SBI Podcast

Today’s topic is how to deploy a sales process. The purpose of a sales process is to win more deals, win bigger deals and to do it faster.

Standard one-size-fits-all sales methodologies no longer work. The competitors can license the same sales methodologies from the same vendors you can, so there is no competitive advantage to be had by adopting the latest sales methodology from the sales training industry. To increase deal sizes, improve win rates and shorten sales cycles, you need to adopt a custom, proprietary sales process/methodology. 

Joining us is Lori Chmura, Vice President of US Sales for Cordis. Lori has over 28 years of business experience, and has deployed a version of a customized sales process during her tenure. During the interview, Lori will demonstrate how she has deployed a new sales process. 

Today’s topic is forecasting accuracy.  How to install a thorough forecasting and pipeline management process. 

Joining us is Evan Randall the Vice President of Sales Operations at Tableau Software. Evan is doing ground-breaking work in forecasting accuracy.  Listen as Evan breaks down the approach to drive forecasting accuracy.

The first segment of the show is focused on individual deal level forecasting. Evan describes how he uses predictive analytics to determine what is likely to happen.  He describes the importance of having a sales process with a level of simplicity to achieve adoption.  A well adopted and easy to use sales process enables you to collect good data. 

Today’s topic is how to build a high-performance sales culture where sales talent thrives. Joining us today is Vicky Oxley, Regional Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Comcast NBC Universal.  Vicky leads the West Region for Comcast, the nation’s largest TV, high speed internet and voice provider for residential and business customers. 

Peter Drucker famously said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and nowhere else is this truer than in sales organizations.  Yet, unfortunately, many sales leaders neglect investing in the culture of the sales department and this results to poor performance. This episode hopes to help prevent this from happening to you.  

Vicky describes the sales culture she has created to help talent thrive.  The program begins with an overview of the Comcast corporate and the specific sales culture.  Listen as Vicky explains how a customer experience culture strives to passionately driven to make every customer interaction the best possible. 

Today’s topic is how to evolve your strategy to stay ahead of the market. Joining us today is Jeff Ray, the Chief Executive Officer for Ellucian. A worldwide leader, Ellucian provides software and services to the higher education market. 18 million students around the world are touched by the software tools.

Why this topic? Strategic time horizons are changing. 5 year strategies are getting compressed to 3 year strategies and 3 year strategies are getting converted to 1 year operating plans with quarterly agile iterations. This time compression requires the CEO, and his executive leadership team, to build the capabilities associated with strategy evolution.

Listen as Jeff and Greg discuss how revenue growth, return on invested capital, and cash flow linked. Jeff describes Ellucian's advantage of a vertical market focus and the benefits to allocating resources.

Today’s topic is  new product launch. Joining us is Andy Wright, Executive Vice President of New Product Development at Cypress Semiconductor.

Cypress Semiconductor is the number one manufacturer of memory used in electronics.  Chances are that the device you are using to read this article right now is powered by Cypress.  Andy is responsible for corporate wide design and driving P&L for all design activity worldwide.

Andy and Greg discuss how to conduct a successful product launch.  A product launch hinges on being able to tell stories that compel your customers to act by answering the key question, “Why change?”.

Product launches fail to generate revenue when sales people and channel partners are not involved in messaging development during pre-launch preparations. When messaging is developed in isolation it is not compelling enough to get your customers to act. Stories told directly to customers by well-trained sales channels enable customers and prospects to answer “Why change?,” and this stimulates latent demand while leading to exceptional revenue growth.

Listen to Andy explains how his team works to identify launch risks early on. He controls launch risk by rapidly sequential phase gating. As each phase gate he evaluates whether he goes through the rest of the R&D phases.  

During the interview, Andrew will answer these questions:

• How should you determine your new product launch goals?
• How do you ready the entire organization for the launch?
• Where does sales enablement live, and who should own it?
• How should you measure success or failure of a new product launch?

Today’s topic is transitioning from sales training to sales enablement.  Sale enablement is about driving revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down.

Joining us today is Brad Kerst, Senior Director of Global Sales Enablement for Intuitive Surgical, a medical device company.  Intuitive Surgical is the leader in surgical robotics, manufacturing and selling the da Vinci® Surgical System.  Brad and Greg discuss the difference between sales training and sales enablement. 

Sales training is the focus on three core areas of technical product knowledge, industry knowledge, and sales skills and execution.  By comparison, sales enablement is a focus on the process and analytics to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales force.  Listen to Brad explain how both are interlocked, with training as the background and context and the enablement side is the execution. 

Brad goes into detail explaining how sales training and sales enablement are symbiotic.  Sales training develops the skills and sales enablement defines the behaviors and skills and generate the insights necessary to drive and maximize results.  In the final segment of the program listen to Brad describe his training certification process and blended learning approach.

