SBI, The Growth Advisory

Joining us on is Steve Grimshaw, the Chief Executive Officer for Caliber Collision. Steve has built and incredible business through both organic and inorganic growth. He’s here today to demonstrate how a chief executive orchestrates the right level of inorganic growth to maximize the valuation of your company.

Today we are going to unpack the career path of a new breed of Sales-driven Chief Executive Officers and what it takes to develop the business mindset to ascend to the top position.

Joining us on the SBI Podcast is Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer for Cybereason, the world's most powerful cybersecurity analytics platform.

Often called the "godfather of inbound marketing" for his work in taking inbound marketing from an idea to a movement of tens of thousands of people, Mike Volpe is one of the most sought-after B2B marketers.

Today Mike is going to demonstrate how to replace leads with real opportunities for the sales team through the use of account based marketing. ABM is the effort performed by both marketing and sales to replace leads with opportunities for the sales team.

Why is this an important topic? Demand generation and lead management does not work for companies with business models dependent on a small number of accounts, but who spend a lot.

On this episode of SBI TV, Matt and Marc Osofsky, CEO of Aberdeen, demonstrate the importance of Market Intelligence.

The buyer is changing, and the sales channels we go to market with must do the same. Buyers are more comfortable than ever purchasing virtually. Inside Sales organizations are handling larger deals than ever before. Today Mike Huseman is here to share his experience leveraging Inside Sales to virtually drive profitable growth.

Joe Vitalone, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Razberi Technologies, demonstrates how to develop and execute a sales strategy at scale through channel partners.

Chief Marketing Officer for Caliber Collision, Greg

Our guest on SBI TV is Robin Saitz, the Chief Marketing Officer at Avecto. Robin is a transformational marketing executive who knows how to get off to a quick start in a new role. In today's show we demonstrate how to get off to a fast start in a CMO's first 90 days. If you prefer to watch a video of the interview, click here.

Getting off to a fast start actually starts in the interview process. Robin interviews with the end in mind, and through the interview process she learns a great deal about the company and team. She dove deep into learning about Avecto, a cybersecurity software company that provides privileged management and application control solutions. Robin states, "I think the interview process is actually sort of like that pre-first day. It's not really counted in the first 90 days, but the interview process I think is a core part of preparing for those first 90 days. So, I like to say that I was interviewing the company as much as they were interviewing me, and it wasn't just to make the decision to join, but also, to help answer ... to get answers to questions that I had that would make my first day and the first month go well. So I insisted on meeting with a lot of people in this process, because it was a big decision for me, and it was a big decision for them."

Once Robin accepted the role as CMO, she prepared for her first day and how she planned out her first 90-days before the start date. Listen as Robin describes her preparation steps.

Matt summarizes Robin's first 90 days, "she articulates how she broke down short-term first 90-day initiatives to put points on the board along with more longer-term initiatives that needed to get done. Robin articulate how she broke down short-term first 90-day initiatives, kind of putting points on the board as we like to say, with more longer-term initiatives that needed to get done. Building that content strategy. Knowing it was both people and resources. Recognizing that, but willing to live with not just doing something haphazard out of the first 90 days to check a box, being thoughtful."

Robin describes how to assess the marketing team and shares:

"So whenever a CMO or any new leader joins a company, I think there's probably a healthy amount of skepticism, nervousness and excitement. It's like all of that. So, kind of have to like knock down the nervousness and skepticism. And so, I firmly believe it's important to understand the individual career objectives and the job satisfaction of each team member. So that's sort of like the first set of questions that I tried to hit on with my team, and I met with all of them individually. And then I also tried to understand ... I collected feedback from their peers, from folks inside marketing, folks outside of marketing."

"I also assess their work output, their responsiveness, and then to the extent, metrics were available. I would look at metrics. Then the other thing that we use that we're testing, we haven't adopted it broadly at Avecto, but I used at my previous company is the Predictive Index for behavioral assessments. I said, "Hey, I'd love to pilot it with the marketing organization," and they were very cooperative with that. So everybody's taken the PI. We have an understanding of who's got a strong process orientation, who's got a high sense of urgency, who's very dominant, and that I think will help the whole organization function better."

