Podcasts about siriusdecisions

This week, Ian and Jeff finalize their discussion about a CMO's first 90 days, coming to the last of the 5 F'in' Marketing Fundamentals - The Campaign. The Machine, roughly equates to Marketing Operations a role that Jeff knows well, having created several marketing operations teams before going on to advise enterprises through his work at Sirius Decisions and Forrester.  In this episode, Ian and Jeff step through the five cylinders of the machine and what the new CMO needs to pay attention to in those first few months: Data Technology Analytics Processs People As always, we welcome your feedback. If you have a suggestion for a topic that's hot for you that we should discuss, please get in touch using the links below.   Enjoy! — The Links The people: Ian Truscott on LinkedIn and Bluesky Jeff Clark on LinkedIn Mentioned this week: Rockstar CMO Presents: The 5 F'in' Marketing Fundamentals Get Your Buyers AMPED with our Customer Journey - Rockstar CMO Rockstar CMO: The Beat Newsletter that we send every Monday Rockstar CMO on the web, Twitter, and LinkedIn Previous episodes and all the show notes: Rockstar CMO FM. Track List: Stienski & Mass Media - We'll be right back Man Machine - Robbie Williams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff Lash is SVP of Global Product Management at Forrester. Jeff has been a long time thought leader on all things product. He led the product management practice at SiriusDecisions (acquired by Forrester) where he worked with many companies on assessing and benchmarking their product function competency and maturity. Jeff started his career as an information architect and usability at Elsevier and Mastercard, and then pivoted into product management, so he has some good insights to share from both sides.At Forrester, Jeff leads the core portfolio that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, with responsibility for product discovery, new product innovation, portfolio management, and pricing/packaging.In this episode we talk about:* How UX and PM work best with each other* Good PMs create opportunities for other team members* PM tools cannot address fundamental problems* Assessing PM function and competency in a company* Organizing and orienting what PMs are responsible for* Measuring success in the PM role* Applying PM principles to pickleball!Connect with Jeff Lash at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefflash/Connect with Rahul Abhyankar at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulabhyankar

SEASON: 4 EPISODE: 14Episode Overview:If you are ready to improve your productivity and increase your revenue, then you are going to enjoy this episode of Becoming Preferred as we dive into the world of sales enablement and go-to-market transformation with a true industry luminary.My guest on this episode is a powerhouse in the realm of business strategy, leadership coaching, and sales enablement. He's the author of the game-changing book, Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence, and his expertise has transformed countless businesses from struggling to thriving.In today's episode, my guest will share his insights on creating clear paths to success for small to medium-sized businesses. We'll explore how companies can improve productivity, increase revenue, and navigate the complexities of today's market, so get ready for a conversation packed with actionable advice, inspiring ideas, and transformative insights. Join me now for my conversation with the brilliant strategist and sales enablement guru, Roderick Jefferson!Guest Bio: Roderick Jefferson is an internationally recognized, business-focused speaker. He has shared his dynamic and energetic voice in a variety of events including keynotes, guest lectures, webinars, podcasts, and domain expertise panels, with companies such as ATD Conference, B2BMX Conference, Cisco, Collibra, LinkedIn, MindTickle, Revasum, Oracle, Sales Assembly Conference, Sales 3.0 Conference, Sales Enablement PRO Conference, Salesforce (Dreamforce), SAP, Seismic, Showpad, SiriusDecisions, Uber, and Zoom.Roderick is also an acknowledged thought leader in the sales enablement space and author of the Amazon #1 New Release & Bestselling book, Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence. He has held a variety of executive leadership, sales, sales enablement, operations, and customer experience roles at 3PAR, AT&T, Business Objects, Magnit, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, NetApp, Netskope, PayPal, Roderick Jefferson & Associates, Salesforce, and Siebel Systems, and Siteimprove.Resource Links:Website: https://roderickjefferson.com/keynotes/Product Link: https://amzn.to/3vENYAoInsight Gold Timestamps:04:25 You learned the importance of setting the goal, and how were you going to get there?05:39 I think you train animals, you enable people07:03 Sales enablement in 3.0 is both art and science07:29 It's communication, it's collaboration, and it's orchestration09:38 What isn't sales enablement?11:44 I'll see trainers that are teaching people how to give presentations instead of having conversations15:36 Culture is what happens when no one is watching17:20 Where I see the biggest problem18:48 What a sales onboarding program might look like20:49 We're constantly validating24:29 What's gone forever and what are the new things that we should be preparing for24:37 Those two big little words, AI26:33 You're doing it because of a why, not a what, and you're getting to the root cause28:32 A strategic investmentConnect Socially:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderickjefferson/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThevoiceofRodTwitter (X): https://x.com/ThevoiceofRodYouTube:

Ego-Free LeadershipKevin Blanco, CIO at Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), offers a transformative perspective on prioritizing your team and drawing lessons from every experience.While "Command and Control" leadership might offer a temporary sense of power, it often fuels an oversized ego that stifles listening, hampers collaboration, and ultimately hinders success.Instead, embrace Kevin's approach, refined through his leadership roles at SiriusDecisions, Smarsh, Thomson Reuters, and KPMG, which champions humility, teamwork, and continuous learning. By putting your ego aside, you unlock the true potential of your team and drive extraordinary results.You're going to love this interview!Connect with Kevin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevintblanco/ This episode is brought to you by Covenant Technologies: https://cov-technologies.com/and Cybertrust Network: https://cybertrustnetwork.com/

Welcome to OrchestrateSales.com's Inside Sales Enablement Season 3 Enablement History. Where we hop in the Enablement Time machine and explore the past, present, and future of the elevation of a profession. On ISEs3 Episode 12, Erich Starrett is joined by Dr. Shawn Fowler, whom he originally met when Shawn was VP, Sales Enablement (a true cross-functional #Orchestrator) at SalesLoft, and a gracious host of his first executive board meeting as President of the Atlanta Revenue Enablement Society back in early 2020. Before then, Dr. Fowler had been the World Wide Director of Enablement & Learning for IBM, and is now a Partner in his own sales strategy and sales enablement consulting venture: RevenueReady.Highlights from the episode include...PAST:⌛️ Shawn "stumbled" into the profession working as the first services salesperson for Silverpop - essentially selling desired business outcomes. The SVP of sales, Todd McCormick, announced he was hiring a head of sales enablement and the hiring manager Drew Pronté said "hey, the CEO said that you should probably be the guy." ⌛️ He didn't know what sales enablement was. At the time he was pursuing a PhD in educational psychology so he combined what he learned from working as a sales engineer and as a services salesperson with what he knew about how psychology of learning works ...and he found himself implementing their first ever Sales Enablement program. ⌛️ His first Sales Enablement event was hosted by SiriusDecisions in Atlanta. "I was thinking we need to start something where we do that on a regular basis. This was easily the most valuable thing that I've done in the last six months."⌛️ "Getting a seat at the table was probably the biggest factor in helping me be successful in sales enablement."⌛️ Silverpop was purchased shortly thereafter by IBM when he then developed and executed their global expansion go-to-market plan. "I had the opportunity to see what it looks like in a much bigger level. IBM is basically a handful of multi billion dollar companies all put together. And I was part of one of those multi billion dollar companies inside of it. I got to see how these really big enterprise complex sales work, how you have to enable people across multiple different continents."⌛️ Shaw was responsible for internal sales enablement including customer service and sales engineers and external - partner enablement - as well. "I think it makes a lot of sense, honestly, when you are in that position you have the opportunity to identify and eliminate a lot of the organizational issues that negatively affects your customer and that negatively affect the team as well."PRESENT:

Get ready to accelerate your revenue enablement success with insights from Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, Peter Ostrow. Recently Peter joined me to unpack the potential of AI to transform Revenue Enablement efficiencies and results. If your Sales Enablement budget is like most the team is understaffed and underfunded while juggling competing priorities.Listen now to hear how you can use AI tools you already own to maximize their impact on every facet of your enablement programs, from RFP analysis to tailoring pitch-perfect emails.Peter Ostrow is currently VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester B2B Sales. Peter capitalizes on 20+ years of revenue growth leadership in sales enablement, sales talent management, and operational expertise. Prior to joining SiriusDecisions and Forrester, Peter was a VP/Research Group Director for the Aberdeen Group, where he founded and was Principal Analyst for the Sales Effectiveness Practice, as well as overseeing research in marketing, customer success, field service and human capital management disciplines.  Prior to his analyst work, he was a long-time B2B sales rep, manager, and enabler.Since 2020, Peter has served on the board of directors of the Sales Enablement Society, the largest and only nonprofit organization dedicated to the sales enablement profession.Please subscibe on Apple, Spotify or Google.

Slicing through the B2B sales noise requires more than tenacity; it demands strategic precision.In the high-stakes world of revenue generation, knowing your buyer's journey isn't just important—it's crucial. Enter Kerry Cunningham, renowned former Forrester and SiriusDecisions analyst and Head of Research at 6sense, as he joins Saima Rashid and Adam Kaiser to drop some truth bombs revealed in 6sense's new research on the buyer experience. In this episode, you'll learn: 1. The strategic advantage of being the first vendor that potential buyers interact with, which the report shows, is a crucial factor in winning the business. Discover tactics for strategically positioning your solution to be top-of-mind early in the buying journey, ensuring you're a step ahead in the competitive race.2. The importance of understanding and influencing buyer requirements before the first sales conversation. With 78% of buyers having their requirements set by this time, learn how to engage and educate your prospects beforehand, so your solution becomes the benchmark against which all others are measured.3. Practical steps to align your marketing and sales teams for a cohesive buyer journey, focusing on consistent messaging and technology integration. Learn why a unified front is key to delivering a personalized and effective engagement strategy that resonates with buyers at all stages, especially crucial decision-makers.Things to listen for:00:00 Experienced tech sales and marketing professional in SF.06:12 Understanding the B2B buying process is crucial.07:02 Understanding B2B buying: complex, group-oriented decisions.13:21 Doubtful buyers seem set on initial requirements.15:19 Sales reps' perspectives are important for strategy.18:14 Effective sales strategy requires clear account focus.21:51 Addressing buyer persona challenges with relevant content.24:10 Syncing marketing and sales with technology is critical.27:18 Study finds adding vendors increases buying team workload.31:25 Focus on key vendors for early prospects.34:41 Kerry doesn't care much for curling.Resources:Check out the full research report: https://6sense.com/report/buyer-experience

Alan Gonsenhauser has 25+ years of experience as a Chief Marketing Officer and P&L General manager for global B2B firms in the Health Tech and SaaS Software domains with extensive cross-functional leadership experience in the go-to-market and finance functions.At Forrester and SiriusDecisions, Alan was a CMO Executive advisor where he mentored 108 CMOs, helping to improve their marketing performance results and business alignment.Since forming DemandRevenue in early 2021, he has supported private equity portfolio companies as a Fractional / Interim CMO and an executive advisor to CMOs and marketing leaders. He helps clients build infrastructure to scale customer-led growth and stop random acts of marketing. He also advises and coaches CMOs to new levels of success and cross-functional alignment.Learn more about DemandRevenue:https://www.demandrevenue.com/Connect with Alan Gonsenhauser on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alangonsenhauser/Connect with the host, Connor Dube, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialsellingexpert/Brought to you by the B2B content marketing experts at www.ProvenContent.comGet access to free content marketing courses, no email opt in required, at www.ProvenContent.com/Free

Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that practitioners who leverage a sales enablement platform for their sales teams report win rates that are 7 percentage points higher than those who do not. So, how can teams leverage Highspot to go beyond what good looks like? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I'm your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. In the quest to drive sales productivity for your business, you've likely asked yourself: What does good look like? This month on the podcast, we're helping you answer this question by exploring best practices on how you can deliver strategic enablement with Highspot. Here to discuss this topic is Peter Zink, the senior director of revenue enablement at Sprout Social. Thanks for joining Peter! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Peter Zink: Hi Shawnna. It’s great to be here and tell a little bit about our story around Sprout Social. As you mentioned, I head up revenue enablement here at Sprout Social. I’ve been doing it for almost three years over here. I think like many people, I got into enablement probably a little bit by accident. I started off as a sales rep following a career as an intelligence officer in the army and I just had a really big passion for wanting to help others. I was in a sales role and I started at a small insurance company where we had done a couple of acquisitions and they needed to build an onboarding program. That was my foray into enablement and that was almost nine years ago. I did that for a little while, and then I decided that I wanted to help other companies with that, and I joined a company called Sirius Decisions where I was a consultant helping other organizations with their sales enablement programs. Sirius was acquired by Forrester and at that point I decided to move back into the practitioner space I have found myself here at Sprout Social and we’re having a really fun time over here and enjoying what we’re doing. SS: I love that, and thank you so much for joining us. As you mentioned, in your background, you’ve helped hundreds of companies from Fortune 100s to high-growth startups, and you’ve helped them design and deploy sales enablement programs. I’d love to get your perspective on what does a good sales enablement strategy look like? PZ: First of all, it was just a really great experience to be able to do that. I got to see over a period of time how enablement evolved and how a lot of different companies were sort of shaping this space. What really struck me was that there are just universal challenges out there that no matter what your scale, a lot of enablement organizations struggle with. When we think about driving change management within our own organization, distilling priorities, and scaling enablement effectively, that’s something that I saw everything from a startup to a Fortune 10 organization that we would work with. When I think about what shapes a great enablement strategy, I think the most important thing is that you really need to come in and define and scope the role properly with your go-to-market leadership. I find that many people throw around the term enablement and it means a lot of different things to different people, so I think the most critical thing with your strategy is to come in and define both the scope of your department in terms of what you will do and what you cannot do. I’ve always tried to align resources around some large strategic priority in the business. I think it’s really critical for enablement to always be seen as your strategy is activating over whatever is most critical for the business. For example, in terms of scope, when I first came in, enablement was really focused on training exclusively. We had our new hire, we had regular ongoing training, we had training for our managers, and I just recognized that there were a few opportunities out there. For example, we had a new brand story that we were rolling out at the time called See Social Differently, and there was an ask from the floor to anchor our company around that consistent story in sales calls and they needed slideware and storytelling to kind of accomplish that. When I thought about our own strategy, I realized that this was a huge priority for the business and that we had to own the delivery and the co-development of those assets around the brand stories of the sales team. That’s where we got into a whole stand to deliver certification with our organization. We ended up becoming a very collaborative partner around the development of those sales collateral assets, and it was critical for us to align with a big initiative like that. At the same time, we also defined what we didn’t do when we came in. In our particular case, I’ve seen it before, where enablement-owned sales tools, for example, are covered in our revenue operations function today. We established some clear lines too in terms of where it was most meaningful for enablement to be effective. In the end, I think a good strategy really comes from defining and scoping what to do, what you do, and what you don’t, aligning whatever your support is on the most important priorities of the business, and don’t be afraid to leverage those opportunities to partner on the most critical initiatives that are gonna impact your revenue team to get there. SS: I couldn’t agree more. Recently the enablement team at Sprout Social received the sales program of the year award from Forrester, which again, incredible achievement Peter, to you and your entire team. Can you tell us about how the enablement strategy at Sprout Social was formed and what makes it so effective? PZ: Yeah, absolutely. In this particular case, the sales program in the year kind of drilled down on a specific aspect of our team big shout out to Morgan Momcilovich, who runs this team, but she was really the program of the year winner that set up what we call our field coach program here at Sprout Social. That program, I’ll get into here in a little bit more, I think in a bit, but I’ll just say that that was an evolution of our overall enablement strategy. When I talked about strategy a minute ago, I would say here that the field coach program is something that is a good example of a program that emerged based on aligning to those most important priorities. We had our broad-based enablement around our product and our campaigns. We had that down really down pat, and we recognized that we needed a role that was closer to the field that serves as that sort of last line of enablement with reps and managers in their organization. We’ve had a lot of success with this program because we’ve hired a lot of people with sales and success experience to then step into this role where they are very much in the day-to-day support of our sellers and our success roles here at Sprout. I think that’s been again, just identifying a way that we can sort of scale our programs and bring it down to the field and make it relevant is what’s made it so successful and why we were recognized through the program of the year as well. Another cool fact actually, is that the program has been valued so much that we actually even had some quota-bearing headcount transferred to us in order to be able to expand that program effectively. SS: That is very cool. I want to ask a little bit more about the program that you guys were recognized for with that award. As you mentioned, it is all about the impact of the field coaching program, and you also have a core enablement team. Can you share how you created a unified approach to enablement spanning across these programs? PZ: Absolutely. A little context today, our centralized enablement team consists of eight people, including myself. The way we structured it basically is, I look at it in two ways. Think of our organization as sort of two structures. I’ve got something called a center of excellence model, so that’s what you just mentioned, Shawnna, about delivering broad-based enablement to the entire organization at once. Think of that as our core plays, such as our new hire program, the rollout of a deck that’s associated with a particular campaign or skill broad-based e-learning that anyone can take, even communications to the field so we try to consolidate what’s hitting the entire sales and success organization at once in a thoughtful way. That’s very much like our center of excellence model, and that’s really when I talk about the unified approach to enablement and spanning things across, you’ve gotta start with that. You’ve gotta have that model in place that is applied to the broad audience and the entire company to kind of try to build your base of support. Then the second leg of that stool, so to speak, is what is that go-to-market enablement team, what we’re just talking about with those field coaches. With the go-to-market enablement team, it’s all about aligning key leaders in our go-to-market organization to some tactical enablement support. The responsibility of these roles is to take a lot of the great work the Center of Excellence group does and make it something that they practice and coach on, on a small team basis, really bringing it to life as it’s relevant to each role. You think about that brand story earlier. That feels different if you’re having a new business conversation versus a check-in for an executive business review with an existing client. There’s a lot that they can do to really bring the material to life and they’re also working on a lot of the fundamental skills that those roles need to be successful. We keep a real, even division and clear responsibilities between these two teams. They even align to different parts of the business a little bit more closely. If you think about the COE, that’s somebody who’s a lot closer to our product org, our marketing organization, and the field coaches and the go-to-market enablement side, they’re really attuned to what’s going on across the sales and success leadership within our org. SS: I love that you guys have that unified approach. Now, to shift gears just a little bit, I’d love to understand what things look like before, and Peter, I know one of your strengths is around really taking a strategic approach to enablement, and I know that you like to examine the business issues and really kind of come up with an actionable enablement plan to address those issues. With that in mind, what were some of the challenges facing your business prior to Highspot, and how have you overcome them since implementing the platform? PZ: Absolutely. Just a step back, like when you talk about strategy and what I sort of assess when I come into an organization, and probably things that you’ve heard before, Shawnna, but I assess what is our talent development strategy. That’s a lot of the training that we’ve just talked about. Another aspect that I look at is our assets, so the collateral, the content, not even just the customer-facing content, but the tools or the job aids that our sales and success people can use in their roles. That’s another big area of assessment. I bring all that up because it kind of talks about the pre-Highspot era. When I came in the training was really quite solid and we had a lot of great stuff to build on there. The asset side was an opportunity for us to get a lot more involved. From what I saw, there were a lot of inconsistent materials that were being shared with the sales organization. We had multiple instances or places where people were going to get what they needed, and usually, that consisted of a shared drive that a particular manager or leader might have been able to consolidate over time. As I mentioned with the center of excellence earlier, we really stood up a good partnership with marketing on just getting a handle on what decks and sales collateral should be associated with what was rolling out. That was a problem right away that I felt that we could get our hands around and do, and do a better job on. We had a couple of platforms where the content was residing, even though at the time we did have a sales content management tool that was in place. What I noticed with the tool was that no one was clearly owning it at the time, so we saw it as an enablement tool that we should own, so we took ownership of it, we cleaned up the environment, we streamlined a lot of things within that tool itself, but it was something that had been around for a while. It was something where reps were familiar with existing ways of doing things, and I saw that we had an opportunity to potentially pick a platform where it was frankly a better experience for our reps where we could get better analytics and insights and where we could just have the opportunity to really reset our entire content environment as a company as well, and rethink it. That’s not always easy to do when you have these existing tools in place, so that was the start and kind of where we were with Highspot, so just a few challenges there. SS: Just a few, but you guys have been making some amazing strides. Tell us a little bit more. It sounds like you guys made a switch from a previous enablement platform. Why did you decide to go with Highspot? I know at a high level you identified a few areas, but I’d love to hear it in your own words. PZ: It’s interesting. I identified a few high-level issues right off the bat, like when I said, gosh, I would love to find a platform that’s got better analytics, for example, around content. Could we get to a world where, besides knowing what is the most used content, I can actually start to associate content with opportunities and revenue? Highspot appeared to give us a path to get there as an organization with some of the Salesforce integrations and other work that we’re doing, so that was very appealing to me. I’ve known Highspot for a while, obviously, from being at Serious Decisions and Forrester, and there’s a tagline that the marketing team has at Highspot or did at one point, and that was Reps Love Highspot. I had this as part of our evaluation, but it’s something that’s become very clear as we picked up the tool, the user experience, and the ease with that reps are able to find content and even just quickly get what they need is critical and isn’t something you really know for sure until you actually load your own instance and put your content in there and see how the environment is working with the team. I think what’s interesting with Highspot is, I don’t know if you know this, Shawnna, on how we launched it, but we launched it at the start of the year and the way we did it was we had our revenue kickoff, which was virtual this year. You had to use Highspot to go to kickoff. I mean, you couldn’t attend sessions, you couldn’t go to breakouts, and you couldn’t even get into the Zoom room unless you clicked around and actually used the content in Highspot. That was literally our onboarding experience for our reps into Highspot, and a big testament to Highspot is, yeah, we had some training and stuff you could take on Highspot, but most of our team has elected not to do that because it’s so intuitive that they’re able to get what they need right off the bat. That’s just been a big win. From realizing that when things like search work correctly, when the platform is fast and snappy when it’s very intuitive for people to find things, it just naturally leads to good results. We see that in our calls and in our conversational intelligence on just the level of content that people are using, what’s being shared, and the level of engagement. Even people leave reviews on content. There are just a lot of signs that the user experience of the tool has become a key reason why it’s been a big win for us to have a platform like Highspot versus what we had before. SS: I love that. On that note on usage, you have at Sprout Social an 85% recurring usage rate, which is again, just a testament in itself to how well you have implemented Highspot within Sprout Social. What role would you say Highspot plays in your enablement strategy? PZ: I do think the percentage is a little higher if we took out marketing and a few executives as licenses there, so I know it’s good, but I bet I think it’s even better, to be honest. We are really proud of our rate and people are going back to it all the time. When you talk about Highspot’s role in our enablement strategy, I see it as more than a content management platform. It is true if I try to hit this holy grail of the one place sales can go and success can go to find what they need, it’s Highspot. Whenever we think about launching something, whenever we think about where we want to point people to learn, we think about where people want to find information that’s relevant to their jobs to be successful. Highspot is the tool that we really want to use to drive people there. It’s funny, with our last tool, we really just focused on putting buyer-facing slides in there, but we’ve done all of our event management. If we have a big training event management where you need to sign up for a flight or go book a hotel or something like that, we’re using Highspot for that. We’ve developed a whole bunch of stuff around our sales process that I’m sure we can talk about at some point that Highspot helps us push and deliver really relevant content in there. It’s key to everything we do. Essentially, when we come up with an enable and play or a launch or anything, the end vehicle that we’re going to use is Highspot to deliver that. That’s because it’s got that superior search experience. It’s easy to use. From what I’ve seen, it’s something that our reps feel like they could go in there and engage with and it’s not a painful experience. SS: Let’s avoid pain at all costs. PZ: Yeah, no pain at all. SS: Now, Peter, I love how you really jumped into Highspot and really immersed yourself in a lot of the core features. One of the ones that you have adopted within your organization is Sales Plays. In fact, you guys are in our top quartile there at 99% sales play adoption. You’ve lightly touched on a few examples, but can you tell us more about how you leverage sales plays and also the role that they play? PZ: I’ll give a little context for the audience, which I think it’s mostly Highspot customers, but just kind of explain why the sales play so critical in the vehicle that we choose to use. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Highspot, the spot is like the container where you put your content. You put a theme around that. There are different themes of these spots and you can put filters. It’s great. You can add whatever filters you need on that particular spot to help drill down and help people find the content that they need. That is all great, but the cool thing about the sales plays is the sales plays are these pages that allow you to be very prescriptive with the sales team or any role in what they’re supposed to do. We use a play for a variety of things, but the most obvious is anytime that there’s a rollout of a new product feature or major campaign assets that we want the sales and success of or to leverage in conversations, we develop these plays. The plays provide guidance around all sorts of things. They provide the ability for us to really give some nice talk tracks and messaging that people can use in conversations, they give us the ability to put and house and surface the content that’s most relevant for that sales motion right on one page. A good example is just today actually, we just launched a campaign where our CMO is talking about the impact that social has on our CMOs. We’re able to, on the backend, pull together all kinds of great assets associated with that campaign that our sales and success team can then go into conversation with. They get some talk tracks and guidance around what they’re supposed to do, but we’ve got things segmented in those plays by role to give a lot of guidance around that as well. They have the materials right there where they can share those with any customers or prospects that they’re engaging with. Basically, the play systematizes and makes it very clear what a rep or a CSM is supposed to do in a particular situation. It provides the context behind all of the great content that’s already housed in Highspot if that makes a lot of sense. We use them all the time. It doesn’t have to just be a marketing campaign either. I am very proud of the team and building what I call playbooks. I feel like the word playbook is another one that’s been thrown around for years. We have built some really cool things with sales plays where no matter where you are in the sales process, no matter what you’re doing with a customer, these plays provide a lot of really great guidance and resources on how to exactly do your job. In fact, we’ve had people change roles at Sprout and use these playbooks to onboard onto their new roles, which is really cool. We have used sales plays to take our sales methodology content and distill it down and provide some really focused guidance on what they’re supposed to be doing with the sales methodology at any one time. It’s been a big hit, and like you said, Shawnna, we’re at a 99% play adoption rate. I don’t know what it would take to get to a hundred, but I’m very happy with that number. SS: It is a fantastic number. Now, you talked earlier too about how you guys have taken these plays and created even playbook spots, and I know that your enablement team has partnered and aligned really closely with your marketing team. Can you tell us more about this partnership and the importance of alignment with marketing? PZ: Sure, I’ll kind of talk about the marrying of the playbooks and the marketing materials like you just kind of mentioned there. I think this is probably the best way to tackle that question. As I mentioned, we built these playbook spots and what that essentially means for those of you listening is I’m sure your company at some point has produced a card or gone through and mapped your entire sales process, and if not, I’m sure that’s something you want to do. Once you have that mapped and you can put that on a card, that’s not enough information or enough guidance for how people can be successful in their role. What we did in Highspot is we built this really cool experience where we mapped out the sales process in Highspot and you can click into this experience and get a lot of great details like example calls, videos from their peers, materials, and collateral that should be used during the particular play. That’s where the marrying of the sales process and marketing come together. In the example that I just provided earlier, we’ve released this new campaign about the impact that Social can have on our CMOs and all the great content associated with it. What we have done with that is in addition to having the play about that, we’ve then segmented that content out. We bring that marketing content into our actual sales process to suggest where you can use it. That’s right within Highspot. If we’re in discovery today, even though this campaign launched just yesterday already, somebody’s going to see when they go in there and start looking at discovery and asking themselves, what is it that I should be using with a CMO? The great content that marketing produces is something that’s available to them right within that sales motion. Highspot has allowed us through these playbook spots and to really align our marketing collateral to the sales and success motions that are necessary to be successful. SS: Very cool. Now, as you know, Highspot has a really strong partner ecosystem and I had actually heard that one of the ways in which you guys leveraged playbooks was around your rollout this past spring of the Challenger Methodology to your entire sales team. I would love to hear more about how you integrated with Challenger and the impact that that’s had on your sales team. PZ: It was funny, it was not a driving reason why we selected the Challenger Sales Methodology, but it has been so great to work with the third-party integration that’s associated with Highspot. It’s been a big win for our organization. Basically, our organization decided to invest in the Challenger Methodology, and Shawnna, I think we were able to do it in less than 24 hours. We were able to work with the Highspot team to basically activate a whole set of challenger content that was directly piped into the Highspot environment. When I say that, I mean e-learning, a lot of collateral that’s associated with Challenger training aids, everything that you could think of that you need to activate a challenger, we were able to turn on immediately within Highspot. We took that, and of course, it’s a lot of content, it always is, but we took the content that came on with Challengers. One thing I’ll say is it is super easy. We literally just flipped in and I don’t have to tell people to go to a different environment. I don’t have to tell people that, hey, log into the Challenger website and follow your path there and we’ll email you this content or put it on a Google Drive. It was right there in Highspot. That goes back to the mission of trying to centralize as many resources in one spot with Highspot. We went in there and we were able to use the sales plays we just talked about to tailor that content and deliver some prescriptive guidance to our sales teams on how to best use the Challenger methodology. Obviously, anytime you bring on a new methodology, there’s very much a foundational set of training that you have to do. We used the sales play feature within Highspot to really call out what people needed to do from a foundational standpoint to be successful with Challenger, and a lot of that was e-learning and some reading that they had to do before we did our live training. We’ve got some manager resources that we’ve been able to house who are playing there as well. The marketplace integration combined with the ability to give some prescriptive guidance on the challenger training through plays has been really critical for helping focus the attention of our team and rolling out this methodology. It’s frankly key for us and it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed working with. SS: Amazing. Now, what are some of the key business results that your enablement team has been able to achieve since implementing Highspot? PZ: I think here in enablement we’ve got to look at a lot of leading indicators. I think before we start to see the business impact and results that kind of comes down. What I can say today for sure, versus what we had before is we are seeing much more consistent behavior from our sales, DEV, and success organization in terms of the content and assets that they’re supposed to be using in customer conversations. It’s very obvious to us that there is a lot of sharing going on, that there’s a lot of viewing what’s going on with the platform, that there is a lot of engagement with what we’re delivering with Highspot, and we have gone upmarket as a company as well over this last year. I feel like Highspot has helped us to win a lot of deals that are more upmarket and give people the materials they need to go in and have a higher quality conversation than they had eight to 10 months ago with this tool. It’s been critical in that respect. The other things are too, I would just say from an adoption standpoint with our methodology and how we get consistent in terms of executing as a business, there’s no doubt that we have delivered a lot of clarity around what we should be doing in our sales process and what we should be doing with our customers through the guidance that we’ve been able to provide through Highspot. That’s been a huge win for just unifying our organization and delivering a consistent motion and helping our organization move up the market more and more as each month goes by. We’re really excited by that and we think that’s going to lead to contributing as well to the growth and the great performance that we’re having here at Sprout. SS: Fantastic. Last question, Peter. A lot of organizations are having to do more with less and be really thoughtful about the investments that they make. What would you tell organizations thinking about investing in the Highspot platform? PZ: To your point, we are investing less today. I think that Highspot is a productivity multiplier, so think about all of the time that is being wasted in your organization right now. If your reps are building content, finding content, maybe even not engaging with the training or the right materials in the first place because it is a lack of intuitive experience at your own organization on how to do that. I think what Highspot has allowed us to do is we have found a platform that we’ve been able to build an experience for our reps that is a lot more pleasant and a good user experience than what they’re traditionally used to. That has led to high adoption, and I think it’s been a big win for our organization for people to be able to stay on message and be consistent and achieve better results in their business. I consider Highspot’s mission-critical, and it is a tool that is needed if you’re going to scale and grow as a company, even if you want to simplify the existing workflows and content that you have today and make it digestible for your sales, you do it. In my mind, it’s absolutely mission-critical for the organization. SS: I love that productivity multiplier comment. Love to hear that. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. PZ: Thanks for having me. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can go beyond what good looks like with Highspot.

