Addicted to Growth

Andy's been in sales for over 25% longer than I've been alive, four decades. His first sales job was selling women’s shoes at JC Penney. In his professional career, he's sold everything from computers to small businesses to complex communications systems that sold for tens of millions of dollars to some of the world’s largest enterprises. He closed hundreds of millions of dollars in products and services before starting his own company.

In this episode we discuss:

How the remote selling environment is impacting sales enablement

One of the top reasons your prospects aren't talking to you and the number one thing you should be thinking about as a rep

Andy's take on the role content plays in the success of sellers today

What happened when Andy combined his insatiable curiosity with a competitive streak

The only reason why salespeople exist (and it's easier than we think)

Why management enablement will become a top priority for leading companies in 2021 and beyond

Why Billions comes up again and everyone needs a Wendy on staff (a mindset coach)

Andy's take on challenging the status quo and more!

Andy Paul

https://www.linkedin.com/in/realandypaul/ (LinkedIn)

Travis and Kevin talk with Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb about being a good human, the value of evangelism, the value of video more.

Episode Highlights:

Good Business comes down to being a good human - Be a better person, team member, and better helper to your customers

The power of bringing joy to your work and providing value to your customers

We’re freer to be ourselves than ever before - COVID has accelerated everyone into each other’s lives and homes

Advice for people who are trying to be more comfortable with being themselves

The importance of spending time with yourself

Do people train their sales reps on cultural linguistics?

Evangelism is necessary as a function in the organization - you’re evangelizing the PROBLEM, not the product

How do we evolve from customer service to customer success?

How to know when your company is ready to evangelize and stand for something

Thing people can do to reconnect with themselves and be more human

How you can use video across the entire lifecycle of your customer journey (internal and external)

Tweetable Quotes:

"If you’re innovating, you either have a solution to a problem that didn’t have a solution before. Or, you have a better solution to a problem that people have been solving."– Ethan Beute

"Creativity comes when you unplug from the input and allow the ideas you already have in your mind collide, with the new ideas you're collecting."– Ethan Beute

"Would this message be more effective if it was more of an in-person moment than this kind of intellectual exercise of decoding these words and sentences and paragraphs you wrote."– Ethan Beute

Links:

Ethan Beute: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbeute/ (LinkedIn)

Ethan Beute: https://twitter.com/ethanbeute (Twitter)

https://bombbomb.com/ (BombBomb)

Ethan Beute: Personal https://ethanbeute.com/ (Website)

Kevin talks with Sales Enablement Program Manager Epris Blakenship with Monday.com about all things sales enablement. In this episode, you'll hear Kevin and Epris touch on the following topics:

How to identify your SME

How to prioritize request for Sales enablement

All adults learn differently

Why sales enablement needs to walk with your sales team

Action and Adapt

How to create practical applications to take learning to the next level.

Pick up the damn phone!

The power of asking why.. Top performers do what they do and most of the time dont know why they do it. In order to replicate their performance you need to understand the why.

Episode Summary

Travis talks with Tracey Santilli and Mercedes C. Smith, about pushing diversity forward, the power of creating moments to get uncomfortable with your people, organizational growth, and more.

Short Bios

Tracey Santilli, Chief Growth Officer at Tierney

Tracey Santilli is the Chief Growth Officer at Tierney, a full-service marketing communications agency and IPG-owned subsidiary. In this role, Tracey oversees strategic planning for all clients, working to develop clear business cases around opportunities, and delivers strategic recommendations to create integrated campaigns that drive business results. She is responsible for all client relationships, general operations, and staffing for 80+ and oversees the management of all practice areas including public relations, social media, crisis management, strategic planning, account management, and paid media across three offices (Philadelphia, New York, and Harrisburg).

Mercedes C. Smith, Vice President of Public Relations, Tierney

Mercedes C. Smith is a Vice President of Public Relations at Tierney, a full-service agency with skills in advertising, PR, interactive and media. With hard work and determination, she has developed strategic campaigns to solve unique challenges for various brands across the hospitality, healthcare, entertainment, consumer lifestyle, and technology sector. Additionally, Mercedes is passionate about empowering others to live their truths, both personally and professionally. “Bring your full self to everything you do. It’s your unique culture, experiences, and perspective that makes you irreplaceable. Own it – all of it.”

