Labcast Podcast by OpenView Labs

Today, customers are more informed than ever. They’ve visited your website, done their research, and already know the business benefits of your product (and your competitors’), often before you even speak with them. In order to set yourself apart and achieve customer buy-in, you can no longer rely solely on technical features or business benefits.

Instead, you need to start employing the keys to Insight Selling — appealing to both the rational and emotional sides of your customers in order to truly resonate and drive the sale home.

Michael Harris, the CEO of Insight Demand and author of Insight Selling: Sell Value and Differentiate Your Product with Insight Scenarios, says storytelling and appealing to your customers’ emotion will make your messaging 20x stickier. In this week’s Labcast, he explains the impact of insight selling, how to incorporate “insight scenarios” into your sales strategy, and three ways to transform your salespeople into trusted advisors for your customers.

This Week’s Guest

“A story is a fact wrapped in emotion. That makes it memorable, and that makes your sales sticky so that long after the facts and figures of your PowerPoint presentation have been forgotten…you know [you delivered] a good story because they can then tell it to someone else.”

— Michael Harris, CEO at Insight Demand

Key Takeaways

* The key concept behind Insight Selling: What exactly is Insight Selling? It involves appealing to both your customers rational and emotional sides in order to illustrate the value of your product or solution. [2:00]

* How to overcome the fear of change: The fear of change can be one of the biggest barriers to customer buy in. Show your customers how your product can resolve an even bigger concern: the fear of the status quo. [6:20]

* Not convinced on the power of emotion? Try this quick thought experiment. [8:30]

* Insight Scenarios: The key to getting customers to believe in your product. [11:45]

* 3 ways to help your salespeople become trusted advisors:

* It’s all about making your salespeople smarter. Try to get your customers to use your product for 6 months. [13:00]

* Put them in the role of customer service. The more they learn on the back end, the more successful they’ll be on the front end. [13:15]

* Get your best salespeople to share their insight scenarios with the rest of your team. [13:30]

* Why storytelling is like jazz: There’s no formula for insight scenarios. You’ve got to improvise and make sure your voice comes across. [14:30]

* Why storytelling is 20x stickier: Storytelling makes your messaging stick in your customers’ minds. This quick experiment proves why. [15:20]

Listen Here

Subscribe to Labcast

Transcript

Announcer: This is Labcast, insights and ideas for the expansion-stage senior manager. Hosted by OpenView Labs.

Jonathan: Hello everyone and welcome to Labcast from OpenView. Today we have Michael Harris with us. Michael is the CEO at Insight Demand, which is an insight selling sales training company.

He’s also the author of the new book Insight Selling: Sell Value and Differentiate Your Product with Insight Scenarios. It’s a great book and I definitely recommend it. You can check it out. It’s available on Amazon.com

So, Michael, I’m really happy to have you here with us today.

What does a typical conversation between your sales team and your prospects sound like? Do calls quickly dive into strategies and problem solving or are they simply a boring show-and-tell of your product’s features? Or worse, is every sales rep’s approach different and no one call alike? If your answer is one of the latter, there’s a good chance your demos and other sales materials are at least partially to blame.

In this week’s Labcast, HubSpot’s Rick Burnes explains why his company ditched sales decks in favor of directing prospects to the Web. Not only does a single website help keep the product story consistent and accurate, Burns says, it also gives customers control of their information consumption. As a result, prospects actually tend to be better informed, more engaged, and more ready to move forward when it comes time for the next call.

Should you be ditching your sales decks? Listen to the full podcast to decide whether that approach is right for you, and for more tips on aligning your messaging and your teams.

This Week’s Guest

“The Web really gives the customer control to consume information on their own time, and the information they want, as opposed to the demo decks, which are really sales controlling the information.”

— Rick Burnes, Product Marketing Director at HubSpot

Key Takeaways

* Why your website trumps sales decks: As they get passed along, demo decks often result in a twisted story of the product. Centralizing materials on your website can help resonate a more consistent product story. [1:45]

* Improving sales conversations: The Web gives buyers control to consume your product information on their own accord. If you provide the right information online, sales calls can become less focused on the bells and whistles of a product and more focused on discussing that buyer’s actual needs. [3:30]

* HubSpot’s tactics for aligning sales, marketing, and development:

* Seating the sales enablement team in the middle of the sales floor. [7:00]

* Creating a board for reps to vote for their favorite marketing and product ideas. [7:10]

* Setting up a wiki to improve feedback. [7:20]

* Encouraging the web development team to show mock-ups to sales reps. [7:40]