Shahin chats with Rachel Teare, Head of Global ABM and Customer Lifecycle Marketing at Cloud Software Group about account and vertical selection for your ABM program. With 25+ years of experience in B2B marketing, Rachel has built teams, and functions and transformed digital marketing. She's won two SiriusDecisions awards; Sales & Marketing Alignment and Demand Creation Strategy Program of the Year and the ITSMA Marketing Excellence Award – Embedding ABM Programs. Responsible for ABM across the entire customer journey with a maniacal focus on account-based growth, Rachel has always been incredibly passionate about people, also shown through her mentoring and coaching. You'll often find her pottering in the garden which is one of her favourite places to think and generate new ideas. The episode covers: Where to start with account and vertical selectionWhat data points to use for making decisionsDefining growthThe must-have conversations Resources mentioned in this episode: From Strength to Strength - Arthur C. Brooks The Diary of a CEO - Steven BartlettPractitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) - Daryll ScottBev Burgess _________________ For your copy of the State of ABM in APAC Report (2022): https://xgrowth.com.au/abm-report/ Miss out on our latest webinar? Listen here: https://xgrowth.com.au/blogs/programmatic-abm/ Join the Slack channel: https://growthcolony.org/slack Hosted & Produced by Shahin Hoda, Allysa Maywald & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

Steve Hardy is the Chief Marketing Officer of Prophix, a performance management software that budgets, forecasts, and reports for corporate finance teams. He is a C-level executive with experience in SaaS with a dedication to driving growth. Along with Prophix, he works as an Advisor to WeSoar.ai and Newchip Accelerator as well as a Board Member at Pavillion. Steve received his start in product marketing, which he has directly translated to his marketing model today. In this episode… Steve Hardy is an effective marketer with more than 25 years under his belt. Leading the marketing for several reputable software companies gave him a well-rounded perspective on the subject. His work won him the 2019 Marketing Executive of the Year Award by SiriusDecisions and Forrester. Today he shares some of his best advice he's developed over the many years of his successful career. Alex Gluz hosts Steve Hardy, Chief Marketing Officer at Prophix, on this episode of the Revenue Engine Podcast to discuss marketing for software. They start with his background and education before transitioning to his current work with Prophix. The two also talk about valuable marketing strategies, gauging the patterns of your campaign, and building collaboration between the sales and marketing teams.

Every new year, leaders look for ways to improve processes, innovate product experiences, and inspire their teams. How can you be the leader your team really needs? This latest podcast episode has some insight. In this podcast episode of The Intent Data Exchange, Mike Burton, VP of data sales and co-founder of Bombora chats with Rich Eldh, co-founder & managing director at Sirius Decisions, now Forrester. Rich discusses his interesting career journey — from a salmon canning company in Alaska to being the founder of SiriusDecisions, a B2B research and advisory firm, before its acquisition by Forrester. Check out this podcast episode to hear key his learnings along the way and the moves leaders should consider to build a collaborative, resilient team.