Travis and Kevin talk with Go Nimbly VP of Marketing, Lorena Morales about people, personalities, home, immigration, and more

Travis and Kevin talk with the Co-Founder of Reachdesk, Alex Olley, about getting back into the trenches, prospecting, creating a safe environment for your reps, how a pivot led to Reachdesk tripling their revenue, and more.

Episode Highlights:

A co-Founder who runs the revenue and marketing functions

Passionate about genuinely knitting together sales and marketing

Most passionate about prospecting and cold calling, creating videos, and writing emails

Prospecting with emotions and creating spirits through prospecting

“If you’re living in fear wondering what your prospect might say, don’t bother in the first place”

Pushing boundaries and figuring out where the lanes are

Creating a safe environment for your reps to take risks and how to help them visualize their growth process

The value of creating connections with peoples pasts

How to know when your leader doesn’t know the answers and what to do about it

Getting back into the trenches as an SDR

How Reachdesk’s pivot led to them tripling their revenue in three months

You guessed it again, sit down and talk to your customers to learn how you can serve them

How Alex evolved his onboarding

The importance and value of the buddy system

How to maintain a culture and how Reachdesk allows everyone on their team to share their values into a community word cloud that grows

How to give your employees a bigger share of the voice to drive the cultural change that everyone is talking about

Negotiation tips from Alex’s time as a lawyer

Alex breaks down how writing sequences is the same as composing a song

How do you teach someone how to make sequences?

A lesser-known way to approach messaging in your outreach through storytelling

Creating an experiential sequence to build relationships with your prospects

How to create virtual and remote experiences that keep people engaged and hold their attention

How to truly differentiate your customer experience in the marketplace

The new currency is experience

Why companies are so reluctant to change and ungate their content…

Quotes

“You’re never gonna win 100% of the time. And if you go into prospecting and you think, I’ve got to make this so perfect, because I don’t want to get in trouble. I’m living in fear of what my prospect might say, don’t bother in the first place right?” - Alex Olley

“You’ve got to create an environment and tell people where the boundaries really are.” - Alex Olley on creating a safe environment for reps to take risks

“As leaders, we have to start making statements about what we think is okay, then handing that over to someone and saying go and test it.” - Alex Olley

“How do you tell a story in a narrative within your sequences or your outreach which builds

“You’re the one who’s orchestrating. You can build together a structure that gives your audience a desire to listen. Tell a story. Make it enjoyable.” - Alex Olley

“Always be positively unsatisfied.” - Alex Olley

Links:

Alex Olley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexolley/ (LinkedIn)

https://www.reachdesk.com/ (Reachdesk)

Travis King:https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisandreking/ ( Linkedin)

Kevin Mulrane:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmulrane/ ( LinkedIn)

Episode Summary:

Kevin talks with Growth Marketing Lead at Interseller, Kristina Finseth about her career path, here unique understanding of marketing and sales, how to build a growth organization from scratch and more.

About Kristina

Kristina owns growth marketing at Interseller, a platform that helps recruiters engage with talent through contact data identification and personalized email sequencing. Having been in the shoes of a recruiter in startups, enterprises, and agencies - she is genuinely driven by a desire to make a positive impact on the way companies engage with talent in today's market. On any given day, you'll find Kristina jamming with recruiters on messaging candidates, training jiu jitsu, traveling, or exploring the local food scene.

Episode Highlights:

Kristina’s career path - military, recruiting, marketing, sales, growth (business development and marketing)

If you’re in a marketing capacity, do whatever you can to get involved with sales

When revenue is the common goal between sales and marketing, it’s really easy to remain in sync with the activities you’re running

One of the biggest challenges facing new growth marketers - building out the repeatable processes, documenting, building the playbook so that as your team grows, and your company grows, it’s easier to plug and play with different people and have them in their niche specialties

The biggest misconception marketing has about sales

The biggest misconception sales has about marketing

LinkedIn Poll results about where SDRs should report into

What is a growth associate, what do they do, and advice for someone considering how this function would fit within their org?

