Podcasts about leadmd

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!Embark on an inspiring journey with Andrea Lechner-Becker, CMO at LeadMD, as she recounts her dynamic shift from the sports entertainment arena with the Phoenix Suns to becoming a maestro of marketing automation. Holding the baton for tools like Eloqua and Marketo, Andrea orchestrates a symphony of insights into the ever-evolving landscape of marketing analytics in the B2B realm. She emphasizes the vital importance of bridging the gap between marketing endeavors and tangible sales results—a task she approaches with both passion and precision. Her expertise, garnered from the distinct challenges of sports marketing, carries over into her profound understanding of customer psychology, offering a masterclass in what B2B marketers should focus on when it comes to analytics.Our conversation then waltzes into the delicate balance of consulting pricing and specialization, where Andrea's seasoned perspective shines bright. The art of valuing expertise, rather than mere time spent on tasks, comes under the spotlight as we navigate the intricacies of pricing strategies and service packaging. We unveil the essence of setting boundaries and communicating transparently with clients, ensuring that the value delivered is unmistakable. Andrea then shares her heartfelt transition from consultant to CMO, where empathy and common sense become the guiding stars. As we uncover the ground realities behind strategy execution, we celebrate the unique position that comes with marketing to fellow marketers, all while embracing authenticity and a genuine marketer's perspective in the consulting world.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals MOps-Apalooza is back by popular demand in Anaheim, California! Register for the magical community-led conference for Marketing and Revenue Operations pros.Support the show

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Andrea Lechner-Becker, mostly retired CMO and Novelist.Summary: Andrea takes us on a wild ride filled with nuggets of wisdom, a few f-bombs and tons of laughs as she unpacks her deep understanding of marketing. Together, we explore how storytelling breathes life into content and why true enthusiasm for a product can transform marketing strategies. We navigate the crucial skills of recognizing patterns and forming strategic partnerships with finance departments. Andrea also sheds light on how flawed attribution methods can lead marketers to do dumb things, why investing in branding from the outset is table stakes and why marketers have what it takes to be outstanding martech sales reps.About AndreaAndrea started her career in martech as a database marketing coordinator at the Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team She later joined a 2-year old marketing automation consultancy called LeadMD. She would quickly get promoted to Principal, VP - Marketing Service and later CMO when the company was acquired by another agency and rebranded as Shift ParadigmThrough the consultancy, Andrea's helped huge brands like Adobe, Atlassian, Drift, TealiumShe also ran marketing at Toolio before leaving her successful career as a marketing exec and going back to her entrepreneurial routes creating uncommonly good contentShe's the Co-Host of OWNED podcast by AudiencePlusShe wrote the Practical Guide to B2B Event SponsorshipShe's also written an intensely emotional and powerful fiction story called Sixty Days LeftThe Impact of Fiction on Real-World IssuesAndrea's insight into the world of writing and fiction is both refreshing and straightforward. She starts by debunking the myth of the "aspiring" writer—declaring that anyone who writes is indeed a writer. This simple yet powerful affirmation encourages daily writing as a practice, not just a hobby, and stresses that writing is accessible to everyone, regardless of their goals.The creation of her novel, Willow, stems from her fascination with America's Death with Dignity laws, a subject she finds both philosophically intriguing and politically complex. These laws allow terminally ill patients to end their lives under medical supervision, a right given more commonly to animals than to humans. Andrea's story sheds light on this contentious issue by weaving it into the fabric of her characters' lives, making it more approachable and understandable.Through Willow, Andrea not only educates her readers about a delicate topic but also challenges them to rethink their positions. She shares feedback from readers who have shifted from staunch opposition to a more supportive stance—or at least to a reconsideration of their views—after connecting with her characters' journeys.Key takeaway: Fiction isn't just for entertainment; it can be a formidable ally in influencing public opinion and sparking debate on critical social issues. For marketers, Andrea's approach underscores the effectiveness of storytelling as a means to connect with audiences on a deeper level. By embracing narratives that reflect real-world challenges, marketers can create campaigns that resonate more profoundly with their audience, encouraging both engagement and reflection.How to Create More Compelling Content and MessagingAndrea emphasizes the importance of going back to the basics in marketing, focusing on genuine human connections rather than overused jargon and AI-powered embellishments. She critiques the current state of B2B marketing, noting that many companies sound alike because they fail to make an effort to stand out. Drawing from Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Andrea highlights how understanding basic human motivations can enhance marketing strategies. She believes that businesses often overlook the importance of connecting on a personal level with customers, colleagues, and bosses.Her experiences at networking events reveal a lack of genuine engagement, prompting her to use specific conversational tools to foster meaningful interactions. Andrea uses a set of questions designed to deepen connections, which she adapts from psychologist Art Aaron's research. These questions help her navigate social interactions more effectively, especially as someone who identifies as introverted.Andrea argues that the lackluster approach to B2B marketing stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing by those at the helm, particularly in large enterprises. She points out that many CEOs, often with backgrounds in finance rather than marketing, fail to grasp the essence of effective communication and its impact on sales and customer engagement. This gap in understanding leads to marketing strategies that do not resonate on a human level.She stresses the importance of conveying the 'benefit of the benefit' in marketing messages, using B2C strategies as a successful example. Instead of selling a product, companies should focus on selling the lifestyle or emotional benefits that the product enables. This approach is often neglected in B2B settings, where the focus might be too narrow or technical.Key takeaway: To stand out in the saturated B2B market, companies must prioritize genuine human connections and understand the underlying human needs of their audience. Marketers should strive to communicate not just the functional benefits of their products but also the emotional peace of mind they provide. By doing so, they can create more compelling, memorable marketing messages that resonate deeply with their customers, enhancing both engagement and loyalty.The Magic of Marketing is Genuine Product EnthusiasmAndrea vividly recalls her journey through the marketing world, from her educational roots to the exhilarating rush of launching campaigns and seeing the immediate impact of her work. With a twinkle in her eye, she talks about the magic of marketing—connecting people to products they'll hopefully love as much as she does. Even though she's stepped back from the front lines, her heart remains tied to the craft.After leaving a high-paced role, Andrea found joy in the simple pleasures of life, like spending time with her dog and tending to her orange trees. Yet, she still dedicates part of her time to sparking career growth in others through social media, teaching job seekers how to think of themselves as products ripe for the job market. Her methods are reminiscent of building a SaaS product—meticulous, thoughtful, and always aiming for scalability.Andrea's story is peppered with anecdotes of her early days in a dog art gallery, where she first realized the power of marketing. She could see the light in people's eyes as they found joy in the art pieces she presented. This foundational experience shaped her belief that marketing, at its core, is about sharing passion. Whether she was working in a gallery or a tech firm, the essence of her approach didn't change.Reflecting on her career, Andrea points out the profound impact passionate marketing has had on her colleagues' lives—transforming careers, enabling dreams, and changing life trajectories. It's clear she sees marketing not just as a job but as a vital part of living a fulfilled life, a channel through which one can make a significant difference in both personal and professional realms.Key takeaway: Embrace the essence of marketing by sharing your genuine enthusiasm for the products or services you represent. This authentic connection not only enhances your marketing effectiveness but also enriches your professional life and touches those around you. Andrea's story is a powerful reminder that at the heart of successful mark...

Join us on a blind date to meet a fellow smarty pants woman in MOPs that we've somehow never really chatted with before. Andrea Lechner-Becker is the whole package: smart, opinionated, funny and a bad-ass. We had the best time getting to know her through her journey into Marketing Ops by way of relational databases of dog portraits at an art gallery, leading LeadMD, being a fellow young bride, a Fur Mommy (hi Dave), and a part time citrus farmer. These days Andrea is a content creator on LinkedIn and TikTok and is absolutely worth a follow! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/prettyfunnybusiness/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/prettyfunnybusiness/support

In this episode of Conquer the Chaos, Justin Gray joins Clate Mask to talk about a loaded topic: Sales.  Justin Gray's company, In Revenue Capital, is dedicated to helping companies improve their sales strategies and increase their revenue. But before consulting, Justin Gray conquered the chaos of sales for himself by growing LeadMD, the business he started in his spare room, to over 20 million in revenue. If you want to know how, check out Justin's episode, where you'll learn the different stages you should have in your sales process, how to scale with partnerships and more. Learn More: https://inrevenue.capital/  

In this episode, we discuss Vivi Gehan's interesting career journey to Marketing Ops.  Vivi is currently Vice President of Operations with Digital Pi (a part of Merkle). Prior to that, she held several other roles in Marketing and Marketing Ops, both in-house and with consultancies, including LeadMD. She is also a member of Mensa!Tune in to hear - -  Vivi's transition from doing events to ending up in Marketing Ops. -  Challenges she faced during her transition from in-house marketing to consulting. -  Some key transitions, or people,  along the way that had a major impact on her career journey. - How Vivi thinks about the skills she gained from past positions and applied those transferable skills for getting and succeeding in new roles.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals Join Us at MOps-Apalooza! Join us LIVE in November 2023 along with 400+ Marketing and Revenue Ops pros. Learn more here.Join Us at MOps-Apalooza! Join us LIVE in November 2023 along with 400+ Marketing and Revenue Ops pros. Learn more here.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

In this episode, we talk with Andrea Lechner-Becker and Drew Smith about attribution reporting. Andrea is currently the Head of Marketing at Toolio. Prior to Toolio, Andrea worked in consulting, and was CMO of Shift Paradigm. Drew is currently Founder and CEO of Attributa, a consulting firm that specializes in attribution and marketing analytics. Prior to Attributa, Drew worked in both consulting and in-house marketing roles, including time with LeadMD.Tune in to hear: -  What tools and platforms that excite Drew about the future of attribution reporting.-  Both Andrea and Drew's perspectives on how they think attribution fits into the overall measurement of marketing and marketing's effectiveness.-  Whether they think attribution reporting will continue to be a hot topic for the foreseeable future.Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals Join Us at MOps-Apalooza! Join us LIVE in November 2023 along with 400+ Marketing and Revenue Ops pros. Learn more here.Episode Brought to You By: MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals

This episode features an interview with Justin Gray, CCO at Shift Paradigm. Shift Paradigm, is a consultancy that executes like an agency, and represents an end-to-end shift in the way organizations align around growth. Justin is a serial entrepreneur who has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them, with successful exits of over 250MM. After joining the Shift Paradigm family as a result of the LeadMD acquisition in early 2021, Justin slotted into a role near and dear to his heart, helming the go-to-market team where he manages Sales, Marketing and Business Development.In this episode, Justin discusses facilitating the client journey, the importance of finding alignment at the executive level, and looking through the revenue operations lens.  Guest Bio:Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur who has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them, with successful exits of over 250MM. After joining the Shift Paradigm family as a result of the LeadMD acquisition in early 2021, Justin landed in a role near and dear to his heart, helming the go-to-market team where he manages Sales, Marketing and Business Development.Justin is also a strong voice for pragmatic entrepreneurship, modern marketing, and building intentional organizational culture. As a recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 500 times in industry publications and maintains a regular column in Inc., while also contributing to Entrepreneur, Tech Crunch and others.—Guest Quote“If we think about how we serve our clients, how that buyer buys and how they progress along that path, you have to be aligned at that executive level, right?Do they understand their goal, their KPIs, their area of influence? And if you don't have that alignment at the top it's almost impossible to get that alignment from within the team. So I think that that relationship at the executive level and just how they view the necessity of their peers and their counterparts there is very indicative of how successful you will be in a revs role.” - Justin Gray—Time Stamps:**(02:46) - Justin's journey into RevOps **(13:14) - How would you organize a RevOps team?**(20:41) - RevObstacles**(22:52) - RevOops moments**(31:38) - The Toolshed**(43:25) - Quick hits —Sponsor:Rise of RevOps is brought to you by Qualified. Qualified's Pipeline Cloud is the future of pipeline generation for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Learn more about the Pipeline Cloud on Qualified.com. —Links Connect with Justin Gray on LinkedInConnect with Ian Faison on LinkedinCheck out the Shift Paradigm WebsiteTake your Revenue Technology Stack Assessment

Every so often, a gap in the market exists that needs to be filled, and it creates a whole new field that shows great potential for the first few that are able to corner it. For our host Josh and his guest, this was such a market in 2009 when they  became the first professional services partner for Marketo in 2009 and grew rapidly with the marketing automation movement. In this episode of the Love Selling Hate Sales podcast, Josh talks to Justin Gray, currently Chief Commercial Officer of Shift Paradigm, formerly LeadMD, which he founded in 2009 before it was acquired by Trendline Interactive. Josh, who happens to be one of the first enterprise account executives in LeadMD, reminisces with Justin the good old days of bootstrapping the company, the hard lessons they learned while essentially creating a new kind of sales model.HIGHLIGHTSDon't fight the marketPivoting to a professional consulting business modelThe productization of services COVID-19 dramatically pushed sales technology forwardFind the path to value, even hyper valueAlways look through the client's lensQUOTESJustin: "Don't fight the market. The market defines what they want to buy." Justin: "At the end of the day, people need a hook to latch on to. And still when we have conversations with new partners today, it's like, what's the three bullet points I can give to my team, right? And it's getting harder and harder to articulate as your services expand, but you have to maintain that focus. You have to be able to tell people this is what we do, this is why it's relevant to you, this is why it's gonna make your customer successful."Josh: "The productization allowed us to confidently say, you're going to get this methodology delivered this way no matter who you talk to. If someone's sick, goes on vacation — God forbid, leave the company, the next person who slides into that slot you're gonna get the same thing." Connect with Justin through the links below:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmd/Email: jgray@shiftparadigm.comWebsite: https://www.shiftparadigm.com/About Josh Wagner: Josh is a growth advisor and the host of the Love Selling Hate Sales podcast. He specializes in helping executives understand modern marketing and sales to drive growth in a scalable way. To learn more about Josh and his work, follow the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshwagneraz/Company website: https://www.shiftparadigm.com/Personal Website: https:///www.joshuadwagner.comPodcast: https://www.lovesellinghatesales.com

Today, David is speaking with Justin Gray. Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur who has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them, with successful exits of over 250MM. After joining the Shift Paradigm family as a result of the LeadMD acquisition in early 2021, Justin slotted into a role near and dear to his heart, helming the go-to-market team where he manages Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. Justin is also a strong voice for pragmatic entrepreneurship, modern marketing, and building intentional organizational culture. As a recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 500 times in industry publications and maintains a regular column in Inc., while also contributing to Entrepreneur, Tech Crunch, and others. Justin and his wife Jennifer met over marketing, have a son named like a superhero, Grayson, and a daughter who's destined to be a Rockstar. When not driving bookings revenues, you can find him roaming the fields at his hemp farm in Missouri or combing the desert looking for a poorly executed shot at the golf course. http://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmd (Justin Grey LinkedIn ) https://twitter.com/jgraymatter?lang=en (Justin Grey Twitter)  What You'll Learn: Understanding Marketing Automation Evolution of MarTech Marketing Fundamentals vs Software How Complex a Marketing Position can be in an Organization Relationship of Sales vs Marketing General understanding of CDP, and its place in the MarTech stack Merger between LeadMD and Shift Paradigm Favorite Quote: “Say YES! Whenever possible” --  The Capital Stack All Things Tech Investing and Value Creation Early growth investor David Paul interviews the world's greatest ecosystem, learns how to start and scale your own business, and finds an edge in today's capital markets.  To connect with David, visit: Twitter -https://twitter.com/davidpaulvc ( CLICK HERE) Substack -http://davidpaul.substack.com/ ( CLICK HERE) LinkedIn -http://linkedin.com/in/Davidpaulvc ( CLICK HERE) IG -https://www.instagram.com/davidpaulvc/ ( CLICK HERE)   DISCLAIMER: David Paul is the founder and general partner at DWP Capital.  All opinions expressed by David and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of DWP capital.  This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for decisions. David and guests may maintain positions in the securities discussed on this podcast.

