SBI, The Growth Advisory

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast we talk shop with a different sort of guest. Rather than examining sales strategy with a sales leader or corporate strategy with a CEO, we’re joined today by a product expert, Merijn te Booij, the executive VP of product strategy at Genesys, to discuss connecting a sales strategy to the product roadmap.

We begin by looking at the steps to building an effective product roadmap: performing a market scan, prioritizing market problems, involving your sales force and finding a product market fit.

From there, Merijn discusses his usage of the Lean version of Agile, where one creates strategic alignment between the product organization and sales organization using cases and milestones.

From there, we look at how to use your sales force to inform your decisions when determining if something should be a new product, new release or new bundle. We also break down the concept behind MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and talk through the challenges the MVP-based development cycle faces and how to avoid ideas that’ll distract your sales force from making their sales.

As always, we conclude our conversation by summarizing how to put all these learnings into action, so your sales strategy can stay on track with your product roadmap and you can hit your numbers.

This week on SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we speak with Kermit Randa, CEO of PeopleAdmin, about connecting corporate strategy with execution.

We start with a discussion of cascading strategy where Kermit explains the hierarchy of objectives and how it can shape your company’s values, focus and business strategy from the top down. We also review how to assign goals that help your talent see how their work on the individual level ties back to the company’s overall mission. Kermit goes on to describe how you can add flexibility to your sales plan by focusing more on your rhythm than on your calendar.

We look at the four forms of feedback that are important for any company that is undergoing strategy development: customer, prospect, competitor and employee feedback. We also discuss tools for measuring and evaluating these types of feedback to help hone your sales and marketing strategies and ensure your functional leaders remain strategically aligned with your corporate strategy.

We conclude our talk by looking at the first three actions you can take right now to immediately connect your corporate strategy with your execution.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with SVP of Strategy at Magento Commerce, Mark Lenhard, about how to develop a revenue growth strategy quicker than both your industry and competitors. Magento Commerce offers an open-source digital commerce solution to 250,000 companies.

In our first segment, Mark covers company revenue growth relative to industry revenue growth. We discuss how to analyze the industry, its customer, the driving demand behind the growth strategy and how to determine critical success factors.

Next, Mark explains the strategy in choosing the proper market groups, and later we explore the theory of three forms of strategy development advantage: product differentiation, cost and customer experience.

In our last segment, Mark shares in detail three actions companies can take immediately to help increase revenue growth.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we’re doing things a little differently. Rather than dishing sales strategies with a CEO or CMO, we’re joined instead by a CFO to get into the nitty-gritty of pricing strategy, the backbone of any successful product marketing campaign. Our guest today is Lauri Hanover, the CFO of Netafim; a global pioneer of the drip revolution.

Together, we discuss how to improve your company’s marketing strategy by determining the perfect price in regards to your costs and product market. We start with an in-depth look at the biggest influence on a sound pricing strategy: costs. We look at how to factor for the costs of building, marketing, selling, installing and supporting your product.

Next, we look at determining a product price relative to these costs along with your product strategy as well as outside influences, such as market trends and competitor pricing.

We end our conversation by discussing the first steps to putting a new pricing strategy into action so you can get your company on the right path toward better pricing and probability so you can hit your mark.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, Greg Alexander, CEO of SBI, and Steve Rutledge, senior vice president of global sales operations at Genesys, discuss how to develop and execute a sales operations strategy using SBI’s revenue growth methodology.

We start by discussing how to establish objectives and identify which internal processes the sales team owns and outline the biggest obstacles to success. We also hear Steve’s views on the difference between sales ops and sales enablement and how the two should work together.

In our final segment we cover key takeaways and practical advice on what to do if you were put on the hot seat tomorrow and challenged with how to develop and execute a soup to nuts sales strategy.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we speak with Robin Saitz, the chief marketing officer at Brainshark, about how to integrate a marketing strategy with a corporate strategy, a product strategy and a sales strategy—something Brainshark does for thousands of companies, including half of the Fortune 100s out there.