* Keys to establishing and updating your buyer personas:

* Establish formal documentation of buyer personas and their buying journeys. [11:50]

* Make conducting win-loss interviews a regular part of your process. [12:30]

* Conduct user testing. [13:00]

* A great way to bring new marketers up to speed: Hubspot gets new marketers on board with the product by asking them to write case studies and talk directly with customers. [17:50]

* The best When you have a new product, get your top sales reps to test the features. [19:30]

Listen Here

Subscribe to Labcast

Transcript

Jonathan: Hello, everyone, welcome to Labcast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. This week we are really excited to have Rick Burnes here. Rick is the Product Marketing Director at HubSpot, which is, of course, our neighbor across the river here in Boston.

I’m really excited to have Rick here. He’s been at HubSpot since way back in the early days, 2008. He’s been in a few different roles, seen a lot of things happen there, seen a lot of great growth that the company has had.

I’m personally looking forward to this call because, way back last September, I was at HubSpot’s Annual Inbound Conference, here in Boston, saw one of Rick’s presentations, and was really impressed with what I heard. He had a lot of good stuff to say about alignin...

Are you going about your B2B marketing all wrong? CEB’s Karl Schmidt explains why the real driving factors behind B2B buying decisions are far more personal and emotional than you think.

Uncovering the Underutilized Power of Emotion in B2B Marketing

When it comes to making purchasing decisions, we all know our choices aren’t always based on logic and reason. Why do you think they keep making red sports cars with terrible gas mileage and keep putting candy bars near the checkout?

Of course, acting on a last-second impulse purchase is one thing, but what happens when we’re forced to make a decision on a product or solution that could make or break our business? What happens when that involves navigating a complex buying process, requiring us to loop in multiple stakeholders across various departments, or when it takes maybe a year or even longer to finalize the purchase? Surely with everything riding on that kind of decision — not to mention with that amount of time to really think things through — our approach becomes more rational than emotional…

After all, it’s strictly business, right?

Wrong. According to the surprising findings in “From Promtion to Emotion: Connecting Customers to B2B Brands,” a whitepaper from CEB in partnership with Google, when it comes to making the purchasing decision, the personal value a B2B solution offers has 2x the impact of the business value it provides. Not only that, CEB’s findings also show that B2B customers are in fact much more emotionally attached to the brands they purchase from than B2C customers are.

How personal and emotional is B2B buying? It turns out the answer is very. And if you’re not targeting your marketing accordingly, you’re missing a huge opportunity to really resonate with your buyers and to help guide them more effectively down the path to purchase.

This Week’s Guest

“If we think about the risk we take on from making a large [B2B] investment…we’re talking millions of dollars. These are career-altering type risks and if we don’t think about what it takes to overcome that risk, from a personal, emotional perspective…then we’re missing where we as marketers should really be focused.”

— Karl Schmidt, Practice Manager at the CEB Marketing Leadership Council

Key Takeaways

* Do customers feel closer to Cisco than Apple? When it comes to having an emotional connection with buyers, B2B brands actually score higher than top B2C brands. [3:10]

* Personal risk plays a huge role in influencing a B2B buying decision: Think about purchasing an iPad in comparison to investing in a CRM solution. [5:20]

* Marketers need to “win the elephant and the rider”: Appeal to both the rational and emotional side of B2B buyers. [9:55]

* Don’t let your buyers end up in the “unhappy valley”: Avoid limiting your emotional messaging and engagement to the demand generation stage. Connect with your buyers on an emotional level throughout their entire journey. [15:02]

* Personal value has 2x the impact on the buying decision than business value. Decisions can often be influenced by effectively answering questions like, “Will this purchase make my team more successful?,” and “Will it make me viewed as a strong leader?” [19:20]

* The big opportunity for B2B marketers: This opens up a window for marketers to really resonate and differentiate themselves from competitors. [22:25]

* One company pushing all the right personal and emotional buttons: Xerox is a great example of a company taki...

Zappos triggered an uproar when it announced it was ditching traditional management hierarchy in exchange for self-organizing teams. In this week’s Labcast, Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland sounds off on holacracy and provides a basic anatomy lesson on the structure of truly agile organizations.

Holacracy — the buzzword has been swarming the web ever since Zappos announced it would be swapping management titles for a “self-governing” system. There seems to be two main reactions surrounding the shift — those who believe holacracy is the way of the future, and those who dismiss it as a passing fad.