In this episode, we talk with Drew Smith about how to get into Marketing Ops or Revenue Ops.  So, if you are not already in the profession, but are interested, then get ready to take some notes.About Drew: Our guest, Drew Smith, is the Director of Growth, Revenue Operations at Directive, a performance marketing agency. Prior to joining Directive, he spent several years with LeadMD (now Shift Paradigm) as a revenue operations consultant and engagement manager. Before that, he held positions in sales, marketing, account management, and inside sales at different organizations. Episode Brought to You By MO Pros The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals

Bob's career has stops at Dell, Salesfore, Oglivy and even my stomping ground at LeadMD. Bob is is a people first leader is sales, sales ops and analytics. He cares deeply about culture and nurturing people to bring out the most of their talents. In this episode we talk about how companies are dealing with remote work, coming back and hybrid work environments. Find Bob on LinkedIn. 

Season Two Episode Nine  Guest: Justin Gray, CEO and founder of LeadMD  About Justin:  Justin is a serial entrepreneur serving currently as the CEO and founder of LeadMD, the world's largest marketing automation consultancy having implemented over half of the Marketo user base. Justin has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them to success. In addition to LeadMD, Justin is also the Co-Founder of PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri he co-owns and operates with his father.  You can learn more about Justin and reach out to him on LinkedIn here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmd/  About LeadMD:  LeadMD is the #1 Performance Marketing Consultancy that leverages best-in-class technology to make your vision actionable and your outcomes measurable. Breaking down the typical siloes of technology and strategy, We collaborate with catalyst marketers and organizations to increase revenues, align teams, and engage your ideal buyers. We've helped more than 3,500 high-growth companies succeed by building revenue engines that scale on top of marketing and sales platforms like Marketo, Adobe, Salesforce.com, and dozens of others.  Learn more about LeadMD here:  https://www.leadmd.com/

We all live in a world of busy. Staying busy is never the problem. Enterprise sales is a different beast, it's not just about churning and burning meetings.  Derek Kelliher is an Enterprise seller with Drift. He knows all too well, that selling in the enterprise requires strategic thinking, partnership and most important of all... SELLING. 

2020 taught us to future-proof our businesses. Ironically, future-proofing looks a lot like digging into the fundamentals, such as putting the needs of your customer first. In this episode, we jump into Josh's "wayback machine" (listen for it) with Justin Gray, CEO at LeadMD, to talk about pivoting during COVID and what's ahead for content marketers. We also discuss: Justin's career path and the unique value LeadMD brings its marketing and sales clients The major pivots LeadMD made in response to COVID How to expand your definition of success to be in-line with your client's outcomes The problems that misalignment in messaging can create For the entire interview, tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Find Josh on LinkedIn or send him an email.

ABOUT THE GUEST - JUSTIN GRAY, CEO AT LEADMDJustin is a serial entrepreneur serving currently as the CEO and founder of LeadMD, the world’s largest marketing automation consultancy having implemented over half of the Marketo user base. Justin has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them to success. In addition to LeadMD, Justin is also the Co-Founder of PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri he co-owns and operates with his father.Reach Justin directly by email at jgray@leadmd.comOn LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmd/On Twitter at https://twitter.com/jgraymatterABOUT THE EPISODE:Justin has been involved in a lot of successful business ventures - on the front lines, as a leader, and as an investor - just see his bio above to get a small taste! So we decided that in this episode, we’d talk about the difference between both people and organizations in a sales and business context who take action and those who prefer to sit around talking and thinking about it. Justin has a lot to offer on the topic, I think you’ll enjoy this episode!0:40 - What’s the best piece of sales advice that Justin ever received - it’s about the desire to help2:44 - What’s some of the worst sales advice that Justin has ever heard? That sales is a numbers game - there is more to it than that4:58 - David sets up the episode and frames the conversation around the DIS-inclination to action7:48 - Justin articulates the difference between a numbers orientation and a relationship orientation and why the disinclination towards a relationship orientation is both hard to measure and in some ways scary, even though it’s critical to real long-term success9:43 - Justin articulates a similar principle around an instance of content creation that illustrates the psychological element of a disinclination to take the necessary actions that lead to success11:53 - How do you develop an environment where leaders feel safe to create a level of autonomy that will support real and authentic execution from the front lines?14:00 - Why startups struggle with building sales organizations that are not constrained by rigidity and limitations17:46 - What is it that makes a salesperson successful?20:10 - How do you bake a value and relationship orientation into a sales organization?21:30 - Where does personality fit in as criteria for sales success?22:28 - How does environment impact the potential for sales success?23:05 - What is something that Justin learned along the way that he wished he knew at the start of his career?24:45 - Where can people find and connect with Justin?

In this episode, Justin Gray, the CEO of LeadMD joins Yaag and Manish to discuss RevOps. Justin dives deep into sharing how to go about building your revenue operations, the responsibilities of a RevOps, and he even goes to share a framework. If you want to connect with Justin after listening to this episode, his twitter handle - @jgraymatter

In the world of technology, new ideas are boundless. For entrepreneurs, this means endless possibilities for a new SaaS offering or creative way to go to market. But what happens when billion-dollar unicorns start to fall flat? Or when the predictive outbound model begins to stall? What will companies do when faced with a pandemic?If you spend anytime chatting with Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD, you'll quickly realize the answers are rooted in focus. In this episode, Justin shares his unique insight into sales, marketing, technology, and entrepreneurship earned through years of success.Justin and Kyle discuss:What companies need to do to competeHow companies can get the focus they needWhy RevOps may not be the right answerWhen is the right time to start a companyWhere should you focus on if you want sustained growth as a startupWho is winning during COVIDAbout Justin GrayJustin Gray is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of LeadMD, the world’s largest Performance Marketing Consultancy, having helped over 3500 organizations build scalable revenue engines. Over the last decade, Justin has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them, with successful exits of over 200MM.Justin is also a strong voice for entrepreneurship, marketing and building intentional organizational culture. A recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 500 times in industry publications and maintains a regular column in Inc., while also contributing to Entrepreneur, Tech Crunch and others. Justin and his wife Jennifer met over marketing, have an incredibly active 2-year-old son, Grayson and welcomed their daughter, Declan in November of 2019.Company Twitter: @myleadmdPersonal Twitter: @jgraymatteLinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmdAbout Kyle HamerA sales and marketing veteran with a deep understanding of strategy, digital marketing execution, and using technology to enhance brand impact. A hands-on leader with a passion for solving business challenges with process, operations, and technology. When Kyle's not tinkering on businesses, you'll find him spending time with those he loves, learning about incredible people, and making connections.About Hamer Marketing GroupMarket growth for a new product or service is often limited by market distractions, unreliable data, or systems not built to scale. Hamer Marketing Group helps companies build data-driven strategies focused on client acquisition and sales development supported by the technology and operations necessary to create profitable growth.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/summitpodcast)

The Chief Marketing Officer is under fire, but it's not for the reasons you might think. Marketing is better understood by many, and yet still shrouded in mystery, but across the globe, we are witnessing the Death of the CMO.Answering this riddle is as complicated as it is fascinating. On The Summit Podcast, this week, our guest Andrea Lechner-Becker sits down to discuss how the biggest branding challenge marketing faces today is an internal struggle.Andrea and Kyle discuss:How to say no while saying yesGetting things done for marketing-minded CEOsMoving marketing from a verb to a nounCreating value for your audience Partnering with salesCreating unforgettable impressions across your brandYou are not going to want to miss this action-packed episode.About Andrea Lechner-BeckerFueled by endless curiosity, Andrea has never met a problem she didn’t want to solve. This led her to manage sales and marketing at an art gallery, then loyalty and email marketing strategy for an NBA team and arena, then the delivery team at LeadMD, followed by a stint as a novelist and culminating with her current role as CMO of LeadMD. With a decade of experience in dynamic marketing roles, Andrea has had the opportunity to work with the most brilliant marketing minds at the best companies in the world. #hugemarketingdorkAbout Kyle HamerA sales and marketing veteran with a deep understanding of strategy, digital marketing execution, and using technology to enhance brand impact. A hands-on leader with a passion for solving business challenges with process, operations, and technology. When Kyle's not tinkering on businesses, you'll find him spending time with those he loves, learning about incredible people, and making connections.About Hamer Marketing GroupMarket growth for a new product or service is often limited by market distractions, unreliable data, or systems not built to scale. Hamer Marketing Group helps companies build data-driven strategies focused on client acquisition and sales development supported by the technology and operations necessary to create profitable grow.A sales and marketing veteran with a deep understanding of strategy, digital marketing execution, and using technology to enhance brand impact. A hands-on leader with a passion for solving business challenges with process, operations, and technology. When Kyle's not tinkering on businesses, you'll find him spending time with those he loves, learning about incredible people, and making connections.About Hamer Marketing GroupMarket growth for a new product or service is often limited by market distractions, unreliable data, or systems not built to scale. Hamer Marketing Group helps companies build data-driven strategies focused on client acquisition and sales development supported by the technology and operations necessary to create profitable grow.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/summitpodcast)

COVID impacted everyone this year, and many enterprises had to update their go to market strategy. How did they do it, and what are they doing to prevent another surprise skid?In this episode of The Summit, Josh Wagner and Kyle Hamer sit down and discuss how large companies are pivoting and building even more diverse go to market strategies.About Josh WagnerJosh started out like many sales professionals, cold calling! He knew early on there had to be a better way and adopted content marketing strategies to further his career. While honing his skills with basic email marketing tools and social strategies he found and fully embraced marketing automation as a way to fuel sales success. As a former client, LeadMD was there to help him build a better sales and marketing engine during his time as the Sales and Marketing Director for a Phoenix-based e-learning company. Now leading the Sales team for LeadMD, Josh brings enthusiasm and passion for helping his team and LeadMD customers accelerate revenue growth.When not "bringing home the bacon" Josh loves to spend time with his wife and their 3 funny little humans. What time is leftover is spent throwing some weight around in his garage gym.About Kyle HamerA sales and marketing veteran with a deep understanding of strategy, digital marketing execution, and using technology to enhance brand impact. A hands-on leader with a passion for solving business challenges with process, operations, and technology. When Kyle's not tinkering on businesses, you'll find him spending time with those he loves, learning about incredible people, and making connections.About Hamer Marketing GroupMarket growth for a new product or service is often limited by market distractions, unreliable data, or systems not built to scale. Hamer Marketing Group helps companies build data-driven strategies focused on client acquisition and sales development supported by the technology and operations necessary to create profitable growth. Hamer Marketing Group Helping B2B SaaS companies use technology to create unforgettable sales and marketing funnels.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/summitpodcast)

