infrastructure has become a microcosm of global capitalism, and what it can teach us about labor relations, lasting imperialism, and the gig economy. Professor Khalili starts with a distillation of the current role of maritime trade, with over 80% of good transported by sea at some point, from raw materials coming from Africa, Australia, and the global south in general, working through production in China, and finally moving across the world in their final form. She next walks Emma and Sam through how maritime trade has revolutionized the global economy, completely shifting the world away from regional production, and helping bolster the power and imposition of the North Atlantic economies, allowing them to reiterate the imperial economics of old, as they take raw materials from developing economies and sell them back, building the debt of the rest of the world. She also touches on the internal shift in North Atlantic economies as industry shifts abroad and service economies begin to take their place at home, ensuring that the inequalities between laborers in debt, and capitalists with credit are reiterated no matter the regional constraints. Next, they dive into the key material of maritime trade, as they explore the transport of crude oil that has aided the rise of Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE as central ports, looking at the self-reinforcing relationship between maritime innovation and the increased production of hydrocarbons. Laleh, Emma, and Sam also dive into what makes port location so important, and the variables that come into play, before they wrap up the interview by touching on the labor exploitation central to maritime trade, and how the already precarious gig work of shipping workers, truck drivers, and port workers has been upended by the pandemic. Sam and Emma also touch on this weekend's updates on the reconciliation and bipartisan infrastructure bills. And in the Fun Half: Emma, Sam, and the MR Crew discuss the ongoing strikes, and the right's attempt to make it about vaccinations and masking, OAN reminds us that gender is distracting us from solving the crisis in Afghanistan (?), and John from San Antonio gives some killer updates ahead of tomorrows elections across the US. They also chat Michael Flynn and blackmail, two topics never too far apart, Angel from Jersey discusses NJ's conservative consciousness, and Anthony from Ohio talks Forbes surprisingly misappropriating Adam Smith to put down unions. There's also conversation on the fall of empire and the disillusionment with democratic voters, plus, your calls and IMs! Purchase tickets for the live show in Boston on January 16th HERE! Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here. Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ (Merch issues and concerns can be addressed here: majorityreportstore@mirrorimage.com) You can now watch the livestream on Twitch Check out today's sponsors: sunsetlakecbd is a majority employee owned farm in Vermont, producing 100% pesticide free CBD products. Great company, great product and fans of the show! Use code Leftisbest and get 20% off at http://www.sunsetlakecbd.com. And now Sunset Lake CBD has donated $2500 to the Nurses strike fund, and we encourage MR listeners to help if they can. Here's a link to where folks can donate: https://forms.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ StitchFix: You know your closet well, but what does it sound like? Yes, your closet. With Stitch Fix Freestyle, a shop that evolves alongside your taste, your closet will scream “so you” without actually screaming. Stitch Fix Freestyle is your trusted style destination where you can discover and instantly buy curated items based on your style, likes and lifestyle. Whether you're looking for a brand you love or to try a new one, at Stitch Fix Freestyle, you can shop hundreds of brands personalized to your size and fit. Get started today by filling out your style quiz at StitchFix.com/MAJORITY. That's StitchFix.com/MAJORITY to try Stitch Fix Freestyle. StitchFix.com/MAJORITY. Egnyte: All over the world, companies hit by ransomware attacks have their valuable digital files held hostage and are forced to decide whether to pay cybercriminals to get them back. EGNYTE is the first ever file system with sophisticated ransomware detection and recovery tools fully baked in. Behind the scenes, Egnyte gives companies with limited IT and security staff the power of much larger teams. With Egnyte, you'll know exactly where key documents are and who has access. Learn more about how Egnyte can protect your business from ransomware. Or see why Egnyte is rated number one for data security by real customers in G2 Crowd. Start your free trial today at egnyte.com. That's egnyte.com. Support the St. Vincent Nurses today as they continue to strike for a fair contract! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere, at https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel! Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! Check out The Nomiki Show live at 3 pm ET on YouTube at patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Jamie's podcast, The Antifada, at patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!) Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop

Sam and Emma host Keisha Blain, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, to discuss her recent book Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America, on how Hamer's long life led up to a final decade and a half of incredibly influential activism. Professor Blain walks Emma and Sam back to the 1920s and the first years of Fannie Lou Hamer's life, growing up on a sharecropping plantation in Mississippi where she was confronted with, beyond the labor abuses of the plantation, constant racial violence, exploitation, and coercion of her community. Specifically, they reflect on the explicit mob violence she saw with the lynching of tenant farmer Joe Pullum, alongside the general poverty and hunger that plagued those around her, before Keisha dives into the breaking point that set up Fannie Lou's eventual dip into non-violent action; her forced sterilization at the hands of a white doctor supposedly removing a tumor. Following this incredibly traumatizing experience, Hamer eventually heard talk of a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting at her local church, at which the public abuses of her community, and their unconstitutional nature, are crystallized for her. Next, Professor Blain brings Emma and Sam along Hamer's life as an activist, organizing for voter registration, from workshops to actually attempting to register in the face of civilian and police brutality, and arrest, just sixty years ago, and they work their way up to her speech at the Credentials Committee in Atlantic City which had even President LBJ on his heels. Keisha then walks through the influence of Hamer's activism today, looking particularly at the story of Breonna Taylor and Kate Young's use of social media to force the mainstream media to acknowledge her name. They wrap up the interview by touching on Fannie Lou Hamer's consciousness around the use of class and poverty to reinforce white supremacy, and looking at how her role as a key civil rights activist is obscured through the whitewashing of history. Sam and Emma also discuss the Right's commitment to the pro-COVID stance. And in the Fun Half: Emma and Sam discuss the brand new 2010 Republican talking point on the Democrats'… dismantling of Medicare? They cover the confirmation of the Boogaloo Boys' classic leftist organizing tactic of actively sowing chaos, shooting up buildings, and committing arson to undermine leftist protests, touching on the slow and steady replacement of election officials in the shadow of the Right's “Big Lie” as well, before Bro Flamingo fittingly calls in to talk cults. Charlie Kirk talks Senator Schumer's kinks, Jay from Chicago discusses the de-normalization of Obama's violent administration, Matt Walsh and Emma share some misinformation on extinction events, and the crew covers some updates from the Kellogg's strikes. Emma also gets on the record regarding the NFL and Jon Gruden, plus, your calls and IMs! Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here. Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ (Merch issues and concerns can be addressed here: majorityreportstore@mirrorimage.com) You can now watch the livestream on Twitch Check out today's sponsors: Egnyte: All over the world, companies hit by ransomware attacks have their valuable digital files held hostage and are forced to decide whether to pay cybercriminals to get them back. EGNYTE is the first ever file system with sophisticated ransomware detection and recovery tools fully baked in. Behind the scenes, Egnyte gives companies with limited IT and security staff the power of much larger teams. With Egnyte, you'll know exactly where key documents are and who has access. Learn more about how Egnyte can protect your business from ransomware. Or see why Egnyte is rated number one for data security by real customers in G2 Crowd. Start your free trial today at egnyte.com. That's egnyte.com. sunsetlakecbd is a majority employee owned farm in Vermont, producing 100% pesticide free CBD products. Great company, great product and fans of the show! Use code Leftisbest and get 20% off at http://www.sunsetlakecbd.com. And now Sunset Lake CBD has donated $2500 to the Nurses strike fund, and we encourage MR listeners to help if they can. Here's a link to where folks can donate: https://forms.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Support the St. Vincent Nurses today as they continue to strike for a fair contract! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere, at https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel! Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! Check out The Nomiki Show live at 3 pm ET on YouTube at patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Jamie's podcast, The Antifada, at patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!) Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Watch More Perfect Union's video about the striking Kellogg's workers here.  

This episode of The Jake Dunlap Show features Henry Schuck, CEO & Co-Founder of ZoomInfo. Hard work, when done consistently, will reward you in the end. Henry learned this very early on when he ran for student body president, worked two jobs, and eventually founded his first company, a nightclub promotion business.Working in iProfile exposed Henry to the world of tech, earning him valuable experience which would be instrumental in the founding of DiscoverOrg and acquisition of ZoomInfo.Henry went to Ohio State for law school as a deliberate choice for its great atmosphere and scholarships to boot. It was during his time here that DiscoverOrg would be created.It was not an easy journey as Henry's time was split between law school and running his new business. His trademark drive for success however allowed him to finish and lead his company from $300,000 in its first year to 35 million in just 7 years.   As Henry became more entrenched in his role as CEO, he learned that he must adapt as the needs of a $50 million company are vastly different from the needs of a $100 million company.Listen to the full podcast and find out more about Henry Schuck's inspiring story of working hard until you reach your goals.QUOTES:09:06 On work: "I just really believed in the value of hard work and I just believed it would pay off."12:59 On mental health: "I just at some point decided that okay, I'm going to need to feel better about this. So what am I going to do? So I signed up to go talk to a counselor."14:12 On taking the initiative for change: "If I'm going to bitch and moan about how much I don't like the UNLV community, then I should probably go try and do something about it. And so I said, well, I'm going to run for student body president."17:17 On never having regrets: "It was about having no regrets around not working hard enough. I will lose fair and square but I won't lose because I didn't work hard enough."33:26 On altruism: "When you have some professional success, you should probably take some time to think about what things along the way were hands that helped you get to that point."55:36 On being an adaptable CEO: "As long as you're convicted about the fact that you want to be that next CEO, you've got to continue to evolve your role."More about HenryHenry Schuck is a leading entrepreneur in sales intelligence and lead generation. Before founding DiscoverOrg, Henry managed marketing and research at iProfile, eventually leading the private equity sale of the company. He then founded DiscoverOrg back in 2007 while he was still in law school. Soon after he acquired rival ZoomInfo and decided to take on the former competitor's name. After taking ZoomInfo public, shares zoomed from $21 to more than $50.Henry led the company on a rapid growth path including funding investments from TA Associates, Goldman Sachs BDC, FiveW Capital, and NXT Capital. Henry's business sells subscriptions to a database of sales and marketing intelligence. Their databases contain corporate contact information, company organizational structures, and “technographics,” a profile of all the technologies used by different companies.DiscoverOrg has been awarded both a Stevie® and a CODIE award in recognition of the quality of their datasets. It was also named a Leader and ranked Number One in customer service by G2 Crowd.Find out more about Henry Schuck through the following links:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hschuck/Website (ZoomInfo) - https://www.zoominfo.com/Learn more about Jake Dunlap and Skaled by visiting the links below:Jake Dunlap:Personal Site - http://jakedunlap.com/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/Twitter - https://twitter.com/JakeTDunlapInstagram - http://instagram.com/jake_dunlap_Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/JakeTDunlap/Skaled:Website - https://skaled.com/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/skaledYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsw_03rSlbGQkeLGMGiDf4Q