But when you get down to the key concepts of holacracy — the emphasis on small self-organizing teams operating autonomously, for example — perhaps the system isn’t exactly the scary new revolution it’s being made out to be. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like agile development.

In this week’s Labcast, Dr. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, weighs in on holacracy and the future of management — drawing parallels between agile and holacracy, and explaining why your own body may be the perfect model for a truly agile, productive, and innovative organization. 

This Week’s Guest

“There is this hierarchy, but it’s all one kind of interacting whole just like your body is. Your heart knows how to pump. You don’t tell your heart what to do or you’re going to get into trouble…You may give it some direction, but then it kind of does it by itself. That’s the holocracy in action. I think that’s what Zappos is trying to achieve.”

— Jeff Sutherland, Scrum Inc

Key Takeaways

* Holacracy isn’t a new concept. In fact, it has a lot in common with Scrum. [2:25]

* In Holacracy and Scrum, there is a hierarchy, but it’s a different kind. Think of it as the human body. [2:50] and [11:45]

* Managers need to take more of a hands-off approach. The best are able to be a coach while also a member of the team. [6:30]

* The architecture of Scrum is a lot like intelligent code. [12:55]

* What’s the future of management? [16:10]

Listen Here

Subscribe to Labcast

Transcript

Announcer: This is Labcast, insights and ideas for the expansion-stage senior manager, hosted by OpenView Labs.

Jonathan: Hello everyone, and welcome to Labcast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. With us today we have Dr. Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of the agile development framework Scrum. Jeff, thanks for coming back with us today.

Jeff: Yeah, great to be here again.

Jonathan: For many of our listeners, you’re familiar with Jeff and his work. But, for those who aren’t, Jeff is a pioneer in the world of software development. He served as a VP of engineering as well as a CTO or CEO of 11 software companies. He’s currently the chair of the Scrum Foundation and senior adviser and Agile coach for us here at OpenView. You can learn much more about Jeff and the transformative benefits of Scrum at scruminc.com.

Jeff, I’m really excited to have you here today. There is a topic that’s been big in the news for the past couple of weeks. In fact, it’s really swarming around a new buzzword. That buzzword is holocracy.

So, as listeners I’m sure know, Zappos a few weeks ago made a big splash when it announced it’d be removing its management hierarchy and replacing it with this radical self-governing system. The response to this has been huge.

Dr. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum and Senior Advisor and Agile Coach to OpenView, explains why Healthcare.gov’s poor leadership and failure to meet a “working product” resulted in a sinking ship. On the other hand, he also explains how companies can follow in the footsteps of Spotify’s success by hiring experienced Agile coaches, employing seamless coordination, and mastering the art of systematic waste management. Listen in to this week’s Labcast below.

This Week’s Guest

“[Spotify’s] competition is Google, Amazon and Apple, any one of whom could crush them in a nanosecond, unless they’re faster, better, cheaper. And they have to stay that way. They have to keep on running out ahead.” – Jeff Sutherland

Key Takeaways

Healthcare.gov: An example of software development gone wrong

* Lack of coordination between the front end and back end. While the front end employed Scrum, it missed the second principle of the Agile Manifesto: “Working software” [3:00]

*  Weak leadership. There were 20-25 consultancies working on the project, but no one steering the ship. [4:05]

* They project should have been launched on a state-by-state basis. This would have allowed success for the states that did work and allowed developers to work on the back end to fix the other states. [3:30]

Spotify: an example of Agile done right

* Why employ Scrum? Going Agile allows Spotify to be faster, better, and cheaper than industry Goliaths like Google, Amazon, and Apple. [8:40]

* Spotify ensures its Scrum masters are also experienced Agile coaches. [8:20]

* Excellent team coordination. Employing “squads” and “tribes,” Spotify makes sure its teams are continuously deploying software and sprinting. [9:15]

* Systematic waste removal. Knowing when to cut off slow teams is crucial to elegant Agile. [11:30]

Additional Resources

* ScrumInc.com

* Scrum.JeffSutherland.com

Listen Here

Transcript

Jonathan: Hello everyone, and welcome to Labcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Crowe, and with us today we have a very special guest — Dr. Jeff Sutherland. He’s the creator of Scrum. For those who don’t know, Scrum is an Agile development framework that dramatically changes how people work, how they organize themselves, and it makes organizations faster, better and far more productive.

Jeff has an incredible background and vast experience in software development. He’s been a VP of Engineering as well as a CTO or CEO of 11 software companies. He’s also the chair of the Scrum Foundation and he’s a senior adviser and Agile coach for us here at OpenView Venture Partners. In fact, Jeff leads a monthly Scrum master and product owner trainings right here in OpenView offices, and he’s kindly taking a break from one of those to talk with us right now.