Josh Wagner (Head of Partnerships @ LeadMD) joined Chris Walker for a short session on State of Demand Gen. They deep dive into Account Based Marketing (ABM) to discuss how it originated and has been used well, and poorly, especially in the B2B SaaS space. For more content, subscribe to State of Demand Gen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Tired of just listening? Check out Refine Labs on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Justin Gray is the CEO of LeadMD and in this episode we discuss what Justin calls "Hyper-Value Sales." Plus, we'll dig into strategies you can use to bring value to your buyer earlier in their buying journey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Dave Karr (VP of Marketing at Klyck.io) and Michael Hartman (Director, Marketing Technology, Demand Generation and Analytics at Freeman Company) discuss how marketing automation and MarTech systems can support B2B marketing operations. We'll discuss how marketing automation can be optimized to support the sales funnel, best practices and concepts for launching a MarTech integration project, how to handle change management when implementing new MarTech, and how to align MarTech systems to support overall revenue generation in the organization. Summary and Time Stamps: Introduction: Michael Hartman, Director, Marketing Technology, Demand Generation and Analytics at Freeman Company (Time stamped at 0:40) Michael's background is in implementing and deploying marketing automation and MarTech. He is currently leading demand generation at Freeman, but started out in management consulting then took a turn into marketing. Marketing automation and its importance (Time stamped at 2:10) Marketing automation and CRM are the core of what every B2B enterprise has and that's not going to change. The major problem is the enormous growth in point solutions in marketing technology and finding a leader in that space. Marketing automation is the core in scaling what you do and CRM is at the center of all of that. Properly making MarTech work and where you get started (Time stamped at 4:00) You need to understand what is currently in place. You need to know how you go to market and decide if your organization is ready for a MarTech solution. ABM is an example of where things become challenging. First you need to get sales and marketing in alignment. Then you can experiment. People and process need to go in front. How to Setup Marketing Automation for Success (Time stamped at 6:25) People and process should precede technology. The system needs to support the day-to-day needs. One of the challenges is the hand off of leads to sales and getting information back to the marketing system. There needs to be a clear picture of the full lifecycle. With that, you can start to see which channels are working better to generate pipeline and revenue. How to leverage the capabilities of marketing automation and the data (Time stamped at 10:45) Enable the sales team to have visibility and see what's happening with prospects and customers. Marketing automation can make the information they're tracking visible within the CRM application. Get the intent information and then you can customize to a prospect or organization. Make sure you update lead statuses and then keep them up-to-date. Having the discipline to update makes the work the best it can be. How marketing automation empowers personalization in customer touchpoints (Time stamped at 14:20) Educate sales teams how marketing automation and the data it can collect can help the them with personalization. It doesn't have to overly complex, you can start by making simple lists. Much of the time, keeping things simple can generate the most wins. The simplest way is often the best way. It's important to not get caught up in complexity and to remember that it won't be perfect. The role management plays in MarTech (Time stamped at 16:40) Bring in middle management because they can upsell through the chain and help sell it to their managers. It's important to enable people to make decisions, but also to give them space to get it wrong. That said, you should continue to try to get better and better. “Done is better than perfect.” It's the journey. It's not the event. Best practices in marketing automation (Time stamped at 21:40) No company is the same, so there is no one size fits all. Having marketing automation and CRM in place is at the core. There are some principles that apply across the board, though. One thing is keeping things simple and solving for the 80% and not the 100%. Also, try things and try to move forward. When it comes to technology, figure out if there is a way to achieve the same goal without buying new technology. Picking the best marketing technology and aligning to your needs (Time stamped 25:05) Most marketing technology can do the same things. You have to decide what you're comfortable with and figure out what the technology can integrate with it. You can win with any of them. It also depends on the size of your organization. Take-Aways (Time stamped 32:55) Best practices are a myth. Every organization is different and how they implement is different. People and process first. Technology should follow what you're doing with go to market. Keep it as simple as possible. Marketing automation is foundational with CRM. Don't look at other technology before having those in place. Resources and links from this episode: Michael Hartman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhartmanndfw/ Dave Karr: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davekarr/ Freeman Company: https://www.freeman.com/apac/ Klyck.io: https://www.klyck.io/ LeadMD: https://www.leadmd.com/ HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/ Zinc Partners: https://www.zincpartners.us