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. The world of sales is becoming increasingly complex with more stakeholders involved in buying decisions, intensifying competition, and rapidly changing expectations of the skills and knowledge that sellers need to be successful. In navigating this complexity, the MEDDICC methodology can help provide a common language for everyone in the sales organization to more efficiently and effectively qualify deals and generate a clear path to success. Andy Whyte's book, “MEDDICC,” lays out strategies and best practices to successfully implement the MEDDICC methodology, and I’m so excited to have him on the podcast today to share some of the key insights from his book. With that, Andy, could you please introduce yourself to our audience and then tell us a little bit more about your book. Andy Whyte: Yeah. Hey Olivia, very good morning to you. Hello to the audience. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I’ve been listening to the back catalog, and I’ve been really enjoying the episodes so it’s great to be on the show, thank you for having me. As you said, my name is Andy Whyte. At heart, I’m a sales guy. That’s pretty much what I’ve always done since leaving school. Went into sales and started doing door to door sales selling home improvements, then worked in a cell phone store selling cell phones, and then got into SaaS and started climbing the ladder up of doing more senior roles and taking on larger propositions from selling to SMB's to selling to enterprises and all different kinds of SaaS solutions. More recently, I went into sales leadership within the last five or six years with a couple of different startups. The book came about really for a couple of reasons. One was I stumbled across MEDDICC myself as an individual contributor back in 2014 or 2015, and I just felt like it was something that as soon as I learned about it, I was like where’s this been all of my career? I don’t know anyone else who’s ever stumbled across some methodology or something, but it just made me feel, not happy because I’d found it, but sad because of all the time I’d wasted on deals before and deals that I’d lost and all this stuff. I could have saved myself the heartache if I had MEDDICC, so I embraced MEDDICC, loved it. It really helped me as an individual contributor, and then as a sales leader it helped me a lot as well in enterprising up the teams I was leading. One of the strange things around MEDDICC is it's 25 years old this year, but no one really had ever stopped to document it or put any kind of book together for it. I definitely saw that as an opportunity to put some of my ideas and thoughts around MEDDICC down on paper. What started as a first blog post iterated into where we are today with a book and a lot of great experiences that have come from that. That's the background story of myself and MEDDICC. OF: Fantastic. Well, again, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today to dive a little deeper into your book, which I know I personally learned so much from. In the book, you note that MEDDICC is a qualification methodology, so I’m curious, how does that differ from a traditional sales methodology and what makes MEDDICC different and unique compared to some of the other qualification methodologies that are out there? AW: Yeah, that’s a great and actually really important question because it’s funny, it is a methodology of course, MEDDICC you can call a framework as well. I tend to swap between both of them. It’s in sales, so by definition you’d say, well, isn’t it a sales methodology? I guess you could call it that. The only reason why I like to point out and not refer to it as a sales methodology is because generally, the definition of a sales methodology is how you talk to your customers, how you engage with your customers. MEDDICC is much more around qualifying where you are with those customers, should you be engaged with those customers. It doesn’t necessarily dictate how you should engage and what messaging to use and how to talk to the customers. Likewise, the same with the sales process. Some people refer to it as a sales process, and it’s not. It’s a framework that sits underneath the methodology and the process, and the reason why it’s important just to differentiate the two is that you can really only have one sales process and one sales methodology. If you were to think of MEDDICC as being a sales methodology, you would assume that you can’t overlay it over the top of the framework methodology you already have. That's why it’s important to differentiate the two. Then when you think about MEDDICC as a qualification framework or methodology, it’s funny how when you get into the qualification framework world, it seems to be a world of acronyms. I can’t even remember most of them. The most famous ones are obviously MEDDICC and BANT. There’s a whole load of other ones. There’s one called CHAMP. There’s some with G's and C's and all this sort of stuff in there. I think where MEDDICC really comes into its own is that it sees you all the way through the sales process and beyond into post-sales and actually pre-sales process. MEDDICC looks so broadly, not just at the qualifying actual moment in time, but it talks about who you’re going to be working with, the proposition that you’re taking to those people, and what would those people be interested in. It can really go pre-sale as well and start to help influence how you market your products and how you message the value of those products as well. And how, of course, all the people internally talk about the different stages of revenue. That's where I think MEDDICC really comes into its own. It’s not to say that the other qualification frameworks aren’t good, but it goes very broadly across the entire sales process. OF: Definitely. As you mentioned, MEDDICC is an acronym and in the book, you walk through each of the different stages of the MEDDICC methodology and also some additions that companies are beginning to use. At a high level, I’d love if you could just dive into what those stages are, and also when it might be appropriate to supplement them with some of those additional steps. AW: Yeah, no great question. As I said a moment ago, MEDDICC is 25 years old this year and it was born inside of a company called PTC. Really where it came from was a guy called Dick Dunkel who invented it. He worked in sales enablement, probably one of the firsts, PTC was probably the very first people to do sales enablement, and he’d come out from the field with the task of helping PTC to level up all the new salespeople they were hiring. One of the exercises they did was to look at why PTC were winning deals, why they were losing deals, and why deals were slipping. What he found wherever he went, whatever sales team inside of PTC he went to, was that there was a continuity in the answers to those questions. These actually rolled up to being the elements of MEDDICC, which was at the time six elements, which is MEDDIC with just one C on the end and two D's. That obviously served us very well. It’s proliferated almost like no other methodology since that time, but what’s actually happened as technology landscapes have evolved, there’s been two particular elements that have come into be popularized inside of MEDDICC. That’s why a lot of people will know MEDDICC as MEDDPICC because it has an extra P in there. As I said, one of those letters is the “P,” which generally stands for paper process. What this is, it goes without saying, but it’s the process that occurs when you start to talk about contracts. SLSA's, DPA’s, there’s all of these three-letter acronyms that exist now that weren't around when MEDDICC was created because generally it was on premise software, you owned the licenses and data privacy wasn’t such a big thing. The paper process has become much more complicated. It’s also the big reason why deals slip, because of the paper process. What a lot of organizations will do is they’ll call the extra P out and that's why the extra P stands for paper process. The extra C is for competition, which again is a similar situation as time has evolved. Now, I think there’s something like a hundred new SAS companies a day. Competition is not just your rival solutions, there are other initiatives that exist that could be taking the same budget or resources that you're going for. It’s not just about money, it could be that the teams are helping to implement whatever solution you’re talking about. Inertia is a competitor as well, the customer just staying with what they’ve done or what they’ve already got. Then of course they can build it and sell so easily now with cloud structure and that sort of thing. Competition becomes much more of a thing today than it used to be all those years ago. That’s why you had the two letters in. For anyone that’s listening that doesn’t know anything about MEDDICC or know what the other letters are, very super high level, you’ve got the “M,” which is for the metrics. These are the quantifiable measures of value, so this is the KPIs if you like. The economic buyer, this is the overall authority, the best way of finding this person is the person to say no and others say yes, and they say yes while others say no. Then you have the two “D's,” which stand for decision criteria, decision process. It’s the what and the how the customer is going to make a decision-type process I talked about. The “I” stands for identify the pain or implicate the pain, which speaks for itself. Then you’ve got the champion, which is for me, the most important part of MEDDICC. It’s the one person who’s going to be your person inside of the customer who’s giving you information, helping you to navigate towards a successful outcome. Then as I said the next one after that is the second “C” for competition, which I talked about. OF: That’s great. One of the key points that stood out to me is you also highlight the importance of discovery, but specifically how it should be thought of as a mindset rather than a stage. I’d love if you could explain that a little bit further. Why is that mindset of discovery impactful in enterprise sales? AW: Yeah, great question. I might be a bit controversial here, but I’m going to go as far as saying, if you’re a salesperson and you’re not doing discovery, then you’re not being a salesperson. You’re being an order taker because if you can’t learn from the customer and adapt to suit the challenges and goals that they’re trying to aspire to or solve then you really are just going to be talking about your own product. Hopefully, if it works out for you, if you’ve got a good product and it’s well suited, then you’ll be taking the order. That’s the first thing I'll say is proper selling cannot be done without discovery. Why I say it's a mindset is because it’s not really about going in with a bank of questions that you need to try and find the answers to. Quite often when people have that mindset of, I just need to do this stage of discovery, it’s not a great experience for the customer. On the other end, it feels a bit like an interrogation. The mindset of discovery is to be genuinely curious because inside of you, you know that to really have the best chance of finding a good fit for your solution, you need to really genuinely understand the customer’s business. You need to understand their goals, you need to understand their challenges, you need to understand where they want to get to and what could be hurdles in the way for them there. Then see, and this is a really important thing, see whether your solution is a good one. Not always will it be a good fit. It may be that the customer does not have enough interest. It may be that your solution is not the right solution for them. I think that we really need to popularize qualifying out in sales. As much as you should be curious to try and find opportunity and strengths for your solution, you should also be thinking, well, do I really want to have to invest the amount of time the deal needs if it’s not going to work out for me, if it’s not going to be a right opportunity for me. Having that very open-minded genuine curiosity is going to lean you into finding real value that you can uncover. Then where MEDDICC comes into that, I always look at it like this. Generally, in discovery you’re trying to understand a few things. You understand the lay of the land you’re trying to qualify, but you’re really trying to find some pain. I quite liken it to a bit like mining for gems is the discovery, and finding the pain is like finding a gemstone, maybe they call it a diamond. Where MEDDICC comes in is it’s going to help you turn what is still a valuable gemstone, it’s going to help you turn that into a diamond ring by putting metrics against what the value of solving that pain would be. That’s where the pain, the metrics, buddy up to. The other point on this actually, which is important, why discovery is a process is because it's something you do throughout the deal. In enterprise sales by nature, they’re generally complex, they're generally long, there’s generally multiple stakeholders involved. Every single stakeholder, every different part of the deal, have new things to learn and will adapt and shift. If you’re up against a good competitor, they’ll be trying to adapt and shift it towards their strengths and towards your weaknesses. You have to be in your toes to make sure you bring it back towards yourself. Discovery is something you should be doing right up until the ink on the signature for the contract is drying That’s in my mind how I see it. OF: Great. You touched on some of the skills that make salespeople successful just now but explore that a little bit more in the context of today. As the world of work has evolved really rapidly in the past year, the skills that are required to be successful in sales have also now evolved as well. In the book, you talk about some of the characteristics of great sellers. I’m curious from your perspective, what are some of the key attributes of really elite salespeople in today’s environment? AW: Yeah, I have one favorite for this and it’s definitely not something that I came up with, but it’s something I heard and it’s outside of sales and it really resonates with me. This is the idea of taking action over having the intention to take action and actually being able to take action. I think that’s something that in sales is critically important. That’s really the difference for me between the elite salespeople and those that could be elite who have all the skills, have all the knowledge, have all the experience, but just never quite make that step up to being what we know as elite. The best example that I think will resonate with the audience on this is we’ve all been in those team deal reviews, where somebody is presenting a deal and as a team, it’s a great thing. One of the things I love about sales is how we can come together as different professionals who have different roles in sales and hear someone talk about their deal and brainstorm how we can help them make progress. Wherever I worked, there’s always been a salesperson who is not elite, but they know all the answers. They’ve got the answer for everybody’s problem in their deal, and they’ll tell you it as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. That is having intention for me, they know what the right things to do are, but when it’s really, really important, they don’t do it. In a MEDDICC sense, they’ll know how important it is to access the economic buyer. They’ll talk about it to everybody, but they won’t do it themselves. They’ll say, well, it’s hard to get there and all this stuff, which it is of course, but that’s kind of the beauty of it. For me to answer your question, it’s really about taking that next step to taking action. In reference to this world we’re in right now where most of our meetings are remote, we’re missing out on that beautiful time that we never really valued before, which is the time where you’d meet the customer in their reception area, and they’d walk you to the office room and then you get to the meeting room and then you’d get the walk back. That might only be 10 minutes, but in that 10 minutes you would build rapport, you would build relations, you could ask for debriefs, you can ask for an insight ahead of the meeting, all that kind of stuff. We don’t get that anymore, but we can. That’s the difference between action and intent. You can most definitely put some time in with that potential champion let’s say before the meeting. You can put some time in after the meeting. In fact, you could top and tail any meeting you have with anyone else by doing that. That’s what the elite sellers will do. Those that are a little bit below elite will know that that’s a good thing to do, they know that’s within their grasp, but they won’t take that step. That’s probably an example of the difference between elite in today's world. OF: I love that. Another thing that it really stood out to me in your book is you write that the most significant factor to the success of your MEDDICC implementation lies in your frontline sales managers’ hands and enablement often works very closely with frontline sales managers. I’m curious if you have any advice for how enablement can give frontline managers the support that they need to properly execute the implementation and really engage them as champions of the process? AW: Yeah, that is a fantastic question. I think being a frontline sales manager is one of the loneliest jobs in sales because you’re in this accountability sandwich where above you, self-leadership, we’re always asking you for numbers, for the reports, all this stuff. Below, your sales team is looking to you to protect them from the noise above, but also help empower them. You don’t really have, except for your peers themselves, but they’re also in a funny way because it’s a competitive industry they're almost your competitors and you have sales managers on the same level as you, you don’t really have anyone who's your buddy, except for sales enablement. Sales enablement are the people, especially in a MEDDICC implementation, who are like your secret weapon for success because what you need for successful implementation of MEDDICC above anything else is momentum. You need to have some forward momentum and wins with it. What I mean by that is, you’ll know this much better than I and your audience will know this a million times better than I do, there’s this thing that happens in all good sales organizations that are trying to evolve and develop and move themselves forward where one minute or one month it will be a new sales tool that comes in. It’s a new analytics tool. It’s going to help you figure out something that you didn’t know about your deals. The next minute it’s a new sales methodology. What tends to happen is you get this flavor of the month scenario happen and underneath it, the sales team, the individual contributors are like okay, what is it this month. MEDDICC, okay, we’ll be hearing about MEDDICC for the next month I guess and then it’ll be something else. What you need to really turn the tide with that kind of mentality is you need to be able to show the value to the salespeople. The great thing about MEDDICC is aside from managers, as an individual contributor, it can really help you to figure out what you need to do with your deals regardless of anyone else around you. To get the salespeople to have that mentality, they need to see some wins. Sales enablement is like the best friend for sales managers there because they can help keep the managers on their toes, help share best practice with them, remind them because as you know, sales managers have a lot of things on their mind. Reminding them of certain elements of MEDDICC that could help in certain scenarios and share successes. I think just that as a partnership really, really helps. Then there’ll be a lot of things in the sales enablement locker, a lot of documentation, a lot of collateral that relates very closely to MEDDICC. I think that bringing those into decision criteria is a great example. Decision criteria are really around, especially technical decision criteria, it’ll be around what are the criteria for which the customers base that decision? Well, most good sales organizers I know have a document that suits that. It’s about sales enablement empowering people to get that document across. The last thing I’ll say on this point is that where MEDDICC really comes into its own is as a common language for the revenue teams to use. It means everyone is talking about the same thing the same way. An example of this, champion is probably the most used phrase in sales. Outside of MEDDICC, if you meet two different salespeople, they’ll have completely different definitions of what a champion is. What MEDDICC does helps you define what is a champion? What is this part of it? What are the metrics? It’s really going to help sales enablement and sales managers to increase the efficiency of their conversations and really make sure they’re talking about the right things. When they are talking about the same thing, they’re defining it the same way as well. OF: Absolutely. I just have one final question for you. We’ve talked a little bit about the complexity of sales today and I’m curious to learn, how can MEDDICC really help foster deep engagement with customers given this increasing complexity? AW: Yeah, that is a good question. I think one of the things that’s adding complexity to sales today is the massive choice that customers have. As I mentioned earlier, when we think about competition, it’s not just solutions that are rivals of yours, you’ve got other initiatives and other things that the customer could be looking to do. It could be looking just to stay the same. Risk is dangerous, change is risky. Build it themselves is another thing. Then there’s this whole other scenario, which is that whilst there are of course people listening to this that will have Germany working for an organization who has a solution and you may have two, three, maybe five other vendors that do a similar solution. There’s this whole Venn diagram now of solution providers that do the same thing and then something else, and then something else. As a customer, you can have 10 options to solve that one thing you want to do and some will do it very well, but some will do it not quite as well, but they’ll do all these other things as well. That creates a lot of complexity for customers. The thing I think salespeople always forget is that our customers are not professional buyers. 99% of their day job is spent doing their job. They only spend 1% thinking about buying that bit of software to help them do their job. They're not out there spending all day reading G2 Crowd and all this stuff. They’re not necessarily experts in buying, so what you really need to be able to do is to approach the customer with, again, that curious mindset to really understand what it is they’re trying to solve and genuinely talking about how your solution can help solve that problem, if it can. Sometimes, like I said earlier, sometimes you may not be the best person to help them. One thing is for sure, if you went into an engagement with a customer and you were to genuinely take an interest in what they were trying to solve, what their problems were, and you turned around and said, hey look, thank you for your time today, but actually, I don’t think we’re the right fit for you, let me help you put you in the right direction of who is, I guarantee you a year, two years, five years down the line, when that person is an ideal prospect for you, that person will take your call and meet you 100%. You would have bought so much credibility and that person is probably likely to introduce you to other people that you can help. I think this is a long game. I think if you have a long game mindset in sales, it will help you out a lot. The short answer to that question, other than that long version, would to be that trusted advisor to your customers and have that genuine curiosity to help them solve their problems. You’ll be surprised at just how much more information the customer provides you if that helps you do your job better. OF: That’s great. Well, Andy, thank you so much again for making the time to join our podcast today. I certainly learned so much from you and I know our audience did too. Thanks again. AW: Well, thank you for having me on and thanks everyone for listening. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening for more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. The world of sales is becoming increasingly complex with more stakeholders involved in buying decisions, intensifying competition, and rapidly changing expectations of the skills and knowledge that sellers need to be successful. In navigating this complexity, the MEDDICC methodology can help provide a common language for everyone in the sales organization to more efficiently and effectively qualify deals and generate a clear path to success. Andy Whyte's book, “MEDDICC,” lays out strategies and best practices to successfully implement the MEDDICC methodology, and I’m so excited to have him on the podcast today to share some of the key insights from his book. With that, Andy, could you please introduce yourself to our audience and then tell us a little bit more about your book. Andy Whyte: Yeah. Hey Olivia, very good morning to you. Hello to the audience. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I’ve been listening to the back catalog, and I’ve been really enjoying the episodes so it’s great to be on the show, thank you for having me. As you said, my name is Andy Whyte. At heart, I’m a sales guy. That’s pretty much what I’ve always done since leaving school. Went into sales and started doing door to door sales selling home improvements, then worked in a cell phone store selling cell phones, and then got into SaaS and started climbing the ladder up of doing more senior roles and taking on larger propositions from selling to SMB's to selling to enterprises and all different kinds of SaaS solutions. More recently, I went into sales leadership within the last five or six years with a couple of different startups. The book came about really for a couple of reasons. One was I stumbled across MEDDICC myself as an individual contributor back in 2014 or 2015, and I just felt like it was something that as soon as I learned about it, I was like where’s this been all of my career? I don’t know anyone else who’s ever stumbled across some methodology or something, but it just made me feel, not happy because I’d found it, but sad because of all the time I’d wasted on deals before and deals that I’d lost and all this stuff. I could have saved myself the heartache if I had MEDDICC, so I embraced MEDDICC, loved it. It really helped me as an individual contributor, and then as a sales leader it helped me a lot as well in enterprising up the teams I was leading. One of the strange things around MEDDICC is it's 25 years old this year, but no one really had ever stopped to document it or put any kind of book together for it. I definitely saw that as an opportunity to put some of my ideas and thoughts around MEDDICC down on paper. What started as a first blog post iterated into where we are today with a book and a lot of great experiences that have come from that. That's the background story of myself and MEDDICC. OF: Fantastic. Well, again, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today to dive a little deeper into your book, which I know I personally learned so much from. In the book, you note that MEDDICC is a qualification methodology, so I’m curious, how does that differ from a traditional sales methodology and what makes MEDDICC different and unique compared to some of the other qualification methodologies that are out there? AW: Yeah, that’s a great and actually really important question because it’s funny, it is a methodology of course, MEDDICC you can call a framework as well. I tend to swap between both of them. It’s in sales, so by definition you’d say, well, isn’t it a sales methodology? I guess you could call it that. The only reason why I like to point out and not refer to it as a sales methodology is because generally, the definition of a sales methodology is how you talk to your customers, how you engage with your customers. MEDDICC is much more around qualifying where you are with those customers, should you be engaged with those customers. It doesn’t necessarily dictate how you should engage and what messaging to use and how to talk to the customers. Likewise, the same with the sales process. Some people refer to it as a sales process, and it’s not. It’s a framework that sits underneath the methodology and the process, and the reason why it’s important just to differentiate the two is that you can really only have one sales process and one sales methodology. If you were to think of MEDDICC as being a sales methodology, you would assume that you can’t overlay it over the top of the framework methodology you already have. That's why it’s important to differentiate the two. Then when you think about MEDDICC as a qualification framework or methodology, it’s funny how when you get into the qualification framework world, it seems to be a world of acronyms. I can’t even remember most of them. The most famous ones are obviously MEDDICC and BANT. There’s a whole load of other ones. There’s one called CHAMP. There’s some with G's and C's and all this sort of stuff in there. I think where MEDDICC really comes into its own is that it sees you all the way through the sales process and beyond into post-sales and actually pre-sales process. MEDDICC looks so broadly, not just at the qualifying actual moment in time, but it talks about who you’re going to be working with, the proposition that you’re taking to those people, and what would those people be interested in. It can really go pre-sale as well and start to help influence how you market your products and how you message the value of those products as well. And how, of course, all the people internally talk about the different stages of revenue. That's where I think MEDDICC really comes into its own. It’s not to say that the other qualification frameworks aren’t good, but it goes very broadly across the entire sales process. OF: Definitely. As you mentioned, MEDDICC is an acronym and in the book, you walk through each of the different stages of the MEDDICC methodology and also some additions that companies are beginning to use. At a high level, I’d love if you could just dive into what those stages are, and also when it might be appropriate to supplement them with some of those additional steps. AW: Yeah, no great question. As I said a moment ago, MEDDICC is 25 years old this year and it was born inside of a company called PTC. Really where it came from was a guy called Dick Dunkel who invented it. He worked in sales enablement, probably one of the firsts, PTC was probably the very first people to do sales enablement, and he’d come out from the field with the task of helping PTC to level up all the new salespeople they were hiring. One of the exercises they did was to look at why PTC were winning deals, why they were losing deals, and why deals were slipping. What he found wherever he went, whatever sales team inside of PTC he went to, was that there was a continuity in the answers to those questions. These actually rolled up to being the elements of MEDDICC, which was at the time six elements, which is MEDDIC with just one C on the end and two D's. That obviously served us very well. It’s proliferated almost like no other methodology since that time, but what’s actually happened as technology landscapes have evolved, there’s been two particular elements that have come into be popularized inside of MEDDICC. That’s why a lot of people will know MEDDICC as MEDDPICC because it has an extra P in there. As I said, one of those letters is the “P,” which generally stands for paper process. What this is, it goes without saying, but it’s the process that occurs when you start to talk about contracts. SLSA's, DPA’s, there’s all of these three-letter acronyms that exist now that weren't around when MEDDICC was created because generally it was on premise software, you owned the licenses and data privacy wasn’t such a big thing. The paper process has become much more complicated. It’s also the big reason why deals slip, because of the paper process. What a lot of organizations will do is they’ll call the extra P out and that's why the extra P stands for paper process. The extra C is for competition, which again is a similar situation as time has evolved. Now, I think there’s something like a hundred new SAS companies a day. Competition is not just your rival solutions, there are other initiatives that exist that could be taking the same budget or resources that you're going for. It’s not just about money, it could be that the teams are helping to implement whatever solution you’re talking about. Inertia is a competitor as well, the customer just staying with what they’ve done or what they’ve already got. Then of course they can build it and sell so easily now with cloud structure and that sort of thing. Competition becomes much more of a thing today than it used to be all those years ago. That’s why you had the two letters in. For anyone that’s listening that doesn’t know anything about MEDDICC or know what the other letters are, very super high level, you’ve got the “M,” which is for the metrics. These are the quantifiable measures of value, so this is the KPIs if you like. The economic buyer, this is the overall authority, the best way of finding this person is the person to say no and others say yes, and they say yes while others say no. Then you have the two “D's,” which stand for decision criteria, decision process. It’s the what and the how the customer is going to make a decision-type process I talked about. The “I” stands for identify the pain or implicate the pain, which speaks for itself. Then you’ve got the champion, which is for me, the most important part of MEDDICC. It’s the one person who’s going to be your person inside of the customer who’s giving you information, helping you to navigate towards a successful outcome. Then as I said the next one after that is the second “C” for competition, which I talked about. OF: That’s great. One of the key points that stood out to me is you also highlight the importance of discovery, but specifically how it should be thought of as a mindset rather than a stage. I’d love if you could explain that a little bit further. Why is that mindset of discovery impactful in enterprise sales? AW: Yeah, great question. I might be a bit controversial here, but I’m going to go as far as saying, if you’re a salesperson and you’re not doing discovery, then you’re not being a salesperson. You’re being an order taker because if you can’t learn from the customer and adapt to suit the challenges and goals that they’re trying to aspire to or solve then you really are just going to be talking about your own product. Hopefully, if it works out for you, if you’ve got a good product and it’s well suited, then you’ll be taking the order. That’s the first thing I'll say is proper selling cannot be done without discovery. Why I say it's a mindset is because it’s not really about going in with a bank of questions that you need to try and find the answers to. Quite often when people have that mindset of, I just need to do this stage of discovery, it’s not a great experience for the customer. On the other end, it feels a bit like an interrogation. The mindset of discovery is to be genuinely curious because inside of you, you know that to really have the best chance of finding a good fit for your solution, you need to really genuinely understand the customer’s business. You need to understand their goals, you need to understand their challenges, you need to understand where they want to get to and what could be hurdles in the way for them there. Then see, and this is a really important thing, see whether your solution is a good one. Not always will it be a good fit. It may be that the customer does not have enough interest. It may be that your solution is not the right solution for them. I think that we really need to popularize qualifying out in sales. As much as you should be curious to try and find opportunity and strengths for your solution, you should also be thinking, well, do I really want to have to invest the amount of time the deal needs if it’s not going to work out for me, if it’s not going to be a right opportunity for me. Having that very open-minded genuine curiosity is going to lean you into finding real value that you can uncover. Then where MEDDICC comes into that, I always look at it like this. Generally, in discovery you’re trying to understand a few things. You understand the lay of the land you’re trying to qualify, but you’re really trying to find some pain. I quite liken it to a bit like mining for gems is the discovery, and finding the pain is like finding a gemstone, maybe they call it a diamond. Where MEDDICC comes in is it’s going to help you turn what is still a valuable gemstone, it’s going to help you turn that into a diamond ring by putting metrics against what the value of solving that pain would be. That’s where the pain, the metrics, buddy up to. The other point on this actually, which is important, why discovery is a process is because it's something you do throughout the deal. In enterprise sales by nature, they’re generally complex, they're generally long, there’s generally multiple stakeholders involved. Every single stakeholder, every different part of the deal, have new things to learn and will adapt and shift. If you’re up against a good competitor, they’ll be trying to adapt and shift it towards their strengths and towards your weaknesses. You have to be in your toes to make sure you bring it back towards yourself. Discovery is something you should be doing right up until the ink on the signature for the contract is drying That’s in my mind how I see it. OF: Great. You touched on some of the skills that make salespeople successful just now but explore that a little bit more in the context of today. As the world of work has evolved really rapidly in the past year, the skills that are required to be successful in sales have also now evolved as well. In the book, you talk about some of the characteristics of great sellers. I’m curious from your perspective, what are some of the key attributes of really elite salespeople in today’s environment? AW: Yeah, I have one favorite for this and it’s definitely not something that I came up with, but it’s something I heard and it’s outside of sales and it really resonates with me. This is the idea of taking action over having the intention to take action and actually being able to take action. I think that’s something that in sales is critically important. That’s really the difference for me between the elite salespeople and those that could be elite who have all the skills, have all the knowledge, have all the experience, but just never quite make that step up to being what we know as elite. The best example that I think will resonate with the audience on this is we’ve all been in those team deal reviews, where somebody is presenting a deal and as a team, it’s a great thing. One of the things I love about sales is how we can come together as different professionals who have different roles in sales and hear someone talk about their deal and brainstorm how we can help them make progress. Wherever I worked, there’s always been a salesperson who is not elite, but they know all the answers. They’ve got the answer for everybody’s problem in their deal, and they’ll tell you it as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. That is having intention for me, they know what the right things to do are, but when it’s really, really important, they don’t do it. In a MEDDICC sense, they’ll know how important it is to access the economic buyer. They’ll talk about it to everybody, but they won’t do it themselves. They’ll say, well, it’s hard to get there and all this stuff, which it is of course, but that’s kind of the beauty of it. For me to answer your question, it’s really about taking that next step to taking action. In reference to this world we’re in right now where most of our meetings are remote, we’re missing out on that beautiful time that we never really valued before, which is the time where you’d meet the customer in their reception area, and they’d walk you to the office room and then you get to the meeting room and then you’d get the walk back. That might only be 10 minutes, but in that 10 minutes you would build rapport, you would build relations, you could ask for debriefs, you can ask for an insight ahead of the meeting, all that kind of stuff. We don’t get that anymore, but we can. That’s the difference between action and intent. You can most definitely put some time in with that potential champion let’s say before the meeting. You can put some time in after the meeting. In fact, you could top and tail any meeting you have with anyone else by doing that. That’s what the elite sellers will do. Those that are a little bit below elite will know that that’s a good thing to do, they know that’s within their grasp, but they won’t take that step. That’s probably an example of the difference between elite in today's world. OF: I love that. Another thing that it really stood out to me in your book is you write that the most significant factor to the success of your MEDDICC implementation lies in your frontline sales managers’ hands and enablement often works very closely with frontline sales managers. I’m curious if you have any advice for how enablement can give frontline managers the support that they need to properly execute the implementation and really engage them as champions of the process? AW: Yeah, that is a fantastic question. I think being a frontline sales manager is one of the loneliest jobs in sales because you’re in this accountability sandwich where above you, self-leadership, we’re always asking you for numbers, for the reports, all this stuff. Below, your sales team is looking to you to protect them from the noise above, but also help empower them. You don’t really have, except for your peers themselves, but they’re also in a funny way because it’s a competitive industry they're almost your competitors and you have sales managers on the same level as you, you don’t really have anyone who's your buddy, except for sales enablement. Sales enablement are the people, especially in a MEDDICC implementation, who are like your secret weapon for success because what you need for successful implementation of MEDDICC above anything else is momentum. You need to have some forward momentum and wins with it. What I mean by that is, you’ll know this much better than I and your audience will know this a million times better than I do, there’s this thing that happens in all good sales organizations that are trying to evolve and develop and move themselves forward where one minute or one month it will be a new sales tool that comes in. It’s a new analytics tool. It’s going to help you figure out something that you didn’t know about your deals. The next minute it’s a new sales methodology. What tends to happen is you get this flavor of the month scenario happen and underneath it, the sales team, the individual contributors are like okay, what is it this month. MEDDICC, okay, we’ll be hearing about MEDDICC for the next month I guess and then it’ll be something else. What you need to really turn the tide with that kind of mentality is you need to be able to show the value to the salespeople. The great thing about MEDDICC is aside from managers, as an individual contributor, it can really help you to figure out what you need to do with your deals regardless of anyone else around you. To get the salespeople to have that mentality, they need to see some wins. Sales enablement is like the best friend for sales managers there because they can help keep the managers on their toes, help share best practice with them, remind them because as you know, sales managers have a lot of things on their mind. Reminding them of certain elements of MEDDICC that could help in certain scenarios and share successes. I think just that as a partnership really, really helps. Then there’ll be a lot of things in the sales enablement locker, a lot of documentation, a lot of collateral that relates very closely to MEDDICC. I think that bringing those into decision criteria is a great example. Decision criteria are really around, especially technical decision criteria, it’ll be around what are the criteria for which the customers base that decision? Well, most good sales organizers I know have a document that suits that. It’s about sales enablement empowering people to get that document across. The last thing I’ll say on this point is that where MEDDICC really comes into its own is as a common language for the revenue teams to use. It means everyone is talking about the same thing the same way. An example of this, champion is probably the most used phrase in sales. Outside of MEDDICC, if you meet two different salespeople, they’ll have completely different definitions of what a champion is. What MEDDICC does helps you define what is a champion? What is this part of it? What are the metrics? It’s really going to help sales enablement and sales managers to increase the efficiency of their conversations and really make sure they’re talking about the right things. When they are talking about the same thing, they’re defining it the same way as well. OF: Absolutely. I just have one final question for you. We’ve talked a little bit about the complexity of sales today and I’m curious to learn, how can MEDDICC really help foster deep engagement with customers given this increasing complexity? AW: Yeah, that is a good question. I think one of the things that’s adding complexity to sales today is the massive choice that customers have. As I mentioned earlier, when we think about competition, it’s not just solutions that are rivals of yours, you’ve got other initiatives and other things that the customer could be looking to do. It could be looking just to stay the same. Risk is dangerous, change is risky. Build it themselves is another thing. Then there’s this whole other scenario, which is that whilst there are of course people listening to this that will have Germany working for an organization who has a solution and you may have two, three, maybe five other vendors that do a similar solution. There’s this whole Venn diagram now of solution providers that do the same thing and then something else, and then something else. As a customer, you can have 10 options to solve that one thing you want to do and some will do it very well, but some will do it not quite as well, but they’ll do all these other things as well. That creates a lot of complexity for customers. The thing I think salespeople always forget is that our customers are not professional buyers. 99% of their day job is spent doing their job. They only spend 1% thinking about buying that bit of software to help them do their job. They're not out there spending all day reading G2 Crowd and all this stuff. They’re not necessarily experts in buying, so what you really need to be able to do is to approach the customer with, again, that curious mindset to really understand what it is they’re trying to solve and genuinely talking about how your solution can help solve that problem, if it can. Sometimes, like I said earlier, sometimes you may not be the best person to help them. One thing is for sure, if you went into an engagement with a customer and you were to genuinely take an interest in what they were trying to solve, what their problems were, and you turned around and said, hey look, thank you for your time today, but actually, I don’t think we’re the right fit for you, let me help you put you in the right direction of who is, I guarantee you a year, two years, five years down the line, when that person is an ideal prospect for you, that person will take your call and meet you 100%. You would have bought so much credibility and that person is probably likely to introduce you to other people that you can help. I think this is a long game. I think if you have a long game mindset in sales, it will help you out a lot. The short answer to that question, other than that long version, would to be that trusted advisor to your customers and have that genuine curiosity to help them solve their problems. You’ll be surprised at just how much more information the customer provides you if that helps you do your job better. OF: That’s great. Well, Andy, thank you so much again for making the time to join our podcast today. I certainly learned so much from you and I know our audience did too. Thanks again. AW: Well, thank you for having me on and thanks everyone for listening. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening for more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Jon is a pioneer in the customer management category. He was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product GoldMine, acquired by FrontRange in 1999. After many years observing the CRM market, he created Nimble, an award-winning social sales and marketing CRM for individuals and teams that is Ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction by G2 Crowd. Highlights include: Why the human is so important (1:50), misconceptions about good networks (3:40), going beyond the business to the personal, digitally (6:57), why regular CRMs don't cut it as contact management tools (13:28), how to become a trusted advisor in the places where your prospects consume content (15:07), and making soft connections firm (23:00). SDR Pods - The fastest way to build an Outbound SDR Team https://bit.ly/3gArLOl