On today’s show we discuss product strategy. Our guest is Peter Sheldon, the Vice President of Strategy at Magento Commerce. Magento is a leading e-commerce platform providing enterprise solutions. Before his position at Magento, Peter was one of the foremost thought leaders at Forrester on the topic of e-commerce.   

The goal of the call today is to think through product strategy using Magento as a use case.  Your company’s go-to-market model needs to flow out of the product strategy.  

There are different types of product strategy: Market Expansion, Market Share and Market Exposure.  Very different product strategies.  Spend the time to get these right.  Your go to market model for sales will be very different depending on which strategy is selected. 

It’s nearly impossible to build a sales and marketing strategy that makes your number every year if you don’t fully understand the product strategy.  The go-to-market strategy for sales and marketing changes significantly based on how you answer these product questions.  Listen to Peter bring the question of product strategy’s impact on sales and marketing to life with the Magento use case.   

Work with your product leader to get answers to these questions to align your strategies.  Peter answers a series of questions to help sales and marketing leaders understand the impact of product strategy on the overall go to market strategy. 

• Is your product strategy focused on participating in overall market expansion where rising waters raise all ships?
• As you compete in a mature market do you have to take market from your competitors to grow?
• Are you also exploring new growing markets and how to expose your products to grow?
• Do you find that the B2B market mimics the B2C world with a 2-3+ year lag time?
• Is your product strategy to enter fast growing product markets and take revenue from distant companies rather than direct competitors?
• Is your product strategy to define new products that are so innovative as to create an entirely new product category?
• Is your product strategy to grow by persuading existing customers to buy more of a product or related product?
• When adding new products requiring cross-sell/up-sell, how do you know when to use the existing sales force vs. a new sales strategy?
• Is the product strategy based on new product pricing and promotion in a mature market and is therefore likely to be temporary based on competitor retaliation?
• Is the product strategy to force smaller companies out of the market?
• For a concentrated market, is the product strategy to cycle through market share without sustainable share gain?
• Is the product strategy to execute bolt on acquisitions to complete or extend the product offering and leverage the current routes to market

Listen to Peter respond to each question and highlight how to avoid the traps and the approach the market challenges.

On today's show we discuss the different types of revenue growth and their impact on company valuation. Our guest is Charlie DeLacey, the vice president of corporate development and strategy at the Kenan Advantage Group. Kenan is a $1.5 billion dollar transportation and logistics business.

Charlie is responsible for driving and shaping the strategy of Kenan Advantage Group, who has experienced 10-15% growth on an annual basis.

The types of growth discussed include organic and inorganic, and the different returns on capital each type of investment drives.  For example, given the opportunity to grow the same amount of revenue through organic or inorganic, Charlie explains that typically organic growth will drive greater value creation.  However, there are other variables such as time, capital requirements and execution risks.  Charlie describes how to make the decision between organic and inorganic growth.

On this weeks’ SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we spoke with Greg Shepard, the chief strategy officer at Pepperjam. Pepperjam is a global digital marketing and performance technology firm, and Greg is responsible for evaluating trends, client feedback and internal requests to foresee opportunities for new product development. The topic of our conversation was injecting buyer behavior into the product strategy. Listen as Greg explains how he uses these insights to build and execute his product strategy.

During the episode, Greg will answer questions such as:

• How do you determine what buyer problems to solve, and what behaviors prove evidence of these problems?
• How do you determine if your product will beat the competition in the market?
• How often should you put your product in front of the buyers to get their opinion on the solution?
• How do you forecast wallet share?
• How do you test for product-market fit within each of your submarkets?

Buyer behavior is changing constantly. And these insights must be considered when it comes to new product development. It’s your best chance to ensure you are developing products that your buyers are willing to invest time, energy and money to solve. Listen as Greg describes how he uses buyer behavior data to successfully develop his product strategy

Your sales operations team must improve the efficiency of the sales team. Instead, sales ops has become a catch all that gets assigned the work no one else wants to do. On this week’s SBI Sales and Marketing podcast we spoke with Burke Lippert, senior director of sales operations at Spok. Listen here as Burke explains how she built an effective sales ops team from the ground up.

During the episode, Burke will answer questions such as:

• What business outcomes should a new sales operations team strive to deliver?
• What should the strategic focus areas of a new sales operations team be?
• What should the forecast and pipeline management process be for a new sales ops team?
• What should the processes for critical activities like territory design and quota setting be for new sales ops teams?

When deployed correctly sales operations can impact revenue growth in a meaningful way. But it must be properly staffed and built. Listen as Burke discusses the best way to do this. She will explain why you should not starve this key department.