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

Justin Gray is CEO and Founder of LeadMD, a performance marketing consultancy. The agency concentrates on achieving tangible, holistic business goals – defining a buyer, launching a product, increasing revenue – to produce bottom-line impacts, rather than focusing on middle-process goals such as website or cost-per lead-optimization. Most of LeadMD's over 3,500 clients are B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations – big market enterprises of $100 million and up.  A “considered purchase” is a complex buying decision, fraught with emotional and financial risks and potential rewards – one that requires extensive pre-purchase research and evaluation. In B2B, this space might include software purchases, but it is more than that. LeadMD's clients include technology providers (50% of clients are software providers), healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and “anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market.” LeadMD bridges the space between being a global strategy consultant and providing regional implementation. The agency has data science, strategy, and go-to-market teams – who set strategies, plug those strategies into a broad range of systems and marketing platforms, build processes that work for clients, measure results, and optimize performance over time. Justin says that broad scope of function is rare in the B2B space. LeadMD's consultants find the diversity in clients, the variety and unpredictability of problems and solutions, and the challenge of cobbling together customized solutions . . . exciting, and average 5 to 10 active, and widely-different campaigns a month. Close client relationships are critical.  New clients may come to LeadMD with a particular goal. The agency uses its “Catalyst Marketing Framework” that clearly states the client's objective and then provides a “laundry list” of what the client will need to have solidly in place in order to achieve the stated objective. This helps them align their activities to the objectives, and, in the end, produce significant, relevant outcomes.  Justin has discovered over the years is that many clients believe they already have a full understanding of their buyer profile. Often that “full understanding” is only superficial. Do they really know who their buyers are? All of them? Then, do they know the platforms where their buyers “hang out”? Probably not. Yet that information is critical to know because those platforms are where LeadMd's clients need to focus their marketing efforts.  LeadMD's 3-person data science team digs in at a deeper level that its clients have – researching the market, defining buyers, assembling ideal customer profiles – and then translates that information into engagement and messaging frameworks. LeadMD utilizes role-based psychological/personality profiling to select candidates who will strengthen the organization—either by reinforcing role-desirable traits . . . or by bringing a new direction to the role. The hiring process can take as long as 2 months. Fifty percent of the organization is employee owned. Justin can be reached on LinkedIn, on Twitter @jgraymatter or on his agency's website at: https://www.leadmd.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined by Justin Gray, CEO and Founder at LeadMD based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Justin. JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate you guys having me on. ROB: Fantastic. Why don't you tell us about LeadMD and where LeadMD excels? JUSTIN: LeadMD is what we describe as a performance marketing consultancy. It basically just means that our outcomes are aligned to tangible business goals, whether that be revenue increase, product launches, defining a buyer – something that's going to have a real tangible impact, not on the tactical side. We don't get into any engagements where we're trying to optimize a website or a cost per lead. It's going to be more holistic than that. Although we might conduct those tactics, we really desire to impact the bottom line of our clients – which are predominantly B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations, big market enterprise. Our secret sauce, or where we made our bones, is by operating bridging two different spaces. Normally you either work with a really high dollar, white shoe global consultancy like Accenture or Deloitte and they will help you set your go-to-market strategy or your marketing strategy, and then you'll work with a much more regional partner that's going to help you, maybe even an independent consultant that would pop in and help you operationalize that stuff. We do both, and we beat out the Deloittes and Accentures of the world every day. Our real claim to fame is that we do stuff. Marketing operations is really the backbone of our organization. We've got the data science team, we've got a strategy team, we've got a go-to-market team, and these are all really smart people. But the thing that makes them truly unique is they know how to go plug that strategy into systems and make it work and measure it and optimize it over time, which is just a real rarity, unfortunately, within the B2B space. ROB: For sure. You cast an interestingly wide net with your description that is still narrow in an interesting way. You said B2B and B2C considered purchases. A lot of times I think when you look at performance marketing groups, that B2B considered purchase dials in pretty tightly on let's say software. There's not a lot of white space around that. But it sounds like when you talk about considered purchase in consumer and non-software – where does the rest of the range go beyond that preconception about software, software, software? JUSTIN: We've got probably five – because we've been in business for over 10 years, we've followed the marketing automation maturity curve, and we're a primary partner of many of those providers. I've got over 3,500 customers, literally from vape pens to traditional software providers and everything in between. But the primary concentrations we see are obviously technology providers, as you mentioned, software. Then healthcare, and that bifurcates itself into the payer/provider side and then the med device side. Both those industries, we've had a really strong footprint in. Then manufacturing. I describe it as when your grandma gets an iPhone happening in manufacturing right now. A lot of these organizations have really archaic marketing practices, but they're springing forward into the latest and greatest because it's become standard at this point. So manufacturing is a big one for us. Financial services, everything from traditional banking to online banking to credit unions. And then really, anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market. That can be insurance brokers, that can be real estate – commercial real estate, predominantly. Anyone that's selling through the channel is also where we've seen a big concentration. But definitely, of that 3,500+, you're probably dealing with about 50% that falls into the software provider space. Still a big industry for us. ROB: Sure. But a fascinating range beyond that. If somebody looks you all up on LinkedIn, at least, if LinkedIn is to be believed, you have dozens and dozens and dozens of employees, but it sounds like you're talking about quite a variety of products and perhaps even thousands of customers. It seems like there's a story of tremendous leverage in there that I'd like to dig into a little bit, that you can be effective across such a range and across so many customers. JUSTIN: Yeah. I think that's just a function of necessity. With the rise of marketing automation and therefore marketing ops, there was this big talent vacuum that occurred. As we were building this agency and bringing people on and training them – and even advertising to them why they should come work for us versus go to the client side – the fact that they're going to get exposure to – our average consultant is running between 7 and 10 active projects every month. That's an incredible amount of exposure that they're getting. As I mentioned earlier, both from the strategy side of the house – fundamentally, how are they going to market? What does their buyer look like? How are they engaging this individual? – all the way down into how we make a platform like a Marketo work for that business. We're talking to a retail burger chain right now. Loyalty programs are their predominant reason for up-leveling their marketing ops tech stack and therefore the surrounding strategies. That's so much different than talking to a traditional B2B software provider. I think that's what frankly is the interesting part about what we do, and that's also what we hear from our employees over and over again, like, “I don't know what my day is going to look like, and that's the exciting part about it.” ROB: Sure, you have 7 to 10 different customers, each of which could ask you an interesting question that day or have something in their tech stack that might not be working quite as they hope. Do your teams specialize in particular marketing automation suites? Also, something I think is different – many agencies we've talked to will specialize in one. They'll have HubSpot and just be trying to increase the quality of metal that is associated with their agency with relation to HubSpot. Platinum, or I guess you can go to gems, too, with Diamonds. How do you think about the right tool for the client? JUSTIN: We were born as a Marketo consultancy, but right around the 2013-14 mark, we decided – Marketo was a predominant provider, and obviously still is, although owned by Adobe. What approach do we really want to be known for? Do we want to be known that all roads eventually end up at Marketo, or do we want to be a customer-driven solution provider? At that point, although we still have partnerships with all of these different providers, we really do take an agnostic approach where we're trying to understand, fundamentally, what is this business trying to accomplish? What is the best tech stack to reinforce that? And oftentimes that does go against hype. We may be recommending Pardot. We may be recommending an ESP, something that's much more in tune with the business goals rather than our traditional partnership. We do have specializations internally, certainly. We've got folks that have a big Pardot footprint, HubSpot footprint, Marketo footprint. If you think about the 6,000+ martechs on the market today, that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. But really, we structure ourselves down into practices, and all of that will fall within our revenue ops practice. So those folks are constantly thinking about what skillsets we have, how we up-level those, how we maintain our certifications, and ensure that whatever comes long, we've got enough context to give the best performance for the customer. ROB: I think something that's implied – and tell me if I'm reading this correctly – by the tool stacks you're mentioning, your Pardots and your Marketos and whatnot are a little bit upmarket from the entry level marketing automation platforms. Is that a selection filter for the type of customer, or is that an outworking of the type of customer that you tend to pursue? JUSTIN: Yeah. When I say big market, I really mean $100 million and up. Everyone's got a different definition of their market levers, but for us, our best client starts around $100 million and goes up from there. I've got a Fortune 3 company right now that has an active engagement with us. So it is that mid enterprise level footprint. ROB: That sort of client often has a very high expectation of touch and relationship with their marketing providers. With that 7 to 10 customer per staffer ratio, the accounts they're serving, how do you retain that sense of touch? Or is it really, because you're delivering results, the touch is a little bit easier to manage and you're not just trying to say sweet things to them? JUSTIN: I would say regardless of how we've grown or scaled, the customer relationship has always been the centerpiece there. You're never going to get away from the fact that when something goes wrong or a customer has a question or a customer just wants a piece of information as they're going into a board meeting and they need that final piece that's going to make them look awesome, they're going to want to reach out and have someone answer the phone, answer their email, be on Slack, whatever it happens to be. Relationship is absolutely critical. Again, I think that's a unique element when you see an agency of our size that's still able to maintain not only great client relationships, but personal relationships within that. We've got folks that have called us on weekends where it's not our problem, it's not even in our space – maybe something happened in IT – but marketing knows that they've got this great partner that is great at problem-solving, and “Hey, let's reach out to them and see if they can help us.” I've been on those calls on Saturdays before. It's a tricky line. You want to make sure that you're setting boundaries and you're letting the client know, ultimately, we want a relationship and a partnership here, not something that's going to feel like a whipping boy. But I do think you can't get away from that within an agency. Any time you try to automate and people insert these separated ticketing systems and portals and things like that that their clients have to go through, I think that's always a bastardization of the client relationship. When I say 7 to 10, also, I should clarify that they may be hopping in and doing a piece of that project. Fundamentally, we've got principals aligned to those accounts that do all the account management and the relationship management. Because of your specialization, you might need to hop in and troubleshoot something on a Pardot platform or help with an integration for Marketo. But it's really critical that we maintain a one to few relationship with the folks that are charged with managing that relationship. ROB: That's aligned with what you mentioned earlier, with those different practice teams. But you probably didn't start off with a variety of practice teams, so how did this whole LeadMD thing get started? JUSTIN: The short answer is accidentally. Yes, you're absolutely right. Most agencies always start in the same manner, which is one person aligned to an account, like “Just don't piss them off. Just don't have these guys call me and say, ‘You're providing terrible service.'” Everyone focuses on that one to one. I think agencies go through a number of maturity inflection points, but certainly when you realize that's not going to work for your business long-term is probably one of the most difficult. But back to your question in terms of how this got started. I was a very young VP of Sales and Marketing at a payment startup. It was actually my first venture into startup world. I graduated in marketing. I had three marketing jobs after college; I hated all of them. Suddenly I stumbled upon this new world, which was startup. I completely fell in love with it from every dimension that you possibly could. In that business, we were selling through channel partners. We had 30+ different partners where our solution was integrated. It was a payment technology system. When we went to market and we marketed, we had to look like we were either marketing on behalf of that partner or co-marketing with that partner. We had that built into our standard agreements with them. I was managing an ESP with that requirement and pulling lists and sending out these blasts and trying to make it seem like it was a lead nurture thing, although we didn't even know what to call it back in 2006. Went out to Dreamforce and was talking to one of my buddies out there who owned a Salesforce agency. He said, “Hey, you should really talk to these guys over here.” We stumbled upon Eloqua, and I was like, “Wow, what is this?” So, we did this whole evaluation of marketing automation platforms back then, like V Trends. There were so many that are not around any longer. In fact, the only two that were in that cycle were Eloqua and Marketo. Marketo I stumbled upon eleventh hour. They had a little 10 x 10 kiosk out at Dreamforce, if that tells you anything about the year. ROB: [laughs] Which would still set them back a pretty penny. JUSTIN: Right, totally. Jon Miller, who's one of the founders, was working the booth. Bill Binch, who went on to become their CRO, was working the booth. I talked to those guys and described what I was looking for, and they showed me their platform. I was just blown away by the drag-and-drop nature, the intuitiveness of it and so on. I signed the contract right at that show. We came back, we implemented it, loved it, rolled it out to my team. Eventually I sold my piece of that business and figured I was going to do the typical, “Hey, let's go live in Italy for a year and take a year off” and so on and so forth. I flew over there. I took two weeks off. While I was over in Italy, a couple of my relationships called me and said, “Hey, can you do what you did over at this company,” which was called Billingtree. I said, “On a consulting basis? Sure, let me figure out what that would look like.” Those three clients who reached out became our first three retainer relationships. It was just me, operating in a spare bedroom, supporting these guys. Fortunately, because of the advent of marketing automation and the rise of these technologies, the phone just kept ringing. I had to bring on employees at that point, and before you knew it, we had 12 employees and I had to take an office space. Truly an accidental business for me. Not something I ever intended to get involved in. Never had run an agency before, never had run any sort of people-based business before. Always technology or payments. Just a really interesting experience that has really become the heart and soul of my businesses. I've sold four businesses since I've had LeadMD as an agency, and it's definitely the one that I am the most emotionally attached to. ROB: With the timing of you starting that business, you were a little bit before businesses probably cared about social in any way. Is that accurate? JUSTIN: That was the big conversation at the time, like, is social going to catch on? Who should be on social? Just like marketing automation, there were like 100 different social media platforms, like Big and – God, I can't even remember all the names of them. Just these random little – so everyone was playing around. I was thinking about it the other day. I can think of days where all I did was set up profiles on different social media platforms because we had no idea what was going to take off. Obviously, for business, LinkedIn has become the home for everyone, and that's where we spend the majority of our day from a sales engagement standpoint, from a content publication standpoint. But yeah, early days, that conversation was taking place across social, it was taking place across CRM, it was taking place across marketing technology and marketing automation. No one really knew what any of this stuff was going to become and if it was going to catch on. My early content creation was centered on that, like “What is this marketing automation thing and why should you care?” Every once in a while, I'll feel one of those little waves come around. Manufacturing went through that 2-3 years ago, where they're asking, “What is marketing automation and why should we care?” You get these little flashback moments as laggard industries fall into more desire for digital transformation and so on. It's interesting to feel that nostalgia when those circles come back around. ROB: I imagine when manufacturing comes around to it, you probably have some playbooks in place and some understanding of how to measure success. How do you help filter when clients are asking – you have some industrial software company who comes to you and says, “Tell us about TikTok.” Who's to say that TikTok doesn't become – at one point in your business, I imagine LinkedIn was not a place where people should be spending time. How do you start to filter and maybe experiment when something is potentially relevant, kind of relevant, or strategically critical? JUSTIN: Fortunately, questions like that all root back to the same answer, and that's the buyer. It's a great emphasis for us to start the conversation on “How well do you know the buyer that you're trying to engage? Are they spending their time on these platforms?” and really have that be the guiding light around a recommendation. Oftentimes when we first engage with a client, we've got what we call our Catalyst Marketing Framework. Essentially, it's just a big menu of dependency, like, “Hey, I want to launch this product in EMEA via a demand-generation go-to-market.” “Great, here's the 15 things that you need to have in place and shored up at a decent maturity level in order to succeed within that.” The box that always gets checked on there, i.e. the customer feels like they've done a great job around it, is, “I do customer profile research and buyer personas.” Then as we proceed down an engagement, that's also the box that tends to get rewound and revisited. We say, “Well, you felt pretty confident in that, but as we dug into the research that you have and the information you have around your buyer, there's some gaps there. Let's dive in and help you better define that process.” We have stood up a data science team. It's small but mighty. It's literally three people, but they're producing some awesome, awesome results in terms of market research, buyer definition, ideal customer profile assembly, and then the translation of that into engagement and messaging frameworks. Long story short, we answer those questions through the lens of the buyer, and it's a great opportunity for us to dive in where often a superficial look at who the buyer is has been conducted in the past. ROB: Right. I think a lot of businesses are pushed into inventing a fairytale about who their ideal customer profile is, and you having three data science people who know what to do with the data is many steps ahead from the forced hypothesis I think a lot of businesses get into. JUSTIN: That's the danger of data science, actually. The one thing we've learned about these services is you really have to set a strong foundation for the fact that data is going to be the determinant of what we do. Even when you think about the narratives that happen within an organization – like I'm extremely opinionated about who our ICP is. I get challenged all the time from our marketing team, like, “Is that truly correct still? That's something that was true 5 years ago. Let's go out and go into the market and do some research and validate that.” If you're going to open that door, you have to open the door to being really uncomfortable, because what you often find from a data perspective is incomplete data. It's the fact that you can't draw those lines without going out and doing customer interviews or prospect interviews and employee interviews. Therefore, organizations really have to be prepared to say, “A lot of these maxims that we've held up are not supported by data and may be untrue.” We've had to do a lot of expectation setting around the engagements that involve data science because the results are often quite different from what the internal narrative actually is. ROB: For sure. I appreciate your willingness to be questioned and not just to say, “I'm right and I know because I'm in charge and I've been doing this for a while.” I think that willingness to be wrong probably helps model what your own team does in engaging with clients and how to guide them through that process gently, where they may be wrong, but you're really just interested in helping everything be right. JUSTIN: I've had some meetings in the past where maybe we've involving a vendor or someone from the outside is sitting in – we had a leadership coach in, in Q4, and they were in one of these meetings and afterwards said, “Wow, the way your staff questions the things that you say, are you ever bothered by that?” My mantra is ruthless pragmatism. If you see something that doesn't make sense or isn't supported by something or you think it's assumed or you think there's a better way to do something, everyone here has the license to dive into that and really question that. I think sometimes that can be a bit uncomfortable for people from the outside. They have these strong lines of strata that are drawn where it's like someone breezes into a meeting, says something, leaves, and everyone just has to go run and do it. I think that's the value if you've got a really strong team and you embrace becoming a people-based business. ROB: That ruthless pragmatism sounds like a cousin of radical candor and that whole line of thinking. Have you had people where it turns out that it may not be a fit for the organization with that level of candor? Is there a way you filter for that on the way in? JUSTIN: We've done probably more work than I even want to admit around trying to profile for hiring and really getting into role-based profiling. We have a 200+ question survey. You don't have to answer all the 200 questions; it just says, “Answer these for an hour. Do at least 100 of the questions.” It is a psychological survey – I forget who publishes it; some university – but our data science team got a hold of it and scrubbed out a few questions that are inappropriate for an employer to ask, and now we give that up front. We don't provide the results of that survey to our team until someone's ready to make an offer. What we've done is essentially taken all of our employees, had them complete that survey – it is a personality survey, akin to a DISC or a Briggs-Meyer, and it really gives great insight into the traits and the skillsets someone's going to have. But we've also scatter-plotted those around role. So, we know that in our project management role, here's the big skillsets that stand out. We take the lens of, do we want to change that? Do we want to bring in someone that's more extroverted to push the team into a certain direction, or do we want someone that fits the existing mold? I will caveat all of this that we are by no means where we want to be in this process. It's always a maturity curve and a learning process. But I think for an agency, every single person I bring in is going to develop personal relationships with the client – I don't care if it's an associate, which is our lowest level of consultant, least amount of time in the chair; if we lose that individual, someone's going to say, “Hey, are you guys okay over there? I was really enjoying working with so-and-so. They're the key to my account.” Any loss of employee, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, is a natural stick in the eye of an agency, so we have to be really careful about who we bring in. We have to be really intentional about the types of people we're looking for. It all boils down to the desire to employ owners, like people that are going to own whatever they're working on. 50% of this organization is owned by our employees, literally, through an equity program. We want that to foster the type of environment that we're trying to create and be a representation of that. But that's so difficult to uncover, even when you take 2 or 3 months through an interview process. There's so much that comes out in the day to day that you just can't get exposure to. Every day we're trying to get better. ROB: Fascinating, Justin. Based on what you've learned so far in building LeadMD, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting over right now? JUSTIN: God, there's probably a host of them. I would say certainly one of the first things I would do is go to specializations earlier. We spent a lot of time trying to hire for these unicorn generalists that could do strategy and be really adept at tactics. We spent a lot of time pulling our hair out, wondering, “Why can't we find more of these people?” The short answer is because they're incredibly rare and rarely exist. I would certainly go more into a segmented and a specialty type of approach earlier. I'd also say – you have to remember the year that this was formed, 2009. People rarely knew what marketing automation was. They didn't know what it did. Certainly no one was implementing it around any sort of consistent methodology. We productized our offerings very early, but when we did so, we also really painted ourselves into a corner. For a number of years, we became a Marketo implementation shop because all of our products were focused on that implementation or optimization motion. Then we had to spend a lot of time unwinding that and getting back to our roots and fundamentals of starting with strategy, starting with the real reasons why, and building from there. The brand ramifications that that has in terms of the runway and the necessary rebranding and the time it takes to get that optic to change is something that added a lot of lead time to our business that I wish it hadn't. Productizations is really critical in terms of trying to define the quality of outputs, but I would not take such a laser-focused productization approach. ROB: I want to pull on something there a little bit, because I think what may often happen is that you're starting, and you're the superhero, and then you hire some people who are pretty good superheroes too and do all of those things, but as you said, they're sort of unicorns. I think sometimes there's a tension in the billing model that can make pulling that apart a little bit difficult. You feel like, “I'm charging X amount for a superhero; how do I switch to charging for a team?” Was that something you learned, or did you have a different path through that transition and that challenge? JUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. Fortunately, there was a degree of immaturity and inexperience that set our original pricing. I'll say something that's quite embarrassing and I rarely admit: when we first launched this business, our rate per hour was $75 bucks an hour because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Right now it's $300, and $500 for end version work. So, we had a lot of room to grow there because I was charging $75 bucks an hour for my own time. As we adjusted along the lines of what you're describing, which is you have this rock star, “I've been charging X for them; now I need to scale, I need to charge potentially the same X for that individual,” we were able to scale our pricing up on the upper bound rather than having to have it come down. Early days, I had a lot of competitors that were very upset with me because of the pricing that we were introducing to the market, and it was just my own inexperience, quite frankly, that made that happen. ROB: Now I think you have some pricing that is probably aspirational for a lot of people who are listening, who would like to figure out how to charge $300 or $500 just for their own time, much less for somebody who they've brought onto their team. I think there's probably a lot to learn in the middle there that makes it easier to learn –  JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but we still run into downward pricing pressure, of course. We'll run into a $25 million hypergrowth organization with another $50 million bucks in funding, and they have no problem paying for anything. Like, “Okay, great, send me over the MSA.” Then we'll run into a global, highly visible, highly well known brand – and I won't say the name, but the biggest rideshare organization out there – and they'll throw something out like, “Hey, we don't pay more than $165 an hour for consulting.” We went through an incredible procurement cycle there. We don't dip down that low. The only thing that really adjusts that mentality for the client, I think, is being able to call in references and referrals from folks that look like them that say, “Yeah, an hour with them is expensive, but only because it's worth three employees. Only because it's knowledge that you're never going to get internally, you can't hire for it, and it's really uncommon what they're combining over there.” You've got to build up – and certainly discounting and things like that are critical to building up those referral sources and getting people to take a chance on you. But once you've got both a good stockade of references and folks willing to go to bat for you, I think that's the most powerful lever that you can pull there. Like, “Let me put you in touch with someone that you respect that we've worked with, and let me have them give you the story.” ROB: There's so much wisdom there to unpack. You're talking about the referrals; earlier, woven into the conversation, you also talked about LeadMD in a consulting role, and you talked particularly about benchmarking. You've positioned yourself alongside Deloitte and some other folks that I think really helps elevate that brand profile instead of saying, “Hey, we are Scottsdale Agency #25 and we are here to help you get some leads.” JUSTIN: Yeah, totally. People think in terms of stories. How many people have put “We want to be the Facebook of X or the Uber of Y” in their pitch deck? People need frames of reference, and I think that really helps them do so. We are the combination between the best strategic Deloitte out there and the best independent consultant you can think of, because they both have really great aspects to them, but they also both have downfalls. The reason we exist is to eliminate those downfalls. So I agree. I think you need to speak their language. There needs to be a shared vocabulary established there. ROB: Really solid. Justin, when people want to find you and LeadMD, where should they go? JUSTIN: They can of course go to the Google machine, but the best channel to get me at is certainly Twitter or LinkedIn. I'm @jgraymatter on Twitter. On LinkedIn, you can just search for me, Justin Gray. LeadMD is just leadmd.com. We use Drip, so there's a little chat feature on there. You can mention that you want to chat with me or anyone within the organization, and we can hop on and have a bit of a discussion there. I love to talk to anyone that's curious about business, marketing, sales, life, any of those topics. I'm happy to lend my time. I find those conversations very interesting. So if you have a question, please reach out. ROB: Perfect. Thanks so much, Justin, for coming on and sharing so much about that LeadMD journey. It sounds like a really excellent ride. JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate it. ROB: Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Throwback to when we stopped in with LeadMD (Phoenix, AZ) where Chris Walker (CEO, Refine Labs) and Josh Wagner (Enterprise Account Executive, LeadMD) discussed B2B Sales and the SDR model, how building a side hustle gives you strong business experience, and how B2B companies should be applying B2C marketing approaches. For more content, subscribe to State of Demand Gen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Tired of just listening? Check out Refine Labs on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Earlier this year we stopped in with LeadMD (Phoenix, AZ) where Chris Walker (CEO, Refine Labs) and Andrea Lechner-Becker (CMO, LeadMD) chat about B2B Marketing, how marketing attribution misses the power and impact of word-of-mouth, and why companies are so driven by net new customer acquisition.