Shane Metcalf is the co-founder & Chief Culture Officer of 15Five, a people and performance platform that empowers people to become their best selves, wherever they work. Named one of the top 100 software companies by G2Crowd, 15Five combines employee engagement, continuous performance management, and manager effectiveness software with education, services, and community for customers including Capital One, Credit Karma, Hubspot & more. On this episode of the Strategy & Leadership Podcast, Shane joins us to share his advice for leaders and discuss the power of questions, self-reflection, and much more. Here's a breakdown of our conversation: - The journey of creating 15Five - Be aware of leadership hierarchies - Questions for leaders to ask themselves - Questioning the role of the manager - His big challenge right now as a leader Get our FREE Strategic Planning Workbook template here: www.smestrategy.net/strategic-plann…mplate-workbook Shane's podcast, HR Superstars: https://www.15five.com/podcast/ Enroll in our strategic planning course to learn our process for creating a strategic plan successfully (without hiring anyone): www.smestrategy.net/strategic-plann…ng-steps-course Are you looking for someone to facilitate your strategic planning process? Book a complimentary consultation to learn more about our approach: www.smestrategy.net/contact Want a software to track & monitor your strategic plan? Get a free trial for Cascade Strategy: go.executestrategy.net/trial?fpr=smestrategy // WEBSITE & RESOURCES: Website ► www.smestrategy.net/ Blog ► www.smestrategy.net/blog Strategy & Leadership Podcast ►www.smestrategy.net/podcast Alignment Book ► www.smestrategy.net/alignment-book Contact ►www.smestrategy.net/contact // FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook ► www.facebook.com/Smestrategy/ LinkedIn ► www.linkedin.com/company/2866558 Instagram ► www.instagram.com/anthonyctaylor/ Twitter ►twitter.com/smeinsights // ABOUT SME STRATEGY CONSULTING: SME Strategy is a management consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations develop and implement their strategic plans. We work with teams to facilitate conversations about strategic direction and business strategy so that our clients can focus their energy on what will move them forward faster. Based out of Vancouver, BC, we've worked with organizations all over North American and beyond in various industries including nonprofits, universities & government organizations. #PowerOfQuestions #CultureTransformation #SelfAwarenessSkills

Season Three Episode NineGuest: Jon Ferrara, Founder & CEO of NimbleJon Ferrara, has been recognized for pioneering innovation in the customer management category.He's the founder and CEO of Nimble, an award-winning social sales, and marketing CRM for individuals and teams. It's Ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction by G2 Crowd and integrates with Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. Learn more at Nimble.com.Ferrara was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product GoldMine. In 1999, Goldmine got acquired by FrontRange and Ferrara left to pursue other interests. During those years, Ferrara continued to watch the CRM market. He saw that most of the CRM products that were serving small businesses moved upmarket (and became more costly and complex) or fell by the wayside, leaving the market underserved.You can learn more about Jon and reach out to him on LinkedIn here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonvferrara/About NimbleNimble is the industry-leading CRM for Office 365 and G Suite that builds award-winning contact management solutions for teams and individuals.Everyday, people use Nimble to successfully nurture their personal and business relationships across email, social networks and more than 90 cloud-based business applications. Ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction by G2 Crowd, and #1 Small Business Sales and Marketing CRM by Fit Small Business, Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence and marketing automation into a powerful relationship management platform that delivers relationship insights everywhere you work.For more information or to sign up for a free trial, visit https://www.nimble.com/trial.Learn more about Nimble here:https://www.nimble.com/

While talk in 2020 has focused on interpreting the new normal, this discussion has been altogether shortsighted. Instead, we should be thinking about what a better normal looks like beyond the pandemic. The research in this year's 2020 Legal Trends Report from Clio aims to further our vision for what this better normal could look like, based on what they have seen so far. The Legal Trends Report uses aggregated and anonymized data from tens of thousands of legal professionals in the United States. This year, the company has adapted and expanded their analysis to provide more up-to-date data on law firms to better identify the challenges faced during the global pandemic in 2020. George Psiharis, COO, Clio joins me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast to share insights from their Legal Trends Report. George Psiharis is the Chief Operating Officer at Clio, the leader in cloud-based legal technology. Specializing in customer success, business development, and data operations, George has worked extensively with law schools, bar associations, and other legal professionals to help make information on cloud computing and law firm economics increasingly accessible. Clio is powering the future of legal services for lawyers and their clients through a suite of cloud-based solutions, including legal practice management, client intake and CRM, online payments, and client-attorney communication and collaboration software. Clio has been transforming the industry for over a decade with 150,000 customers spanning 100 countries, and the approval of 66 bar associations and law societies globally. Clio continues to lead the industry with initiatives like the Legal Trends Report, the Clio Cloud Conference, and the Clio Academic Access Program. Clio has been recognized as a Deloitte Fast 50 and Fast 500 company and a market leader by G2 Crowd.

I had the honor of speaking with the marketing team at Ararat Box where they shared some behind the scenes of the brand, how it started, and what's next for them. We also did some Q&A with the live audience. Ararat Box is a startup supported and funded by Renderforest, which is one of the largest IT companies based in Armenia. It has over 10 million users worldwide and is one of the world's largest video production platforms. Renderforest is a pure Armenian company and is 281's largest taxpayer in Armenia (data of 2020 Q1-Q2). Our clients include companies like General Electric, Vodafone, Ericsson, Springer, Bose, Sony Music, and much more. 99% of the revenue is generated outside of Armenia, and we do our best to bring as much money as we can to our country. While being a small team of 3 in 2013, Renderforest has grown to a staff of 80 employees in 2020 and has built its headquarters in Yerevan. G2Crowd listed Renderforest as one of the Best Software Companies in the world for the year 2019. We are involved in more activities dedicated to the development of Armenia. You can learn more by visiting armenia.renderforest.com or renderforest.com/aboutWhile creating the Ararat box, they decided to support mostly small businesses of Armenia. Over the first half of 2020, the Ararat Box team traveled across Armenia, shortlisted over 150 small businesses, and tasted over 1000 products. They handpicked every product and guarantee that you will receive a box handpicked with care. Each Ararat Box has around 20 Armenian products made by different suppliers, from which 70% are small businesses. We switch vendors every month, ensuring you receive entirely new products, and this way, we support hundreds of small businesses every year to export their products outside of Armenia. Ararat Box is involved in charities as well. Recently they collected and made over 400 boxes, which were sent to the children of Artsakh whose fathers are currently fighting in the frontline. Website: https://araratbox.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/araratbox/

In this throwback episode, we talk to Godard Abel, Co-founder and Executive Chairman at G2 Crowd and CEO at SteelBrick before he sold it to Salesforce, about how there are many different factors in determining the success or failure of a leader or business.

Learn how you to use every feedback to your company's advantage from the Head of Content Marketing at G2 previously known as G2 Crowd. Meet Jakub Rudnik, a journalist by trade and a talented content creator at heart. With his never-ending curiosity and years of experience, he's been able to successfully manage a team of 20+ content creators at G2 and achieve outstanding marketing results. In this episode, you will learn a lot about building transparency for business software and using content marketing to your advantage. What's the phenomenon of a website like G2 and why so many people use it? How to attract more customers using your bad reviews? Why it's critical to track the right data? And what are the typical content marketing mistakes to avoid? Enjoy the episode! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This series is brought to you by OneIMS - Integrated Marketing Solutions that fuel explosive business growth. ►Follow OneIMS online! Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/OneIMS/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oneims/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oneims/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/oneims?lang=en Don't miss the upcoming episodes of Coffee with Closers! Subscribe to our channel for more business insights from OneIMS.