Jeff, thank you very much for being here, for taking the time.

Jeff: Yeah, thanks for doing this Jonathan.

Jonathan: The topic we’ll be discussing today is one I’m really excited about. It’s examples of Agile done right, and Agile gone bad. This is something, I know, that comes up a lot in the trainings. People always like to hear about examples of Scrum and Agile in action, and lately there’s been one very prominent example of Agile gone bad that I’m curious to hear your thoughts about. Can you talk a little bit about healthcare.gov, what went wrong and how better Agile practices could have maybe helped avoid what’s become a really notorious software disa...

From free prospecting tools to compensation plans done right, these four free sales management webinars will help you take your team’s performance to the next level.

In recent months, the OpenView Sales and Marketing Support team has hosted four webinars, and we plan to keep up this monthly rhythm in 2014. CeCe and I have thoroughly enjoyed hosting these sessions (perhaps a little too much — we are total hams), and look forward to making the webinars that much more interesting to our portfolio companies and beyond in the upcoming year.

Live webinars can sometimes be difficult to attend, particularly for sales people who are not always at their desks. So, for your listening/viewing pleasure here are the recordings of all four of our recent sessions in one centralized location — enjoy!

1) The Top Free Sales Prospecting Tools

Kyle Porter of SalesLoft joins CeCe and me in this 45min webinar covering the top free tools your sales team needs to use to boost your performance and increase your efficiency. The session includes:

* What free tools you can implement to enhance your prospecting efforts

* Where and how to access these tools

* The power of using internet data to boost your sales team’s performance

* Best practices for how to successfully implement and integrate these tools into your prospecting process

2) How to Design a Sales Compensation Plan that’s Right for Your Team

Compensation plans are extremely powerful tools for influencing sales results — but only when done right. If done incorrectly, they can back-fire and even demotivate and distract your sales team.

In this webinar, CeCe and I are joined by sales strategy consultant Michael Hanna to tackle the frequently-asked question, “How do I design an effective compensation package for my sales team?” The agenda includes:

* Best practices for setting base salary / variable split

* 7 critical, but commonly overlooked factors for designing and implementing sales compensation plans

* 10 compensation modeling elements

 3) Getting Attention in 15 Seconds: How to Turn Any Cold Call into a Warm One

In this webinar, CeCe and I team up with sales trainer and consultant Jeff Hoffman to share a handful of best practices that can help salespeople and lead generators boost prospecting productivity and harness the power of momentum selling. The contents include:

* Why traditional cold calling techniques don’t work anymore

* What you can do to get your prospects’ attention in 15 seconds

* And how to leverage Hoffman’s proven “Why You? Why You Now?™” prospecting strategy

4) Work Smarter, Not harder: Planning a Model Day for Success

Do you want to consistently hit your numbers? Help your team plan for success and structure their day to maximize output without putting in more hours. In this webinar, CeCe and I discuss:

* Why time management is essential for hitting goals

* Where time is lost in the day

* How to create a daily plan to achieve your goals and hit your numbers.

What webinar topics would you like our team to cover next year? Please give us your feedback!

Even outside the holiday season, it’s natural to want to volunteer your time towards activities outside your primary role. For salespeople, that might be helping onboard a new client instead of generating new leads. For CEOs, that might mean trading in the leader role for administrator-in-chief. But while being a team player sure might seem like the jolly thing to do, the truth is the giving spirit is likely distracting you from your most important duties — and hurting your company, overall.

Mike Weinberg, one of OpenView’s Top Sales Influencers for 2013 and author of bestselling book New Sales Simplified, has nontraditional tidings to share this year — if you really want to be helpful, start being selfishly productive. You don’t have to be a complete Grinch in your non-work activities, but if you really want to be productive, you need to start stealing back your calendar and saying “No” to non-high payoff activities. For example, salespeople: Ask yourself throughout the day, “Is what I’m doing right now leading to a sale?”

This Week’s Guest

“[Your] primary job is not deliveries. It’s not operations. It’s not program management. It’s finding new business. Your job is to pick up a weapon and go kill something, and every time you get distracted from doing that, you think you’re helping, but actually you’re hurting the cause.”