Buyer centricity has long been the war cry for marketers and sellers alike, but the recent Global pandemic, economic crisis, and even civil unrest has proven that the reality falls desperately short of the promise. The root of the issue resides in the fact that marketing and selling, at least under ‘business as usual guidelines’, feel trite. The traditional go-to-market motions that many organizations have built come with a dependence on some degree of sleight of hand. The promise of “results” is propped up by practices that neither understand the true needs of Buyers nor feel any ownership in achieving them. We’re living through events that have the potential to finally force true change. The only organizations surviving and in many cases thriving in the current environment are those that both had formed true relationships with their buyers and were agile enough to respond to how the market was affecting those individuals and others like them. About Mike's guest: Justin Gray Founder & CEO, LeadMD Justin is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of LeadMD, the world’s largest revenue performance consultancy, having implemented over half of the Marketo user base. Justin has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them, with successful exits of over 200MM+ in the last decade. Justin’s latest endeavor launched in 2016 when he co-founded Six Bricks an online learning startup designed to combat employee and customer churn through experience-based education. Over the past 10 years, Justin has emerged as a strong voice for entrepreneurship, marketing, and culture. As a recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 350 times in industry publications and holds his own column, Tribal Knowledge in Inc., while writing for Entrepreneur, Tech Crunch, and others. Justin and his wife Jennifer met over marketing and three years later welcomed their son, Grayson, into the world in April of 2017 and a daughter in November 2019. This episode of WVU Marketing Communications Today is hosted by Michael Lynch from West Virginia University which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.     

In this episode, we dive further into the concepts of sales enablement and the connection to revenue enablement within organizations. Jamie Kirmess, Principal at LeadMD, joins as our guest to discuss how B2B companies can leverage sales enablement to support better connectivity between sales and marketing, digitalization, change management, and ultimately revenue enablement. Jamie shares real life examples of how LeadMD's clients have applied sales enablement strategies in their business to drive better marketing results and increased revenue. She also leaves listeners with 3 powerful concepts that can be immediately applied in their business. Links from the episode: Jamie Kirmess's LinkedIn profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiekirmess/ Klyck.io Website - https://klyck.io LeadMD Website - https://www.leadmd.com

In this week's Father’s of The Future podcast, I share some good times and positive vibrations in the ZOOM ROOM with my boy Josh Wagner. Josh is the host of the "Love Selling Hate Sales" podcast, Celebrates his marriage of over 13 years, and has 3 children including a SPICY 4-year-old girl. Josh and I first met in 2011 after Josh had "Maxed Out" his results in the home gym and somehow found me and "Thee CrossFit Scottsdale" as we just so happened to be running a 24-hour W.O.D or workout of the day that was absolutely insane and still is. The rest of our story is HISTORY! In this EXPERIENCE we discuss... Modern Marketing Security and Safety Powerful Parenting Economic Advantage Influential leadership Building a home gym Art Vs Science of Sales Ideal Customer Profile Life after the pandemic Modeling positive behavior Connections/ Communication/Relationships Power of Proximity in building long term relationships For all of Josh's SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION check out the links below. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJQYyvXyd44Us5SO5noadMA For more info on LeadMD visit... https://www.leadmd.com/about/ For more info on Josh Wagner visit... http://joshwagner.info/ linkedin linkedin.com/in/joshwagneraz If you are a Father and want to learn more about any of the programs we discussed in this episode visit www.LukeKayyem.com or email Luke at Luke@LukeKayyem.com and in the subject line write Fathers of the Future! You can also Follow Luke and join the Fathers of the Future movement on Instagram and Facebook @lukekayyem, www.FathersoftheFuture.com

In this episode, Josh and Kyle discuss:What does the recent M&A activity mean for MOPs and SOPs teams?Best of Breed vs All-in-One Software - What to choose?Creating a business case for marketing software.How to use technology for ABM pilots?What can we expect in the coming years from marketing, sales, and technology?About Josh WagnerJosh started out like many sales professionals, cold calling! He knew early on there had to be a better way and adopted content marketing strategies to further his career. While honing his skills with basic email marketing tools and social strategies he found and fully embraced marketing automation as a way to fuel sales success. As a former client, LeadMD was there to help him build a better sales and marketing engine during his time as the Sales and Marketing Director for a Phoenix-based e-learning company. Now leading the Sales team for LeadMD, Josh brings enthusiasm and passion for helping his team and LeadMD customers accelerate revenue growth.When not "bringing home the bacon" Josh loves to spend time with his wife and their 3 funny little humans. What time is leftover is spent throwing some weight around in his garage gym.About Kyle HamerA sales and marketing veteran with a deep understanding of strategy, digital marketing execution, and using technology to enhance brand impact. A hands-on leader with a passion for solving business challenges with process, operations, and technology. When Kyle's not tinkering on businesses, you'll find him spending time with those he loves, learning about incredible people, and making connections.About Hamer Marketing GroupMarket growth for a new product or service is often limited by market distractions, unreliable data, or systems not built to scale. Hamer Marketing Group helps companies build data-driven strategies focused on client acquisition and sales development supported by the technology and operations necessary to create profitable growth. on

Strategic selling starts with trust. And when someone chooses to work with a marketer at an agency, they're pretty much putting their job into your hands.  In this episode, I interview Andrea Lechner-Becker, CMO at LeadMD, about selling strategically vs. functionally.   What we talked about: Selling strategically versus selling functionally  What it's like selling people's brains and problem-solving abilities If you write a novel about only having 60 days to live, you gain a new outlook on life How Andrea stepped away from her job to work on a passion project for a year   Check out this resource we mentioned during the podcast: Andrea's debut novel, Sixty Days Left Check out this and other episodes of The Marketer's Journey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play!

In this episode, Dave Karr hosts a chat with Josh Wagner (Director of Partnerships, LeadMD) to discuss concepts from Klyck.io's most recent eBook, the 2020 Digital Roadmap for Industrial Sales and Marketing. Topics include sales and marketing alignment, marketing automation, CRM, sales enablement, and how to apply digital tools for success. Resources referenced in the Podcast: Download Klyck's new eBook here - 2020 Digital Roadmap eBook Request a demo of Klyck.io's sales enablement platform - https://klyck.io/request-a-demo/ Josh Wagner's LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshwagneraz/ LeadMD's Website - https://www.leadmd.com Info on Klyck.io - https://klyck.io

LeadMD is based on a set of core values that focuses on enabling uncommon talent and a set of marketing principles designed to create catalyst moments within our clients.Justin is also an angel investor.Now, if you want to hear a well polished entrepreneur, this is your episode. Everything about Justin is just clean. He’s the type of leader that everyone should aspire to be and he’s done it all without receiving an ounce of funding. Links mentioned in interview:---------------------------https://www.leadmd.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/leadmd/https://twitter.com/Jgraymatter Follow Us:----------Podcast Website:http://www.tbeshow.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/grzybowskijYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9lkipQ_wV2vmzspwtdA7hQ Sponsors:---------Penji helps businesses by making graphic design simple, fast, and affordable for all. By delivering unlimited graphic design, Penji’s customers are able to shift their focus back to their customers and business.. Follow Penji Here:------------------Website: https://penji.coInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dotpenji

On this edition of Money Savage CREATE, we talked about the importance of staying closely connected to what matters most, evolving as a leader, being a good steward of our responsibilities, and the value of feedback with Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD, Principal of Graymatter Ventures and Partner at Greyson Organics.  Listen to learn how to recognize when a problem isn’t solvable and how to move on! You can learn more about Justin at LeadMD.com, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For the Difference Making Tip, scan ahead to 22:52! Time to get your Mind, Body and Money right?  StriveDetox.com Interested in starting your own podcast?  Click HERE George is honored to be included on Investopedia's list of the Top 100 Financial Advisors for 2019! You can learn more about the show at GeorgeGrombacher.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook or contact George at Contact@GeorgeGrombacher.com.  Check out Money Alignment Academy as well!

Program host, Jim Obermayer, read a recent press release from LeadMD and what caught his eye was the 133% growth figure for their year over year sales so far in 2019. “Why” is the question Obermayer asked the company. The answer prompted the interview for this program with Justin Gray the CEO of LeadMD. His response is both interesting and predictable for a company that counts several thousand companies as its clients. Justin Gray bio (Founder, CEO) Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur who has launched four multi-million- dollar companies, become a recognized speaker and has been published over 350 times throughout his career. Justin is the CEO and founder of LeadMD, a role he’s held for the past ten years. He also co-founded PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and led the company through a successful acquisition in 2017. He is the co-founder of Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri he co-owns and operates with his father, as well. Justin and his wife, Jennifer, met over marketing in 2013, welcomed their first child, Grayson, in 2018 and are expecting a daughter in November 2019.  Bob Blount bio (Vice President of Sales) Bob Blount is a passionate sales/marketing and business development leader focused on profitability, accountability, and results. He has 20 years of sales and marketing experience and 10 years of business development, SaaS, marketing, account-based marketing, digital communications experience. He is a former Board Chairman of MedicAlert Foundation and has received recognition including top sales awards, most profitable sales team awards and has been named one of Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) top 100. Bob joined LeadMD as Vice President of Sales earlier this month. About LeadMD LeadMD is the number one performance marketing consultancy in the U.S. Launched in 2009, LeadMD empowers marketers to drive revenue and customer success. The company focuses on people, processes, and technology that create predictable and sustainable revenue for high growth and enterprise brands. LeadMD has helped thousands of brands improve and deliver value through strategy and proven tactics that work. For more information, visit https://www.leadmd.com or email at go@leadmd.com.  

Program host, Jim Obermayer, read a recent press release from LeadMD and what caught his eye was the 133% growth figure for their year over year sales so far in 2019. “Why” is the question Obermayer asked the company. The answer prompted the interview for this program with Justin Gray the CEO of LeadMD. His response is both interesting and predictable for a company that counts several thousand companies as its clients. Justin Gray bio (Founder, CEO) Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur who has launched four multi-million- dollar companies, become a recognized speaker and has been published over 350 times throughout his career. Justin is the CEO and founder of LeadMD, a role he’s held for the past ten years. He also co-founded PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and led the company through a successful acquisition in 2017. He is the co-founder of Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri he co-owns and operates with his father, as well. Justin and his wife, Jennifer, met over marketing in 2013, welcomed their first child, Grayson, in 2018 and are expecting a daughter in November 2019.  Bob Blount bio (Vice President of Sales) Bob Blount is a passionate sales/marketing and business development leader focused on profitability, accountability, and results. He has 20 years of sales and marketing experience and 10 years of business development, SaaS, marketing, account-based marketing, digital communications experience. He is a former Board Chairman of MedicAlert Foundation and has received recognition including top sales awards, most profitable sales team awards and has been named one of Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) top 100. Bob joined LeadMD as Vice President of Sales earlier this month. About LeadMD LeadMD is the number one performance marketing consultancy in the U.S. Launched in 2009, LeadMD empowers marketers to drive revenue and customer success. The company focuses on people, processes, and technology that create predictable and sustainable revenue for high growth and enterprise brands. LeadMD has helped thousands of brands improve and deliver value through strategy and proven tactics that work. For more information, visit https://www.leadmd.com or email at go@leadmd.com.  

Paul works for a Marketing Consulting Agency called LeadMD a local AZ company. He has over a decade of experience in sales and marketing at organizations spanning from enterprises to start-ups. Paul focuses on how solutions resolve customer pain points, Paul always brings a level of optimism to all engagements as he believes in Win-Win situations, being helpful, and building meaningful relationships. Paul is passionate about marketing consulting because due to his sales role Paul has the ability to affect someone's life both personally and professionally. Paul believes that the problem with sales is that there is so much pressure around selling, hitting quota, sales managers breathing down your neck, then how do you do that to preserve your integrity and play the long term game. To learn more about Paul and LeadMD check out their website at www.leadmd.com or shoot Paul an email at paul@leadmd.com and you can connect with him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/pkchadwick/ Please Like, Subscribe, and Comment below! #marketingconsulting #agency #LeadMD #sales #marketing #salesmanager #arizona #growth #success #podcast #InspirationthroughGrulerNation #inspire #gruler #inspiration #GrulerNation #GrulerNationPodcast #gnp #arizonapodcast #scottsdale #yesphx #phx The Gruler Nation Podcast is a show that focuses on conversations with interesting "Level 10" people passionate about changing the world with their work, relationships and ideas. The show is hosted by Robert Gruler, an attorney and founding partner of the R&R Law Group, a criminal defense law firm based in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on helping good people charged with crimes move forward with their lives. Interested in being on the show or have a guest recommendation? Email Robert directly at robert@rrlawaz.com or visit www.robgruler.com for more information. Support the show (https://www.ericshouse.org/donate/)

  Program host, Jim Obermayer, read a recent press release from LeadMD and what caught his eye was the 133% growth figure for their year over year sales so far in 2019.   “Why” is the question Obermayer asked the company.  The answer prompted the interview for this program with Justin Gray the CEO of LeadMD.  His response is both interesting and predictable for a company that counts several thousand companies as its clients. ----more---- Justin Gray bio (Founder, CEO) Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur who has launched four multi-million- dollar companies, become a recognized speaker and has been published over 350 times throughout his career. Justin is the CEO and founder of LeadMD, a role he’s held for the past ten years. He also co-founded PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and led the company through a successful acquisition in 2017. He is the co-founder of Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri he co-owns and operates with his father, as well. Justin and his wife, Jennifer, met over marketing in 2013, welcomed their first child, Grayson, in 2018 and are expecting a daughter in November 2019.  Bob Blount bio (Vice President of Sales) Bob Blount is a passionate sales/marketing and business development leader focused on profitability, accountability, and results. He has 20 years of sales and marketing experience and 10 years of business development, SaaS, marketing, account-based marketing, digital communications experience. He is a former Board Chairman of MedicAlert Foundation and has received recognition including top sales awards, most profitable sales team awards and has been named one of Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) top 100. Bob joined LeadMD as Vice President of Sales earlier this month. About LeadMD LeadMD is the number one performance marketing consultancy in the U.S. Launched in 2009, LeadMD empowers marketers to drive revenue and customer success. The company focuses on people, processes, and technology that create predictable and sustainable revenue for high growth and enterprise brands. LeadMD has helped thousands of brands improve and deliver value through strategy and proven tactics that work. For more information, visit https://www.leadmd.com or email at go@leadmd.com.  

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.

Michael Davis is the VP of Client Success at LeadMD. Michael collaborates with executives and decision makers to pinpoint business challenges within sales, marketing and system architecture to identify key opportunities for revenue growth. He also designs and prioritizes tailored strategies to accelerate business impact for high growth, mid-market, and enterprise companies in B2B and B2C environments. Renee welcomed Michael to the podcast to share his Top 3 Ways to Measure the Revenue Impact of Marketing. They discussed the importance to defining the customer lifecycle and aligning KPIs and compensation structure. They also discuss the stratospheric rise in martech, and why companies should keep their tech stack as lean as possible, buying technology last (if at all).

