This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Mark Turner, SVP and GM of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region for Genesys, about how to set up a sales strategy to avoid going from hero to goat overnight due to poor sales forecasting and pipeline management.

In our first segment, Mark discusses what his experience has been like being a part of and witnessing 120 end-of-quarter cycles in the software business, and we touch on the three different flavors of surprise that come at every end of quarter.

Next, Mark shares with us his team’s best practices in running effective quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and the role the sales operations team must play in order to achieve end-of-quarter sales strategy success.

In our last segment, we recap our sales forecasting and pipeline management processing discussion with Mark and share a few takeaways that can be implemented into action and your sales strategy immediately.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Greg Head, the chief marketing officer at InfusionSoft about how to quantify the value a marketing campaign can have on business.

In our first segment, Brian shares how to assess if marketing is generating enough demand to fill the top of the funnel and how to draw the line between what project marketing will do and how much sales is responsible for in filling their sales funnel by leads and prospects.

Next, we examine the sales and marketing departments a little closer and discuss how much outbound versus inbound should be responsible for lead generation in order to stay profitable in sales revenue growth. We also look at the impact content marketing has on your overall brand marketing strategy.

In our last segment, we discuss how, from a small business standpoint, to choose an external service provider and how to make sure that your selection is generating enough benefit to warrant your expense.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Brian Walker, CEO of Herman Miller about finding and sustaining strategic alignment from the CEO’s chair all the way to the customer.

In our first segment, Brian discusses some steps he’s taken to drive sales strategy from his role as CEO. The beginning of the processes includes annually narrowing down a set of four to five business strategies presented to the company to see all the way through. From there, each will be outlined in a detailed one-page document in order to understand the situational analysis of the project you’ve decided to take on in order to achieve overall business alignment.

Next, Brian shares what has helped him run a strategy where strategic alignment exists along the product and sales team, and the role the CEO plays in keeping the product team, the marketing department and the operations group aligned.

In our last segment, we ask Brian to send us off with some advice from his approach to leading a sales team as a CEO.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Paula Shannon, the chief sales officer and executive vice president of Lionbridge Technologies, about how to keep your team invested in a sales strategy as the year progresses.

In our first segment, Paula shares what she feels is the right level of detail that a sales leaders should be requesting from their direct reports to gauge execution. A part of Paula’s company sales strategy consists of a weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence of strategic reporting on sales strategy and a lot of focus on the details of day-to-day sales pipeline management.

Next, Paula discusses how she keeps her CEO, CFO and the whole team on board throughout the year by executing a strategic sales strategy. Paula explains how she believes proof lies in the data and how she and her team focus on studying the historic data available to them to identify trends that later translate to a sales forecasting strategy. 

In our final segment, Paula helps us understand the delicate balance that lies in being both customer focused and company focused when change arises.

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