Revenue Riser

The role of a leader is to create an environment where coaching can happen, to get authority from above, and to facilitate their team to get on with the work.

In this episode, Anna and her guests explore how to take sales coaching to the next level to empower collective leadership within sales teams.

David Clutterbuck is a leading coaching author and mentor, who combines purpose, robust research, and infectious enthusiasm.

Emmet Florish is the CEO Ctrl.io, and is on a mission to help sales managers tackle their biggest challenges.

• Two things only the actual leader can do
• Great coaches exhibit compassion (for others and for themselves), curiosity, courage, and connectedness
• Why having “the data” can get in the way of coaching
• What does your team really need you for?
• How can you get out of your team’s way?
• How coaching expands from coaching the individual to coaching the system
• A coaching culture can’t simply be handed down – it has to be agreed upon and supported across the whole team
• A sales meeting doesn’t always have to be led by the sales team leader
• How to celebrate our mistakes for the learning they create

• Connect with David on LinkedIn
• Connect with Emmet on LinkedIn
• Revenue Riser episode 4: Spread a little happiness and grow your sales
• Revenue Riser episode 5: CRM: actionable insight that drives sales

Attracting talent is difficult in this current climate. Recruiters need to be clear on the candidate they want to attract, the role and job description, and the characteristics that will be a good fit for their business.

It’s vital to consider what value the role has to the organisation, as well as ways that a candidate might demonstrate their own value outside of the standard interview process. Anna unpacks these and many other issues in this episode, focusing on hiring a rockstar sales team, not simply recruiting individual rockstar candidates.

Julie Greenfield has extensive experience recruiting and enabling salespeople, with practical down-to-earth experience, combined with an obvious passion for the aspirational.

Alex Ede is Business Development Director at PRISM, a neuroscience behavioural profiling tool, and a go-to advisor on all things behavioural.

Actionable steps you can take to recruit the best-fit talent for your business:

• How to make sure your job description actually matches the work to be done – and why that matters.
• Be clear about what the candidate can expect from your business.
• Does your network think and look like you?

• Connect with Julie on LinkedIn
• Connect with Alex on LinkedIn

Successful channel partnerships need focus and collaboration, and in an increasingly uncertain climate, it becomes even more important that we not take existing relationships for granted.

Joining Anna to continue their conversation on channel success are Steve Warburton and Matt Hathorn.

Steve Warburton is Managing Director of Zen Internet's partner and consumer business, and one of the most highly-regarded channel leaders in the industry.

Matt Hathorn is CEO of Recur, which has been helping vendors and partners activate and deliver on their mutual sales growth plans, for over a decade.

• Effective execution of strategy starts from the shop floor, not from the top down.
• This value exchange should be evident across sales, operations, technical, etc.
• Now more than ever during a challenging economic period, it’s important to know what you’re good at, and focus on delivering that core competency, rather than become tempted by other avenues that ultimately dilute the core business offering.
• Enablement is an open-ended activity. Activation is what drives real sales. It’s less well-understood but more impactful.
• It’s far easier to learn in bitesized chunks, but those chunks need to be connected together to create an effective learning journey.
• Ferocious competition is not always in the interest of the customer, especially if it leads to businesses failing to co-operate to deliver customer success.
• If a client is acquired by a larger entity, we cannot assume the relationships we’ve built with that partner will hold, so we need to view a merger or acquisition as the beginning of a new relationship, and put in all the requisite effort to create success.
• Why a partner who’s just been acquired might be like an oil tanker arriving at the front door – and what to do about it.

• Connect with Steve on LinkedIn
• Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
• Revenue Riser S02E02: Take your channel success to the next level

Account-based marketing encompasses an organisation’s entire go-to-market strategy. It involves deep understanding of a few target customers or prospects – and crucially the people within them.

Contrary to the name, ABM is about far more than marketing. It encompasses sales, customer success, research, and planning. And although SaaS products play an important role, it is not a tech-driven solution, but rather a collaborative insights-based approach, aided by technology.

Helen Brown is the founder of Seeblue Marketing, a specialist tech sector marketing agency. Steve Bonadio is VP of Global Demand Generation at Ivalua, a growing spend management platform.

• Technology can enable an ABM strategy, but isn’t at its root.
• The insight gathered from an ABM platform needs to be absorbed by a human.
• Avoid embarking on an ABM campaign before you know you have a strong, proven message.
• ABM campaigns are a team effort, spread across marketing, sales, and customer success teams.
• Don’t talk about yourself at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, tailor and personalise your approach for each target customer.

• Connect with Helen on LinkedIn
• Connect with Steve on LinkedIn

Leveraging Squadify’s latest data around team conditions for success, we learn from co-founders Dan Hammond and Pia Lee what’s important for high functioning teams to perform in a fast-paced, post-covid world.

We’ll drill into what the data is telling us around

- the shifts over the last 18 months and the balance between ‘being’ and ‘doing’,

- where the biggest gaps to team performance lie and why we should pay attention

- what we can do to make a difference.