On the very first Ground Table, Databox’s John Bonini is joined by Andrea Lechner-Becker (CMO at LeadMD), John McTigue (former EVP and cofounder at Kuno Creative) and Pete Caputa (CEO at Databox) to discuss how the website conversion has evolved. Are website forms dying? Are chatbots and/or live chat really a better experience? Should you really still be gating your content? Tune in to hear the debate. Check out the report referenced throughout the episode here: https://databox.com/website-form-conversion-rates

LeadMD is a bootstrapped marketing agency who have helped over 3,000 high growth and enterprise clients like Forbes and eBay. Having started in 2009, they’ve implemented over half of the Marketo user base and last year they generated $5.6M in sales! Tune in as Justin Gray shares their success story and more! Topics Discussed in this Episode: [05:35] Figuring out your customer type and bridging the gap between knowing the type of customers you want to serve and actually getting them [08:00] Partnership strategies and how to get good results [10:40] How LeadMD figured out their pricing model, why they chose to put their pricing on the site, and how they engaged their customers [15:00] How to productize services [17:33] Nailing down your hiring practices and the core values to look for when hiring people [23:56] Training people to be able to deliver success for your business [26:56] LeadMD’s content marketing strategy Key Takeaways: When you’re a bootstrapped organic business, you can’t afford to spend time anywhere that’s not going to yield some type of result. There’s a high degree of customization that comes in when you’re working client to client, especially in the enterprise. There always comes a point in the hiring process where you can’t be involved in every interview or get the entire team’s input. That’s the point where you have to have your hiring practices really nailed down. With content marketing, it’s about targeting the right content at the right buyer at the right time. Action Steps: Work with a partner by embedding your business into their processes Productize your services by defining them, identifying the milestones that go with each product, determining the tasks that roll up to those milestones, and putting a default value of time. Deliver consistent outcomes and outputs by consistently training consultants and providing an accurate baseline scope. Hire people focusing on their fundamental traits and personalities. Justin said: “Skills can be taught, they can be augmented, but someone’s personality traits cannot.” “Customer sentiment and putting people in the organization towards managing the customer relationship is critical.” More from Justin Gray: LeadMD Justin’s Twitter Resources mentioned in this episode: Marketo SaaStr Sponsor link 14-day Free Trial to LeadQuizzes Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast! And don’t forget to leave me a rating and a review on iTunes!

Helping us move from awareness to action this week in a special live performance is Justin Gray. Justin is the CEO of LeadMD as well as Six Bricks. You can find out more about Justin and what he’s working on at LeadMD.com, SixBricks.com Facebook, and Twitter. For templates of letters/emails and or talking points referenced in the show, or simply to say “hi” click here.

This week we talk with Justin Gray, the CEO and founder of LeadMD, co-founder of PaidSuite,  co-owner of Greyson Organics (an organic farm in rural Missouri), and co-founder of Six Bricks. Justin, who grew up in Fountain Hills and attended the University of Arizona, talks with us about his passion for entrepreneurship and modern-day marketing - topics he has written and spoken about extensively.  Justin has been published over 300 times in industry publications and holds his own column, Tribal Knowledge in Inc., as well as featured contributor statuses with Entrepreneur and others. We cover a wide range of topics including how he approaches writing (and why it is important for marketers to hone this skill), when should founders get out of the way, the importance of culture and values governing behavior, his views on unicorns and hiring, empathy, and the concept of 1+1=4. Also, check out Justin's podcast - Driven & Co. - which examines guests' "unconventional roads to leadership."  Great stuff! SELECT LINKS FROM THE PODCAST Connect with Justin: Email, Twitter, LinkedIn Billions Ear Hustle S-Town Arizona Chamber of Commerce contact@azoriginals.net

Reed Clarke — Selling Professional Services It’s all based on relationships Full show notes complete with shareable clips and links to items mentioned in the show available at: http://top1.fm/27 This episode was sponsored by ViewedIt by Vidyard. Get the free chrome extension today: http://top1.fm/v Reed Clarke is the top Solution Consulting Director at LeadMD, based out of Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the first professional seller on the show coming from the the consulting space, as opposed to product sales space. Reed shares how he has managed to rise to the top of his team in just over a year of being there, as well as the lessons he has learned in his extensive sales career. Tune in to this episode for some insights into establishing relationships with prospects, as well as how selling professional services differs from selling product-based solutions.

Liz Stuart, Vice President of Operations - Partner Alliances and Customer Experience at Advanced Systems Group, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss the view of the channel from the reseller side, how to be successful reseller, what it means to have a good relationship with your vendor partner and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Transcription   Announcer: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host, Jen Spencer, as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast: The fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners. Jen: Hi and welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer here at Allbound, and today I'm joined by Liz Stuart, who is Vice President of Operations of Partner Alliances and Customer Experience at Advanced Systems Group. And I'm really excited to have Liz on the podcast today because she is bringing us the perspective of the partner. And we've only had that one other time before with Justin Gray from LeadMD. Normally, where I'm talking to channel sales and marketing leaders, but I think this is such a great way for our audience to really step into their partner shoes. So, to start it off Liz, you've been there for about 17 years. You probably know every nook of the place. Can you tell us a little bit about Advanced Systems Group? Liz: Sure. First, I'll say thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast. I'm a huge fan, so I'm really honored to be here today and talk about kind of what the partner experience looks like. ASG, we've been in business for 37 years. We started off as a Computer Land franchise and pretty quickly turned into a value-added reseller or solution provider. We have historically focused in the storage space, and today we're really looking at object storage, and software-defined networking, and kind of software-defined everything. Jen: Wonderful. I wanna dig into some of your experience and some accolades actually. You were named one of CRN's 2016 Women of the Channel for your role in driving profitable growth and facilitating stronger channel alliances for ASG. Can you share a little bit about how you've grown these relationships with your vendors? Liz: Sure. So, one of the things that we did as a company about 10 years ago, or maybe a little bit longer than that was we developed a role or a group of people that we align with our strategic partnerships. And basically, that's the vendor alliance manager, strategic alliance manager. These folks are aligned to our partners and their purpose is to have a deep understanding of who the partner is, their people, meaning their org charts, and that changes a lot, the processes, the programs, certifications that are required, and to bridge the gap between the vendor partner with our sales and engineering teams and then onto operations as well. This role is critical to our successful with our vendor ecosystem because that changes often and trust with our vendor ecosystem is so very important and that person helps keep that continuity and keep the repeatability of the consistency and the repeatability of the relationship and how we go to market. Jen: Excellent. I want, you know, to get some partner perspective from you. You know, ASG is a reseller for a lot of companies like HP, and Oracle, VMware, Cisco, NetApp, and Hitachi. Can you share a little bit about your relationships with those vendor partners? I'd love to hear what those partners have done to help you be successful in selling their solutions and products. Liz: Sure. So we have a mix of what I would call the industry giants. Some of the ones that you just mentioned and we also have our boutique-type partnerships or the smaller-type partnerships. And I think having a mix of those is the recipe for success. You know, from the industry giants, you're gonna have consistency in their programs and go-to-market. There won't be a lot of surprises there. They're gonna be very process-driven, and probably move a little bit slower than some of these…some of the boutique-type on partnerships. Now, on the smaller and boutique-type vendors, they're gonna bring agility and focus. They tend to move faster. They provide great service. And it's nice partnering with them because they're not gonna get processed...they're not gonna let process slow them down or getting the way of providing great service, and they tend to be a little bit more scrappy. Jen: Great. I love that. Liz: Yeah. Jen: And, you know, are there any trends that you've seen? You know, thinking about those different vendors, whether they are those larger organizations or those smaller scrappy ones, any trends you're seeing some of your vendors moving towards as a whole? I mean, just in the time that you've been working in like a channel operations type of a role, what shifts have you seen these organizations making to help support you? Liz: So, one of the things that I think we're all hearing about is, you know, the buyer journey is evolving. And I think it makes sense that the partnership journey should also evolve too. And vendor partners that we're having a lot of success with, get that. So they're looking at unconventional ways of partnering and meeting the customer, a lot of times that's us, right? Where we are, meaning they're continuously educating on solutions, and processes, and programs. It's not a one and done, right? They're not gonna show up and do a lunch and learn and not see them again till the next QBR. The ones that we're seeing a lot of success with are the ones that come to you, they set an agenda, they...we agree to mutual of our goals, we have a mutual understanding of what their KPIs are, what we need from them and what their expectations of us are. And then we can deliver to that and then they can do the same. And I think it's that transparent and open reciprocal conversation that's just going on all the time with the partners that are...that we're really successful with. Jen: Do you have a...I'm just, you know...I'm curious about this. Do you ever have experiences with one particular vendor that you're like, "This work so well," and then do you share that with another vendor or do you try to really compartmentalize your interactions? Liz: I think it's important to share. And yes, we do wherever we can share it and try to repeat that if we're having great success. And we ask for the same of our partners. So one of our questions I have, when I'm on boarding a new vendor, is, "What have you seen work?" Or if we're struggling with a vendor, if a vendor feels like they're struggling with us, I'll go to them and say, "What does your best partnership look like? And what does that...who is that partner or what does that partner look like? Do they have the same DNA as us," right? And one of the things that I find is, you know, vendors because you're a large solution provider, will want you to sign up with them. They expect that all of your sales and engineering teams are gonna sign up to sell their solutions, and they're disappointed when they don't. And I think a lot of times it's because the homework hasn't been done to make sure that there's a good match between us as a solution provider and what their...the vendor solution is. And a lot of times that is...that's where the relationships tend to go sideways or not necessarily bloom the way the vendor expected them to bloom. Jen: Oh, that makes perfect sense. There's an article that you wrote that was called "Tips for Building a Mentor-Mentee Relationship." And it digs into some best practices for really getting the most out of those relationships, and it spoke to me because you wrote it with the intended audience of women in technology, and which is something that's a passion of mine. I'm, you know, on the board of Girls in Tech Phoenix group here in Phoenix, Arizona, but when I was reading it, I really believed that your tips can be applied to partnerships as well. And, you know, from the view of the partner, how can your tips for working with a mentor, how do you think those can translate to working with the vendor? Liz: So, when you're working with a mentor or a mentee basically you're building a relationship that's based on trust and mutual respect. And I think that's very, very important when you're building relationship with a vendor partner, building that trust, building that mutual respect. And that usually comes when you spend time getting to know each other, right? So the tips, I think, are being respectful of each other's time. So when you do meet with each other, you have an agenda for your meeting, you set goals, and you assign ownership to each other, right? So the vendor will have some goals that they want us to meet. They'll assign it to specific people. Vice versa, we'll have some goals that we want the vendor to meet, and we'll make sure that there's follow-through there. And the biggest thing is the follow-through. I mean, one of the things that I tend to see is, you know, a vendor comes in, say, "Here's what we need to do for the next quarter," and then you just don't hear that much from the vendor until the next quarter. So, I really strongly believe in having a cadence and the vendors meeting us where we are, meaning, you know, being in our offices, officing in our offices. That's they're gonna get the most thing for their buck when they're highly visible to our executive leadership as well as sales and operations, and engineering. So in doing, that those are the key components of building that trust and the mutual respect. And I really just really, really believe that a great partnership is when the relationship is reciprocal. Jen: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's so critical. And, you know, if you think when organizations build these partnerships, I don't think...you know no one sets out to do it poorly, right? Like, no one sets out going. Liz: Right. Jen: "I'm gonna set these goals and then I'm not gonna follow through on that." So everyone, you know, will have these, like, aspirations of what we want this to be. And you mentioned kind of having these sort of cadences. So is it best for the vendor to have sort of a prescribed sort of system that they will go...they go through? I mean, how do you hold each other accountable for that follow-through? Liz: I think that's the best ways when there is a set prescribed system, you know. And we...every vendor is a little bit different. Whenever my vendor alliances folks are meeting with their vendors, we basically tell them, "This is what we see working. This is what works. And if that works for you, we'd love to build a cadence with you, whether that's once a week, once a month, whatever that might look like." And depending on their role at the vendor, it may or may not work, right? So it just depends on who we're working with. But, yes, I do believe having something that's repeatable and consistent is a key. Jen: And, you know, because it's so...it's just so great having kind of your perspective on here, I'm wondering, you know, if you could give sort of a piece of advice to someone who's trying to manage all of the information that comes in and the processes that are part of being a value-added reseller. I mean, what advice would you give that person? Liz: I would give, the advice that I would give is to do a deep dive. There are so many ways that we can be profitable working with our vendor partners. So deep-dive into all of their programs, their financial programs, their deal reg programs, every single program that they have and understand who they are and understand your partner managers, what their KPIs are, and make sure they understand what yours are and what your goals are for the future. And make sure you can tell your company's story, because you're selling your company as much they're selling their company, and you want them to work with you as much as you wanna work with them. So, as much as they want to work with you, so, I think that it's critical to have open dialogue and be transparent in that way and make sure that your goals align with each other, and always be working on building that relationship and making it more successful. And if there are areas that fail, you know, learn from those mistakes, move on and try new things. I mean, I think one of the things that I...one of the other things that I'm seeing a lot is trying to think outside of the box about how you partner and how you go to market with vendors or partners. You know, trying to think unconventionally and thinking about what the customers' needs are. And our customers, they're going a million miles an hour just like we are, so thinking about what are their needs, right? Do they really wanna attend another basketball game or is there something that I can provide to them where I can get in front of them, that maybe they can have their family with them because they wanna be spending time with their family? So just thinking outside of the box. If they're passionate about doing community work or volunteerism then maybe you partner with them in that way. And, man, that's...you know, what a way to build the strong partnership is by volunteering together. So, I think there are so many unique ways that you can partner with vendors and your customers for that matter, that we just have to kind of think outside of the traditional box. Jen: You know I love that. And because what you're saying is, you really have to understand and get to know this person. I mean, it's a relationship. It's just like when you… Liz: Exactly. Jen: …meet a new friend or when you start dating somebody. You're going to engage in activities and do things that are going to be, you know, shared and enjoyed, you know, among that group. And so, that makes perfect sense. And so, we do kind of have to throw away some of our old playbooks of, you know, delivering over, you know, logoed, logo with polo shirts or… Liz: Yeah. Jen: You know, yeah, or the boxes at a basketball game like, you know, you were referencing. Is that something that the customer or that the vendor or, you know, your team actually cares about? And I think in order to do that, in order to actually execute on this advice, gosh, there's gotta be like cultural alignment, right? Like, you've gotta have...at your level, you know, you've gotta be part of an organization that's culturally open to that transparency and that collaboration. And then the vendor has to have that same kind of culture as well. And its how do you make sure that before you start engaging with a partner on that level, that you've got that culture alignment? I mean, do you have any advice for that? Liz: That's the million-dollar question, right? And that is...that's part of what my vendor alliances team work so diligently on, right? And they spend so much time getting to know the vendor, understanding our internal data. You know, where the vendor might be a fit. It might not be a fit in one region, but it might be a great fit in another region because of their product mix or their cultural mix. And we're pretty consistent across the board, but there is some tendencies in different...there's different tendencies in different regions. So, that's part of what the vendor alliances team does is they...you know, they operate on data and they look at who the vendor is, what changes have been happening at the vendor, what changes have been happening internally, and really work hard to bridge that gap. And hopefully, the trust that our internal team has with our field sales team will help build the trust with the vendor partner so that that cultural connection happen easier, faster, better. Jen: Excellent. Awesome. Okay, Liz, before I actually let you go, you know, you listen to the podcast, so you know what I'm gonna do right now. I'm gonna ask you some... Liz: Yes I do. Jen: ...random personal questions. Okay. So my first question for you is what is your favorite city? Liz: San Francisco. Jen: Okay. So because that's my favorite city also I'm gonna ask you why. Why do you love San Francisco? Liz: So, I grew up in the East Bay, and I love all things Northern California, but specifically around San Francisco, there is just an energy in that city. Every time I go there it just...it feels like home, it looks like home. It's just a great city. And the food is excellent too. So, I mean, it's just...it's beautiful. It's just everything about it. Jen: Awesome. Well, from one East Bay girl to another I agree. Agree 100%. Liz: I love it. Jen: Okay, second question, are you an animal lover? Liz: Of course. I love all animals, but for pets, I love dogs that don't shed, so I have a Shih-Tzu Poodle mix and he is the best little companion for our family. He is great. And he's been with us for eight or nine years and loves kids and he's just as easy...so yeah, that definitely, I'm a dog lover. Jen: Wonderful. Oh, what's his name? Liz: Charger. Jen: Charger, cute. Liz: Yeah. Jean: Okay, question number three, Mac or PC? Liz: PC. Jen: All right. And question number four. If I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to? Liz: So, I am feeling a little nostalgic, so I'm gonna say I would go to the Azores islands. They're a group of nine volcanic islands west of the continental Portugal. And I've been to one of the islands, Terceira Island, twice. My parents are both from that island. And one of the things that I've always kinda dreamed of doing is going to all nine of those islands and immersing myself in that, in my culture, as it is my culture. So, that's one of the places I'd love to spend some time and take an extended vacation. Jen: That sounds wonderful. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me about channel and share a little bit from a reseller's perspective. It was great. If any of any listeners wanna reach out to you personally, maybe they have more questions, you know, what's the best way for them to get hold of you? Liz: They can email me at liz@virtual.com or I'm on LinkedIn at Liz Stuart, and it's S-T-U-A-R-T. Jen: Wonderful. Well, thanks again for your time, and thanks everyone for tuning in. And we'll catch you next time with an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast. Have a great day. Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, #NeverSellAlone.