In this episode, we speak to Alan Gonsenhauser, the Principal and Founder of Demand Revenue about all things customer experience. Alan is an experienced CMO and general manager, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. He now offers Interim / Fractional Marketing Leadership, CMO Executive Advisory and Coaching, and Keynote Presentations, bolstered with comprehensive Strategic Marketing Services.Prior to Demand Revenue, Gonsenhauser spent 25 years as a chief marketing officer and general manager for leading global B2B firms across health IT, medical and dental devices, technology, financial and professional services firms, and more recently as a CMO Executive Advisor, Coach, and Analyst at Forrester and SiriusDecisionsLearn more about Alan GonsenhauserLearn more about Demand RevenueFollow Peter Mahoney on Twitter and LinkedInLearn more about PlannuhJoin The Next CMO CommunityRecommend a guest for The Next CMO podcastProduced by PodForte

  As marketers, we spend a lot of time talking about Millennials. We target them as consumers, employees, and donors, to the point of obsession, as the next cohort after the Boomers. But wait! We are overlooking Generation X, not surprisingly called the “Forgotten Generation.” This is the 65 million people in their 40s and 50s sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials. They represent a $2.4 trillion market. Ignoring them could prove a costly mistake for both businesses and nonprofits. In this episode, we speak with Alicia Lifrak, who is a Gen X member herself, and has spent the past 25 years leading strategy in the nonprofit and higher education worlds. She explains why marketers ignore Gen X at our own peril, and what we should be doing about it. Pop Quiz: Can you name at least 3 Gen X leaders of major transformational companies today? Listen to this episode for the answer. About our Guest: With more than three decades of experience in the philanthropic sector, Alicia M Lifrak is a marketing executive and board advisor, based out of California. He was the first head of marketing for Sirius Decisions, a sales and marketing advisory firm now part of Forrester Research. Previously he has served as marketing executive at companies like Eloqua, inRiver, TOA Technologies and previously created the online marketing function for Nuance, now part of Microsoft. He co-founded DemandCon, the first demand generation conference after creating the Eloqua Experience and Markies awards program that Oracle has continued even after acquiring Eloqua. An in-demand speaker at events like Dreamforce, DMA, AMA and Campus Party, Steve stays active in the industry, serving as a marketing mentor to young professionals. She currently serves as Executive Vice President for the Gabriel Group, an OSG Company, leading the nonprofit division in offering full-service fundraising, marketing and strategy consultation to clients. Prior to joining Gabriel Group, Alicia spent 25 years leading teams to achieve exceptional results in nonprofit and higher education. Alicia also serves in several key leadership roles as a volunteer and active member in organizations including The Nonprofit Alliance, NonProfit Pro, Rotary International, the Meridian Society and the Washington University Women's Society. After moving around the U.S. for most of her life, Alicia now lives in Illinois with her four kids, a cat and a dog. She travels frequently, for work and for fun, is an avid reader and loves to see live music. To connect with her directly or learn more, contact her at Alicia.Lifrak@osgconnect.com WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master's degree programs in Marketing Communications.  

Kerry is a Featured Thought Leader at Sales Assembly, the industry's only Scale-as-a-Service platform that leads B2B Tech companies on their journey to scale better, and a Product Marketer at 6sense, an account engagement platform that helps revenue teams identify and close more opportunities by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the B2B revenue team. Kerry brings over twenty-five years of experience in B2B demand generation and management, spanning a broad array of industries and markets. Prior to his current roles, he was an analyst at SiriusDecisions and Forrester, where he authored and co-authored a wide range of key models and frameworks. In this episode of the OpsStars Podcast, Kerry Cunningham, Researcher and Thought Leader at 6sense and former VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester, joins Rachael to discuss the future of B2B Marketing and Sales including why now is the time to move past MQLs as a measurement of success and how to better leverage Opportunities to support buying groups.

  Marketing is no longer about simply bringing in new customers. Marketers are also responsible for managing customers to profitability. Our guest Steve Gershik explains why customer management is the new horizon, and how we all need to develop the tools and skills to understand our customers deeply. We must become digital anthropologists, examining customer behaviors and signals to infer the steps needed to serve customers and expand their value. Join us for a lively conversation, beginning with Steve's notion of the “funnel beyond the funnel” and the surprising origins of the AIDA concept. About our Guest: Steve Gershik is a marketing executive and board advisor, based out of California. He was the first head of marketing for Sirius Decisions, a sales and marketing advisory firm now part of Forrester Research. Previously he has served as marketing executive at companies like Eloqua, inRiver, TOA Technologies and previously created the online marketing function for Nuance, now part of Microsoft. He co-founded DemandCon, the first demand generation conference after creating the Eloqua Experience and Markies awards program that Oracle has continued even after acquiring Eloqua. An in-demand speaker at events like Dreamforce, DMA, AMA and Campus Party, Steve stays active in the industry, serving as a marketing mentor to young professionals. WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master's degree programs in Marketing Communications.  

Nigel Williams is the Chief Strategy Officer at Kingpin Communications, a leading B2B technology agency.  Before moving agency side Nigel served as CMO at Quadrotech, a pioneer in email migration and Microsoft 365 management. There Nigel had the usual CMO responsibilities from brand to Demand generation. He is also a long-serving Sirius Decisions practitioner and spent 12 years in Field Marketing before becoming a CMO. We discuss: How he divides his time as a CMO Inspiring teams to deliver results Balancing short and long term priorities Honest self-appraisal as CMO How to enable effective decision making Mentioned in this episode: Brought to you by CMO Crowd and The Marketing Practice Find out more at cmocrowd.com

Nigel Williams is the Chief Strategy Officer at Kingpin Communications, a leading B2B technology agency. Before moving agency side Nigel served as CMO at Quadrotech, a pioneer in email migration and Microsoft 365 management. There Nigel had the usual CMO responsibilities from brand to Demand generation. He is also a long-serving Sirius Decisions practitioner and spent 12 years in Field Marketing before becoming a CMO.We discuss:How he divides his time as a CMOInspiring teams to deliver results Balancing short and long term priorities Honest self-appraisal as CMOHow to enable effective decision makingMentioned in this episode:Brought to you by CMO Crowd and The Marketing PracticeFind out more at cmocrowd.com

We knew going into it, that this show was going to be impactful, and it was exactly that. Both Brad and Michelle have amazing backgrounds that have led them to where they are today. When you listen to the podcast, be ready to pull out a map to track Brad's amazing background and upbringing, and then you'll be astonished to hear the longevity and growth that Michelle has had with Televerde. These two have the passion for supporting the growth of purpose driven companies in two areas that overlap through the entire conversation. The topics of mental health programs and supporting the growth opportunities for incarcerated women were the strong threads through the conversation. While talking about growing a purpose driven business it is important to also mention the importance of profit at that level as well. People, purpose, and profit can all thrive and grow at the same strong level. This is a principle that both Michelle and Kindra are familiar with through their work and alignment with Conscious Capitalism. This podcast is a great one for leaders to listen to. It is important to hear and understand the need for mental health programs to support employees. This is not a new topic but a topic that companies are not familiar with talking about, and they need to get over it. When it comes to the topic of diversity and inclusion, then the conversation of hiring previously incarcerated men and women in the workplace should be part of the conversation or companies are not truly hiring in a fully inclusive manner. This conversation was deep, honest, passionate, eye opening, and important to share. In the words of Brad's amazing late mother, “ The well being of everyone is dependent on the well being of everyone.” Culture Mindful is a workforce culture nurture and growth mindset coaching platform. Their future of work digital platform is designed upon proven methods to boost workforce performance, mental well-being, build team resiliency and nurture inspired teams. Brad Kewalramani is the Founder of Culture Mindful. He has a professional background in Talent, Culture & Employee Experience. He spent the first decade of his career in the recruitment and staffing agency space, was then headhunted for a leadership role in the home owner association management space, and most recently moved in to the space of office coffee services because he was fascinated to learn that companies justify the spend of money on coffee and snacks for culture. He is now on a mission to assist organizations cultivate culture mindful workplaces that supports performance and mental well-being. Connect with Brad on LinkedIn and follow Culture Mindful on Instagram. Michelle Cirocco is Chief Social Responsibility Officer for Televerde and the Executive Director of Televerde Foundation. She joined Televerde in 1999 and has held several leadership positions including Chief Marketing Officer. Michelle was recently named one of the World-Changing Women in Conscious Business by Conscious Company magazine. Her journey of transformation was also featured by Forbes in a two-part interview. Michelle is a strong customer champion with a tireless commitment to using business as a force for good. Michelle earned her MBA from Arizona State University where she also serves as an Advisory Board Member for the Center for Services Leadership. She holds multiple certifications from SiriusDecisions. Michelle is an avid TED fan and organized and hosted TEDxPerryvilleCorrectional, the first TEDx to be held in an Arizona prison. The event looked behind the curtain of incarceration to show the potential that exists in providing second chances. Michelle dedicates a significant amount of her free time giving back to her local community by volunteering for the Phoenix Rescue Mission and Athena International. She is a member of the National Association of Female Executives and MBA Women International. Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn and Twitter, and follow Televerde on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the Televerde Foundation on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Christine Nurnberger and her team decided to pitch the implementation of Revenue Operations at Bottomline Technologies on a whim… the night before a meeting with the “higher ups.” No pressure, right? The result? “YES! This is what we need,” the executives said after she made her case.  The rest is history… and during this session replay from #B2BSMX, Nurnberger shares her story on how RevOps came to life at Bottomline. Plus, you'll get the scoop on why companies with revenue operations alignment perform better with 19% higher growth rates and/or 15% greater profitability, according to SiriusDecisions. RELATED LINKS Register for the B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, Ariz. here. 

The New Customer Journey with Chris Jolly Joe Lynch and Chris Jolly discuss the new customer journey. Chris is the founder of The Freight Coach, a company that stages transportation companies ranging from traditional freight brokerages, asset-based trucking companies looking to expand into brokerage, as well as technology companies looking to implement their product into the industry. About Chris Jolly Chris Jolly is the founder of The Freight Coach and the host of Coffee w/#TheFreightCoach podcast. Chris has over 14 years of experience in transportation with the bulk of his experience in freight brokerage. His experience within freight brokerage includes operations, sales, and leadership ranging from start-ups to one of the largest brokerages in the transportation industry. His passion is the training and development of sales and operations professionals in the brokerage business. Chris earned his bachelor's degree in Management from the University of Wisconsin- Stout located in Menomonie, WI and holds an associate in Management from Chippewa Valley Technical College in Eau Claire, WI. About The Freight Coach The Freight Coach partners with growth stage transportation companies ranging from traditional freight brokerages, asset-based trucking companies looking to expand into brokerage, as well as technology companies looking to implement their product into the industry. Our main objective is to utilize niche-specific transportation training methods to improve efficiencies within the sales process and use our experience to enhance your operations team to execute your freight mix at a higher level. The Freight Coach provides one on one training with leadership as well as carrier and customer sales representatives to ensure that they overcome the barriers they are facing now to pave the way for greater success. Key Takeaways: The New Customer Journey Chris Jolly is the founder of CJolly Freight Consulting and the host of Coffee w/#TheFreightCoach podcast. In this podcast interview, Chris and Joe discuss the new customer journey which refers to the way that shippers and supply chain professionals research and buy 3rd party logistics services. Prospective customers are rejecting the sales process and instead defining their own buying process. Prospects are educating themselves by consuming content (articles, social media, podcasts, etc..) rather than engaging directly with sales and marketing people. In this new environment, the rules of (customer) engagement have shifted. Social media is still an important element of the new customer journey, however, Chris believes that 3PLs and brokers need to up their social media game. Ideally, brands can better communicate their values and what they stand for online. Many companies and individuals are blurring the lines between formal and informal communication – people are showing more of their authentic selves, and sharing their personal lives. This shift is kind of scary for larger brands who are reluctant to takes big risks with brands that have been built over many years. Chris believes that buyers are attracted to companies and brands that lead with authenticity and openness. The dark funnel is a customer's purchasing journey that occurs off-site through social, paid, competitive, influencer and other channels not controlled or visible to the brand. In recent years, marketers have come to rely on sales funnels that culminate in a marketing generated lead, but increasingly savvy customers are avoiding the tactics and methods (webinars, white papers, cold calls, etc..) that put them in the sales funnel. Recent research by Sirius Decisions and Forrester suggests that 67% to 90% of the customer's purchasing journey is in the dark funnel – consuming off-site content. If your marketing feels like marketing you are doing it wrong. People love to buy, but they don't want to be sold to. As buyers became increasingly savvy and sophisticated they resist anything that feels salesy. Sales and marketing teams need to find ways to engage with prospects in ways that fits their buying process. Learn More About The New Customer Journey Chris Jolly The Freight Coach Coffee with The Freight Coach Podcast (Chris Jolly) Becoming More Confident on the Phone with Chris Jolly Why Cold Callers Fail with Chris Jolly REAL AF with Andy Frisella on Apple Podcasts The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Jay Gaines is passionate about great marketing leadership that drives innovation, positive transformation, and measurable results. His career spans more than 20 years in a variety of B2B industries, and his experience includes organizational design and leadership, marketing strategy and planning, branding and category design, demand creation, sales and marketing alignment, and digital strategy. Jay has held executive-level marketing and business development positions at both well-established and startup b-to-b companies where he consistently transformed marketing organizations to achieve significant and measurable business contribution. Jay is currently head of marketing at AgentSync, and prior to that, he was chief marketing officer at Forrester and SiriusDecisions. Jay has worked as an advisor to many leading Chief Marketing Officers to drive positive organizational change, innovate, and help them to create the most effective, measurable, and focused marketing function possible. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University. This week's episode was brought to you with the support of bambee.com/scale and marpipe.com/uncharted --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