John Rougeux Bio and Show Notes:LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbrougeux/B2B Growth Podcast Co-HostFlagandFrontier.com  Category Design StrategistBook Recommendations to get 1% better:Never Split the Difference by Chris VossMarketing High Technology by William H.  Davidow7 Category Design Business Strategy Criteria  & What CD is Not:Category Design Isn't Necessarily Being First to MarketCategory Design Isn't Winning Awards on Gartner, G2Crowd, or ForresterCategory Design Isn't a Gimmicky Slogan or Advertising GTM campaignDon't Vilify Something that is Good at Another Context as Nemesis to base Category DesignThere Has to Be a Significant Business Pain Identified by your ICP or Buyer PersonasYou Should Be Able to Solve a Problem in Meaningful way Not Just Surface-based, but DeeperYou Need Buy-in from CEO/Founder C-level stakeholders To Launch a Category Design Business Strategy   

Jeff Reekers joined Aircall when it was a small startup looking to break into the US market. Here's how he's built a marketing strategy that fueled 15X growth in just three years. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Aircall CMO shares the marketing strategies he's used to help the company achieve extraordinary growth in just three years. When he first joined Aircall, Jeff was one of just two marketers on the team. Now, the marketing department alone has 30 employees.  Jeff shares why the company's international-first approach, along with its emphasis on partnerships, allowed Aircall to scale quickly. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details. Resources from this episode: Visit the Aircall website Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn Give Jeff a call on his Aircall number at (646) 712-9381 Learn more about the Revenue Collective Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jeff Reekers, who is the CMO of Aircall. Welcome to the podcast Jeff. Jeff (00:25): Thanks Kathleen. It's a pleasure to be here. Kathleen (00:27): I'm excited to talk with you. Aircall has such a fascinating growth story and you know, one marketer to the other, I'm always interested to kind of try and pull back the curtain and see how the, not to use too many analogies, but see how the sausage is made. So, but before we dive into the Aircall story maybe you could talk a little bit about yourself, what your background is and, and how you wound up in your role at Aircall. Jeff (00:53): Yeah, sure. So I've had a few different experiences before joining Aircall. I started my career going way back. I'm from the Bay area originally. I moved out to New York city to start my career originally, didn't really know what I wanted to do, had a economics major and I was coming out and hoping to do grad school at the time. And ended up getting a job at Forbes, which is where I started my career. Mostly doing copywriting, ad copy, a little bit of journalistic ghost writing when I was asked to do it. And it was an amazing experience and it got me introduced into marketing. But interestingly, one of the articles I had to write was something called best of the web, but essentially you know, interviews with entrepreneurs we're getting started in the New York city area. Jeff (01:50): And somebody I came across in my research for that was a company called Lawline, which was an online education startup for attorneys who needed to recertify their license. And it was just like the emerging time when you remember like real time player that they, that was a, that was a thing. And the videos were just starting to go online. And so this was a first step towards online education for attorneys who all have to recertify their licenses. And we were the first to do that, to move online. That was an amazing experience because it was just from the start and we scaled and we grew, and, you know, I had that traditional experience of kind of doing everything in a company from being joining it early. And I realized immediately that that startup life, that was exciting to me and having a real impact was exciting to me. And so that was sort of my springboard into the the startup world. And I got deeper into marketing thereafter headed demand at a few different companies. Think HR, Handshake, which was recently acquired by Shopify. And then I joined on with with Aircall about four years ago now. Kathleen (03:03): Awesome. And what does Aircall do for those who are not familiar with it? Jeff (03:06): Yes. We're a business, a hundred percent cloud based phone system for support and sales teams. So focused on the SMB. So any inbound, any teams that are receiving inbound inquiries, e-comm companies, whatever it might be, that need to efficiently route calls and know who their customers are before they call them, or the sales organizations that are looking for a productivity boost or to have better insights into the customers that they're calling. There are two main focus points. Kathleen (03:34): Great. And the reason I was so excited to talk with you is that you came in at an earlier stage with the company. It wasn't really all that long ago, three, four years ago. And at the time how big was the company? Jeff (03:51): I have a trouble remembering the exact number of employees. We had around 40, 40, 50 employees somewhere around there and you know, a couple million in revenue at that point. Kathleen (04:03): Yeah. And, and today, how big is the company? Jeff (04:08): Larger than that. We're we've, we've gone from, you know, that stage closer to the $50 million mark. So we've grown quite well over that time. And we've expanded into the U S, which is essentially one of the initial points of myself joining on in the company was helped build out the U S and we scaled other regions as well across the, across the country. And now we're at about 350 probably going on 400 pretty soon employees. Kathleen (04:39): Wow. And if I understand correctly, like I'm not a big math person, but I try to, I try to do math in my head if I'm doing it correctly. It sounds like you, as a company, you grew by about 15 times in three years. Is that roughly accurate? Jeff (04:55): Yes. I think that sounds, I think that sounds pretty accurate. Yeah. Kathleen (04:58): Wow. That's unbelievable. And, you know, selfishly, like, I, I want to know, I want to know what went into that, cause that's, that's such a crucial stage of growth. I'm also a startup marketer. I love the startup world, right. That's like the Holy grail that everybody wants to experience. You come in when the company is smaller and you ride that rocket ship and you're a part of that story and you contribute to the growth. So, you know, from a marketing standpoint, like, I'll just turn it over to you. Maybe you could kind of set the stage and talk about like what you did in the beginning and some of the key leavers that led to the growth of the company. Jeff (05:31): I think, I think what's important to realize is one is yes, I like to believe that there's been things on the marketing and we've done that have had a major impact here, but even going before that there's, there were some inherent aspects of Aircall that stood out at the time that I joined, even though we were small, that that indicated we had a really positive opportunity, big, really big opportunity for growth. And a friend and former colleague and great, just start up mind, his name is Preston Clark, I remember he wrote an article years ago about I think it was how to become a VP of sales in SaaS. And he wrote about uncovering the hidden opportunities or how to, how to find those small companies that were just going to take the, the I'm really going to explode it in the next stage. Jeff (06:22): And so there were, there were some things I recall when I joined our call that really made me feel that this was something special. The first was there was an early product market fit. We sold there was traction in a very specific segment of the market, which is SMB market. There was inbound demand for the product already. And there was positive, you know, positive growth. And you could see that from an early stage, there were some things that had to be improved on certain customer segments. We had to go further into further develop who our real customers were, all these things, but there was something, there were part of us put out in the world and people were finding it, signing up for it, sharing with their friends. And that was a really positive sign. The second was, we were just getting started in a new market, which is the U S and so we had proven traction in Europe and we were just starting on the U S side. Jeff (07:21): And so that was very exciting to me. Cause you could see the ability for the product to adapt over into the U S market. And third was probably most important because it's the sustainability of the company is Olivier, our CEO wanted to build a great company to work for and you can't really accomplish what you like to accomplish. If that's not true, is this harder to stick with a company it's harder to be there for four or five, six years or for the long haul, if you don't have that. And those, all those things were really true. First off at Aircall that I think helped us. And that, that to me was the foundational part that all their marketing tactics or strategies or how we sold it, came from that base in a way. Kathleen (08:11): Yeah. That I love your point about wanting to build a great company because it is true, you know, to support growth that fast. I I've, I've owned a company in the past. I've been a CEO and any CEO can tell you that growth can either be the greatest thing that ever happened to you, or it can be the thing that kills your company, you know, and growth is the thing that kills your company. If you're not building that, that strong culture, like a place where people really want to be where they're inherently self motivated and excited about the mission and all that. So it's interesting that you brought that up because it's seen as something outside of marketing, but I think it's, it all goes back to that philosophy of like you companies only have customer service to the extent that they have happy employees is sort of the same principle. Jeff (08:57): Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know, from there, it was from there, we grew up our, our strategy and we scaled fairly logically. So we had a good presence already in France and other parts of Europe and we wanted to expand those, get into a few new markets. There's Germany, Spain, UK, that we wanted to grow more aggressively. And we had some early ground already coming from a few other regions like Australia. And then we, you know, we really needed to focus on, on us and let that expand as well. So we had an international strategy as well from the start, which I think was very advantageous to us because we were able to spread very quickly and have an infrastructure that that was global from day one and... Kathleen (09:51): Now just a clarification. When you joined the company, how many people, including yourself, were in the marketing team? Jeff (09:56): There was one other person. Kathleen (09:59): Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Were you the first US hire on the marketing team? Jeff (10:03): No, we were just starting our us office and our one other employee was also in the US. Kathleen (10:10): Okay. So they, so the company had grown outside of the US without having like fulltime in-house marketers. Is that? Jeff (10:18): Yes. Correct. So we had I think we had a couple people writing content local content out there. But really our first marketer was in the U S and Olivier, our CEO, was very adamant about going to the US market very early in the company's history. So it didn't become this sort of you know, stepchild or the hated stepchild or the always in the back seat or something like that. And so was very adamant about building and moved from Paris to New York city. And so he started the first office out here with a few other, a few other employees that were hired soon after that, including our first marketer who's a sort of a junior generalist at the time. Kathleen (10:58): So that's okay. So, so you come in your, did you have a background in international marketing at all? Jeff (11:05): That was pretty new to me. That was pretty new. Only other really other English speaking countries, you know, UK, Australia but not real dense in across the European markets was that intimidating was exciting to me, to me that was exciting. And that was it was the perfect, that was the perfect balance because there was something to offer on both ends. You know, I was going to get to know those markets extremely well. And at the same time my first and foremost focus was how do we do this in the US? How do we replicate this in the US? So I was allowed in a lot of the opportunity to really focus on the U S for the first six months or so, because that was objective number one, build pipeline in the US. So I didn't care about product, I mean, there was no care about or no focus on product marketing. No we weren't yet on post, you know, post sale customer marketing. We cared about it a lot, but Kathleen (12:09): Got it. You can't boil the ocean. Right. So what did you start with? Like, how did you come in? You've got good bones is how I would describe it, right? Like you said, you've got great product market fit. You have the start of a really great company and you've got inbound interest. So you've got all the good bones, like, what do you start with? Jeff (12:27): Yeah, there were two things. One, our product demos really well. It's a beautiful product. Ease of use. The design is really what stood out as a differentiator. So first was what makes this product different? And, you know, I came from a background where I had set up phone systems in the past. One of the many things I did at Lawline of all my jobs there was I set up our company phone system. It was ShoreTel. It's actually a company called N5 networks, which was acquired by ShoreTel soon after, but I set up that system. And so it was like, you know, it's a baby boy product. He still had the landline, phones, everything plugged into some thing in the, in the back room. Every time I went to go troubleshoot it, I was unplugging wires and shutting off the internet accidentally. Jeff (13:12): I didn't know how to train anybody cause it was just difficult to use. And so I recall my first experience using Aircall and it was just, I signed up for my own trial. It was just this wow moment because what took me weeks to set up, I already had this, I was already set up in the app. Like I signed up for trial. I had a phone number. I signed up for a Zimbabwe phone number. I was adding my teammates, I had everything set up. And so to me that was this wow moment where I really felt that from the side that I, when I was a consumer, I could empathize with that. And so first thing I really, we really thought about what is, how do we just show that to people right off the bat? How do we get that out? And so, you know, we've always focused on trial experiences and trying to get people to the point of a demonstration. And so we focused a lot on events, inviting people into our office, holding community events. We'd demo people and show the product at, at those at those events. I used to do a lot with webinars, like really bottom of funnel webinars, product driven, and just get it out there and get some early customers coming in the door. Kathleen (14:27): And when you say events, did you, do you mean like local events or describe to me? Jeff (14:32): We did both. We would do some trade shows. Really costly. So we were cautious, cautious of doing too much there, but yeah, we would do local events, invite people into our office and gather 50, 60 people in the sales or CX community, holding events. Do a little bit of a community around it. And then eventually we were able to follow up with them, you know, show them a demo, something like that. And it gets some early cost get, just get a few customers in the door, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And then that would say that scaled into more questions. Okay. So we've got some things working there. Then the more challenges came with, how do we really scale and grow that more quickly? And I think one thing that's been very unique to Aircall in our marketing has been our focus on partnerships and integrations. Jeff (15:28): And so by far the biggest driver of growth in North America has been that we've partnered with very strong companies to integrate the product for one and then to drive co-marketing and co-selling efforts. And so how do we build a brand in North America? Well, easiest way to do that was to try to attach ourselves to HubSpot and Intercom and Zendesk and companies that were already doing a great job. If we could just attach ourselves to that, that would be fantastic. And so we worked really hard to build integrations, drive up app rankings on their app exchanges, do co-marketing efforts where we did all the work. Just hope that the, let us slap the logo on there and, and help distribute it. We worked to get into onboarding emails. So it came out from a HubSpot, for example, you know, like you signed up for HubSpot, they'd recommend Aircall, one of the apps to sign up for. And so we just started attaching ourselves to these brands through product integration and then co-marketing efforts and it kind of organically grew from there. Kathleen (16:38): So what I think there's a lot of people that talk about co-marketing and talk about channels and things like that. Can you talk a little bit more about what it takes to, to really make that partnership successful? Like you talked about doing a lot of the work, like dissect that a little bit for me. Jeff (16:56): Well, it has to start with the need. And so we tried to go beyond the co-marketing was a way that helped promote a dual need that their customers also had. And so the integration product part is really critical. And I think, I think that's been a core thing is that the product and the marketing are really integrated at Aircall. And they always have been whether it's that trial experience and getting the customer to a wow moment, whether it's being able to have a, an amazing UI UX that we can demo really well. Or if it's on the integration front so that we are partnering with companies, building integrations into their product, to help them solve a problem. And then leveraging that from a marketing standpoint, how do we comarket with them? And so, you know, HubSpot, for example, timing is great. Jeff (17:46): They're building out their CRM system, a sales hub, soon after they started building out support hub. And what's something you needed, you go from Salesforce to HubSpot, you need a dialer on top of that. And so we built that integration and we solved that problem for them. So somebody goes from Salesforce to HubSpot, I'm a HubSpot account executive, and I'm getting an inquiry of, okay, I'm using, you know, NewVoiceMedia with, with Salesforce. I need something new because you guys don't integrate with HubSpot, or you guys don't integrate with NewVoiceMedia. What can I use? They, and eventually we got top of mind with the HubSpot team so that, Hey, we promote Aircall and that's fine. Kathleen (18:24): And how do you get top of mind? Like what, what, any advice? Yeah. Like what would be your advice for somebody who's just starting that process? Jeff (18:31): A lot of work. We, we put a lot of focus on our partnerships from both the, we have that team. That's been a part of marketing, but we focused on the partnership itself, relentlessly. And so first to get one customer and do unscalable things, you know, if we got, when we were trying to really grow on certain apps with certain apps like HubSpot or a customer with it, with a K or a Intercom, those first customers, they were very meaningful. They, they have an issue. You've got to hop on it immediately. If you just got up to go above and beyond to show that, okay, I've referred over, you know, Aircall on top of HubSpot and, or I have an app that comes into attaches in the HubSpot. We have to know that if I'm the HubSpot team, I'm probably going to get a question about this integration of it's not working. Jeff (19:24): And so if that sort of stuff comes up, you have to solve it immediately. Give HubSpot a really good experience from your side. Let them know the partnership's valuable. Gain traction over time with getting good reviews you know, lots of installs. Helping them. If you think of HubSpot, for example, they had a lot of focus on growing their ecosystem. One part of growing their ecosystem was showing that apps are getting installed. So how do we get as many apps installed as humanly possible on top of that ecosystem, regardless of whatever we have to do, and we can get their attention in that fashion. So we really focused on just hustle, really? How do we, how do we get a lot of installs? How do we drive an amazing experience with those partners? How do we solve a need for them? And then eventually if we can service them enough and give enough value, we can be top of mind for them. Kathleen (20:16): Was there anything in particular that you can point to that really drove the growth in installs? Jeff (20:25): There's a number of things that say there's no, there's no one magic thing. I can't think of one magic, you know, activity we did that that opened the flood Gates. It was just a lot of work. It was getting one, doing one-on-one on outbound on just a specific focus for three months, sign up many customers in the segments. It was SEO, you know, searching for what competitive terms around our partner plus phone system or call center or apps on that exchange. Could we do it was positioned our website in a certain way that facilitate people to go towards one direction. So let's just, a lot of activities, you know, they all come, they all sort of compounded. I think that the main thing is that we, we focus that as a core part of the strategy and the product was solid there. And so we, we combine the, the marketing effort and the product effort together. I think that was the, you know, that was sort of the kicker. And then was just a lot of activities after that. Kathleen (21:32): And you talked about also one of the things that was key was really getting a lot of reviews in their partner marketplace, if you will, or their app marketplace. Were there any strategies in particular that you use that you found to be successful for getting those reviews? Cause I've, I've been in the position of having to get reviews before, and sometimes it can feel like, like pulling teeth, trying to get people they'll, they'll say yes, yes, I'll do it. And then they never do. Or, you know, like how did you, how did you approach that? Jeff (22:01): Just pay people. An email and pay then a $25 gift card. This is pretty much our only tactic. Kathleen (22:09): Yeah. Well, Hey, if it works, if it works. Yeah, Jeff (22:12): Yeah, yeah. Pay for the review. Kathleen (22:15): And did you, did you invest in any like review site marketing outside of your partner relationships? Like, did you do any G2 Crowd or any well now? Jeff (22:25): Yeah. Yeah. So, so I'd say on top of the partner, which, which has always been still is one of our key drivers. We've always had an intense focus on inbound as well. So review sites have always been a core part of that. And you know, we could, we could control that. And so we tried to look at like, what are the things in the world that we can control? We have customers, lot of them are happy. We can control number of reviews that we have on G2 and Capterra. We just have to hustle and do it. And so we focused heavily on the first, the app review sites where we thought we could gain SMB market share, which is what we were more focused on at the moment, really small business. And we focused on Get App, Capterra. Sort of winning the awards for those those categories or those those platforms promoted them and so on. And then eventually we would spend money on them to help promotions as well. Kathleen (23:23): Nice. So, all right. I totally took you down a winding path there cause I love, I just like getting into details. So you formed these partner relationships and that really began to kind of like heat up your, your lead gen and customer acquisition. I'm going to turn it back over to you now. Jeff (23:41): Yeah. We did it with HubSpot, Intercom. We had a great with, still do, and that makes sense. Aircall plus Intercom, you've got chat and phone together. So I'm really focused on co-marketing with them. Co-Marketing calendars with them. We developed a couple of unique products with them as well. We have one product called Aircall now. It's not something we still actively promote, but I had a ton of buzz around it at the time, which was you could convert an Intercom chat directly into a phone call and that phone call would go directly to the rep that you were chatting with at the time. So when you got really innovative with the, those types of activities, and then we turn that into an app ecosystem. So initially we hustled, we built all the, all the apps. Jeff (24:28): We tried to create partnerships with them. And then at some point along that growth cycle, we thought to ourselves, well, we could be that company that other companies are building into and then trying to get leads off of with us and partner with us. And then we could do lead sharing in that way. And so at some point we turned that into an open marketplace for apps that could be built on top of the Aircall market, on top of the air call API. We publish them on our app exchange and that's something we've been focused on the last year and a half, two years or so. And we've had 60, 70 companies build out apps on top of us and that's scaling quite well. And so we kind of use that as a, okay, we had to really hustle, get it done. We still do that. How do we enable other companies to do that also? Create a flywheel effect from that. Kathleen (25:21): And now you're in the opposite position of people wanting to, whereas you were bending over backwards to make a relationship work with HubSpot, hopefully now there are people bending over backwards to make a relationship work with you. Jeff (25:31): Yes, it's both. It's both ways still. Yeah, we grew those out. Gorgeous customer. I think I can name many, many partners that we've had that have been really strong for us. And that's been a big driver in other areas, you know, inbound, outbound. Kathleen (25:49): When did you add outbound into the mix? How soon? Jeff (25:53): Early? Pretty early. Kathleen (25:56): And did you insource, like, did you have your own team doing the outbound or did you outsource that? How did you handle it? Jeff (26:03): In house? From the start and different regions respond? You know, the international part is very interesting with with outbounds in certain regions. You know I think of France, for example. The response rates are just 3X, 2X higher than they are in, in the US for example. And so we've grown them everywhere. We've had SDRs, we have an SDR team in France for Germany, Spain, for UK, for APAC and North American team as well, although it has slightly different oddities and unique points to the local markets to grow. But yeah, we, we scaled that out and built it early. We want to do it in house and I found it particularly valuable, not just from the pipeline generation standpoint, but early on when we were first starting to go to market. I mean, that's how you get to know and experiment who your customers are. You can try different segments out, you can iterate, you can see what messages that respond, that you get are being responded to. Kathleen (27:16): And did that team sit in marketing or in sales? Jeff (27:21): It sat in, it sat in sales. Yeah, it sat in sales, but worked really closely with myself. And there was a brief period of time, again, this is like startup sort of life, I guess, but there's a brief period of time in 2018, late 2017 and most of 2018 that I headed up the North American sales team. And so it's kind of a blurry question because it was all coming in to me. Kathleen (27:46): So that, you know, it's so funny because I always say like, every marketer should work as, as a salesperson at some point in their career, it makes you such a better marketer. Jeff (27:54): Yeah, totally. And there's no better way to get to, yeah, to get to know the customer, to understand what messages are resonating. I mean, the, the campaigns we're running to figure out what what pockets of customers are responding, what messages are they responding to? Kathleen (28:12): And to know how, like what salespeople need from marketing. Jeff (28:15): Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's, that's how we figured out what integrations to build. That's what we figured out. The messaging on the website, and we're still using a lot of that copy today. And a lot of the information that we found throughout balance is, is, you know, actively in our, our our marketing today. Kathleen (28:31): Nice. Now I really want to hear like, kind of the parallel story of all of this is happening. This is what you're doing from a strategy standpoint. How did your team evolve? Because you joined and it was you and one other person and how many marketers are there on your team right now? Jeff (28:51): There's approximately a 30 marketers. Kathleen (28:53): Oh my gosh. Jeff (28:55): And then we've got another 10 or so in channeled partnership. Kathleen (28:59): Talk to me about like, how did that evolve? Like what positions did you add first? Jeff (29:06): Yeah, so we're very demand focused. Most of our early hires were in demand. I like that mentality when you're first starting because demand can hack, not a word I'm using frequently anymore, but demand can kind of piece together and hack product marketing to a degree in messaging. We could figure out contents because you have to answer those parts to get the, to get pipeline generated. So by default, you have to experiment, you have to figure things out. You could start the other side and really focus on product marketing and messaging did not solve the demand part, not piece everything together. And so I think first off was what am I okay. Being okay. And what would I like to be really great with? And we really want to be good on demand, acquisition marketing, build up our SEO strategy, figure out what channels could really work for us. Jeff (30:08): And then have an experimental mindset when it came to customer cohorts, you know messaging, all those activities. And so our first hire was in demand for North America. We hired multiple content marketers at that point to build out our SEO which you put a lot of effort into. We then hired we, then continued on events cause we have been marketing early on was, as I mentioned, was working well for us. We hired on events. We started adding on partner account managers to handle our partners. And it, it kind of scaled from there. Eventually we got to the point where everything was being housed in the US and I started seeing a huge imbalance at that point. We're putting all this emphasis on the US and then just trying to translate things for Europe which was a mistake. Jeff (31:03): You can't just translate content and call it localized you know, localized market ready work. And so we then, one of our first hires then went out to Paris to lead our growth efforts in Europe. And she ended up building out a pretty large team. That team was actually larger than the US team at this point because we localized everything, we built original content for Spanish market, for the German market and so on. And so we've really focused heavily on that content marketing portion there. And then I would say we delayed product marketing till about hire 15 or so, a year and a half year. And I hired our first product marketer. It was too late, but I think at that point, for every role that we've had, and, you know, I think we, before we expand into a new area, if it's demand focused, want to know this is what to double down on. Jeff (32:00): If it's not demand focused, then I really want to feel some pressure. Like we have to have it, we can't hustle any harder than we're hustling. And if we don't have this, it's really going to hold us back versus versus getting into that mentality when you start to scale, which is you know, like, Oh, we really need customer marketing, but really nobody's, we could do customer marketing if we just prioritized it internally, or, you know, it gave somebody a new opportunity or figured out a way to move pieces around. And so he, we brought product marketing on second. We brought operations on third. We don't have a director of operations though. We've kind of more leveraged our revenue operations team for that. And then more recently we brought on brand marketing as well. So if I go through our lineage, it was demand, content, and then doing that same thing in Europe. Product marketing next. It's really help us figure out what cohorts and sort of scaling different verticals, enabling sales to go up market and these activities. And then starting to bring on brand managers to think about, you know, our, our, how we are competitively different in terms of our style, our tone of voice, all these activities that we have. We have a good longterm vantage point of our our strategy. Kathleen (33:30): How many direct reports do you have today? Jeff (33:33): I have, let's see. It's it's changed a little bit recently, so I have eight at the moment. Kathleen (33:41): Yeah. That's about, I feel like that's about the max that you can have before it starts to feel like crazy. You're in one on ones all, all week long. Jeff (33:50): Yeah. Yeah. So those teams are North American demand, European demand, product marketing, brands. We have an ecosystem head person that runs our marketplace, that new apps that are installed on our marketplace. We have a head of developer evangelism as well, who's one of our cofounders and he's responsible for essentially the marketing for developers to come build stuff on top of Aircall. And then our head of brand as well. And then the last two that sort of fringe with our North American team, which would likely now report into marketing longterm would be our partnerships head and head of channel sales. Kathleen (34:31): Okay. All right. So I could talk to you forever and there are some more questions I have, but you are a very busy man clearly. So the question I have for you is if you were talking to somebody who right now was in the same shoes you were in three years ago, like coming in as the first, you know, head of marketing and like, and it's one or two people in the company and they, their goal is to scale the way you have. What advice would you give them? Jeff (35:00): Well, I think there's, there's two seemingly separate concepts here. One is we really focused on what was, where could we find growth efficiently? Testing it, and then doubling down, while also placing some big bets along the way that were going to be necessary for two years down the line. And that's really critical because if we didn't do the big bets that weren't going to pay off for a long time, that we couldn't really test, we wouldn't have continued to grow. We would have grown in the short term, but not the long term. And so I think what we had done, and still do successfully is think of both the short and long term, an example. I think all the things I was mentioning earlier were sort of short term. That testing mentality and growing off of that, but then longterm, you, we had to answer some difficult questions. Jeff (35:56): We've got to, we invested a lot in certain integrations and partnerships like Salesforce. We invested in channel which it was a lot of work to build up a channel team and direct sales. It's a lot of work to put into our marketplace and get apps to get built on top of the marketplace. On top of that marketplace, who was, are things that weren't going to payback for two years down the line, and we think they're going to work. But you have to place enough of those and and structure it in a way that you're okay if a couple of them don't work out fully and that the upside is going to be there. A couple of them do really, really well. Kathleen (36:37): And you also, I would assume, need to have a CEO that has the same attitude. Cause it's one thing for you to feel like I'm going to place big bets and know that that's a big bet and it may or may not pan out. But like, I feel like that's the tricky thing as head of marketing. You know, there are lots of marketers who see the value in that, but if they're not really aligned with the C suite on that approach, then that can really backfire. Jeff (37:01): Yes. Yes, totally. And I think that goes back to that original point though, which is what were the, what's the pre joining the company components that indicated this had an opportunity to be kind of special and the mindset of the CEO was a critical component of that. Kathleen (37:20): Yeah. Wow. Well, like I said, I could pick your brain for hours, but I'm going to shift gears cause there's two questions I always ask all of my guests. So before we wrap up, I want to make sure I ask you. The first is the podcast is all about inbound marketing. So I'm curious if there's a particular company or individual that you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to do inbound marketing well these days. Jeff (37:44): Well, I, can't not say Intercom because I just love Intercom and I'm not just saying that because of our partnership. But, but when I originally joined, I remember our, our one of, one of the members of our board interviewed me and asked me if, if we could build one company, who would you build it after? Emulate? Intercom was my go to response. Just love their brand or their content strategy. And it's just they're, they're, they're quite inspiring. I think they've always done a good job. Individual named Shane Murphy runs their marketing now. He's quite fantastic. So also love the work that there's a few answers to this from different ways. Like I love the sort of mojo that Gong has built. I find that inspiring. Drift's done a really cool job on, on social media and there's definitely parts to take out of their playbook for what they've done, what they've created. I also think that Gorgias a company that we work closely with who's in the help desk space does a really fantastic job of having that growth sort of, you know, hacker mindset. So there's a lot of companies that I think do a really admirable job on the inbound side. Kathleen (39:00): Nice. I like those examples. You are not the first person to mention Intercom, so it's not just that he's biased. There's definitely something there. Cause I've heard people say that before. Second question. A lot of the marketers I talk to say their biggest challenge is just keeping up with everything in digital marketing, cause it changes so quickly these days. How do you personally stay up to date on, on all of it? Jeff (39:23): I mean, I read as much as humanly possible. Both on marketing and not on marketing, I find a lot of inspiration from, you know, non-marketing books. Like there's gosh, whether it's like bio's or, you know, stories of generals and strategies type of books, I really, really enjoy. There's a book called Thinking in Systems, which is Donna Meadows, which is just a fantastic book about logical mindsets, like logical thinking and the systems that can help, can basically create the infrastructure for anything. And I find that to be a really fascinating book as, as it applies to marketing because you know, marketing is an insanely complex system as it grows kind of logically about it. You can, you can tie things back and I, I get a lot of inspiration books like that. Jeff (40:21): And then outside of, it's more, more specific direct marketing related. I mean, any of the sort of traditional blogs, whether it's Saastr or whether it's Tom Tungaz, whether it's your traditional like SEO land, you know, SEMrush, those types of things. I love, I love inbound. I love SEO. And so I try to read as much as possible on those activities. And I'd say also Revenue Collective. I mean, gosh, I don't know what I've learned more just like life as a whole, but also marketing, because you have every great marketer on the planet in that group and you can post messages to them. So I'm giving, I'm giving a shout out to the Revenue Collective, but gosh, that's how we met. Kathleen (41:11): That's how we met. Jeff (41:11): Yeah. I think that's the community where I've just learned so so much. And you can just go through the logs and read old history of conversations in there and that's, that's an evening of reading right there. Kathleen (41:21): Yeah, that's great. I would second that. So if you like autobiographies, as you said, I don't know if you've already read this, but my one hot tip for you, and I am shamelessly copying this from David Cancel at Drift because he's the one that I got this tip from, read the autobiography of Arnold Schwartzenegger. Actually has some of the most amazing like marketing and business and life lessons. I was totally captivated by it and I mean, that would not be who I would normally pick up a book off the shelf by, so yeah, it's great. Jeff (41:55): Yeah, I will, I will. I'm gonna play this part for my wife because she knows I have a fascination with him. Kathleen (42:03): Have you read it yet? Have you read it? Jeff (42:06): I read like the first half of it, I have not read the completion of it. Actually. It was Audible. Like I was doing it on my own. Kathleen (42:11): I did, I listened to it when I worked out, actually I would listen to it while I was lifting weights and I'd be like, okay. I mean, if Arnold can do what he did, I could lift 15 pounds. Right. So it's so good. I loved that book. But anyway, enough about Arnold. So if somebody is listening to this and wants to learn more about Aircall or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that? Jeff (42:35): Well I always have to say this. An easy way is to call me on my Aircall number, (646) 712-9381. And you'll get a, you get a nice voicemail experience there as well as if you call it, then I've got a lot of lines. So I can, I can, I can distribute that and not ruin my you know, my, my cell phone for, Kathleen (42:59): I think you're the first guest I've ever had who's given out their phone number. So I love this. Jeff (43:04): That's it? That's it. You don't, you don't, don't email me. You can LinkedIn me, I suppose, because it's easy to, to find my my LinkedIn. But yeah, it's just drop an Aircall and that will get the message and tell me how to contact you back. Kathleen (43:19): Cool. I think everybody should test that out. That's fantastic. All right. Well, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review, but of course, whatever review you think it merits cause that's how other folks find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Jeff. Jeff (43:47): Thank you, Kathleen.