Justin Gray, CEO and founder at LeadMD, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss partner relationships and breakups, trusting data, success in the channel and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Transcription   Man: Effective selling takes an ecosystem. Join host, Jen Spencer, as she explores how to supercharge your sales and master the art of never selling alone. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, the fundamentals of accelerating growth with partners.   Jen: Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound, and today I am joined by Justin Gray, who is CEO and founder of LeadMD. Welcome, Justin.   Justin: Thanks for having me.   Jen: Well, it's so good to have you, and for those of you who are listening who don't know, Justin brings a lot of expertise, I'm really excited to have him on the podcast. In addition to being the CEO and founder of LeadMD, he's also a weekly columnist at Inc., the CEO and cofounder at Six Bricks, managing partner at Gray Matter Ventures, partner at Grayson Organics, and CMO and cofounder at PaidSuite. That's a lot. You're a busy, busy man.   Justin: It's a mouthful.   Jen: Yeah. I'm sure our listeners are going to be able to gain a wealth of knowledge from you. So, Justin, tell us a little bit about these companies that you work with.   Justin: Sure, I've kind of picked different organizations up along the way almost by accident, but, really, the centerpiece organization that I'm a part of is LeadMD, a digital marketing consultancy. Out of that kind of sprung the need to educate and match great marketers with employers, and that's what Six Bricks does. I've since formed a little venture, a very little venture organization called Gray Matter Ventures that I'm using to feed organizations, including Six Bricks. Then I've got some other ventures in the payments world, and then a very unprofitable labor of love known as Grayson Organics, which is actually my family's farm that we converted into organic in 2008 and have been running small field crops ever since.   Jen: That's awesome. So, what we talk about here on the show is partner programs and partner channels. And, so being a founder, a cofounder, on the executive team of these organizations, you have a lot of experience running companies and contributing to these organizations. In your experience, when do you think the best time is to start a partner channel program?   Justin: Yeah, it's kind of like that old question of when's the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago, the second best today. Obviously it does depend on the business model. The payments business that I'm a part of operates exclusively through the channel, so we started that organization with the notion that we would be managing and maintaining a completely outsourced sales channel to sell and implement our products. So, look at the model through which you want to sell, if that's going to be totally outsourced to the channel, or if that's going to be a blend.   Have a consorted channel strategy right from the beginning and tackle really difficult questions like who's going to market on behalf of the organization, are you going to do it from a corporate level, are you going to shove that down to and empower the franchisees or channel partners to do that on their own behalf? Those are decisions that are always best made right upfront, and so I think just as with anything, developing a really strong strategy from the beginning and executing towards that consistently is what we see as a recipe for growth.   Jen: Would you mind sharing why you decided to sell exclusively through channel for that organization?   Justin: Yeah, so sales is all about trust, and that particular organization, which is PaidSuite, sells integrated payment products. So we looked at the marketplace and we could've formed our own inside sales channel and tried to penetrate the market from scratch, but, instead, we chose to actually partner with software organizations and ISOs that already had existing relationships and add our suite of products to their repertoire. So, it just really allowed us to break down those trust barriers, accelerated our speed to market, and led to a good deal of success within that business. I think, had we chosen to try to kind of brute force it and spin up our own inside sales channel, it would've been a much longer time to market. It would've been a lot more investment on education and training, and just empowering that force. So, again, it was the right decision for us based on what we wanted to accomplish in the business within our first 24 months.   Jen: Oh, it makes perfect sense, absolutely. I think what's really cool about you and your perspective is that you have that business where you are going to market through these partners, but then with LeadMD, you are a partner of many technology organizations that I know a lot of our listeners would know about. And, so you get to see both sides of it, and that, I think, brings this other layer of expertise to you that a lot of people don't have. Most people pretty much live on one side of the fence or the other.     Justin: Right. Yeah, actually, one of our strongest verticals is channel sales. We've got organizations like Blue Cross Blue Shield, we've got a lot of med device organizations, Mobi, just organizations that are dependent upon that extra layer of support, and again that provides a lot of interesting challenges from a marketing standpoint. It presents a lot of opportunities to empower those sales channels, educate them, and, obviously, we got to keep them up-to-date on the quickly evolving world that we all live in. So, definitely a huge amount of opportunity, and then we really do see the folks that are empowering their channel partners through marketing and through education. That's a strategic advantage for our organization, absolutely.   Jen: Let's talk more about that. With all of your experience, I'm sure you've created a number of strategic alliances that have been fruitful. Maybe you've even seen some that have fell flat, whether they're partnerships that you've been a part of or that you've been supporting from an agency perspective. I'm wondering if there was any sort of recipe or repeating factor that you could recognize in a partner or in a partnership that would signal this makes sense, this is a mutually beneficial alliance.   Justin: Yeah, and that's always a really difficult prediction to have right upfront. My crystal ball is broken, so what may seem like a great partnership where everyone's aligned and we're going to go to market together and achieve this awesome amount of success is often not the case. You really need to be careful about whether this is going to be truly a value equation, as we term it, presenting equal value on both sides. And, so we've tried to get more formalized throughout the years at LeadMD as we've taken a look at the types of partners that we would potentially want to work with, the types of partnerships that have worked well in the past, and really gauge new potentials on that scale. So, we've actually kind of developed a partner evaluation framework that we leverage when we're looking at a new partner.   Having worked with over 3,000 B2B technology organizations, we have a lot of folks that want access to our customer base, but that isn't always a as I mentioned a balanced equation. We're often not getting the same amount as we're putting in there, so we've kind of tried to really hone in on what makes a successful partnership. For us, it really does come down to the fact of can we wrap services around that partner offering? Does it lead to more work, frankly, for our organization? We're a time and materials billing organization, so we need to figure out a way to build clients and provide value. And if the partner solution doesn't enable us to do so, it's a difficult partnership for us. We definitely need to be enabling our customers, and if we can't do that in the form of providing that solution and wrapping our best practices around it, it's not a good solution for us.   Jen: Right, and that's great food for thought for a lot of businesses that are creating these agency partner programs, I'm glad to have that kind of feedback to share with folks. Can you also kind of tell us when you think about the most successful partnerships that you've had, where did they come from? For people that are just starting out and just starting to build their program, is there anything we can learn from some of your most successful endeavors?   Justin: Yeah, our most successful partnership to date is obviously Marketo, and like anything successful in business, I think it comes with a healthy dose of luck. So, there is some unrepeatability around that as well, but I would say that what is a constant between all of our good relationships is we're using that solution in house. We have a relationship with them, they're aligned with our culture and we know that we align from a methodology standpoint. So, I was Marketo's 20th customer way back in 2006. I started using the platform before I was ever a partner at a payments organization, I sold my piece of that payments company, and kind of went out on my own and didn't really know what I wanted to do.   Some folks hit me up and said, "Hey, would you help us build a sales and marketing engine?" and I said, "Yeah, that sounds great, but you're going to have to implement some technologies that I know how to run. So, let's go ahead and implement salesforce.com, let's implement Marketo, and let's really get all of the text back in place to support that repeatable engine." Throughout the years, we kind of grew with Marketo and formed a really strong partnership with them to the point where they would outsource a lot of their work to us. We were participating in deal cycles with their sales reps. We were empowering them where they needed kind of that value engineering consultative approach. A lot of their sales reps just aren't marketing experts, and our folks are. So, we were willing to slot in within that sales process, provide that marketing expertise, and, of course, as a result, we were able to win business.   So, again, it was a win-win throughout that entire life cycle, and that really is why that's our flagship partnership. We've been able to repeat that with a lot of core digital marketing platforms and sales platforms that we brought on. Engagio is probably the newest member of that stable, and, again, we use the software, we see the value in it. We have the expertise in house to really ensure success within the partner orgs that we board on that platform. So, I would say that you can't discount the value of relationships. Relationships really drive everything that we do. I love the way that marketing is currently going, in kind of this quality over quantity aspect, finally. And, at the center of most of those relationships and partnerships is a really tight understanding and alignment that you just don't get when you start taking all-comers.   Jen: Well, I'm glad you mentioned this because you wrote an article fairly recently, and it was called "How to Avoid Getting Eaten Alive by Your Partner Ecosystem." I loved it. If anyone hasn't read it, I recommend when you're done listening, go check it out. It's at leadmd.com/marketplace, we'll also link to it in the show notes. In the article you say, if you want to get to the heart of how well your potential partner performs, become a client first. And, it is really great advice, and I understand from your Marketo story, even from the Engagio perspective, I understand it. Is it a hard and fast rule that you have to use that technology in order to find value? Could you see partnering with an organization if you weren't actually using that product first? Or, is that part of that evaluation criteria that you have?   Justin: I mean, it's one that we feel really strongly about. There's exceptions to every rule, obviously. I would say that there's no better way to really get an understanding of how well that partner treats its customer base, and, therefore, my customer base, than to experience that firsthand. So, we view that as something that's really important to our business. Now, we're also a sales and marketing consultancy who can use all of these products, if a product doesn't have the fit within your stack or within your go-to-market strategy, then I certainly understand that.   It is absolutely my pet peeve when we're up against a competitive deal, and we're up against an agency that doesn't use Marketo themselves. I mean, it's as simple as navigating over to their site and looking at the scripts that are contained on the site. It's like hey, great, you're up against us and a HubSpot partner. Why is the solution that they're proposing to you not good enough for them to use? That's fundamentally part of our sales strategy. We've been using this, we know the ins and outs of it, we don't support any other marketing automation platform, so we feel strongly enough about it to make it an exclusive partner of ours as well. So, we kind of put our money where our mouth is, and, eat our own dog food, drink our own champagne, make up our own bad analogies. It's core to our business. It works for us.   Jen: Yeah, it definitely makes sense. So, back to that article. You mentioned to avoid partnerships where you stand nothing to gain.   Justin: Sounds obvious, right?.   Jen: Yeah, it's obvious. Obvious, right, but, I mean, no one goes into a partnership going, "Well, I'm not going to get anything out of this. Let's jump right in," right? So, it's possible at the start of the relationship everyone's like, "This is going to be amazing," but then as the companies maybe grow, you evolve maybe a partnership becomes one-sided. Maybe you end up doing the heavy lifting without anything in return. Do you have any advice for folks on how to handle that kind of situation? Do you break up? How do you not burn a bridge? Do you hang on hoping there might be something in the long-term that will keep this alive? What advice do you have?   Justin: Yeah, I think there's obviously a couple of facets to that. So, as I mentioned, it sounds super obvious, right, but I would say that there is kind of this aspirational partnership that exists out there. I feel like this happens a lot with big logos. Like, we know they've got a ton of customers and their customers kind of look like our customers. Thinking putting out a press release and putting this logo on our site is going to add so much credibility, but we don't take that extra step to really drill into what are we going to do together? How are we going to realize this value?   I find asking those uncomfortable questions yields the best result. So, yeah, we both operate in the same space, and we've got similar customers, but what are we going to do together, explicitly, tomorrow? Are we going to market together? Are we going to create content? Are we going to do some account planning and alignment exercises? What is success going to look like in 6 months, 12 months, 18 months? How many deals are we going to have boarded? When we board a deal, what is that process going to look like? Am I going to run the majority of the implementation? Do you want to own some as the technology provider?   So, having those really difficult conversations upfront I feel helps to avoid the very difficult conversation down the road where you've been a part of that partnership, you've had the logo on your site for two years, and there's never been anything that's precipitated from that agreement, and now you've got to go back and say, "Hey, this isn't working out." I mean, breaking up is hard to do, so I would say the more that you can really drill in, get explicit, and set up a plan right from jump street, the less you will have to go back and revisit and have those uncomfortable conversations.   So, that's first and foremost. Now, if you haven't done that or things change, conditions change, the landscape looks different, and suddenly you find yourself in that bad position, I think it's best just to use real world data there. Let's look back at the pipeline we've generated together, it's weak to nonexistent. The types of customers that we've boarded maybe are no longer customers, or maybe we weren't able to make those customers happy because of the misalignment of expectations. One of our core tenets is we track everything. If I'm boarding a new partner, I'm tracking that all within CRM. What deals are we working on together? What deals did we swing and miss? What deals did we win? And, then I can pull those reports.   The Marketo partnership has not been all roses and champagne either. Marketo's gone through some pretty big market shifts. During the course of our partnership, they've gone from 20 employees to 1,500 employees. They've gone public, and then they were taken back private. There are major continental shifts that we've seen within that organization, and the org today behaves fundamentally differently than it did when we first rolled out our partnership and I wrote a contract on the back of a napkin. So, as it's progressed, the data has really enabled me to come to those partner conversations and say, "Look, this is data from 2013. Look at the data from '15. You're my largest competitor right now," which at one point Marketo was my largest competitor.   So, you have to be able to back up those shifts with actual data, and what I actually find, certainly within larger organizations, is they're often not well-positioned to gather that data themselves, or there's been so much turnover or process shift internally that they're actually using my dataset as law to describe the success of the partnership. So track everything, and that makes those conversations a little bit easier as you get into that data, and everyone can look at the same thing and agree that, yeah, this isn't working and maybe there's a solution to that, or maybe it's time to go our separate ways. But regardless, we can't blame it on emotion at that point, we want to blame it on something that's tangible, that's real.   Jen: That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there are a lot of organizations that you've partnered with that have benefited from the fact that you are gathering that kind of data. Unfortunately, for a lot of companies that are growing a million miles a minute it does seem sometimes like an afterthought, just this extra thing to do. But, it is extremely important, especially when you're balancing those resources and trying to figure out where to spend your time. So, do you also use that data that you might have with one partnership to help determine what success looks like in another partnership? Do you keep that internally and leverage that as a baseline?   Justin: Yeah, so we'll introduce that baseline in partnership conversations. We're potentially looking at a new partnership right now, and normally the first question out of my mouth is what does your most successful partnership look like? You can get a big feel for how that process is going to go by the data that they're able to present. If they're more on the fluffy side of, "Well, we do some activities together. They sponsor our trade show every year or our conference. We do some marketing together," I'll know that this is not as data-driven as we want it to be because I want to see sales pipeline.   I want to see the amount of revenue that you've closed together in the last 18 months. What does the joint sales cycle look like? So, absolutely, we've taken that data collection and turned it into a benchmark to which we hold other potential partnerships. The question always exists out there of there's this new company and they don't have a long track record, but we think there's a lot of potential. And, those are going to exist.   When we partnered with Engagio, they were less than 12 months old at that point, but, fortunately, they were made up by the who's who of previous Marketo employees. So, there was some faith that was included within that partnership as well, knowing that Jon Miller's not going to start an organization that's going to tank. Again, that's where you have to kind of leverage those relationships, whether it's data-driven or it's relationship-driven, insight is the key out of either one of those points.   Jen: All right. You could say that that relationship originally came out of good data as well, so that was definitely a very, very, very safe bet. Okay. So, I have one last official channel question for you, and that is, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who's really trying to breathe life back into their channel partner program? We see this a lot, we see a lot of organizations who start a program. And they probably under-resourced it, or they expected to do one thing, it does something else, and now they're kind of back at it ready to reinvest. If you could give that person, that organization, or that leader advice, what would it be?   Justin: Yeah, I really do love data, but, moreover, I love getting to the why. I don't just want to hop on a phone call or go to a meeting and ask that question. I want to see it firsthand. So, my number one piece of advice to our internal folks or anyone that's in charge of managing partner relationships is get out there and get embedded within that partner. We love to go out into bullpens and just work for a day and see what those conversations look like at that partner organization. Are they mentioning us? Are they having conversations that we could be assisting but we're not being tapped to come in and be that resource?   I love getting embedded within those environments and just seeing how their process works. Is another partner there when you show up? We've had that happen before. I had one of my competitors literally officing out of Marketo for a while, and we were like, "Wow, we really need to up our game," because they've got a level of access that we're just not taking advantage of right now. So we immediately said, "We'd love to get a cube here and park ourselves two days out of every week." And we flew someone over, and I actually eventually lit up a sales team in San Francisco to be closer to them. That insight would've never come about if I hadn't made a trip over there and just said, "I'm going to sit in your bullpen and see what these conversations sound like." Ultimately, you want to understand what does that sales pitch sound like? Where do they struggle? Where do they need help? Where can I provide some value? Simply saying, "You need to help me sell into your customer base," or, "You need to sell my services," is not going be effective.   Communicating “We have to have a solution-based message. So, when you're running up against this objection, we can help, and I heard your sales reps combat that objection a dozen times when I was out onsite.” So, I really do think that kind of that employee exchange approach is a highly valuable exercise, and, regardless of whether that has to do with partner or any other aspects of the business, I really do encourage our employees to get out there, get embedded with the partner, and understand why aren't we more successful in this partnership? I guarantee you will learn something that you would not have had you not been in that close proximity.   Jen: Absolutely. Gosh, that collaboration is unbelievable. Such good advice, and such an awesome story, too. Now, before we totally wrap this up, at the end of the podcast I always ask people some more kind of personal questions to get to know them a little bit. I make it a speed round, but I don't know how fast we end up really going, but just four questions. Are you up for it?   Justin: Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it.   Jen: Okay, okay. So, first question is what is your favorite city?   Justin: My favorite city is San Francisco, California.   Jen: Me too. I'm going to ask you why. See, I do this, I make it not be speedy because I want to ask more questions.   Justin: I lived in San Francisco for two years, really for the purposes of assisting in LeadMD's growth, and, I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, so probably not the most culturally diverse epicenter in the world. It just blew my mind to be able to walk down the street and get the best food in the world, walk into a networking group and everyone's leaning forward and engaged, and participating in these conversations. It just seemed like everyone wanted to be there, and that's kind of how I describe San Francisco.   You could throw an event in Arizona, and struggle to get five people to show up. I was part of a Bulldog meet up when I was over there, and like 30, 40 people would show up with their Bulldogs every week. And, I was like, "Jesus, I can't get this level of engagement when I'm giving away free training, much less trying to get Bulldogs to show up to a meet up." So, it just seemed very intentional, and I love intentional things.   Jen: So, side note...I'm gonna help you. We're going to lobby together for, like, a high speed train between Phoenix and San Francisco.   Justin: Yeah, absolutely.   Jen: So, that'll be a pet project in our free time, Justin.   Justin: Hyperloop.   Jen: Yeah. The next question for you was going to be are you an animal lover? You mentioned the Bulldogs, so is that a yes?   Justin: I am. Yeah, I love bull breeds, and I love English Bulldogs. I have a 10-year-old English Bulldog named Chubs. It's a girl. I wanted to give her a complex early in life. When that dog's no longer around, I will absolutely be heartbroken. So, yeah, I love animals, love dogs.   Jen: All right. Question number three. Mac or PC?   Justin: Mac, a thousand times.   Jen: Yeah. And, question number four. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip. Where would it be to?   Justin: Oh, that's a really good one. I've got this weird philosophy on life that I love really new experiences in really comfortable places. So, I would actually probably go to St. Thomas. It's my favorite spot on earth, but I'd love to try to figure out some new stuff when I was down there. The last time I was down there we found this little secluded pool that is in this outcropping of rocks on one of the many islands that surround St. Thomas. So, I think it's just one of those places where you can go and find something new every single time, and definitely one of my favorite places on earth.   Jen: Sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. It was so awesome getting a chance to talk to you about channel, about partnerships on both sides of that fence. If anyone who's listening would like to reach out to you personally, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?   Justin: I'm looking forward to being the only guest on this show ever that actually loves using Twitter, so you can hit me up at @jgraymatter on Twitter, or you can check us out. Our site leadmd.com. I'd like to say we give away more best practices than most agencies have. So, all of our content's there available for free, and, of course, my contact information is there as well.   Jen: Wonderful. Well, again, thank you, and thank you all for joining us for The Allbound Podcast. We'll catch you next week with an all-new episode.   Justin: Thanks, Jen.   Man: Thanks for tuning into The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And, remember, #NeverSellAlone.

Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur serving currently as the CEO and founder of LeadMD, the world’s largest marketing automation consultancy having implemented over half of the Marketo user base. In our interview, we specifically discuss Account-Based Marketing, a Business-to-Business marketing strategy that's exploded in popularity the last couple years and is being implemented by most, if not all, enterprise B2B companies. Is it a silver bullet? Is it hype? Tune into our fantastic discussion. More about Justin Gray: Justin has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them to success. In addition to LeadMD, Justin is also the Co-Founder of PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri which he co-owns with his father. Over the past 10 years, Justin has emerged as a strong voice for entrepreneurship and modern day marketing. As a recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 300 times in industry publications and holds featured contributor statuses with Inc., Entrepreneur, TechCrunch and others.  Special Guest: Justin Gray.

On this episode, we drive into the day-to-day processes of individual reps, searching for nuggets of wisdom and optimization. Justin Gray, Co-Founder and CEO of LeadMD, joins me on this episode.

Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and CMO at Terminus, was a recent guest on B2B Nation. In this episode, we discussed how account based marketing began, how account-based marketing works for channel sales, the FlipMyFunnel methodology, the upcoming panel at CO:LLOBORATE with Jon Miller of Engagio and Justin Gray of LeadMD, and more!

Aly Saxe, founder and CEO of Iris PR Software, joins Host Deirdre Breakenridge on Women Worldwide.  Aly's journey in public relations has led her from PR pro to PR agency owner to building software for agencies and in-house teams. Chaotic systems and a lack of visibility into her team’s performance pushed Aly to create a tech platform to cure the headaches of PR agency management. On the show, Aly discussed her approach to problem-solving especially as a woman in tech. Because you have to be flexible and agile and keep up with the pace of change, Aly shares her favorite resources. She also offers her insights on the importance of integration in an organization and the best way to break down silos between departments including marketing, PR, sales and other areas within a company. Because these barriers separate talent, businesses miss out on increased productivity, ideation, innovation and a better experience for customers. A little more about Aly Saxe …  In 2007, Aly founded Ubiquity PR to provide strategic PR services to funded, high-growth B2B tech companies. Ubiquity PR created award-winning PR campaigns for companies like Infusionsoft, Firehost, SocialWhirled, and LeadMD. You can connect with Aly on LinkedIn and Twitter @Aly_Saxe

Justin Gray is the CEO & Chief Marketing Evangelist of LeadMD, Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Automation Consultants. He shares his thoughts on the growth of marketing automaiton, it’s impact on ABM, features to look out for, advice for marketers looking to implement ABM and MA, and FlipMyFunnel. More on LeadMD: http://leadmd.com Check out the upcoming FMF Virtual Summit: http://bit.ly/1RMW7q1

It’s marketing vs sales! Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic), co-founder of Topo and Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD join the podcast for a spirited discussion around Groupon’s viral hit the clip on man bun, sales and marketing alignment, reaching the C-suites with content, and account based marketing.

Justin is the founder and CEO of LeadMD, a company that helps marketers build revenue engines. In 2011, Justin realized the potential that lies in creating organic and engaging content, catapulting Justin into the social media mogul he is today! Justin recently joined AMP UP Your Social Media’s host Glenn Gaudet to discuss marketing automations solutions on social media. “Spend a day with sales. It’s the most high-performance activity you can do as a marketer.” Justin discusses tips for providing technology and automation into your social media strategy: 1.Educate and train your employees. 2.Organize your funnel and the technology that helps manage that funnel. 3.Get your marketing and automation teams on the same page. 4.Break away from the traditional marketing funnel diagram.

Dave Lee is an Infusionsoft Expert.  Being involved with Infusionsoft from a very early stage and helping it's development into a global beast.  He then spotted a need and and an opportunity, co-founded SixthDivision and PlusThis to help people get the most out of this software.   In his own words... "I’m an entrepreneur, marketer, optimist, and sales junkie. Once I call my shot, I make it happen. I built Infusionsoft’s marketing and sales teams and drove the business from $600k to over $17 million in recurring revenue, while creating the marketing automation for small business category. I then left to help create LeadMD, a marketing automation consulting company for larger businesses, and grew it from startup to over $3 million during an 18-month period.Having driven growth and success for other organizations, in late 2011, I decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots and co-founded SixthDivision alongside Brad Martineau. It’s been an amazing ride and it just keeps getting better!So here’s where I get to brag about my awards and stuff.  In 2008, I was named a Warrillow Marketer of the Year finalist.  I helped Infusionsoft achieve the prestigious Inc. 500 award three years in a row (2007, 2008, 2009).  Most recently, I have been featured on NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox television affiliates speaking on marketing automation and small business success, and was quoted in Forbes Magazine as one of America’s PremierExperts™.  I’ve also been featured in CNBC, Reuters, MarketWatch, and Yahoo Finance, among other notable news outlets throughout the country.