Studying the Buyer Journey has been around for years, but there have been significant changes since the Internet and COVID arrived. For example, SiriusDecisions (now part of Forrester Research)  found that 67% of the buyer's journey was done digitally. They reported their findings in 2013! In Forrester's Predictions 2022 report they state:Persistent digital engagement will become the norm, with 70% of marketers adopting an “always on” digital engagement strategy in 2022. The stakes are high — 17% of B2B buyers said that the competence demonstrated during the buying process was the most significant driver of purchase choice, far ahead of the relationship with the sales rep (5%) or customer references (6%).How are you handling the buyer journey in your business? How well do you understand the buyer journey or how to use it for your business to be more successful? The buyer journey has stages or cycles that you take your customer through before, during, and after purchasing.In this episode of the B2B Marketing and Sales podcast, Steve Miller and Dave Loomis talk about the buyer journey, its four stages, and how to successfully establish it in your marketing strategy. Dave explains the four stages of the buyer journey and why he believes it's a recurring cycle that takes the customer from awareness to experience and back again through the retention process. Steve explains the importance of talking to your customers differently as you consider their different buyer journeys. Listen in to learn the importance of ensuring your buyer isn't just aware of your business but also takes the action to build a relationship with you. What You Will Learn in this Episode:·       [2:06] The four stages/cycles of the buyer journey; awareness, consideration, purchase, and experience. ·       [5:30] The trade fair booth analogy – how to impact your customer before they come in to buy and after they buy.·       [10:40] The nurturing stages of the buyer journey – the middle stages that can often be overlooked. ·       [13:29] How to specifically target customers based on their individual buyer journeys. ·       [15:18] How to talk to your customers differently while considering their different journeys. ·       [16:48] Don't leave your customers at the awareness stage, ensure they take the next step towards building a relationship with you.  

Kerry Cunningham authored and co-authored a wide range of key models and frameworks for SiriusDecisions and Forrester, has spoken at dozens of industry events, including 4 appearances as a SiriusDecisions Summit keynote speaker. Throughout, Kerry has continued to drive the buying groups revolution in B2B, helping organizations transform from outmoded, ineffective lead-based practices to modern, buying team and opportunity-centric processes to unlock next-level performance.Kerry brings to his work with B2B organizations a unique combination of academic and real-world expertise in marketing, organizational design and management, including expertise in cross-cultural organizational design and change management, employee selection and retention, and performance management. In addition to dozens of business briefs and articles, Kerry is a published author in both literary and scientific publications. Kerry has a BA in psychology and journalism from Indiana University Bloomington and an MS in psychology from San Francisco State University.Get FREE access to more B2B Mentors episodes and content here: https://www.activeblogs.com/b2b-mentors/Follow Kerry on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerrycunningham/Learn more about 6sense on their website here: https://6sense.com/Get access to all past and future podcast episodes: https://www.activeblogs.com/b2b-mentors/Follow and connect with the host, Connor Dube on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/socialsellingexpert/Instagram: connor_dubeIf you're already thinking you need to find a more efficient way to conquer your monthly B2B content like blogs, newsletters, and social media – we'd like to show you how we can improve the quality, save you tons of time, and achieve better results! To learn more visit www.activeblogs.comEpisode Summary:Kerry Cunningham, RevTech revolutionary and product marketing expert, joins Connor to talk about what marketers get wrong about lead conversion. Hear Kerry talk about his early attempts to build a better conversion solution, the insights he's gained about lead generation as a marketing tool, and the “Oh Sh!t!” moment for marketers. Learn what's changed about your customers' buying experience, how to read the signals about whether a customer is in the market, and how you can leverage website traffic data to maximize conversion opportunities.Key Takeaways:There's a whole sector of B2B industry built around the idea of generating leads from your website and somehow converting them into business with marketing automation, lead scoring, etc. — but that's not how it works.Buyers, and buying teams, haven't changed; they're still looking for a solution to their business problem. What's changed is the amount of information available to buyers. They can research — and buy — what they want without ever talking to a sales team.Falling conversion rates can signal multiple points of interest from one potential client. Most of a website's visitors are anonymous — and not decision makers. Multiple contacts from a single account lower the conversion rate and increase conversion possibilities.Hope you enjoyed this episode of B2B Mentors! Make sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Leave us a 5-star review, so your friends and colleagues can find us too. B2B Mentors is brought to you by activeblogs.com. Head over to our Content Trifecta page to schedule a chat with Connor about custom marketing content solutions for your company and the Content Trifecta effect!

The Dark Funnel with Tom Augenthaler Tom Augenthaler and Joe Lynch discuss the dark funnel. As the founder of an influencer marketing company, Tom helps companies tell stories that make the customer the hero. Having customers and influencers talk positively about your company is one of the best ways to attract and win new business. About Tom Augenthaler Tom Augenthaler is the Founder and CEO of The Influence Marketer. On the website, Tom shares his ideas and knowledge of influencer marketing with others looking to learn about this powerful strategy. Tom is a pioneer in the space and has been working with influencers since 2007 while with Hewlett Packard, and as a consultant helping corporate clients since 2009.  He is an international speaker, corporate trainer, and recognized as one of the Top 50 experts in the field by Talking Influence. Tom writes for several media outlets including Social Media Examiner and Social Media Today. Tom earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Gettysburg College and a Master of Liberal Arts in English and American Lit from Harvard University. About 551 Media and The Influence Marketer The Influence Marketer is the best place to learn about B2B influencer marketing. Tom Augenthaler has been helping top brands utilize B2B influencer marketing since 2007, he is a true pioneer in the space. The Influencer Marketer provides lots of free content on influencer marketing and is the place to go for any company looking to start or improve their use of influencer marketing. Tom offers full team training on the many different aspects of the process, one on one mentoring, or strategy calls. He consults digitally and in-person to help B2B businesses build a marketing strategy that is right for them. Key Takeaways: The Dark Funnel Tom Augenthaler is the Founder and CEO of 551 Media, where he helps B2B companies build brand affinity with influencers. In the podcast interview, Tom explains that the dark funnel is a customer's purchasing journey that occurs off-site through social, paid, competitive, influencer and other channels not controlled or visible to the brand. In recent years, marketers have come to rely on sales funnels that culminate in a marketing generated lead, but increasingly savvy customers are avoiding the tactics and methods (webinars, white papers, cold calls, etc..) that put them in the sales funnel. Instead customers are educating themselves about their buying options via articles, blog posts, social media, videos, influencers, etc.. outside the view of the sales and marketing team. Prospects from the dark funnel often contact companies with a good understanding of the company's service offering and very close to making their buying decision. Marketing tools that enable marketers to engage, track, and contact prospects are great, however, some brands have been over-zealous and savvy customers are keeping themselves off the radar and in the dark funnel. Recent research by Sirius Decisions and Forrester suggests that 67% to 90% of the customer's purchasing journey is in the dark funnel - consuming off-site content. Tom and his team help companies navigate the dark funnel. They empower businesses to inspire, educate, and persuade through influencers. Learn More Tom Augenthaler Linkedin Tom Augenthaler Twitter The Influence Marketer A Better Way to Reach Your Target Market with Tom Augenthaler The Customer is the Hero with Tom Augenthaler The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

The MQL is at the heart of demand generation. In this episode, Jamie shares her story on how she built a winning campaign to drive MQLs - only to find out that they weren't converting. Listen in for her advice on what to do when the MQL definition isn't strong enough to drive opportunities, plus grab her top-notch recommended resources.

  This week's show is called "How Forrester is applying the SiriusDecisions frameworks both within the organization and across the revenue engine to drive results" and our guest is Kelley Hippler, Chief Sales Officer at Forrester. Join us as Kelley tells us a little bit about this years' Forrester B2B Summit, formerly known as SiriusDecisions and then dives into the new concept of B2B revenue waterfall and its effect on marketing and sales working together in an account-based environment. Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing. I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena. For sponsorship opportunities, contact Cherie.  

If you’re a B2B marketer and you’ve never heard of Forrester, you’re probably not a B2B marketer. The world-renowned research and advisory firm has firmly established itself as one of the most influential of its kind, and in this episode, CMO Shirley Macbeth fills us in on how Forrester maintains its high status via ever-evolving brand strategy and dedicated brand activation. Having joined Forrester right when the world shut down in March 2020, Shirley dove headfirst into bringing Forrester’s Bold at Work message to life and consolidating the recently acquired SiriusDecisions without losing its loyal customer base. Not only that, Forrester’s marketing team drank its own champagne, using data to increase marketing spend and narrow down its list of key target personas from 20 to 5 (as well as its product set from hundreds to a handful). This is an awesome B2B brand story—check it out! For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegade.com/podcasts/

Right now, Channel Enablement is a top priority for everyone that interacts with partners and/or dealers as their route to market. In fact, Sirius Decisions indicates that 62% of high-performing organizations having some sort of ongoing Partner Enablement in place for multiple partner personas for 2021. So, how do you get ahead of the curve in these particular areas? How do you maximize your time and efforts in optimizing your relationships with your partners and dealers - resulting in better business outcomes? Join us in a candid conversation about these critical topics and more with Taylor Macdonald from Sage Intacct. Hear how Taylor has solved the sales enablement challenge by giving his partners the chance to not only learn the skills they need to drive revenue, but also the opportunity to teach and learn from each other in a community environment.  According to Taylor, nothing is more effective than learning from those that face the same challenges as you do every day.

Questions covered: What is your definition of being authentic? Have you always shown up authentically in the workplace? Why is it important to show up as authentic? Why do you feel that showing up as your most authentic self, can help advance someone's career? If someone doesn’t feel safe or comfortable to show up as authentic, what advice do you have? Bonus Question: What do you appreciate most about working with someone who you feel is being authentic? (Only available to Patreon members) Ashley Spurlock LinkedIn BIOs: Raechel Duplain has over 11 years of experience in content and product marketing in the Tech industry. Most recently, she works as Group Manager, Strategic Product Marketing at Podium, Utah’s 5th-fastest growing software company. Raechel is also a Certified Scrum Master and is Co-CEO of BrightZebra Marketing, where she and her business partner, Ashley, teach female entrepreneurs how to grow and scale their online businesses with a clear marketing and content strategy. Raechel has had the privilege of presenting at industry events like SiriusDecisions, Alt Summit, Aspire Her, and more. Her work has also won a CMA (Content Marketing Award) and an IHAF Gold Award. When she’s not working, she enjoys spending as much time as possible with her family, listening to podcasts or Audible, practicing the piano, and doing house projects. Ashley Spurlock has 14 years of experience writing and managing marketing projects and teams in the tech, education, and fitness industries. In recent roles she has overseen an Agile team responsible for content marketing, sales support, and product marketing and worked on web marketing strategy for a large enterprise tech business. Recently, she left the corporate world to spend more time with her toddler, freelance full time, and focus on helping female entrepreneurs market their businesses with BrightZebra. In her free time, Ashley loves family time, reading, mowing the lawn, and looking for the next weekend road trip! Join Patreon for $5/mo Next Level Leaders Free Community www.nicholeharrop.com www.instagram.com/nichole.harrop  