We learn the highest and lowest scoring attributes and how to shift team mindsets and focus.

Of course, no team conversation is complete without discussion on psychological safety. What we see here are the specific behaviours of teams that create that safe environment where we’re "comfortable in the uncomfortable".

If you want to know more about Squadify, head over to www.revenueriser.com/squadify

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Why do we sleep - and could it really be a secret of success?

Host, Anna Britnor Guest, and Habits Coach, Azzy Aslam, explore commonly held beliefs about sleep - and why some of them simply aren't true.

Research shows that a lack of sleep (and spoiler alert #1 that definitely means less than 6 hours sleep a night - and for most people it's more than that) significantly and negatively impacts a number of important factors necessary for high performance.

This episode is full of useful insights and practical tips to help

- Sales leaders to improve their own sleep,

- To educate and encourage their team members to do the same

- To construct and time sales activities to leverage energy and performance levels (spoiler alert #2 - that may mean changing your sales meeting schedule and re-imagining your SKOs)

Useful resources:

Sign up for the Revenue Riser newsletter - it's where we share useful resources and additional tips from our guests and get your input into future content. Plus it's occasional so we won't overload your inbox (the email one and the one in your brain).

Check out Azzy Aslam's podcast: Changing Habits, Changing Lives. It's on your app and at https://comentra.com/podcast-2/

Read Matthew Walker's book Why we sleep. It's full of compelling research yet written in lay terms so it's easy to read and understood. If you're planning to buy from Amazon UK, please use our associate link.

And, finally, if you enjoy this podcast and would like to receive occasional updates and links to useful resources, please sign up to our newsletter at www.revenueriser.com

This podcast is brought to use by Alate Business Growth, supporting tech B2B companies to grow their leadership and sales capability.

Many tech companies take the VC path to growth but what's it actually like? What makes a successful partnership for both the investor and founders?

In this episode, Eran Westman and Alfonso de la Nuez share their personal experiences with host, Anna Britnor Guest. What has worked for them and where do some of the pitfalls lie?

Alfonso de la Nuez is co-CEO of UserZoom, a fast growing user experience insights SaaS company. Having taken UserZoom through several investment rounds, he frankly and openly shares his journey from start up to growth stages and from Spain to global.

Eran Westman has seen both sides. A former CEO, he joined Viola Growth as a partner in 2018. Viola is an Israel-related growth stage VC and Eran's portfolio includes Bizzabo* and Bringg. He shares his personal perspectives of what's critical in making investment decisions and how Viola supports the companies in their portfolio.

From their different experiences, however, they both firmly agree on one common factor for success.

*You can hear our conversation with Bizzabo's head of sales, Paul Szemerenyi, in season 1: Scale the sales organisation for growth. Plus check out our conversation with UserZoom CRO, Jamie Mellalieu, talking about Leading growth in a volatile world.

Want access to additional insights and resources? Sign up for our occasional but impactful newsletter at www.revenueriser.com

Revenue Riser is brought to you by Alate Business Growth and is hosted by Anna Britnor Guest. Alate supports tech B2B companies to grow through developing sales, customer growth and leadership capability. www.alatebusinessgrowth.com

What role does the CEO play in leading growth? What does it mean to be a sales-led leader? And why should a CEO carry a ball of string if they want to take their company of a voyage of change?

Join me, Anna Britnor Guest, with guests, Lorrin White & Allan Merritt, openly and candidly sharing their experiences about leading growth in their organisations. In this episode we talk about leading the pace of change and why being in a growth phase doesn't necessarily translate into immediate revenue. We discuss why decisiveness, communication and clarity are essential and Lorrin and Allan offertheir tips for leaders looking to grow their companies.

About our guests:

Allan Merritt is an experienced business founder and leader. He is now leading growth as CEO of Arnlea Systems , specialists in tracking, inspection and maintenance software for the oil and gas sector.

Lorrin White is CEO of Bamboo Technology, an award-winning ICT provider, supporting clients to connect and grow their businesses. Lorrin has been on the Bamboo journey for nearly 20 years, rising through the ranks to take the reins as MD and now as their passionate CEO.

Revenue Riser is hosted by Anna Britnor Guest of Alate Business Growth who has over 30 years experience within the tech sector. From a successful sales career she now works with tech B2B companies to help them to grow.

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What does your partner or vendor of the future look like? What can you learn from experienced channel leaders to help you avoid the pitfalls, and to activate and accelerate your sales? Hear from Zen Internet's MD of Partners, Steve Warburton, and Matt Hathorn, Director and Founder at channel profitability specialists, Recur Global, in conversation with Revenue Riser host Anna Britnor Guest, herself a long time activator within the channel. We discuss how the partners of today are not necessarily the ones who will deliver for the future, how to spot potential and spend your partner enablement and activation funds wisely. Matt and Steve candidly share their experiences of what's worked, what hasn't and how to create aligned, close partnerships that deliver real value all round. And if you enjoy this episode please subscribe and follow this podcast for more episodes. www.revenueriser.com