One of the highlights for us at B2BMX was a panel discussion where four experts talked about ABM strategies they've deployed at their companies.  The panel featured Som Puangladda, VP of Global Marketing at GumGum, Adam Goyette, VP of Marketing at G2 Crowd, Eric Martin, Senior Director of Demand Gen at SalesLoft, and Justin Gray, the well-known founder of LeadMD. Som, Adam, Eric, and Justin joined forces to address topics like deployment, personalization, scalability, measurement, and alignment. On this episode of #FlipMyFunnel, we're sharing that discussion with you.  ----------- Join me for weekly special LinkedInLive sessions where I interview your favorite guests like Pat Lencioni, Seth Godin, Whitney Johnson, and Kim Scott — LIVE. Here's the one-click invite: https://evt.mx/mSGV4Ka8

This week on Product Love, I talked to Marty Duffy, VP of Product at G2Crowd. G2Crowd is is the world's largest tech marketplace where businesses can discover, review, and manage the technology they need to reach their potential. We talked about how Marty hires product managers at G2 (he even provides a homework example!), and how he builds an environment for PMs to go faster.

One of the highlights for us at B2BMX was a panel discussion where four experts talked about ABM strategies they've deployed at their companies. The panel featured Som Puangladda, VP of Global Marketing at GumGum, Adam Goyette, VP of Marketing at G2 Crowd, Eric Martin, Senior Director of Demand Gen at SalesLoft, and Justin Gray, the well-known founder of LeadMD. Som, Adam, Eric, and Justin joined forces to address topics like deployment, personalization, scalability, measurement, and alignment. On this episode of #FlipMyFunnel, we're sharing that discussion with you.

A lot of entrepreneurs dream of ringing the bell. You've poured your blood, sweat, and tears into your venture. Finally, it's going public. But to get to that point, you've got to overcome a lot of challenges. In today's marketplace, you can spin up a new business in minutes. Gone are the days that required raising millions just to get your app up and running. The challenge is no longer about getting started. It's about breaking through the noise. And one of the keys to doing that is building a fantastic culture. That's what Godard Abel came on the latest #FlipMyFunnel podcast to talk about. Godard is currently Co-Founder and CEO at G2 Crowd, a leading B2B review platform. We talked about leveraging your brand to scale, connecting your employees to your mission, and defining your culture in a way that's memorable, repeatable, and portable. Check it out.

In this one we talk to Godard Abel, Co-founder and Executive Chairman at G2 Crowd and CEO at SteelBrick before he sold it to Salesforce, about how there are many different factors in determining the success or failure of a leader or business.

In this one we talk to Godard Abel, Co-founder and Executive Chairman at G2 Crowd and CEO at SteelBrick before he sold it to Salesforce, about how there are many different factors in determining the success or failure of a leader or business.