The average tenure of a sales leader is 18 months. And while there are many reasons why VPs of Sales don’t last long in their jobs, one strong reason (according to my guest) is the lack of a model for success. My guest in this episode is Phil Harrell, VP, Group Director Sales Research at Forrester. He has spoken to many sales organizations around the world and has gathered valuable insights for sales leaders that he shared with me during the podcast.  Phil is an industry thought leader in sales and marketing with more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-performance B2B sales teams worldwide. He has held executive-level sales and marketing positions at well-established companies and hyper-growth technology startups and has proven success in growing revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Phil joined Forrester through the acquisition of SiriusDecisions. Prior to SiriusDecisions, he was vice president of sales at HubSpot, where he was responsible for building the mid-market and enterprise businesses. Listen to this episode to learn how you can build a model for success in your sales organization. B2B Buyers Expect B2B Companies to be as Efficient as B2C Companies Phil says that their research at Forrester has shown what buyers expect from sellers and organizations: To be transparent and open, being straightforward with their pricing. To understand them at a very deep level, using the information they gather to personalize every interaction. To be immediate, answering right away when they ask for something. B2C companies have created an expectation of efficiency in the consumer’s mindset, who now wants the same experience in the B2B world. “So as a sales leader,” Phil says, “when you're thinking about your sales organization, you have to think about how to design and optimize the experience your buyers are having to be almost like a consumer experience. Remove friction and make it really easy for your sellers to engage with buyers.”  The pandemic has only accelerated this trend. Buyers now are much more comfortable interacting in the virtual world and interacting with salespeople digitally. Remote selling is here to stay. Even after the pandemic, buyers are going to prefer digital engagements (perhaps not all the time), so sellers have to get comfortable helping buyers virtually.  Phil says that instead of pushing for a close, the new role of the seller is to help buyers through their journey, help them get the information they need to make a decision. Typically, sellers withhold information to get that 15-minute meeting, but consumers are pushing back for more transparency. Three things that sellers can do to be more transparent are: Publish pricing upfront Ungate content Educate and provide information instead of pushing for the sale Buyers want sellers to anticipate their needs and be hyper responsive, so they can have a great experience. That’s when customer loyalty and advocacy happens. Four Things Sales Leaders Need to Build a Model for Success Phil says that sales leaders need to think about how to build a model for success instead of relying on last-minute deals to hit quota. Most sales leaders don't have a system to make their results repeatable, scalable and predictable. But Phil says that sales leaders should be able to explain the processes they have installed for acquiring and managing talent, managing leads, and managing the execution against opportunity management and against their sales pipeline. If leaders have a really good handle on the productivity and the health of their organization, they’re going to stand out and keep their jobs. Here are the four things you need to build a model for success: A process, from lead generation to onboarding. Infrastructure, including sales prospecting tools and technology to help sellers do their job faster and better, automating processes. Insights about buyer engagement and the buyer’s journey coming from the CRM or AI software, so they can hyper personalize the interactions. Talent with the right competencies, trained in remote and virtual selling. Sales is 51% science and 49%. And the science part has to do with CRM hygiene, gathering and entering the right data (touchpoints, for example) into the system. Sales leaders must use data to help their reps be successful at selling. The Importance of Sales Planning How can sales leaders ensure that they're going to get off to the right start at the beginning of the year?  Phil says you got to make sure you've done a really good job on sales planning, from territories to quotas. “One of the critical things you have to do is make sure that you have your sales plan ready early in January and when you get to the kickoff, you roll out the quotas, you roll out the comp plans and you tell the marching orders of exactly what the expectations are from a product perspective and how they're going to get to their number.” Another thing sales leaders must do is prioritize the processes and the technology tools they need to start the year strong. Sales Productivity One of the biggest challenges that is burdening sales organizations is sales productivity.  At many companies, only 30% or 40% are hitting their numbers, mainly because of quota over assignment. Phil says he recommends no more than 10% quota over assignment from the VP of sales down to the rep level. Another problem with sales productivity that Phil mentioned has to do with organizations getting bigger and the processes that are put into place affect productivity. “In a startup, it's simple,” Phil says. “Everything is about the buyer and so processes get designed from the buyer into the organization. As you scale, invariably you put in more processes and it gets designed by headquarters and pushed out to the field. And before you know it, you look around and you see all these processes that are designed to actually help the organization, not the customer, and salespeople say it's really hard to get deals done here. Everything takes too long.” Phil recommends doing a survey of your reps to understand what's keeping them from being productive. What are their top challenges? Then you can prioritize the top two or three things that are really in their way.  “If you're making it hard on your sellers to do business with the companies that you're trying to do business with, you're making it hard on the buyer. All buyers want immediacy. And if you can't turn something around quickly, if you can't respond within 24 hours from the very start, that's a signal to them that you're not an organization they want to do business with.” That is one of the reasons why here at Vengreso we develop a free sales productivity tool, to help sellers respond to messages on the fly, with well-crafted templates that can be used in any web-based messaging platform with just a few keystrokes. Listen to my conversation with Phil for more tips on how to build a success model for your sales organization and how to make your reps more productive. Outline of this Episode [6:25] B2B Buyers Expect B2B Companies to be as Efficient as B2C Companies  [14:30] Four Things Sales Leaders Need to Build a Model for Success [30:25] The Importance of Sales Planning [36:09] Sales Productivity

Today we're speaking with Megan Heuer. She's a veteran of ABM practices, she's worked with Gartner, Peppers and Rogers, Sirius Decisions, Forrester, Engagio and now a consulting group in The Bay Area called Winning by Design. She shared so many insights into best practices around ABM for High ACV deals, including a really interesting way of calculating LTV.

Phil joins me on the podcast today to discuss how sales leaders can build an effective and successful "sales machine"You’ll Learn:What is a Sales Machine?Six Components of a Highly Effective Sales MachineWhy just proving numbers is no longer sufficient for sales leaders.About Phil HarrellPhil is an industry thought leader in sales and marketing with more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-performance B2B sales teams worldwide. He has held executive-level sales and marketing positions at well-established companies and hypergrowth technology startups and has proven success in growing revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Previous Work ExperiencePhil joined Forrester through the acquisition of SiriusDecisions. Prior to SiriusDecisions, he was vice president of sales at HubSpot, a software-as-a-service provider of inbound marketing and sales solutions, where he was responsible for building the mid-market and enterprise businesses. He also spent almost 10 years at cloud services provider Akamai Technologies in multiple leadership roles, including vice president of sales, vice president of application performance solutions, and vice president of channel sales. Phil was a key contributor to Akamai’s growth from a pre-revenue start-up to nearly $1 billion in revenue by leading sales teams to consistent overperformance, heading up the company’s entry into online video streaming and developing the company’s worldwide application performance solutions business.Phil began his high-tech sales career at Pegasystems, a $700 million provider of business management software to enterprises. He also worked as chief revenue officer at Firecracker and vice president of sales at Kaminario. He has been an active angel investor for the past 15 years and serves on the boards of directors of Read to a Child, an education nonprofit, and Viddler, an online video company.EducationPhil holds a BA in public policy and Slavic languages from Duke University and is a graduate of MIT Sloan School’s Greater Boston Executive Program.

In this episode, I (Steve Watt) had the opportunity to interview two true leaders in the ABM space, Matt Senatore and Steve Casey. Matt is the Service Director for Account Based Marketing at SiriusDecisions and Steve is Principle Analyst of B2B Marketing at Forrester. These guys are experts on what it takes to go from good to great in the AMB space. We talked about setting a great foundation with your pilot program, 5 keys you need to scale, and how to avoid common pitfalls that get in the way of being great. ------------- Join me for weekly special LinkedInLive sessions where I interview your favorite guests like Pat Lencioni,  Seth Godin, Whitney Johnson, Kim Scott LIVE. Here's the one-click invite: https://evt.mx/mSGV4Ka8

When you buy a new suit, do you throw out all your old suits?  Unless they're all riddled with holes and covered in stains, why would you? They still work. And the same applies when adopting an ABM strategy: Your demand-gen still works, so why throw it out? On today's #TakeoverTuesday episode, special host Steve Watt speaks with guest Bob Peterson, VP of ABM for SiriusDecisions, fresh off the stage at B2BMX where he spoke about the power of the demand spectrum. The idea behind the demand spectrum is to marry ABM strategies with your existing demand-gen strategies and striking a balance to get the best of both worlds. --------- Join Sangram's "Becoming Intentional" newsletter, read by over 10,000 leaders, for a 1-minute read on how to lead professionally, grow personally, and live fully. Only available on LinkedIn.

This week on Product Love, I talk to Jeff Lash, Vice President and Group Director of Product Management, at SiriusDecisions. With over a decade of experience in product management, he believes a key trait of product managers is empathy.

Christine is the Service Director of Content Strategy and Operations at SiriusDecisions. In this week's podcast, she describes the Content Transformation Roadmap she uses to identify the strategy, people, processes, and technology needed to achieve these milestones. She also shares some thoughts on the definitions of “content marketing” and “content strategy” in B2B environments. (Kristina gets VERY excited.)

In this episode, my guest host (Steve Watt) had the opportunity to interview two true leaders in the ABM space, Matt Senatore and Steve Casey. Matt is the Service Director for Account Based Marketing at SiriusDecisions and Steve is Principle Analyst of B2B Marketing at Forrester. These guys are experts on what it takes to go from good to great in the AMB space. We talked about setting a great foundation with your pilot program, 5 keys you need to scale, and how to avoid common pitfalls that get in the way of being great.

Everywhere you look, B2B marketers are talking about Account-Based Marketing, and its prominence is only growing. So to better understand the technology, we talked to Laura Ramos, VP and Principal Analyst for B2B Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research. On this episode, Laura talks about where ABM came from, what's next for the technology, and what it means for B2B marketers. She also talks about her background with Forrester, why she left and came back to the field of research, and the most important insights she drew for the SiriusDecisions 2019 Summit. Links: Notes & Quotes: http://bit.ly/2yXulqL Laura's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauraramos2013 Laura's Twitter: twitter.com/lauraramos Forrester Research: forrester.com 5 Key Takeaways: - Account-Based Marketing takes the idea of one to one marketing and scales it in a sustainable way. - The two most important aspects of ABM strategy are the ability to analyze data and insights, and the ability to personalize content. - ABM forces both sellers and marketers to focus on the right things, rather than focusing purely on volume. - ABM is forcing marketers to think harder about who they target, and that's a good thing. - "You need your sellers to be helpful and human, not hungry." - Laura Ramos Bio: Laura Ramos is the VP & Principal Analyst serving B2B Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research. She is a leading expert in business-to-business marketing with hands-on senior management experience in corporate, industry, and product marketing; demand management; and social media. --- Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

The Marketing Trends team sat down with some marketers at the SiriusDecisions B2B Marketing Summit 2019, and have compiled the highlights on these recap episodes. In Part 1 of our SiriusDecisions recap, we brought you interviews with CEOs for a high-level look at some of the biggest and most important Marketing Trends. For this episode, we wanted to talk to people who are a little closer to the action for more tactical insights. Part 2 of our recap features interviews with three practitioners, as they discuss their most important insights and lessons learned from the SiriusDecisions 2019 B2B Marketing Summit. We interviewed Sara McNamara, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Cloudera, an enterprise data platform, Asher Mathew, VP of Business Development at LeanData, a revenue operations platform, and Jeff Davis, Founder & Revenue Strategist at JD2 Consulting Group, a management consulting firm working with B2B businesses on sales and marketing alignment. Links: Full show notes & quotes: http://bit.ly/30ACY6x Sara's Twitter: twitter.com/ifeellikemacmac Sara's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/saramcnamara Cloudera: Cloudera.com Asher's Twitter: twitter.com/ashermathew Asher's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ashermathew LeanData: LeanDataInc.com Jeff's Twitter: twitter.com/jeff_davis2 Jeff's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffreydavisii JD2 Consulting: www.jeffdavis2.com Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