We start by discussing how Robin connects the dots between vision and mission when crafting a functional approach to corporate strategy, product strategy, sales strategy and marketing strategy.

With this four-part marketing strategy laid out, we then talk about how Robin’s actually integrates her marketing strategies with a product roadmap and incorporates input from the sales organization into her marketing plan.

From there, Robin shares some tips on selling a strategic marketing plan internally, from the CEO to the product leader and the sales leader. We conclude by examining the first three steps leaders need to take when developing a solid four-part marketing strategy.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Ted Grulikowski, vice-president of the B2B unit at Market Source, the world’s leading sales outsourcing company, about taking a new product to market by recruiting and managing a team of resellers.

In our first segment, we discuss how Ted helps his clients grow their reseller revenues (2:38) & how he helps them overcome the common obstacles they face when trying to increase their revenue growth with resellers (3:30).

In our second segment, we look at the process of determining an ideal reseller profile (8:10), scoring & quantifying individual reseller value (9:36), determining an efficient coverage model (10:53), recruiting resellers from competitors (12:15), avoiding channel conflict with internal sales teams when outsourcing (14:15), recruiting reseller partners (15:30) & organizing internal channel groups (17:04).

In our final segment, we discuss learning from mistakes (19:20), identifying and mitigating risks when planning a growth strategy (20:25), and then outline three key takeaways that will help you achieve the sales growth you need to make your numbers in 2016 (22:40).

Today's guest on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast is Chris Bittner, the Senior Director of Global Sales and Channel Strategy at Autodesk. We asked Chris to help his peers support their company's sales strategy by discussing channel selection and channel optimization.

We cover important tactics of channel management, including product channel fit, which channels the end customers what to buy from, the ideal channel partner profile, and how to deal with channel consolidation that's going on these days. By the end of our episode, you'll learn the three things you absolutely need to do to have an optimized sales channel.

Developing and executing your company’s revenue growth strategy is not easy. Too often the corporate strategy stops with the executive team. When, in fact, it needs to trickle down throughout the organization.

Listen to how John Myers, CEO at Rentokil Initial, has successfully does this at his company. Rentokil Initial is one of the largest business services companies in the world with 60,000 employees across 60 countries. As you can imagine, developing and executing a revenue growth strategy in a company of this size is no easy feat. Despite this challenge, John has been able to effectively translate his strategy throughout the entire organization.

During this podcast, John will discuss:

- How to define your company’s mission, vision and values.

- How to ensure your customer’s experience matches your brand promise.

- How to determine the organization’s financial objectives.

- How to know which markets to compete in, and which to avoid. - How to determine your sustainable competitive advantage.

Your corporate strategy must be more than just a series of tactics. To make your number, you need to develop and execute a complete revenue growth strategy. This strategy needs to pull insights from the external marketplace and use this data to make key choices. Choices like “why do we exist?” Your strategy will set the direction for the entire organization.

Listen to this podcast to hear how one of your peers has been able to do exactly that.

It’s marketing’s job to set the sales team up for success. To do this, the marketing and sales strategies must be aligned. We recently spoke with Clint Poole, the Vice President of Marketing at Lionbridge about this issue. You can listen to the episode here. Clint is responsible for driving demand for the company’s new solution offerings via a multi-channel demand generation program. This has given him great insight into how to align marketing and sales.

During the interview, Clint will tackle topics such as:

- How to ensure your brand promise is communicated correctly by the sales team.

- How to create both demand generation and sales enablement content.

- How to nurture leads until they are sales ready.

- How sales can play a role in helping marketing campaigns be successful.

We will use SBI’s playbook, “How to Make Your Number in 2016” to guide our conversation. If at the end of the show, you want a copy we’ll let you know how to get it.

Aligning the marketing strategy to the sales strategy in a large businesses is hard to do. Why? Because the two strategies are the most closely tied of any of the functional strategies. As a marketing leader, you must think through how you are going to help make the sales team successful. What is the key? A well thought out methodology. If you do not have a structured approach you will lose both time and money.