Guest: Ryan Bonnici - Chief Marketing Officer @G2 (Formerly @HubSpot, @Salesforce, @ExactTarget, @Microsoft; Writer @HBR, @Forbes) Guest Background: Ryan Bonnici is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2 Crowd, where he's driving the growth of the world's leading B2B technology review platform that's helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global marketing at HubSpot, Salesforce, and ExactTarget, Ryan's marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and LifeHacker.  Guest Links: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram How We Grew Our Organic Traffic to 1 Million Monthly Visitors in Under a Year The Most Important Marketing Metric You're Not Measuring Learn.G2.com Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The Inbound Marketing Playbook - The Art & Science of Marketing Metrics - Ryan's Methodology - Hiring and Retaining World-Class Talent - B2B Brand Building - What can we Learn from B2C? - Social Media Strategy - Ryan Talk's the Talk AND Walk's the Walk Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to the Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Ryan Bonnici on the show. Ryan is the Chief Marketing Officer of G2, formerly known as G2 Crowd. They have a $500 million evaluation on $100 million capital raised, where he's driving growth of the world's leading B2B technology review platform that's helping more than 1.5 million business professionals make informed purchasing decisions every single month. With previous positions leading global Marketing at HubSpot (who IPO'd back in 2014, they currently have a $7.5 billion evaluation), also Salesforce (who also IPO'd, they have $124 billion valuation), and ExactTarget (who Salesforce purchased). Ryan's Marketing and SaaS expertise has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Entrepreneur.com and Life Hacker. Here we go. Naber:  Ryan, awesome to have you on the show. How are you? Ryan Bonnici:    I'm doing well, Brandon, thank you so much for having me. Naber:  Good. It is amazing to...I can see you right now, see your lovely hair, and hear your lovely accent, which is always a treat for me. You're in Chicago right now, correct? Ryan Bonnici:    I am, yeah. I moved from Australia to the US a few years ago, and it's beautiful, sunny and warm outside, so I can't complain. Naber:  Awesome. I've done some solid research on your personal and professional, from all the content you've put out there, and I'm pretty convinced, based on the moves that you made, that you're doing your penance for growing up in beautiful, best in the world to live Sydney and Cronulla, by trying to attempt to live in the coldest, major market cities in the US - in Boston, Chicago. Ryan Bonnici:    Haha, yeah...this is true. Naber:  No slag on those cities because I love both of them. Lived in Chicago for about five years as well. Hey, let's jump in. So, I know that you've had such an amazing career and, in the intro everyone's heard a lot of your accomplishments as well as a bunch of the companies you've gone through. So, what we'll do, I think today is we'll jump into some personal stuff first, for maybe a few minutes, and go through what it was growing up as Ryan Bonnici, and then we'll hop into some of the professional, and that'll be the meat of what we talk about. Sound okay? Ryan Bonnici:    Sounds amazing. Naber:  Cool. Trinity Grammar School, growing up in Cronulla, going through all the interesting things you did in your childhood to become the person you are today - which I believe, a perennial overachiever, which I'll talk about in a second. But talk about a little bit about, maybe three or four minutes, on what it was like being Ryan Bonnici as a child and growing up. Ryan Bonnici:    Good question. Gosh, I think in one word, what it was like growing up as Ryan Bonnici as the child, would be "lonely" a little bit. Yeah, I was an only child. And, my parents wanted to have more kids, but they stay separated when I was young. And then I got back together, and they eventually divorced, but they didn't really want to have a second child because they weren't sure about what was gonna happen with their relationship. And so, I don't know. I remember just growing up and always wanting a brother or sister or someone to play with. And so, I definitely feel like I was a very different person then than who I am now. But I don't know, I think that shaped me to be honest, in good ways and in bad ways. So I think, early on and growing up, decided that I was going to put my self worth on my accomplishments, which I wouldn't recommend people do necessarily because you will always be unfulfilled because you're always trying to get the next best thing, or to make yourself better, or be better. And flash forward 30 years, and through a lot of therapy, I've been able to unfold a lot of that stuff. But, yeah, I don't know, that's probably the one word that would best describe me - maybe "lonely", and probably not very social. Which is bizarre, because I think across Linkedin, and Instagram, and Twitter, and different social networks, I probably have a few hundred thousand followers, which I share a lot of content with. So, I come across really social, but I'm secretly just an extroverted introvert. I grew up in Sydney, Australia. I didn't really focus all that much on school up until year 11 and 12, which are the two final years of high school, in Australia. And I don't know what it was, but something just clicked in my mind, and I was like, I really want to get a really good GPA because I want to be able to get into any University in the world. And so I worked my butt off and I got a 4.0... Naber:  Wow. Ryan Bonnici:    And then went to university for a year, and I was a bit burned out at university, and then I took a couple of years off from studying to be an international flight attendant, which kind is random. Naber:  That's pretty cool. Ryan Bonnici:    Really fun. It helped me save up to buy my first investment property back when I was 19... Naber:  Wow. Wow. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, and then I can jump into the career stuff, or happy to answer more questions on the growing up, or wherever you want to take it, Brandon. Naber:  No, that's good. That's good. Let's pause there just for 30 seconds, and then we'll hop into some career stuff. But, you mentioned, you mentioned the word "lonely", and you've talked about - in a lot of the content you've put out around mental health, mental health in the workplace, and how it shaped you professionally - can you talk a little bit about that? Because you're really passionate about it. And, I think that's probably a good place to start because you talked about how some of the events in your childhood had shaped you up until who you are today. Can you just give us a little bit more about that, and how it shaped you as to who you are right now? Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, sure. So I think mental health is just something that, I think it impacts everyone to some degree. Some people have good mental health, somebody will have poor mental health. And I think everyone will experience poor a mental health, at certain times of their lives. I think for me, and my family anyways, there's definitely a genetic component because my mum, my mum's mum, there's quite a significant amount of depression and suicidality in our family. So I think some of my own experiences growing up, as well as some of just my genetics, I think predisposes me to have more issues in that space. Which I think I used to view as a problem, but now I just view it actually as something that needs to be trained in the same way that I train my body by going to the gym, I train my mind by going to therapy and doing different therapeutic modalities. And so, I think growing up as an only child and experiencing bullying when I was in primary school, just sort of...I think you attachment to your friends, your attachment to your family, your attachment to these key figures in your early years is really paramount in your formation of the world, and relationships, and whether or not you, when you interact with someone, whether you are going to over-index for them being trustworthy, or you're going to over index for them being someone who's going to take advantage of you, or whatnot. So I think for very good half of my career, I was definitely the latter. So I, unconsciously anyways, viewed everyone around me as a potential bully. And so that meant that I was super competitive and was always thinking about how people around me were going to, I don't know, get in my way, or take me down, or stabbing in the back, which sounds really dramatic. And it wasn't like I was going through my jobs and literally thinking that, and like planning behind the scenes. But I think what I've learned for therapy now, is that I think, and in some ways, I think I've grown a lot of empathy actually toward those parts of me that felt that way, and still sometimes do feel that way, because they were defensive and they were protective, right? They protected me when I was young by not trusting peopl..kids, when I was younger. It protected me from enduring more bullying. But once I was no longer at school, and in university, and at work where that doesn't really ever happen all that much, still sometimes happens, but not all that much, it's definitely less helpful of a strategy. So I think that shaped me in some ways and meant that I focus more on, I'll talk about it a bit later, but I think in career success you really need to focus on relationships and results, the two R's. And I think, it probably meant for me the earlier on in my career, I over-indexed on results. And I think now I do a better job at,equally indexing between results and relationships. Naber:  Wow. That's great. That's a really good framework for people to think about. Thank you. And then I really appreciate you sharing all of that as well. We're lucky enough to know each other personally and professionally, which is really cool. So, I wish we had three hours, four hours, 10 hours to talk about this stuff right now. So that's actually a really good segue. You mentioned getting into university and then getting into your first few gigs and over indexing on results. Can you walk us through some of your, just walking through your professional jumps in the roles that you've had? Maybe in three or four minutes, and then I'll hop into a couple of questions about some of the superpowers I know that you have, and some of the things you've written about as well, so we can get a little bit more of your mindset. Ryan Bonnici:    Sure. Yeah. So, I basically started, my career in tech started at Microsoft, into Microsoft for their, I forget what it was called, but it was basically their accelerator program, their leadership program. Microsoft either hires people that are fresh out of university that they identify as folks with leadership potential, and they fast track them to management, or they hire people with 10 plus years of experience. Microsoft almost exclusively never hired anyone with from one to nine years. So I entered through that leadership track, and that was my first exposure to Marketing. I always knew I wanted it to be a CMO. And weirdly, I always knew I wanted to be a CMO before 30. So yeah, I started my career at Microsoft. And then, after spending some time there and learning a lot about B2C Marketing, a company called ExactTarget, which was based out of Indianapolis, in the US, was growing internationally. And Microsoft was a really big user of ExactTarget's email Marketing platform, of which I was a user. And so when they launched Asia Pacific, they hired me as their first Partnerships Marketer. So I then joined ExactTarget, and spent a few years at ExactTarget. And there I really was able to move up, in both experience and in leadership. And so, I built out a big team there across Asia Pacific while I was at ExactTarget. And then ExactTarget was acquired by Salesforce. So I was able to then spend a few years at Salesforce running their Marketing for Asia Pacific. Again, a really remarkable super innovative company, but quite a bit smaller than...a little bit bigger than ExactTarget, but quite a bit smaller, the Microsoft. So I was running all of their B2B Marketing. And so, at ExactTarget, I suppose I was able to really refine, I would say my enterprise B2B Marketing playbooks. So how do you work with Sales to create net-new Sales opportunities for Sales, as well as nurture and accelerate existing Sales opportunities to move them through Sales process faster. So it's very high touch, low volume game, the enterprise B2B playbook. And I had done that for quite a few years and really enjoyed it, but I felt I had really pushed it to its extreme. And, at that time, I was really interested in the company called HubSpot because I was fascinated by how they were doing Marketing, and I love their product. And so I then moved to HubSpot, and was the first Marketing hire in APAC, and then built out their APAC Marketing Team across Sydney, Singapore, Japan. And what I loved about HubSpot, and what was really important to me in my journey, was that HubSpot was still B2B Marketing, but it was B2B at scale, right? So we were selling our software platform, which was an all in one Marketing and Sales platform to small and medium businesses. I think the average sale was about a thousand dollars per month, for HubSpot. And so when you're selling a product that, it's less about high touch and more about, high volume. And so that was really important to me because, eventually I still do want to start my own company. And while I love the enterprise playbook that I used at ExactTarget and Salesforce, when you're throwing big events and doing a lot of that high touch, high hand holding activities, it's really expensive, right? We're talking millions of dollars. Whereas at HubSpot, we had much tighter budgets because we were much more focused on ROI-focused Marketing, and the biggest driver and the most effective driver for ROI-focused Marketing and B2B, and in B2C actually in a lot of senses, is content Marketing. It takes a little bit more time than some of the other strategies, but once you build up traffic from content, the leads, and the MQL's, and the revenue just keeps flowing. So I love...probably prior to G2, my time at HubSpot, those three years, the most proud, time of my life. It was also really challenging, but I learned so much in that first year, about how to do scalable Marketing. So I'm so grateful to have worked there, and just genuinely love the team there so much. I then moved over from Sydney to the US with HubSpot to run their Global Marketing in the sense of digital, social, brand campaigns, PR - and that was fun because it exposed me to another part of Marketing that I didn't have as much exposure to in APAC. And then about, gosh, a little under two years ago, then moved to G2. And the reason why I wanted to move to G2 is that I love B2B, but I think eventually I realistically want to get back to B2C or a B2B / B2C role. And what I love about G2 and a lot of the most innovative businesses today - like Uber, Airbnb, they're all marketplaces... Naber:  Marketplaces, yeah. Two-side or three-sided marketplaces. It's amazing. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. And they're really fascinating, and super complex and difficult. But I wanted that challenge. I think, if you look at my roles from moving in B2C at Microsoft, to Enterprise B2B, to SMB B2B, I don't like it when I'm comfortable, because I don't feel I'm learning. And I find it takes me a year to basically, without sounding an arrogant douche bag, it takes me a year to become an expert at something. So, my first year at G2 I was hopeless maybe. First year at HubSpot, I wasn't hopeless, but I didn't feel I could add as much value necessarily as the other marketers on the team had been there longer. And I find, typically it takes me six to 12 months to learn everything from that industry and that company and the existing people on the team. And then at the six to 12 month point, I'm able to have a bit more of an integrative understanding of what we should do next because of all of the experiences that I've had. And so, yeah, I always find that when I do my best work is from years one to three, the end of years one to three. Yeah. Naber:  Very cool. That's actually amazing to know about yourself. You know, wot many people really have that self reflection, understanding of where their best work comes from, how long it takes them to be good at something, what the expectation of themselves, and how to manage that. That's, that's great. I've always been so impressed, impressed by your career, for a lot of reasons. You've accomplished more in a shorter space of time than most, and at really high velocity. But a lot of people that do that, they usually go usually a "T". As in they usually have a lot they have very thin breadth across a lot of things, but a lot of depth in one thing. You have depth and so many things across a Sales and Marketing spectrum because of you're unique set of circumstances, that you both put yourself in, and that you were put in a for the roles and responsibilities that you've had. All the way across, operations, digital, and Sales, and Sales Development. You actually, mentioned that, your job is part marketer and part Sales person and one of your articles. And I think that that's just a true testament to your background, your experiences, to have that mindset. But one of the things I want to talk about right now, you just mentioned, all the amazing businesses you'd worked with. I want to talk about talent. And how you think about attracting, pipelining, hiring, retaining great employees. So you and I both subscribe to the same mindset, I believe, from the content that you've put out there and from having conversations, that talent and hiring is the number one priority for every business. And should be for every single hiring manager as the CEO of that hiring process. So always be pipelining, even and especially when you're not hiring so you can get rockstars on your team, regardless of having readily available headcount or budget, regardless of of having those things open. So let's break those things down. attract pipeline, hire and retain. You talk about in some of your content, I think it was in an Entrepreneur.com article, you talk about not just thinking about Sales and Marketing from an inbound perspective, but thinking about recruiting, hiring and attracting talent from an inbound perspective. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset, and how you apply that to the way that you hire talent? Ryan Bonnici:    Sure, sure. Yeah. So, I think the reality is, and the way I think about recruiting is, most people that are actively looking for a job are actively looking because they're probably not good at their job, and that's the reality. And people that are good at their job, they don't look for jobs. They are constantly...they're working hard, they're doing a great job for the company that they're at, and it's businesses that intrigue them that they might want to speak to. So, I'm at a loss for words for the exact word that I described this. I did a talk on this once at a big HR conference in Singapore. But you've got people that are actively in the process, and then you've got your inactive folks. And you're active folks make up something like 10% of the pool, and inactive or dormant candidates, which again, that's not the right word for it, make up 90% of... Naber:  Passive candidates. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, your passive candidates are making up...they're the best candidates, but they're not the ones coming to job boards and looking for you. And so you really need to be focused on how do you attract them. And so I'm a really big believer in that, for really key talent. you need to be proactively meeting, and building relationships, and learning about people and what they're doing and working on. And so I probably do job interviews...I interview about, I don't know, maybe five to 10 people a week. Sometimes for roles and I don't even have open. And when I say interview, that's a very loose term. It's more so, 50% of those might be official interviews, 50% of them are literally just coffee catch ups - where I've sent a note to let's say, the Head of PR at a big marketplace that I won't say because I have spoken to someone recently in that space, and I'm like "Hey, I absolutely love the PR that you're doing at your company. I read a few of these stories, and they're fascinating. Would love to just sync up marketer to marketer and see if we could learn from each other and just chat" And I genuinely actually do, I just want to get to know these people and learn about them. And all of the best hires I've ever made have been passive candidates, because it's based off of their work, not them being actively in the cycle. So whenever I see a great company running a great campaign, I'll look at, okay, who runs campaigns at that company, and I'll then stalk them on Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and slide into their DM's, and work out a way to meet with them because I'm genuinely interested in their craft. And it's not a Sales pitch because I am genuinely interested, and they can see that and they get it. And that's how I open up. That's how I like to fill funnel right now. That's not to say I don't work with a recruiter. I have a recruiting of here at G2 that's constantly hiring roles for me. But most of my director and above level roles, I rarely, rarely hire...not because I choose to, but I find that most people that I will hire at director or VP level will be folks that I have found myself. Because I think that if you're a passive candidate...and I get emails all the time from recruiters and I'm passive in that I'm looking for a new job, but I rarely respond to them. But if a CMO or CEO at another company that I was really interested in, reached out and said, "Hey, love what you've been doing at G2, and how you completely changed the brand, and how you've grown traffic, and I listened to on a podcast - would love to catch up." That's something that I'm like, yeah, YOLO. I want to meet other smart folks, and I like to hear that the things that I'm doing are getting noticed, selfishly. And so that sort of thing - that works. And so that's how I think about recruiting. I'm pretty process oriented. When I'm going off after a candidate - a passive candidate - I'm a little less process driven because it's very much that I am just looking for great people out there. When I'm in Director-level or below interview, when someone's in our active recruiting cycle, and whether or not we've found them or they found us, I use a bit of a case-based method for how I interview. So I basically start off the interview, where I want to learn a bit more about them. But then I asked them a pretty simple question of, "What were you brought into your company to impact?" And so this has helped me really quickly understand, if they give me a really long answer or they can't answer that, it just shows me that they don't really know why, what their role is at the company. So I'll ask them that to understand. So if someone asked me that at G2, I'd say "Well, I was brought into G2 to drive more Sales revenue, increase our brand, and drive more traffic. And then I'll follow it with a specific task. So I asked them, "Can you please describe the task, or the challenge, or the project, or the problem that you were brought in to solve?" So they might say, "Well, I was brought in to to increase our MQL to SQL conversion", right? Or Blah, blah, blah. And then I will ask them, okay - after whatever they say - then I'ill ask them, "How did you measure your success on that thing?" And then they might say, and this is the worst response ever, they might say, "I wish I could measure it, but my company doesn't really care to measure those things." And then I would dig in further, "Oh, okay, that's okay. Let's say your company did measure those things, how would you want them to be measured?" And that way, I can work out is their brain thinking about measurement in the right way? And then after I understand the measurability component, I then go into action. So, "What projects or tasks did you specifically work on to reach success?" And what that helps me understand is - did they actually do the job? Because companies have lots of successes. We as a Marketing team have done a ton of success, and we talk about it as a team. So it would be easy for someone to take ownership, or pretend that they drove the success of the team, or something else. So this "actions" thing is important to me because it helps me understand, from start to finish, what was their involvement? Did they partner with someone? Where did the idea come from? Did they hit roadblocks? That's really key. And then I'll ask them, "What results we're actually achieved?" And then I'll go into timeframes, "So, how long did it take to get here?" and scale around what would they maybe do differently, or would they do it again or not? And so, that's just really quickly, at a high level, the case flow that I like to go through when I'm interviewing a candidate that has a core set of skills that I'm trying to get deep into and understand how they think. Separate to that though, I think, for me, I really care about people that are data-driven, growth focused - so they have experience in growing things. And the data stuff, the growth stuff, that will come through in this case method that I use. I want people that are lifelong learners, that are obsessed with...if you do want to work on my team and you aren't on social media, and you aren't obsessed with how ads work, and how tracking works, and how digital works - this isn't the right team for you. So I can tell from a lot of their online presences already, whether or not they're probably going to be right for me. And yeah, that's high level how I think about the actual nitty gritty process of it. And then when it comes to retention and growing employees, I have a pretty direct approach where I connect with most people on the team every other month. I connect with, obviously, all my direct reports every week. But I try and encourage them to really understand that transparency is the most important thing to me. And I try and mirror that to them. And by being really transparent with them and sharing with them, what I am working on, what I'm finding challenging, why I can't do what someone has asked me to do, and giving them the logic. And I think today with employees, that they crave to understand "why?" you as a leader make the decisions you make. And, I think, for a long time, leadership decision were made behind closed doors, and people were just told what to do. And I think Gen-Y's, and most employees now in today's workforce, want to be involved, and want to be able to share their opinion, and I'm really encouraging of that. But I also explain that this isn't a democracy. And I want everyone to share their opinion, so that I can make the best decision. And I might make a decision that is different to what you want, but that doesn't mean that I won't listen to you and respect your opinion. But I have to make a decision at the end of the day, and I might have a broader perspective than you because I'm getting all of your input, and then I have all the inputs from my job, and being on a leadership team, that you might not have. So yeah, that's really quickly, I guess how I think about, recruiting, interviewing, and then developing and retaining employees. Naber:  That was great. You did my job for me - all the way down to the method, and the process you use, some of the questions you ask, the examples you gave. I really what you said around the vulnerability and transparency of communication...openness of the communication within your team. You write about that and some of the things you read about making sure people can share. Ryan Bonnici:    I really think...I can always keep doing a better job, this is something that I need to work on - partly, it's something that I have needed to really focus on consciously, because it's so different than my style a few years ago. And I think that's partly through a lot of therapy, and a lot of my own work, I realized that some of those defenses that I used to have as a child that were helpful then, weren't helpful as an adult, as a leader in business. And so I've had to develop there further. But I think that...this is a bit of a, not a sad story, but I had a colleague yesterday who I love that they're on my team, they're amazing, who we were meeting for a one on one, and they texted me and they said...let's see if I have the message (*searches phone with Ryan Bonnici style, focus, grace, and precision)...it was basically, long story short, "Hey Ryan, I'm really sorry. I'm not going to be able to make our one on one right now. I think I'm having a panic attack, and I might head home." And naturally I was, "Please, do what you need to do for it, and take care of yourself." And I don't think an employee would have sent that to me previously. They might've said, "I'm out sick" or something. But I have said to my own employees in the past, over slack, when I was having an anxiety attack at some point, I just canceled all my meetings that day and took a mental health day, pretty publicly. And I was like, "I'm out today guys, I'm taking a mental health day." And I was in the office, and I had to go home because I just wasn't feeling it. And the amount of people that texted me after for that to say that they appreciated me being so public with that helped them feel they could bring their whole selves to work. And if they are feeling similarly, they don't need to lie about how they feel. They can just be open. And not to say that they have to, but I think again, it's all about sort of living it yourself, and showing others that they can do the same thing. Naber:  Totally. Setting the standard, demonstrating the standard, so you can hold the standard. I talked to someone about that, about culture the other day and I believe it's the exact same thing with mental health in the workplace and openness of communication. That's a really good example. Thanks for sharing that. And you keep that openness, from a retention perspective, I think the openness that you keep with the way that you talk to your employees and the way that you talk to your teams - it sounds from the way that you're writing and the example here, I read an article that you'd written the other day, sorry I read the other day that you'd written, talking about encouraging your best employees to consider outside job offers, and having that very open dialogue and open discussion. Can you talk a little bit about that mindset and what that means to you? Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, sure. So I think part of it is that too many leaders and people in business tip toe around the idea that people are going to work for a company forever, right? And I think the reality is that the average lifespan of a marketer at a company is, gosh, two years maybe. And so yeah, if you look at my track record, it's three years on average. Naber:  I read the other day, it was something like - those coming out of college right now are poised to have something like 13.2 employers throughout their life. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, that makes sense. And, I'm really open with people because if you look at my track record, I've done the same. And so what I really want to encourage people to do, is if reaches out to you for a job offer because they think you're a good fit for a role, you should respond. I mean assuming you want, you don't have to, but you should...and I do this, I would always respond to them. So recruiters hit me up all the time, and they be like, "Hey Ryan, I have a CMO role or CEO role at this super sexy high growth company, blah, blah, blah." My first message back, I have no niceties, I'm like, "Thanks for your message. What is the company?" Because that's all I care about, right? Who is the company that we're talking about? Because there's heaps of roles out there, but I don't want to work for just anyone or for everyone. And so once they tell me that the company is, then if it's an interesting company, I might chat to them or their leadership team to learn a bit more. And I think why that's important is because it helps me solidify to myself if I am in the right role myself. By chatting someone else and seeing what other roles are available and by asking questions I can work out, "Oh gosh no, in my role today, I'm so much happier." But it also helps me have a baseline understanding of - what roles are out there? What are the typical skillsets that are needed,? How much are people paying for my skillset? Which helps give me visibility into, do I need to be asking for more money at my current company, or am I paid fairly. And so I think if you treat your employees really, really well, and be open and honest with them in that, they're not probably gonna work for you forever, and that you want the best for them in their career, because you understand that they'll then be an advocate for you and your company afterwards, then they're a little bit more open about these things. And so, and yeah, I just do that with my team, and I practice what I preach. And so it means that that encourages folks to feel open about that they can come to us and say, "Hey, I have this job offer from this company. I don't necessarily want to leave, but they're offering double what you guys are offering me." And if this is an employee that's amazing that we couldn't do without, then we'll try and do whatever we can to keep them. And that might mean more responsibilities, if they've shown that they deserve it. It might mean more pay. It depends on why the person's making the decision, right? And that's case by case, but I think you can get a better understanding of that, and help them see as well, by asking them questions about the role and the company...I often times find that I will uncover things that they don't know, or haven't realized. Like, they haven't asked how much budget they might, or who their boss is going to be, or if they were told that they could run a team - but is it going to be in writing that they will get to run the team? And just these things that they haven't asked. And they start to then realize, holy shit, I have so much more potential and bandwidth here on Ryan's team. Yes, the grass might seem greener on the other side because they're offering more money, but there's a reason why they're offering more money. It's because they can't get good talent. So, I don't know, and by doing that they may realize that, yes, they should leave, or not. And so, I think I preface always these conversations with my team with a bit of an asterisk, in the sense of that you might go through that process and come to us and say that there is this offer that you're going to take, and we might say to you, if we don't feel you are contributing well on the team or you're not someone that we want to change the situation for, you should take the role. Naber:  Take it. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. No, exactly. Naber:  That's the best case scenario for everybody too, it's great. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. You should take that role because we think that you are paid fairly, and as per your last performance review, we've made it pretty clear to you in terms of what you would need to do to get to the next level, and you haven't done that yet. So, we're happy for you to stay here and keep developing you, but if it's money that you want, you're not going to get that here until you put in the work that we've shown you. And I think just from having that dialogue, they can better understand how much more quality coaching and development they are going to get with you than another company. And they can then make their own decision. So that's how I try and think about it. Naber:  Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for the multiple, multiple layers you went into with that. And you've been, you've been at so many businesses where you've had just amazing people at those businesses, built awesome cultures. I think one of the things that people want to hear about is, how you think about talent. We just talked about that. And then also, a couple things around the science of what you've done. So building Inbound Marketing Engines, you've been at the Mecca of Inbound at HubSpot. And I couldn't even count on two hands how many amazing people I know at HubSpot, and how many reasons I love the culture there, as well as love the products. And so even people outside the business feel that way. But, tell us what you learned at HubSpot about building Inbound Marketing Engines that translates to G2 and how you've built that engine right now, as well as every subsequent Marketing engine you're going to build. What translates that everyone should be doing as they're building their Inbound engine. Ryan Bonnici:    Gosh, okay. So, I mean, as you mentioned, working for HubSpot has taught me everything that I know about Inbound. And that was actually, when I mentioned before why I was so grateful for work there, was I just was able to work with the smartest Marketing minds, and I just fucking love that team, and miss them so much. They're a big customer at G2 actually, and I got the chance to head back to Boston last month because we recorded this amazing customer success video with their CEO, Brian Halligan and Kip Bodnar, their CMO. And they were talking about all the value that they get from G2, and why they couldn't connect with their customers if it wasn't for G2. And so it was so fun to get to go back there and profile this company that I was so proud to have worked at, and that was a big customer of ours. It was really quite nice. Look, what I think what I learned there is that...HubSpot literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing. And so, I think what I learned about was just how to take a really data driven approach to drive, to creating content that drives results. And I think, blogging and writing, Content Marketing is something that can be done really...most people do it horribly wrong. Because everyone can write, so everyone thinks they can be a blogger or a content marketer. And anyone can actually write good content, if they have the right training or if they use the right assistance tools. The problem where I think most people go wrong with content Marketing is once you've decided what you're writing about, if it's not the right topic, you can't optimize it for something whereby no one searches for that topic. So, optimization, SEO optimization when it comes to content Marketing, happens before topics are even selected, before pen touches the paper. And that's why my VP, Content & SEO is an SEO by trade. He ran SEO at Atlassian, and now leads SEO and Content for us G2. And the reason being is, you need to look at...you to just start with keyword research and work out, okay, where are people searching? And which searches indicate that this person is our persona that we are trying to attract to our website, blog, etc? And then you need to work out, okay, how high quality are the keywords in relation to the persona - like, is 50% of the traffic that we're going to get for this keyword with a million searches going to be our buyer persona, and if so, that means 500,000 of the 1 million is going to be out traffic. Or, alternatively, there could be a 700,000 terms per monthly searches that has a 90% percent alignment to your buyer persona, which is going to be higher than that 500,000. But if you just chose the biggest number, you might not get as much of the right people. And so we take a super data driven approach. And we, we literally published, just yesterday, I had the team publish a playbook. And it's a five part playbook - on learn.g2.com (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew), which is our learning hub - which was literally the entire play by play that we created to create a blog at G2 just last year, around seven months ago, that went from zero visitors to over a million monthly visitors within seven months or something like that. Insane growth, right? This blog now makes up...this blog is driving millions and millions of visitors, and it hasn't existed - per month, I should add - and it hasn't existed for more than a year now. You know, HubSpot's blog drives about 6 million monthly visitors, but HubSpot been working on that bad boy for about 10 years. Naber:  Wow. That's a great proportional perspective for how fast your blog has grown. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. We are on track to hit 4 million monthly by the end of this year - that's goal that I set the team for the blog alone. Our total website, we'll be at about 10 million monthly by the end of this year. And when I joined G2 our traffic was around, it was less than a million a month. So, in two years to go from less than a million monthly visitors to 10 million, which is where we're on track for, that's fucking insanity. Naber:  That's literally 10x. That's insane. Ryan Bonnici:    And that's not just my work, it's not just the Marketing team's work. We have a great product team that we work with, we have lots of contributing content writers that create content...But majority that traffic's all organic as well, I should have said. We don't do any paid content. And so, yeah, that's one thing that I'm really frickin' proud about. Because, I mentioned earlier, relationships and results. Relationships are super important, but results are as well. I think, you said I was able to fast track my career. And, I was, I got the Cmo role at G2 when I was 29, and I couldn't have done that if it wasn't for really overindexing on results. And what I mean there, is if you tell me to hit a million monthly visitors, I'll hit four (million). And it's not because I'm trying to show off or anything, it's basically because I derive a lot of self worth through my work achievement. And, over time I'm getting better at disconnecting and finding self worth from who I am as a person, regardless of job, but that's still something that's really important to me. And so, I'm thankful for that part...that lonely boy role that I played when I was younger because it helped get me here, and I don't think I would change it looking back. Naber:  Wow, that's an excellent answer. I love it. I hope everyone...I don't think people could write down notes fast enough as they're listening to that. So can we dive in one more layer on that? So two things. One, what are the phases you go through as you're thinking about building a strategy - for one year, two years? If I'm listening to this as a Head of Marketing or Head of Sales & Marketing, and I'm thinking about - what are the phases I'm going to go through? You've directed this movie multiple, multiple times. So what are the phases you go through as you're building a strategy. And then two, what does your scorecard look like do that you know how to measure it? Ryan Bonnici:    So, I guess, it can be a bit different depending on if you've been doing content Marketing for awhile, or if you're just starting out, it's slightly different. If you've been doing it for awhile - and I wrote a big blog post Entrepreneur magazine called The One Marketing Metric That You're Not Measuring, which outlines this process in more detail. If anyone Google's The One Marketing Metric That You're Not Measuring and my name, they'll find it. But basically, if you've already been creating content for a while, step one would be explore all your Google analytics data, map it and connected to your CRM data, and worked out which blog posts are driving the most organic traffic, and what's the conversion rate of that traffic into leads, and leads into MQL's, and MQL's into revenue. And then you can start to connect, what content topics that I'm writing about? If I think of HubSpot, one content topic they might write about is Marketing automation, and another content topic they might write about is social media, another contents topic they might write about is Marketing budgets - because, all of those things are things that a Marketer would be searching for, and they sell to a Marketer. And so, you would then group all of your content in pages around those topics, and see, okay, in the aggregate how much traffic has the social media content driven to our blog organically, how much of those organic visitors to social media content have been converted into leads, etc. And you can start to work out what content topics are driving the most revenue at the bottom of the funnel. Yeah. Does that kind of make sense? Connecting the two? Naber:  Yep. Ryan Bonnici:    And then, so that would be what I would recommend you do if you've already got a lot of content, you are driving organic traffic, and you want to get a bit of an understanding of what is and isn't working. If you're just starting out fresh - and then once you've done that, you then can still do what I'm going to suggest now - but if you are starting out fresh, then what I would suggest is just, you know, your buyer persona better than anyone. Think about, sit down, and think about what does this person do in their day to day life. And I if use the HubSpot example again, the Marketing persona that we were trying to attract, I don't just think of about their job in the context of my software. So what I mean by that is, yes, HubSpot's platform does email Marketing and social media. So those were two of the topics that I touched on before. HubSpot product does nothing around budgeting, but we still created content around that topic because that was something that a Marketer needs help with. They create budgets - they go to Google, and they search for budget templates. So it's not just about creating contents that are close to your product, it's about creating content around topics that your buyer persona would be searching for regardless of whether or not they are looking for your product at that moment in time. Okay? And that's a really important piece because if you just create content topics around the things that are in relation to your product or service, they're way more competitive typically than other topics because that's, that's the simple "dumb" Marketer to thing to do. Sorry, that's a bit mean. I shouldn't say the "dumb" Marketer thing to do. That's just the thing that everyone does naturally. You don't have to be very creative to think about doing that. And so, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that, but you should be thinking broader as well. I feel bad now the saying "dumb" Marketer. Naber:  Ha, I think people will forgive you based on all the valued you're delivering, so don't worry about it. Ryan Bonnici:    And so, once you start to look into those different topics, that's when you start to do keyword research and using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. But, ideally come to G2, and search for the best SEO software, and we'll give you personalized recommendations. And then you can start to look at some content tools that are out there, and group these different topics to see what kind of volume of people are searching for the topics? How difficult is it to rank for these topics? So most of the different platforms will give a difficulty score of one to a hundred. A hundred - meaning it's impossible, you are never going to rank for this unless you are facebook.com. To one - any person that launches a new website can rank for it. And so you want to choose a mixture of difficult terms because they typically have higher volume, and a mixture of some easier terms because they typically have a lower volume. And the easier terms are good because they start to drive immediate traffic to your site because you can rank for them quickly. But also, once you start driving organic traffic, then you start to create the flywheel effect whereby, okay, all these new people that are reading your content are going to enter your subscription process. And then they'll be return visitors for email Marketing. As well as, they're probably creating, if they're marketers and that's who you're attracting, they probably have their own blogs. If they really liked what you wrote about, they might link to you. And then if they link to you, that helps you increase your domain authority, which then helps you rank for more difficult terms. So you want to be doing both. And I think that's a mistake that we made early on at G2, where...and it was my fault, I joined from HubSpot, and we had a domain authority of 92 out of a hundred at HubSpot. And so when I joined G2, I think we had a domain authority only around 80. So some of the terms that I wanted the team to go after very early on were just too difficult. And so we didn't drive any traffic to them until six months later. And the team was smart enough to say, "Hey, while we've created some of these really difficult, high volume content, we need to do some easier content that's going to be a quicker win in the meantime to get the flywheel going, to get Google noticing our site. I know I explained that really quickly to a certain extent, but I know we have limited time. And there's...I could talk about this literally for 24 hours. There's so many details to this, and it seriously...if anyone wants this step for step, they should just go to learn.g2.com (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) because we published the playbook for this yesterday. Naber:  Awesome. Do you remember, for the audience, do you remember what the title was? Ryan Bonnici:    I think the title of it is literally, how we grew our organic traffic to 1 million monthly visitors. (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) Naber:  Okay, sweet. Very original title - that's good. Ryan Bonnici:    Haha, yeah, very original. Naber:  For everyone listening, I'll put the link to in the description of this, of this episode. (https://learn.g2.com/hub/1-million/how-we-grew) Hey, last thing I want to talk about because I know we do have limited time, is one more superpower that I think is really clear to everyone - that both follows you on social, understands how your career trajectory has gone, as well as the businesses that you've helped build - is around brand building. You just went to Cannes Lions, and you wrote a Linkedin article about it being a big chance for B2B marketers to learn from top B2C Marketing strategies. And you talked about B2B brand building a little bit in that. You also have on social media, your following...you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I couldn't believe the numbers that it was looking at. I mean, I could, but I couldn't at the same time. And you have 21,000 fans on Facebook, 56,000 followers on Instagram, 20,000 followers on Twitter, 32,000 followers on LinkedIn. Every single one of those platforms is extremely challenging to get even close to a fraction of that, let alone have that consistency. So could you talk a little bit about, building brand from a,B2B perspective, and then also from a social perspective where you can marry those two things together, however you think about it. But I think a lot of people are going to struggle with building their B2B brand because you mentioned, B2B is so far behind B2C and being able to do that. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah. Yeah. So, I think B2B Marketers are traditionally the worst at building brands. And it's because, B2B typically, when you're selling to businesses, you're typically selling a higher value product. It's very logical, rational. You're solving a very specific problem. Which means that because it's so Sales driven, and because Sales focuses time on those pain points with prospects, Marketing just seems to always be quite clinical and boring and corporate. So the reason why I went to Cannes was because, I think the B2C world do a much better job when it comes to...When it comes to CPG, consumer package goods, and fast moving products, it's far less logical and rational, and it's far more emotional, and gut, and instinctual. And so their content and campaigns are always very visceral. They're very much about making you feel a certain way. They're about surprising you, delighting you, making you laugh, making you cry. And I don't necessarily think that, B2B should go completely down that path. But I think as a CMO it would be silly of me not to, it would be dumb of me. Here we go, I'll pay myself out and make up for my last comment. It would be dumb of me not to go to that event, at least once, because there's stuff that I can learn from that industry. And I think that's actually, funnily now that we talk about it, a very good proof of what I said before, that I am obsessed with learning from other people in other industries, selfishly because I want to steal all of their great ideas and apply them to my world, and integrate them better than anyone else. And I think I genuinely do a pretty good job at understanding many aspects of Marketing, more than I think other CMO's that have just stayed in one lane. And it's because I just push myself out of my comfort zone. So, yeah, I don't think B2B CMO's do a very good job at that. And I don't think we have done a very good job at G2. And so, I want to upskill myself so that I can help upskill my team, etc. I think, if you look at software today, right? There is something like 60,000 pieces of B2B software out there. There's probably, there's something like 250, maybe a thousand different email Marketing platforms. And so in the B2B space, B2B used to be a differentiator...so B2B software - SaaS - used to be, I think a thing that could differentiate you in terms of winning or losing. If you're a company that got in on SaaS and software early, that gave you an unfair advantage. And I think today everyone uses software. Everyone uses 50 different pieces of just email Marketing software alone. The software is less the differentiator today, and it's how you use the software. And so, once you move into a parody market where you're selling products that are similar to everyone else's...and not all software categories are like this. CRM certainly is, email Marketing certainly is, Social Media is kind of like that. These categories where there's tons of different options, they're all kind of similar. People, when they're making the decision, they're going to lean more into some of the emotive components because if your products are all the same, who wouldn't want to work with the brand that's a bit more fun, and is a bit more enjoyable, they like more. And so that's kind of my thoughts B2B branding, and that's why we at G2 went through a rebrand earlier this year, where we dropped the Crowd from our name, so we're just G2 now. We completely redid our logo, our brand colors, but it was more than just a visual refresh. It was more actually that we as a company changed our mission, and our focus, and shifted because we understood our buyers a little bit more. So that's what I would say on the B2B branding side of the house. On the personal brand and building your own brand on social, I talked about this at Drift's conference last year. I keynoted there and spoke about how to build your career and your brand. And I think sometimes people feel embarrassed to toot their own horn, and it doesn't need to be that. But I think the way I've always viewed it is that, the bigger my clout as a person, as a marketer, basically the more interesting I am to people so that they follow me, that they want to interview me, they talk to me, they allow me to talk at events - the more valuable I am to an employer. Because I already have a platform to talk to people, right? So, if you think of me in my current role, right? When I go into my next role at my next company - which no idea when that will happen because I love G2 - I've published content for HBR, for the World Economic Forum, for...fuck, there's just so many publications now. I all of these connections there because they trust me, and they know that I'm not writing Salesy content. I am exposing my flaws, and talking about wins, and I'm giving their writers something of value. And so when I go to my next company, now immediately I have this rolodex of companies that I can write for, and all the buyers they're going to say Ryan as the CMO, GCO, etc. of this new company. And I'll naturally...I'm a Marketer, so I'll naturally pull in a very natural, lovely way, a mention of that company that's super authentic to what I'm writing about, obviously - and, yeah, it's a win-win. And so, I think my lesson for folks listening that are yeah, okay, well it's easy to get press when you're a CMO and write for these companies - when I wasn't a CMO, I still was doing it. You just have to start smaller. And so the step by step process that I told people to do is - you probably already worked for a company, so tap on your content Marketing teams door and say, hey guys, hey gals, I would love to create some content for our company blog. And no content Marketers are going to say no to that because they have really big traffic goals, and they want more content. And say to them, hey, what topics do you guys need content around, and let's see if I can find a crossover of where I have a skill set and where you need content. And then work with them, publish some content, publish more content, that helps get you on the map. And then you then might get noticed by someone, and someone might ask you to write for them. But now at least you can at least proactively reach out to tier three publications, and say, "Hey, I write for insert company publication here', and here are a few links to some of my work. I just recently put wrote this piece of content about topic x, which I think would be a really good fit for your audience. I've pasted it in the email below, let me know what you think. And if you publish it" And that just kind of gets you up and running, you know? And so if that person doesn't reply, try another tier three publication. And that's genuinely how I did it. And then I went from tier three to tier two. And then when I started creating content for tier one, I referenced my tier two work, and you just slowly work your way up. And then after a while, you don't need to reference it anymore because people would just Google your name and they'll see all of the content, and that's the proof, kind of thing. So, yeah. Naber:  Excellent. You've been doing this for so long - personally and professionally. Ryan Bonnici:    Oh - The only thing I would add as well, Brandon, is that I think for...the biggest asterisk on all this before, and it's kind of like what I mentioned with content Marketing, if you don't have the right keyword and topic idea from the get go, you will fail. With building your personal brand and writing content. If you aren't authentic, and if you don't have something unique to say - that's key - no one's going to publish your bullshit. If I wrote a blog...that blog post that I wrote for Harvard Business Review about why I tell my best employees to seek other job offers - if I wrote why I love to run one on one meetings...like year, no shit, Sherlock. Of course we all know that that's important. Like, "Oh Ryan has a different view on career progression and letting people leave." That is interesting. So, that's where you need to be a marketer, and you need to think about storytelling. You need to think about your unique skill set, and how you can tell a story that people will want to read. Because I think if you don't have that from from the beginning, that no one will ever reply to you and this won't work for you. Naber:  Love it. Unique and authentic. I've heard that over and over from a few different businesses that are great at it, people that are great at it...You've just been doing it for so long, that's extremely valuable, and thank you for the examples and all the detail. You're running short on time right now. I want to get one rapid fire question, and then we'll wrap. Is that okay? Ryan Bonnici:    Sounds great. Naber:  Okay, cool. So this is a question, and I explained this to guests each time, this question I usually ask people on their birthdays. Your birthday's not until October, October 3rd, I believe, and we both have October birthday, so I got excited when I saw that. It's not creepy, maybe it is that I know that. But anyways, the question I was asking is, what's the most valuable lesson you've learned in the last 12 months personally? Ryan Bonnici:    The most valuable lesson I think that I've learned in the last 12 months... Naber:  Personally, we'll get to professional in a second. Ryan Bonnici:    Yeah, I was just going to go there anyways. It was probably could be more...to be kinder to myself. I think has probably been the biggest lesson that I've learned in the last 12 months. Because I think, this job and this challenge, which was bigger than I had ever taken on, definitely pushed me to my limits last year. And I think, and I'm in a really good place now. But I got pushed into...and I'm saying "got pushed" is maybe just a defeatist way of saying that I let myself get too stressed out, or whatnot. As tough as I am on others around me, I'm 10 times as tough on myself. So that little Freudian slip of "dumb marketers" means that secretly, I think that I am a dumb Marketer. And that's, like fact. Like, deep down I'm insecure that I am that persona. But, I think, I've definitely learned over the last 12 months, through a shit-ton of therapy, to just be kinder to myself. Because everyone is fighting their own battles, whether you can see it or not, and most often times the folks that piss you off the most or that activate something in you, have something deep going on inside of them, but that what you're seeing is just their defense mechanism to help them avoid dealing with whatever it is that they were trying to avoid. And I've been there. And so, I don't succeed at being kind to myself and others everyday. But I think it's something that I'm actively working on. Naber:  Awesome. Be kinder to yourself. I actually need to steal one more thing because I feel the extra two minutes is going to be worthy of the way that you feel after it, because you've given a lot of really good career advice. What's your best career...I think you're going to expand on it a little bit earlier. But what's some of your best career advice that you have for young professionals as they're navigating their career? Ryan Bonnici:    Well, I think my best career advice that people today, young and old, would be that, we're really lucky today because of social media, it's so easy to find interesting people. And so I touched on before, in terms of what I do when it comes to recruiting, when you see a really cool ad, or if you think about the brands that you love, or the companies that you'd want to work for, going to Linkedin, to Twitter, to Instagram, and follow all of the leaders at those companies that are doing the awesome work. They're sharing content on how they think, how they feel on all of those channels. And so you can learn so much more about them that way. And who knows, maybe you can reach out to them because you study them so well, and you have a really poignant question to ask them that they think was an impressive question. And then they'll take time to have coffee with you. And then you get a job offer...I really think that the best way we learn and can grow in our careers is by looking out there and finding who are the best people doing the best work. Let's learn from them, and let's copy them, and let's recreate what they're doing in a better way. And so that's probably my best career advice. And I think next to that is just, don't forget about the relationships in career. And I think, I would say that that was something that I needed to realize a few years back. I think most people though over-index on relationships, and don't over-index on results. I was the other way around, which wasn't great either. But I think you need to crush your results, right? If your boss tells you to jump here, you jumped double there, or you jump to where they are asked, and show them something else that you jumped to where they didn't know they needed to jump. But you also need to do relationships, I think, at the same time. I think you can burn bridges if you don't do that. Naber:  Awesome. Ryan, you the man. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your time, brother. Naber:  Thanks for having me. Brandon was nice to chat. Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciate it and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love the Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rat