Today we are going to demonstrate how to Go-to-Market with a new product. We will cover the topics of sufficiently covering your markets, selecting and optimizing your sales channels, and finally, pricing and packaging your products correctly. If you prefer to watch the interview in HD video on SBI TV, click here.

Why are these such important topics? Traditional routes to market are being replaced with innovative ways to reach customers. So, evaluating whether you have the right channels in place for a new product launch is vital for driving revenue growth. Revenue growth driven by products that create new markets, attract new customers, and convince customers to buy more is the most valuable type of revenue growth. Download the full interview transcript in a MS Word document here.

The first segment will seek to answer the question: How do you evaluate whether you have the right channels in place for a new product launch? Christopher provides examples of when he launched a new product and added new channels, and when he used an innovative route to market that gave him an advantage and resulted in a substantial revenue lift.

Christopher outlines, in the second segment, how to package your new products to differentiate yourself from the competition. Christopher goes on to advise the audience on how to identify and validate the true points of differentiation in your product, and how to bring that product differentiation to life.

The final segment of the show describes how to avoid these pricing mistakes when launching a new product. Price your products in a way that does not scale with customer growth and this will result in revenue leakage. Price your products in a way that is difficult for your sales channels to explain the change to your customers and watch your sales steadily decline.

Christopher details his approach to determining the right pricing strategy for a product launch, pricing at different levels to different customer segments, and equipping the sales force with value-based messaging and negotiation strategies to defend the price point.

Our guest on SBI TV is Dan Levinschi, the Head of Marketing for PandaDoc. Dan is a revenue generating marketer who knows how to quickly transition from marketing strategy to execution.

Dan and I discuss how to move from marketing strategy to execution. Dan describes his process for developing a marketing strategy, and how he interlocks the company’s corporate strategy, product strategy, and sales strategy with his own. Dan also shares his rollout strategy and how he presents it to the marketing team to ensure that each person understands the overall strategy, their role, and how their execution fits into the overall strategy.

To follow along, leverage SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018 PDF Workbook and turn to the Marketing Strategy section starting on pages 236. To download the full transcript in a word document, click here.

In today’s captivating show, Dan shares his method for transitioning from the planning phase to the execution phase of the marketing strategy, specifically how to ensure that the right KPI’s closed loop reporting is built into each new activity. Turn to the 13-minute mark of the video to watch Dan discuss how a marketing leader validates that progress is being made on major initiatives without micromanaging the team.

Matt and Dan discuss how precisely Dan makes this happen at PandaDoc:

“It is very important for me personally knowing what everyone on the team is doing without being too invasive. The number one thing that you need to have is a playbook for how your department functions. If people don’t understand how your department functions, it doesn’t matter whether they’re on your team or on a separate department, you’ll always run into the problem of people not knowing what you do essentially. You also have to build an internal Wiki page with all things marketing, just for internal for the company. Then you need to have a project management system in place. If you’re a startup on a budget, you can use something like Trello. Another thing you have to focus on are the core problems and helping your team to understand the impact of their work. Some people just go to work for a paycheck and do the minimum necessary. If they understand very well what the impact on the work is, they’ll be more motivated to work diligently. I find that when people are motivated they don’t need strict management, you can give them a lot of responsibilities and freedom and they’ll spend their time on the right things.

Dan Levinschi shares his advice on encouraging the marketing team while also instilling the team with a sense of accountability.

“The way we normally work is to hold open forums. I think that the best ideas are born when you have a number of viewpoints in the same room. What we do is, whenever there’s an argument about whether we should continue a project or not, the results are not there, the real question I’m asking is: “What is the immediate impact on business short term and long term?” If the impact is minimal, which you can generally quantify through specific metrics, it all comes down to revenue. Then it’s a simple argument for me to win. For example, if the impact is short term but in long term this doesn’t make any sense, maybe we should kill the project and reiterate. To summarize, I’m a performance marketer, so I believe in numbers. If you cannot prove it to me in numbers, then the argument generally ends.”

Having a solid strategy in place sets a company and a department up for success. Understanding and utilizing marketing metrics in your strategic process can make the difference between success and failure. Skip to the 20-minute mark of the video to watch Dan describes how he establishes accountability with his marketing team, how he manages individual contributors, how he reports progress to the CEO, and how he measures the success of his team’s strategy.