Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, we’re joined by an outstanding guest to discuss a topic that’s a little out of our normal purview: Designing a compensation plan for a sales department. Our guest, David Loeser, is a heavy weight in the HR field with 30 years of experience helping companies like Pepsi, Continental Airlines, Quaker State, Hostess Brands and Unisys Corporation, where he’s currently the senior VP of world wide human resources. We get into the nuts and bolts of keeping your team incentivized so they can hit their numbers.

We start today’s talk by discussing how to get your sales leader onboard with your compensation plan, looking at how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs stacks up to today’s world of instant gratification and endless information. We go on to talk about how to define a forward-looking, free market-based compensation strategy. We also discuss how to elevate your sales strategy by putting customer satisfaction at the heart of your compensation plan. David further explains the difference between reporting the number and making the number, a differentiation that’ll help you really understand the relationship between your sales strategy and compensation strategy, as well as how to systematize your feedback delivery. We conclude our talk by discussing the current thoughts around timing a compensation strategy and exploring the advantage of imagination vs. knowledge.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Paul Rosen, who is the senior vice president of sales for OnDeck Capital.  Paul joined OnDeck Capital in 2012 when the company was doing $13 million in sales. Today, only three years later, the company is doing $160 million in sales and recently had a successful IPO with a market cap of $1.5 billion. On today’s podcast we will discuss how Paul was able to build a corporate strategy that helped scale business sales growth from $13 million to $160 million in three years.

In our first segment, Paul talks about the sales strategy a sales leader follows to invest in capital both short-term and long-term, and how brokers helped the company’s corporate strategy in a big way when making these moves.

Next, Paul shares with us how to incorporate a direct sales channel to compliment an indirect sales channel to your sales strategy, how to gain mindshare with channel partners without surpassing your corporate strategy budget, all while expanding into new geographic markets and successfully launching new products.

In our last segment, Paul wraps up our conversation by sharing advice he would have given himself at the beginning of his journey of being a sales leader in a fast-growth company.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Mike Ellis of ForgeRock about how to successfully drive strategy execution through functional leadership alignment.

In our first segment, Mike shares how the CTO drives successful execution of corporate strategy while staying in strategic alignment with the CEO. We discuss how to know when numbers are missed because of poor execution in sales and marketing or if it is because there's a product problem.

Next, we talk with Mike about what it takes to keep the marketing strategy in strategic alignment with the overall corporate strategy and bringing that strategy to market. We then touch on the cadence in face-to-face communication and Mike offers advice to ensure the product, marketing and sales teams continuously test and adjust the assumptions in the strategy. In this segment, we also take a look at how to keep strategic alignment when you want to make a corporate strategy shift that could potentially disrupt other teams’ strategy development. 

In our last segment, we conclude our conversation, and Mike sends us off with three immediate actions to take if you’re a CEO who finds his teams struggling to execute corporate strategy.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Chris Marjara, the CMO of McGraw-Hill Education.  McGraw-Hill Education has been publishing print textbooks for 125 years.  Today, the company provides e-learning digital technology solutions to educators. Chris, who has spent 20 years marketing software solutions, was hired by McGraw-Hill to lead the marketing team through this business model transformation. With 5,000 employees in 44 countries, this is no easy task.

In our first segment, we dive straight into one of the bigger challenges of the task Chris faced: the overall marketing budget and how budget planning works with a job this big. Chris outlines how to secure budget for new marketing initiatives from skeptical executives and, in turn, how to generate a return on the marketing initiatives quickly.

Next, Chris discusses how to leverage analytics to accurately measure the effectiveness of the marketing budget and show the value your CMO needs to see to continue funding your marketing initiatives. We also take a look at how to detect poor performing tactics to reallocate the budget toward stronger performing tactics.

In our last segment, we recap our discussion and send our listeners off with immediate tactics they can apply to their company’s marketing budget strategy.

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This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Chris Giglio, CEO of Aderant, about how to hire the right sales executive who the CEO can develop a trusting business relationship with in order to make his or her number.

In our first segment, Chris shares with us the evaluation process he and his team structured in choosing the right sales executive, how to build a trusting relationship that is transparent between the CEO and sales leader, as well as understanding what is actually happening in the market in order to understand the relationship between your sales and product teams.

Next, Chris discusses how he manages to spot a good sales executive in the early stages of hiring when a sales leader is selling a product he himself knows well. Chris also delves into their company’s new design principle and how it shifted their approach to hiring the right person for the job. We also discuss how to assess the reasoning behind why a company isn’t growing. Chris shares his organization’s 360 reviews that give everyone a good look at what’s happening in the overall picture and where the real pain points exist.

In our last segment, we summarize our conversation and offer a set of immediate actions you can take to implement into your executive recruiting design in order to find the right sales executive for your organization.

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