This episode I speak with Adam Goyette, VP of Marketing at G2 Crowd. Adam has over 15 years of experience developing digital, social, and content marketing strategies that drive customer engagement, lead generation, and revenue growth. In our conversation we discuss: How to transform into a more data-focused and insights-driven organization Getting away from vanity metrics to focus on those that are connected to business outcomes Ways to increase your knowledge of how buyers are interacting with you throughout the entire revenue funnel The best ways to demonstrate marketing ROI Additional Resources: Connect with Adam on LinkedIn “4 Metrics You Must Track For Alignment” (The Alignment Blog) Music/Production: Chris "KID" Robinson, Hitmakuzz Productions Subscribe to the podcast: Apple Podcast | Stitcher | RSS |Spotify

In this episode, we look at some free and low-cost task management applications.  Some of these do more and add on project management or even invoicing features.  However, they do all help you keep track of the work you (and your team) need to get done. Many Excellent Options If you spend a few minutes and peruse the massive list of potential tools in this area from G2Crowd (see link below), then you will see there are almost too many options.  When you need to find the best tool for you in this realm, then a search with additional keywords will help.  A field of options this numerous needs to be reduced to make any progress.  I recommend you improve your search by specifying whether you need free, time-tracking, team support, chat, or reminders.  There are other useful terms, but these are a good start. Why This List? There is a broad range of requirements in this field.  The tools available will match up better with specific combinations of these.  Since I have no idea what your requirements are, a valid question is how this list was created.  What do these task management applications have in common? A critical factor in creating this list was tools I have some experience with.  I have done a few evaluations of this family of solutions the last few years and spent more than a few minutes with each of these.  The requirements were different each time.  Therefore, this is a short list that should allow you to get to three or fewer options that are a good fit for whatever your requirements are.  You will be well served to do some additional research for your needs using these as a starting point for what is available and building your list of wants and needs. Resource Links Huge List: https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/project-management Asana: https://asana.com Trello: https://trello.com Basecamp: https://basecamp.com Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira Todo.vu: https://todo.vu Wrike: https://www.wrike.com/main/ ClickUp: https://clickup.com Monday: Monday.com Avaza: https://www.avaza.com Hive: https://hive.com

Mark Cuban is famous for saying “In business, you only need to be right once.” Godard Abel doesn't believe in that. He's already been right twice and is working on his third project now. In 2013 Abel sold his software company, BigMachines to Oracle for $400M. Then in late 2015 he sold his next company, SteelBrick to Salesforce.com for $360M. But Abel isn't an overnight success story. BigMachines took nearly a dozen years to build and Abel told me that they missed their sales numbers every year for the first seven years. With only $1.5M left in the bank, he and his team decided to continue onward and the rest is history. Abel mentioned that a major piece of his success has come as a result of mindfulness. He follows Jim Dethmer's Concious Leadership style, he reads books from Eckhart Tolle, and meditates using Headspace every day. His focus on health and wellness has allowed him to think more clearly and become a more successful leader. And if being right twice is great, a third time would be icing on the cake. That's what Abel is working on right now with his team at G2 Crowd. In this interview, we talk about the impact that mindfulness has had on his life, how to build a great company and the best way you can book a meeting with someone important via email and LinkedIn. Listen Here: iTunes Google Play Stitcher Connect with Godard: G2 Crowd LinkedIn Twitter Sign up for the weekly Millennial Momentum Newsletter. No BS, All hustle

For a transcription of this episode, check out the Heinz Marketing Blog on 2/5. Our guest is Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2 Crowd. I'm super impressed with how effective G2 Crowd lists have been, both the overall top XXX lists by segment as well as the metro area lists.  We'll talk about Ryan's approach to B2B PR, how that impacts sales pipeline (directly and indirectly).  Check it out and learn more about G2 Crowd here. More about Ryan: ► Incredibly passionate, self-directed and confident senior executive leader with fortified marketing, management and organizational skills evidenced by ongoing customer, partner and team success. ► Extensive experience across B2B and B2C marketing and sales development has led to a strong understanding of the processes behind the job, refined interpersonal skills and an advanced understanding and track record in achieving strong positive return-on-marketing-investment and business growth.

Join us this week live at 11:30 am PST - Thurs. 12/21/17 when our guest will be, Henry Schuck, co-founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg, the leading sales and marketing intelligence platform. Under Henry's leadership, DiscoverOrg continues its exponential growth path, and in late August acquired its rival RainKing. The recording will be added here no later than 12/26/17.  You can catch the recording and transcription on the Heinz Marketing blog on 1/2/18.  From CEO to SDR: Astronomical Growth Through a Maniacal Focus on Sales Development   What to expect: Brief overview of DiscoverOrg: o   The unequivocal leader in sales and marketing intelligence - focus on the most accurate and actionable B2B sales and marketing data to power pipeline and revenue growth o   Just marked its 10-year anniversary. In the past year: ▪       Acquired its largest rival, RainKing ▪       [In 2016] had $71M in revenues; on track for $125+M in 2017 ▪       Named to Inc. 5000 Fastest-growing companies for seven straight years ▪       Among other 2017 accolades: Inc. Top 50 Best Workplaces; Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (third consecutive year); CODIE Award for top sales team, marketing team, company, and CEO in 2017; top sales and marketing software from G2Crowd, TrustRadius; TechOregon top growth company ▪       Fundamental belief that to be (AND scale) a high growth company, you have to DO the HARD things: define your target market, cold call relentlessly, align sales and marketing, execute an ABM strategy, etc.  DiscoverOrg practices what it preaches   Journey to 24k Demos/Year from the SDR team: History of DiscoverOrg's SDR team (comparison of 2015 stats to today's) 2015 became the year we focused on hyper growth:  Realization of need to step up the SDR program in order to compete with companies the size we wanted to be o   Implemented new hiring methods o   Created new inbound/outbound team structure o   Better aligned SDR team w/ Marketing o   Invested in new Marketing leadership The tech stack:  Highest quality data available remained the foundation SDR incentives:  competitions, awards, clear career path Created a culture of “No politics. No B.S.  No a-holes.” o   Challenged SDRs to become 1% better each day Bring Finance team in as an accountability partner Metrics:  What we look for from inbound and outbound teams Henry's involvement: from “When it's bad” to “When it can get better” o   Personal attention, mentorship and encouragement are all key to keeping the team on track o   Encourages the rest of the team to stay accountable, hold one another accountable Why being paranoid when it's good….is good o   Need to ensure repeatability of excellence The results:  24,000 demos booked in a single year   More about Henry: Henry Schuck is a leading entrepreneur in sales intelligence and lead generation. Having founded DiscoverOrg in 2007 when he was 23, he has led the company on a rapid growth path including funding investments from the likes of TA Associates, Goldman Sachs BDC, FiveW Capital and NXT Capital. Under Henry's leadership, DiscoverOrg built the industry's most accurate, highest-quality contact database, through a mix of technology and a team of live researchers who continually call into thousands of IT, marketing, HR, and finance departments. DiscoverOrg was recognized for the quality of its datasets with both a Stevie® and a CODIE award. It was also named a Leader and ranked Number One in customer service by G2 Crowd. Before founding DiscoverOrg, Henry managed marketing and research at iProfile leading the company to a successful private equity sale. He is a cum laude graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he was selected in 2013 as the Honors College Alumni of the Year. He also holds a juris doctorate degree cum laude from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and has studied comparative law at Oxford University. He is a licensed attorney in Washington and Nevada.

This week on The PPC Show we're joined by Garrett Mehrguth, CEO of Directive Consulting, to break down the B2B marketing funnel. My top three takeaways from this show: 1) Everyone says they value top of funnel, but lie in the way they allocate budget. 2) The importance of valuing and tracking your B2B funnel: Impressions > Contacts > Opps > Deals > Revenue 3) Share of SERP: how B2B marketers can start optimizing platforms that not only advertise in search but also rank organically like: Capterra, G2Crowd, Software Advice, and more. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-ppc-show-podcast/message