5 Key Takeaways: The Marketing Trends team sat down with some CEOs at the SiriusDecisions B2B Marketing Summit 2019, and have compiled the highlights on this episode. Our top 5 takeaways from these conversations: - The best content is that which you are uniquely positioned to create. "We challenge our brands to dig deep to figure out what is the one thing you can do that no one else can? If you go swimming in the sea of sameness, bad things will happen." - With a general transition toward subscriptions, focusing on new business is not as relevant anymore as the post-sale and customer journey expansion. - The goal of marketing is to facilitate value-creating transactions. - In order for an ABM strategy to succeed, it requires buy-in from the entire organization, not just parts of marketing and/or sales. - To handle escalations, be blatantly transparent and clear about how you're going to fix the problem. Click here for full notes & show notes: http://bit.ly/2xkNbaA Interviewees: Shafqat Islam is the Cofounder & CEO of NewsCred. Jon Miller is the Cofounder & CEO of Engagio. Eric Spett is the CEO of Terminus. Bryan Wade is the CEO of Sigstr.  Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

From founding their first company in 2006 to becoming top executives at Salesforce, Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley have achieved a lot together. Most recently, they have helped introduce the world to the new category of conversational marketing by co-founding their latest venture, Qualified. On this episode, Sean and Kraig sit down with Ian Faison and Lauren Vaccarello at Sirius Decisions 2019, where they discuss early days at Salesforce, successful business partnerships, and implementing conversational marketing. For full notes and show notes, click here. Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

Join us for this episode:  Sales Enablement's Evolution from a Front Row Seat with Jim Ninivaggi,Chief Readiness Officer at Brainshark, Inc.  Hear Jim as he talks about: His front row seat to the evolution of sales enablement.  How does it differ from what he saw 6 years ago? The “bifurcation” that is happening and how it is primarily around two key areas of sales enablement: sales readiness and sales content management. We will discuss what this means. We will discuss how this bifurcation is shaping the sales enablement tech landscape. How sales enablement is a critical component of marketing alignment in some key areas: Helping in the management of content. Ensuring reps can use assets effectively in their buyer interactions. Helping ensure lead conversion through better initial buyer conversations. Working hand-in glove with product marketing to ensure reps are ready to position enhancements and new products. We will wrap up by talking about the group that seems always lost in the alignment discussion – first-line managers, and how we need to think about providing assets for managers to use in coaching reps. More about our guest:  Jim is an established thought leader and business analyst from his former role as the head of SiriusDecisions' sales enablement practice. He has researched and presented to business leaders around the world on advanced concepts in optimizing sales talent, maximizing rep productivity, world-class sales leadership and sales enablement technology. Jim has published more than 200 research briefs and engaged audiences at hundreds of conferences, forums and executive presentations.  

Some of the points Matt will be covering with Terry Flaherty and Kerry Cunningam of SiriusDecisions will include: Why did SiriusDecisions update the demand waterfall? What's a Demand Unit and why does it matter? What's a Demand Map and what value does it deliver? What are the major changes/differences that Sirius introduced in this version of the waterfall? What has the reaction been to the new waterfall? What are some of the major things to consider when implementing the Demand Unit waterfall?

In this episode that I call Success Factors, I speak with David Fradin, a classically trained Product Manager & author, Janna Bastow who is the Co-founder of ProdPad, Lulu Cheng who is a product Manager at Pinterest, Jeff Lash who heads Product at SiriusDecisions and Tristan Kromer who is a Product Manager & Lean Expert. […]The post DYT 075 : 6 Success Lessons for Product Managers | Medley appeared first on .

In this Focus Forty episode of The Design Your Thinking Podcast, I talk to Jeff Lash who is the Vice President and Group Director at SiriusDecisions and runs a blog called How to be a Good Product Manager. Who is Jeff Lash? Jeff is a recognized thought leader in product management, with over a decade […]The post DYT 048 : The Good Product Manager | Jeff Lash appeared first on .

The buzz: Crystal ball for 2017. If #1 on your business wish list is to know what 2017 holds for your company, your industry and the world, we've got insightful predictions from more than 75 thought leaders about the technologies, strategies, and trends that can help you grow and compete in 2017 and beyond. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl, or Dom, and join us for SAP Game-Changers Radio 2017 Predictions – Part 5 live. Hear our complete 5-part special on-demand at Coffee Break with Game-Changers Radio. Featured guests: Larry Stolle, SAP; Marisa Kopec, SiriusDecisions; Sheila McGovern, IBM; Tamara Schenk, Miller Heiman Group; Dave Duggal, EnterpriseWeb; Maria Haggen, SAP; Elvia Novak, Deloitte; Christopher Carter, Approyo; Carlos A. Russell, Ternium; Vic Briccardi, RTS Consulting; Rich Seltz, SAP; Matt Donovan, GP Strategies Learning Solutions; Sherryanne Meyer, ASUG; Sathish Gajaraju, Sensify; Ken Redler, cSubs; Padman Ramankutty, Intrigo. Happy new year from SAP Game-Changers Radio!

The buzz: Crystal ball for 2017. If #1 on your business wish list is to know what 2017 holds for your company, your industry and the world, we've got insightful predictions from more than 75 thought leaders about the technologies, strategies, and trends that can help you grow and compete in 2017 and beyond. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl, or Dom, and join us for SAP Game-Changers Radio 2017 Predictions – Part 5 live. Hear our complete 5-part special on-demand at Coffee Break with Game-Changers Radio. Featured guests: Larry Stolle, SAP; Marisa Kopec, SiriusDecisions; Sheila McGovern, IBM; Tamara Schenk, Miller Heiman Group; Dave Duggal, EnterpriseWeb; Maria Haggen, SAP; Elvia Novak, Deloitte; Christopher Carter, Approyo; Carlos A. Russell, Ternium; Vic Briccardi, RTS Consulting; Rich Seltz, SAP; Matt Donovan, GP Strategies Learning Solutions; Sherryanne Meyer, ASUG; Sathish Gajaraju, Sensify; Ken Redler, cSubs; Padman Ramankutty, Intrigo. Happy new year from SAP Game-Changers Radio!

Our guest today is Jim Ninivaggi, Senior VP of Strategic Partnerships at Brainshark, Inc. Some of what we are covering in this episode is: How do you define sales enablement? Can you walk us through the evolution of the sales enablement function? What did it look like five years ago? What's the state of sales enablement today? Where do you see sales enablement one year from now? What are some key, top-of-mind issues that sales enablement leaders are focused on? What are some issues they may not be focused on but should be? About our guest: Jim Ninivaggi is senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Brainshark, Inc., a leading sales enablement solutions company. He has three decades of experience studying and driving sales productivity. Prior to Brainshark, Jim founded and led the sales enablement research practice at research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions – publishing hundreds of research briefs, reports, and blog posts during his 10 years at the firm, and helping shape and raise awareness for the sales enablement space.   Ways to connect with Jim Ninivaggi and learn more about Brainshark: Brainshark, Inc. (www.brainshark.com) – a leading provider of sales enablement solutions for training, coaching and buyer engagement, helping companies close more deals faster. Brainshark Integration Engine – newly announced, this connects all the content, data and applications in organizations' sales enablement ecosystems. Continual enhancements to Brainshark for Coaching, Brainshark's award-winning sales coaching solution. Brainshark for Coaching empowers sales managers to coach their teams anytime, anywhere – so reps are prepared to capitalize on every sales interaction.

