B2B Revenue Acceleration

If you’ve been in tech long, you know about product marketers. But here’s the question:

What do product marketers actually do? 

That’s the question we posed to Suda Srinivasan, VP of Marketing & CX at Obsidian Security.

What we talked about:

• The 101 on product marketers in B2B tech companies
• Some specifics on a product marketer’s role
• A product marketer is a quarterback
• Product marketer coordinates with the technical team
• Product marketing is a leveraged function
• Product marketers are not simply content creators
• A product marketer should be a problem-solver
• The most successful product marketers

To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

Bill started his first company when he was 18. Since then, he’s founded and/or advised 27 different companies.

He doesn’t need a marketer to paint lipstick on his product — his experience speaks for itself. And, he’s taken that experience into action as the CEO of boomtime, a company that specializes in word-of-mouth marketing. But Bill Bice has a message for B2B sales teams: Be consultants. Use the challenger sales methodology.

And he came on this episode to tell us how to do it.

What we talked about:

• The best sales reps are already making their own sales material
• Who can become a challenger sales rep?
• The 5 archetypes of sales reps:
• • The hard worker
  • The lone wolf 
  • The relationship builder
  • The challenger
  • The problem-solver
• Position you company as an organization of consultants
• The challenger sale is basically word-of-mouth at scale
• The challenger sale is a long term commitment for an organization
• Don’t use copywriters

Checkout these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

• Article Bill wrote on the Pillars of the Challenger Sales Rep

This is an interview with Bill Bice from boomtime.

To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

Common thought: “B2B companies need a content strategy.”

Common mistake: Starting your content strategy by asking, “How can I get more leads?” or, “How can I look like a thought leader?”

Do you notice what’s missing? The user.

On this episode, Director of Marketing at Sales Hacker, Colin Campbell, delivers his thoughts on executing an effective content strategy.

What we talked about:

• Forgetting to start with the user
• Caring about how your audience feels
• Your industry may help determine what medium to use
• Finding the content gaps within your competitors
• Asking “which piece of content drive traffic?”
• A better litmus test for content marketers: “Are we growing?”
• Testing

This is an interview with Colin Campbell from Sales Hacker.

To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

We live in an increasingly impatient society, and it's affecting the way startups perceive how fast they should be scaling.

On this episode, we discuss a 4-phase approach that startups can use to gauge their growth. It comes from Martina Lauchengco, an operating partner at Costanoa Ventures.

What we talked about:

• 4 stages of early-stage startups
• Phase 1: Founder selling -- founder is everything
• Phase 2: Product-market fit validation
• Phase 3: Go-to-market fit validation
• Phase 4: Scaling (Gas to the fire)
• Scale when you have demand + a repeatable sales process
• The real litmus test of whether you can scale 
• The most successful company isn't always the most disruptive

Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

• Martina’s article on early-stage startups

This is an interview with Martina Lauchengco, an operating partner at Costanoa Ventures.

To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

Like many sales reps, Richard Smith was thrown into the deep end in his first sales role as an SDR. Along the way, he developed his skills via trial and error, receiving little feedback on his performance.

Sure, he made it.

But he thought, “Wouldn’t I have made it sooner if someone had coached me?”

That driving thought has been the engine for confounding Refract — a sales coaching company that analyzes sales conversations and helps “unlock the black box” of those conversations so sales leaders can effectively coach their sales teams.

Richard came on the B2B Revenue Acceleration podcast to share some insights into how sales leaders and managers can rethink sales coaching.

What we talked about:

• Sales leaders believe in coaching (but they still aren’t coaching)
• Time & lack of training are the 2 reasons leaders don’t coach 
• Sales leaders can utilize tech to save time & measure coaching
• Tech supplements culture, but culture comes first
• Tech saves time
• Tech enables peer-to-peer coaching
• Tech helps measure & track coaching

This is an interview with Richard Smith, Cofounder & Head of Sales at Refract.

To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

Often, messaging is focused on a product and its features — but it shouldn’t be. Messaging should be focused on a persona, and how that product (or service) impacts them at their level of an organization.

It’s all part of a strategy Sri Sundaralingam calls “persona-based marketing,” which Sri unpacks in this episode.

Sri is a CMO Advisor & Consultant for cybersecurity startups, with previous head of marketing positions at Symantec, Shape Security, and others.

What we talked about:

• What is persona-based marketing?
• How persona-based marketing enhances the effectiveness of ABM
• Example of persona-based marketing without ABM
• Example of persona-based marketing with ABM
• Why the sales team has the answers on who your personas are
• Driving persona-based marketing alignment with the sales team

This is an interview with Sri Sundaralingam, CMO Advisor & Consultant for cybersecurity startups.

To hear this interview, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.

Your job title shouldn’t be Partner Account Management — it should be Partner Development. Giving your partners leads isn’t the reason you built the partnership in the first place.

Invest time in teaching them how to prospect effectively and what the ideal client profile looks like

On this episode, I interview David Davies, author and Chief Sales Transformation Officer at Sandler Training

What we talked about:

• 3+ bullet points (You can just copy/paste your blog subheadings here)

Checkout these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

• Dave’s book, Making Channel Sales Work
• B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast

To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.

If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here.

The reality of an Amazon and Yelp world is that people are going to do informational searches before they visit your website.

If you’re only measuring whether your brand shows up when people are searching for it, you’re completing ignoring whether it’s what your searcher wants in the first place.

On this episode of B2B Revenue Acceleration, I interview Garrett Mehrguth, CEO at Directive Consulting, about why sales development is so undervalued in B2B marketing — and what we can do about it.

What we talked about:

• Why it’s time to value sales development
• 3 best practices for developing good sales development timing
• The only 4 metrics you need to be tracking
• Focusing on your brand, not your search results

To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.

If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here.

“Open source” means more than just the software. It’s more of a business model, mindset, and culture — especially when it comes to growing and maintaining upstream and downstream communities.

On this episode, I got to interview Freek Hemminga, Head of EMEA Marketing at SUSE, about the challenges of marketing an open source company.

What we talked about:

• The main goal of open source software (& how to achieve it)
• Balancing brand and services / upstream and downstream
• 5 ways to build positive communities
• Qualifying inbound leads for a +20% growth

To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.

 If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here.

Acquisitions: You don’t have to tell everyone. You shouldn’t tell everyone. But what should you do?

On this episode, I sat down with Varun Kohli, Co Founder and Chief Business Officer at MachEye, to talk about surviving acquisition.

What we talked about:

• Maintaining professionalism during transition
• Whether it’s more advantageous for startups to be absorbed or remain autonomous
• The 3 things you should do to discover the most opportunity during transition
• When to stay and when to run
• Understanding how to leverage transition from a marketing perspective

To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The B2B Revenue Acceleration Podcast.

If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, you can listen to every episode here.