How you can start to change the narrative around traditional funnel metrics to focus on revenue and when you know you have done that successfully

Current trends in marketing and growth

Kristina’s number one piece of advice for adoption of tools

Tweetable Quotes:

"If you’re in a marketing capacity, do whatever you can to get involved with sales."– Kristina Finseth

"When revenue is the common goal between sales and marketing, it’s really easy to remain in sync with the activities you’re running."– Kristina Finseth

"There's are some sales rockstars out there that know how to get in front of prospects better than some marketers.."– Kristina Finseth on the biggest misconceptions marketing has about sales

“What's different is, I'm going to get booked meetings for you. So look at the quality metric, which is if meetings are getting booked, and then we're closing those meetings. That's what people should be worried about. Are we closing those deals? It really is all about revenue, not just Hey, I had 1500 people register for a webinar. Here's a lead list. Right?” - Kristina Finseth

Links:

Kevin Mulrane:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmulrane/ ( LinkedIn)

Kristina Finseth:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinafinseth/ ( LinkedIn)

Travis talks with Product Manager, Phyllis Njoroge about a few areas of opportunity for LinkedIn’s product team, content creation and distribution, podcasting, voice, and more.

About Phyllis

Throughout her life, she has been interested in "everything."** When she was a child, she asked if she could go to college forever because her favorite thing to do is learn and improve. In history class, she grew jealous of the Renaissance person because it was the last she heard of someone being allowed to be well-versed in, well, a lot of things.

Introduce our lead in the third act: Product Management. she no longer has to choose what areas to be skilled in for a specialization because the specialization demanded that she be skilled in several areas. She can stay an artist, an engineer, a therapist, an entrepreneur, a leader, an innovator, and a visionary without having to switch hats. Like many others, Phyllis didn't choose to become a product manager; she was engaging in many product management skills and found a title that aligned with what she wanted out of her life and her work.

Outside of solving for user problems, she spends her time trying to work on some other problems in the world: imposter syndrome, lack of diversity and equity in STEM, and a surprisingly common lack of career fulfillment. She rides on the fundamental belief that life should be fair, easy, and lived freely by everyone regardless of the circumstances they were born into.

She aims to improve the world from where it was yesterday and would love to connect with anyone who looks to shake up tradition for innovation.

Links:

Phyllis Njoroge:https://www.linkedin.com/in/phyllis-njoroge/ ( LinkedIn)

Travis King:https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisandreking/ ( Linkedin)

During the 20th episode of Addicted to Growth, sales leaders Travis King, and Kevin Mulrane connect with

Principal & Founder of JD2 Consulting, Jeff Davis. Listen to learn about Jeff’s story, the biggest misconceptions people have about marketing, how we can create togetherness, and more.

Favorite Points:

Create togetherness.

Ask “so why are we doing this?”:

Where most organizations fail when trying to align sales and marketing

Travis talks with Carol Malakasis about her journey into sales, her passion for food, and what early-stage founders should be thinking about when it comes to building and growing their sales playbooks and more.

Episode Highlights:

Carol’s timing cold calling her way into one of New York’s top kitchens

Why Carol is so passionate about food and caring for others

Where and how Carol developed her go-getter mentality without playing sports or group activities

How Craiglist opened Carol’s door to tech sales

How she’s helping early-stage startups and their founders (seed to series a) build and grow their sales playbook

The importance of a strong product for early-stage companies

The two biggest struggles with early-stage startups:

Where to allocate capital because you only have a little bit of money

Where to allocate human capital - who’s the right person for this job?

How to explore what you want in life, identify your strengths and be curious to learn something new

The value of having a growth mindset and pushing yourself and your people to grow

What it means to be the village idiot and how to figure out if you think that way or not

3 Favorite Points:

How Carol Cold Called Her Way Into a Top Restaurant Kitchen in NYC

How to Develop a Go-Getter Mentality as a Non-Athlete

How to explore what you want in life, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and be curious to learn something new

Tweetable Quotes:

"Who doesn't like food, right, like food is culture and history and memories. And we all had someone that cooked for us, right a mom or an aunt or a dad or some sort of caretaker growing up. ."– Carol Malakasis

"We all learn that when someone cooks for you and treats you to a wonderful meal is because they love you because they want to take care of you."– Carol Malakasis

"Some adversity is good. You kind of need to get hit on the face a little bit when you're younger, to sort of learn how to respond and move on to have those responses be innate."– Carol Malakasis

“If you ask for help, and you're coachable, and you have a goal in mind, you can do really, really well.” – Carol Malakasis

Links:

Travis King:https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisandreking/ ( Linkedin)

Carol Malakasis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolmalakasis/ (LinkedIn)