Charlie McDermott is the founder of the Business & Entrepreneur Network (BEN), helping small business owners put automated systems in place so that their businesses don't rule them, they rule their business In this interview Charlie reveals the 7 stages of the perfect customer lifecycle so that we can increase sales, get more testimonials and build a huge legion of satisfied customers who refer us to their friends Joey Bushnell: Hey everyone, this is Joey Bushnell, today I have with me a special guest Charlie Mcdermott. Charlie, thank you very much for being with me today. Charlie McDermott: Absolutely, thank you for the invite. Joey Bushnell: Let me tell you a little bit about Charlie and what he has done in the marketing world... Speaker, author, and founder of the Business & Entrepreneur Network, Charlie McDermott helps small business owners clear the path to building valuable, scalable and… saleable businesses via automation and the creation of direct response marketing assets. Charlie started his first business as a college student at West Chester University located in Pennsylvania, and grew it into an 8-figure health club empire. Twenty-two years later he sold that business to focus his marketing expertise on Hollywood where he used over twenty different forms of media to breakthrough the clutter and land his son acting roles in feature films and television shows including, The Office, Private Practice, Medium, and a full-time gig as Axl Heck on the hit ABC comedy, “The Middle”. Today, Charlie works with hundreds of entrepreneurs every month online from as far away as Australia and via live events held in the Philadelphia, PA and Wilmington, DE areas. Charlie, thank you for being on the call with me today. Charlie McDermott: Thank you I'm excited. Joey Bushnell: Today we're going to be talking about how sometimes business owners are working too hard. We are going to be talking about how people can increase sales with automation. My first question is... Why is automation critical to business growth, success and financial independence? Charlie McDermott: Great question. I started this business and entrepreneur group “The Business Entrepreneur network”. I created a monster because I taught our students, about 200 small business owners and we do live events and other things too, but the problem is I taught them how to be great marketers. You would think how that would be an awesome thing, however when you get really good at marketing, you build your business, get a lot of customers and if you aren't set up properly you can get very busy. For many business owners it becomes a vicious cycle of marketing the way the business comes in. It's like go,go,go and serve,serve,serve then you're absolutely exhausted and they wake up the next day and say “Oh my goodness sales are down” do it again, market go,go,go and it ends up burning these guys out in many cases. Even in the best case it's just not a fun way to live because they end up working 7 days a week and missing out on family events. So about 6 months into the start of this group a light bulb hit us and what enabled me to sell my health club business and spend 2 years with my son out in Hollywood and help him in his acting career was that I was able to build systems in my business and sell. If you have a choice of owning Joe's pizza shop or Joe's in the shop flipping the dough and is at the cash register with the white powder on his hair and on his fingers. He's serving up your pizza slice and locking up at night and the morning and even cleaning the floors. Or would you rather have a McDonalds? I have yet to go to into a McDonalds and have the honor of finding Mr Donald in a McDonalds. They don't need to be there. Those businesses are set up with systems, as we know, that frees the business owner up to do other things to enjoy life and have a predictable cash flow versus Joe's pizza shop, it's all in Joe's head. When Joe decides to retire or move on or take his son to Hollywood, Joe is screwed because it's all in his head. Bringing back our Business and Entrepreneur network, marketing is very important and certainly you need to have a good product or service. But if don't have good systems in place so you aren't doing the same thing over and over again, spending way to much time doing manual stuff, stuff that costs in our area $10-$12 an hour, when you are worth $500 or more an hour, you are not going to be able to grow your business. Joey Bushnell: You talk a lot about building a valuable business versus what you call an ABCYT business. Can you give our audience some direction on how to build a valuable business? Charlie McDermott: For our members from the start, everything we do should be based on selling our business at some point. It's OK if you don't want to but sometimes things change. When I got my Health club business I was a college student and 23 years later my kids are teenagers and I wanted to do some things and it just made sense for me to sell my business at that point. Without those systems in place you don't have a valuable business. So Joe's pizza shop is worth maybe $50,000, if he's got a good location or special recipe versus the McDonalds which is worth millions. The only difference is McDonalds has the systems in place, therefore that's what you want to build a business that has the turn key operation possibilities. The last thing you want to do is wake up in the middle of the night and say “Oh my goodness, if Joe gets hit by a bus or if Mary decides to leave or take maternity leave” all of a sudden as a business owner, many times our support people end up dumping their work on you. It traps you again from growing your business and that is not a valuable business. The ABCYT is the “Always be chasing your tail” phenomenon that business owners do pretty much every day of the week. We get caught up in the fires, we end up doing things ourselves, no one else can do it as good as we can versus spending their time building the systems so the same thing happens over again consistently and you take as much of the human factor out of the equation as possible. Joey Bushnell: What are the 3 gaping holes in the sales funnel? Charlie McDermott: This starts evolving to taking the human piece out of the equation and especially in the areas where it is critical that we eliminate as much error as possible. When I say error it's not that staff are screwing up, it's that many times they forget, they get busy and stuff doesn't happen when it should. So when you look at a typical sales funnel you have your big top where people come on board. For an internet business they come in through the website, a retail store they are coming through the door and for other businesses they are coming through the phones. For many businesses they are coming through all of those areas and others. Question number 1 is... Are we capitalizing on that traffic? Are folks coming to our websites, shopping, picking tyres and then leaving without giving information? In my health club business, this goes back 8 years since I sold it, back then it cost us $350 to bring in a new sale. We had an army of sales folks and it would drive me crazy if I saw a prospect come through our doors and then 5 minutes later leave and then find out that they didn't get their information. We have no way to follow up with that person and we either have to do expensive advertising to maybe get them back or just sit and wait. I didn't like those options. So we made darn sure we had a system in place that captured that information. The problem with most businesses and the difference between now and then is websites really weren't that critical back then. Today a lot of folks start there. Especially in the bricks and mortar retail service businesses. They kind of get a feel for things then if they choose to visit, they'll head to the store. So if you are not capturing information on the website at the beginning of that funnel that is one of the 3 areas where you are missing the boat. That is a huge gaping hole. If you have 100 people at your website today and none of them give you information you've lost that big time. If people stop in the store and we're not capturing information. Have something in place even if it's only 10% or 5%, over the course of a year that's a huge amount of dollars that could flow to your bottom line. Then when we get those votes, who give us that information then what happens? If you are fortunate to have a sales staff, great, even if it's yourself doing the sales you all probably have busy seasons. In my health club our busy season was January through to March/ April. People after the new years wanted to lose weight and had their goals and it was lousy weather so why not join a health club, it's something to do. Then a few months later we slow down a bit. What would happen with our sales staff during those months is they would become order takers instead of sales people. The difference between an order taker and a sales person is the order takers are sitting there waiting for the business to come in and hand them a check versus a sales person who is working their leads and prospecting. What would happen in the first quarter of our business is a lot of the warm to cold leads wouldn't get followed up on because my sales team was just living off the cream. People just walking in the door saying “Hey, sign me up, here's my money”. The question there is, if I had to do it all over again, and we had 8-9 full time sales people, what if we could have automated all those warm to cold leads? So there would have been follow up happening every single day or so many times a week and it didn't involve our sales people, it was consistent and at the end of the week, 2 weeks, whatever the buying cycle is, we could bring them in as a sale and it wouldn't cost us a nickel. Wouldn't that be a great system? I probably could have cut my sales staff in half or better yet keep them at 8 and let them do what they are good at which is sell. They spent probably 80-90% of their time on the phones and a lot of it was voicemail versus if we could free them up just to sell, our sales would have gone through the roof. The businesses out there have the ability now where software is available to automate their sales and marketing so that they capture information when folks come on to the website. Then those prospects get what is called “Nurtured” along the way so you can identify those who are hot and want to buy today and we are going to pull them in as quickly as possible. But it's that bulk of folks who won't buy for upwards of maybe a year or two. There are some statistics out there, Gartner research says 67% of prospective buyers that tell you no today, will be ready to buy in the next year. Unfortunately most businesses give up after a few days or weeks so they miss out on 67%. SiriusDecisions says 80% of leads you consider to be dead, will buy within the next 2 years. These are flat out dead leads that businesses give up on and 80% of those could become buyers. So another huge, huge hole there. Joey Bushnell: Wow, definitely some food for thought there. How can a business owner plug the holes that they currently have in their bucket and instead increase the sales, referrals and testimonials automatically? Charlie McDermott: The best thing is to get us imperfect humans out of the equation as much as possible. One way is to have the systems in place obviously, and to have a program that leads a bread trail so you can lead your prospect from the beginning point to the end point, obviously being sales transaction. The challenge is, where is the end point for a lot of businesses? If your buying cycle is a week, we'd all like it to be in 7 days but as we just heard in those statistics, it may take up to 2 years. So what if we had a system in place that went 2 years and beyond? You can do that, you can put that in place so you don't miss sales. Not to go crazy with statistics but here is one that will just blow everyone away. It was a question with my sales team because no one wants to be that stereotype pushy sales person who is trying to high pressure me, we have a lot of that in the health business industry. Unfortunately that hurts businesses, they give up too soon and they miss out on the bulk of sales. 48% of businesses quit after the first call that's almost half, 24% after the second and 90% quit after the 4th. So only 10% of businesses keep it going for 5 or more contacts. That is important because when you look at when these deals close 81% on or after the 5th contact. So 10% are tapping into the 81% that close. The challenge is for business owners to stay front of mind, continually have a message and have those contacts without it costing them an arm and a leg. By doing things such as sending out emails but in an automated way so that you as an example have a “Thank you card” for some businesses as a way to say thanks for visiting. Then a series of emails that go out over weeks and months that continue to nurture that prospect and let them know that you are still there. Occasionally give them an offer to bring them back in to see if you can close the sale. But to do it in a way that doesn't involve a whole lot of time and energy is a huge advantage you have over your competition. Joey Bushnell: I understand that one of the major services your company provides is business automation based on the 7 stages of the perfect customer lifestyle. Could you tell us about these 7 stages please? Charlie McDermott: This is a way of looking at your business differently than most. The typical business is all about prospecting, bringing the traffic in, capturing that information, nurturing those prospects, converting them to print then what happens is they start all over again. They go back to generating traffic, bringing them in, negotiating, whatever that process is to closing the sales and starting over again. The opportunity there, let me jump back to my health business again, 60-70% of our members, when I sold it we had about 12,000 members at the time, were referring new members to us. So most businesses have the ability to control that rather than just relying on “I give you a good job or product, you'll tell your friends and family”. Unfortunately in this day an age with so much clutter and so much distraction that isn't necessarily true. What you want to do is put a system in place that reminds folks that you are there and you can help their friends and families and basically build referrals. Going back to generating more traffic and closing more sales right after the last sale, the next step in the perfect customer life cycle is what we call the “Deliver and Wow” stage. The wow stage is all about delivering the unexpected. So under promising and over delivering we've all heard that before. What if after someone purchases your product or service they got something in the mail or via email that was a digital download that didn't cost you anything but was an extra added bonus that made them think “Wow these guys are really special”. Every business out there battles with buyers remorse. I don't care what product or service you are selling and certainly the more high end it is the more you are battling. This is also a great strategy to reduce that or eliminate that because now you are making these folks who were maybe thinking “Umm I don't know if I made the right decision” then in the next day or the next hour there is something they get which was totally unexpected and totally takes their mind off “Did I make the right decision” to “Wow this is the right decision for me”. So the wow sequence is exactly what is sounds like. It's all about wowing your customer and it's an automated sequence that starts form the moment they purchase. As an example when someone purchases something on a website or in your store the actual purchase would trigger a thank you card or email that says “Hey, thanks for purchasing”. Then a series of events could happen over the next few days, weeks, months or even years to make them feel great abut their purchase. Here is what happens in most businesses, that I just had an experience with last year, we decided to get our house painted. Joey have you ever had a house painted? Joey Bushnell: I haven't had one painted but I painted one before. Charlie McDermott: Right so after you painted you know it's good for life. That is what my painting contractor thought too. However 3-4 years into it I noticed the paint was peeling. Did you ever see that on a paint job? Joey Bushnell: Yes Charlie McDermott: You would think that these guys would contact their customers after a period of time and say “Hey your house may be in need of more paint, or if it's not maybe you want to change the color of it”. So last year I decided it was time and I liked the guys who did our house last time, fair price, did a great job. I didn't even want to shop I just wanted to get them here. Do you think I could remember who they were? Joey Bushnell: Probably not, no. Charlie McDermott: No I couldn't, I looked, I couldn't remember. They sent us nothing, no phone calls, emails, nothing. So I end up shopping around and finding another painting contractor and it's a shame because I lost out, they certainly lost out on about a $3,000-$5,000 gig there. That is the way it is with a lot of businesses they assume they'll remember us, we did such a great job and sold such a great product. I don't care if it's 3 years, 3 months or 3 weeks even, folks today have a short memory because there is too much stuff going on. The wow sequence should happen and continue for a long long time. Especially if you are in a business like the car, real estate or things of that nature, you are dependent on them coming back 5-7 years down the road, you don't want them to forget about you. Then there is the point where after the sale, folks are either happy or not happy. Wouldn't you want to know if someone wasn't satisfied with your product or service? In most businesses the only time we find out is if they are really ticked off and you get a nasty letter phone call or whatever it is. Thank goodness so we can fix it but it's probably the 80-20 rule there. 80% of folks who weren't satisfied never tell us but they are telling their friends and everyone else and maybe even going on social media and so forth. Today more than ever it's important to have a sequence in place even a simple email that goes out on an automated basis, let's say 30 days after the purchase that says “We love having you as a customer, hopefully your product is going great for you doing everything it says and then some. By the way can you let us know if you are happy or not happy? Just click a yes or no button right here.” The "yes button" saying they are happy, goes into a separate sequence and when I say sequence I mean a series of emails or it could be postcards, voicemail blasts or anything you can think of. The next email that comes out at a certain point in time could be “Now that we know you are happy maybe it's a good time to ask for a testimonial, or tell you about our referral program". It would be kind of awkward to ask for a testimonial if they weren't happy with the product or joining the referral program so they can blast it out to the whole universe. That is obviously important and good to know who is going to support you. But more importantly it's the folks who aren't happy. The second they click that no button, you could trigger an email that goes out to your PA or receptionist to make a call right away and connect with that person. Have an email that goes out at the same time saying “we are sorry we are going to do everything we can to fix it...” I did this back in the day with my health club business but we didn't have email, we found that our unhappy customers end up being our best supporters because we were able to fix things and listen to them which no other business was doing. So when we got them back to being happy they were the happiest customers ever. So there's a huge opportunity to have something in place not just for the obvious, you don't want someone negatively talking about your business but the extreme positive that those guys and gals are going to be with you for life because you are one of the only businesses that listens to them. So to summarize the 7 stages in this perfect customer lifecycle are... 1. We want to attract the traffic 2. We want to capture them as leads in our business whether it's with web forms on the website, phone calls and have those systems in place or if they come in to our business. 3. We want to nurture them in the 3rd stage. Whether they are ready to buy today or 2 years from now there is some kind of a system in place that keeps my business front of mind. 4. Then there is the convert the sales point, which is important. At some point we want to generate dollars from this group. These next few stages are really critical and the ones that most businesses leave out. 5. The deliver and wow 6. The up sell customers stage there is huge opportunity there that most business forget to up sell and cross sell. Once a customer has bought your product, 30 days later they may be ideal candidate for your next product or service. 7. Then the final stage number 7 is focusing on getting referrals. Referrals whether you have 60-70% like I did in my business or 10-20% you can still build that business and that's the best kind of business you can get. One because it doesn't cost you an extra nickel and we tend to listen to our friends and family members when purchasing something than an ad in the newspaper. Joey Bushnell: Brilliant, Charlie that is some great information and thank you for letting us know the 7 stages that was very cool and I was taking a lot of notes while you were talking there. Charlie, where can we get more of this stuff from you and how can we learn more about you and your programs? Charlie McDermott: Yes there are 2 places... The business and entrepreneur network you can find at www.benresults.com Ben is the acronym for business and entrepreneur network and we branded it after Philadelphia's best known entrepreneur. You may know this guy, Benjamin is his first name and he is a big time inventor Joey Bushnell: Benjamin Franklin? Charlie McDermott: Yes you got it. In the states Ben is a $100 so we give away Ben's at all of our events and have some fun there. But our automation you is www.automationyou.com is our automation services where we help businesses automate their sales and marketing. We get them from working so hard, back to some sanity where their profits are significantly more then they were and they can maybe go on a vacation now and then. Joey Bushnell: Charlie, we'll put both of those links where people are watching it. I'd just like to say thank you for your time today and the great information that you have shared with us. Charlie McDermott: Thank you for the offer Joey