Key Points

* Being too much of a team player can become dangerous when it interferes with your primary job. For salespeople, that’s finding new business. [3:00]

* It’s okay to be selfish. [5:30]

* Take control of your calendar. Make appointments with yourself for things you need to work on. [5:45]

* CEOs: You’re not administrator-in-chief. [7:45]

* Sales Managers: Stop being the firefighter, and start the being a Navy Seal. [8:30]

* Take advantage of offloading. Mike uses EA Help, a virtual assistant. [10:15]

* Pro tip for 2014: Do some year-end, post-mortem analysis and start planning for 2014. [14:50]

Listen Here

Labcast 127: Mike Weinberg on Being Selfishly Productive

Transcript

Jonathan Crowe: Hello, everyone, and welcome to LabCast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. This week, we have consultant sales coach and speaker Mike Weinberg with us. Mike is the author of the bestselling book New Sales Simplified: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development. Mike also has a popular website and blog at NewSalesCoach.com, and he was even named one of our Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013.

I’m really excited to have Mike here with us, especially during this very busy season. It’s busy for all of us, especially salespeople. It’s a mad dash to the finish, as everybody knows. And it’s also the season of giving, but Mike here is with us to suggest that, you know what? Salespeople should actually realize it’s okay to be a little selfish.

Mike, great to have you with us. Can you talk a little bit about being selfishly productive?

Mike Weinberg: Sure can. Good morning, Jonathan. Great to be with you. Thanks for the invite.

This is a controversial topic. And yeah, it is the season of giving,

In this week’s Labcast, leadership advisor and author Mike Myatt shares powerful tips for hacking leadership gaps and giving your company the vision and drive it needs to move forward.

CEOs, here’s a reality check: Rate your leadership ability on a scale of 1–10, 1 being the absolutely worst leader you’ve encountered and 10 being the best. What did you give yourself? Around an 8? The fact is, chances are your employees, on average, will rate you two or three points lower. Now, imagine getting up in the morning and trying to pump yourself up to work for a 5.

The difference between those two perceptions is what Mike Myatt, one of America’s top CEO coaches, calls a leadership gap. And without closing it, you are unlikely to provide your team with the motivation and guidance they need to thrive and succeed.

All isn’t lost, yet. Myatt provides exactly the advice you need to live up to your full leadership potential in his upcoming book, Hacking Leadership: The Eleven Gaps Every Business Needs to Close and the Secrets of Closing them Quickly. Listen in to this week’s Labcast as he shares several insights from the book to help you reassess your management style, focus your vision, and transform your leadership ability from a 5 to a perfect 10.

This Week’s Guest

“When I look at these gaps, what I try to get leaders to understand is that they first and foremost have to really have a very clear, well-articulated, crisp vision. Then they have to align the strategy and the operations around that vision.”

— Mike Myatt, author of Hacking Leadership

Key Takeaways

* Great leaders create relationships with strong independencies [1:47]

* Don’t be a bottleneck leader — build an amazing team you can trust, and then delegate [3:16]

* Build your agenda focused around something other than a pure profit motive [6:35]

* If you focus on your team, culture falls into place [8:44]

* To get rid of leadership gaps, start with a well-articulated vision [12:30]

* If leaders want to create trust they have to hold themselves accountable [14:14]

* Realize people don’t always see you the way you see yourself [16:04]

* Case study: Brian Kibby and McGraw Hill [20:07]

Listen

Labcast-126 Mike Myatt on Hacking Leadership

Subscribe to Labcast

Transcript

Jonathan: Welcome to Labcast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. This week I’m very excited to have a special guest. With us, we have Mike Myatt. Mike is a leadership adviser to Fortune 500 CEOs and boards of directors. He’s widely regarded as America’s top CEO coach. You may know Mike from his extremely popular Forbes column, Leadership Myths: Busting them One by One. He’s also the author of two books, Leadership Matters: The CEO Survival Manual, and his upcoming book, Hacking Leadership: The Eleven Gaps Every Business Needs to Close ...

Publishing a book can seem like a daunting task. In this week’s Labcast, marketing experts (and published authors) Dorie Clark and Jonathan Kranz walk listeners through the publishing process and offer tips for keeping motivated throughout the journey.

Publishing a book is an extremely rewarding accomplishment for you and your business. However, all of the work that comes with writing and publishing a book can lead to a lot of confusion. People often wonder: How do I even decide to saddle up and begin the writing process in the first place? What kinds of material should I cover? What publishers will take me on?

In this week’s Labcast, Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You, and Jonathan Kranz, author of Writing Copy for Dummies, share the most valuable lessons they’ve learned throughout their own experiences in publishing.

This Week’s Guests

“If… you can prove that you are well known and well respected in your industry, that is invaluable. That is what’s going to get you the ability to win a book contract. So start today.”

–Dorie Clark, Clark Strategic Communications

 

 “The idea that you have to write the whole book is just too intimidating, but it’s not so bad if you say well I need a chapter a week, a chapter every two weeks, depending on how long the chapters are. That’s manageable.”

–Jonathan Kranz, Kranz Communications

Key Takeaways

* Know yourself: What kind of person is fit to write a book? ( 5:27)

* Can your book aid your business? (5:55)

* Persuade publishers that you are famous enough to move copies. (7:43)

* Blog if you need a bigger platform. (8:48)

* Hop on the social media train. (9:48)

* How to write a book proposal: (10:26)

* Write a sample chapter (10:51)

* Write an in-depth outline and a bio (11:10)

* Include a description of who your book’s audience is. (13:07)

* Allot blocks of time to write. (16:16)

* Anticipate a slow editorial process. (17:52)

* Be fearless about asking people to buy your book: (21:16)

* Amass your database and send personalized emails (23:08)

* Be easy to find online. (24:46)

Listen Here

Labcast 125: Jonathan Kranz and Dorie Clark on How to Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book

Subscribe to Labcast

Transcript

Kevin: Hi there, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Cain, and today I’m very fortunate to have two outstanding content marketers with me, here in the studio, to talk about a very interesting aspect of content marketing, and that’s publishing a book. I’m going to actually let them introduce themselves. So, Jonathan, why don’t you tell people who you are?

Jonathan: Thank you, Kevin. I’m Jonathan Kranz, and I have a company called Kranz Communications, but I think the more relevant thing here is that I’ve published a book from my own business interests, so I know what the pathway is like. My book is “Writing Copy for Dummies,” and that came out in, you know, ancient history,

Imagine your SaaS sales strategy model on a graph with the Y-axis being price of service and the X-axis being complexity. Is it a self-service model, a transactional model, or an enterprise model? Knowing your SaaS sales strategy model builds the basis for determining the right levers to adjust.

Ray Grieselhuber, co-founder and CEO of GinzaMetrics, breaks down how to cater your sales and marketing to your sales model, keep your cash flow consistent, and stay out of the “startup graveyard.”

This Week’s Guest

“The lower right quadrant is where you don’t want to be, which is called ‘the startup graveyard’… nine times out of ten, when I look at other SaaS startups out there, the number one problem I see happening is they’re just simply not charging enough money.”— Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of GinzaMetrics

Key Takeaways

* Imagine your sales strategy on a graph: The Y-axis is price, and the X-axis is complexity. [3:00]

* Your SaaS model will typically fall under one of these categories:

* Self-Service Model [4:00]

* Transactional Model [4:35]

* Enterprise Model [5:00]

* Whichever model you choose, make sure you don’t end up in “the startup graveyard.” [6:00]

* The right levers to pull varies from model to model. For example, the enterprise model demands a sophisticated sales force, while the self-service puts more emphasis on web marketing. [9:15]

* Annual revenue models help build predictability and stability in your cash flow. [10:45]

Listen Here

Labcast 124: Get Your SaaS Sales and Pricing Strategy Right with Ray Grieselhuber

Transcript

Kevin: Hi, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Cain, and today I’m joined by Ray Grieselhuber, to talk about how to get your SaaS sales and marketing pricing strategy right.

If you don’t know Ray, he’s the CEO and Co-Founder of Ginzametrics. Ray has over seven years experience in organic search, social, and paid search marketing, and has helped both Fortune 500 companies and start-ups alike drive growth, increase revenue, and expand to global markets.

Hey, Ray, welcome to Labcast. Thanks so much for joining me today. How are you doing?

Ray: Very well, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Kevin: It’s great, you know, it’s interesting to have someone like yourself, with a background in SEO, and really an SEO expert, here to talk to us about something actually quite different today, in terms of putting your CEO hat on and talking a little bit about SaaS companies, and sort of how their sales and pricing strategies work.

Ray: Yes, I mean aside from online marketing, and SEO, this is probably one of my favorite topics, so I’m looking forward to it and happy to be here.

Kevin: Great. Well, you know, one of the things I wanted to kind of kick off with is this whole discussion that you’ve kind of led on your blog about this idea of there being Four Horsemen of SaaS, which is basically, you know, the four different things that are going to kill a SaaS start-up.

Ray: Yes.

Kevin: Can you kind of describe what you mean by that, and what those things are?

Ray: Yes, sure. And I guess I would preface it by saying that the Four Horseme...