This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Bill Sexton, director of sales ops at Zebra Technologies about how to design compensation plan for the upcoming year.

In our first segment, Bill discusses how he performs an annual benchmark of his company’s compensation plan and how he hits them in order to make his sales quota. Bill then delves into how to find an accurate peer group to compare against and how to benchmark against those competitors.

Next, Bill illustrates how he and his sales operations team establish the many types of roles in their organizational chart and how they build it into the five global plans they need.  Bill also shares how his team handles the financial modeling as it relates to the managing incentive budget.

In our last segment, Bill sets us up with three concrete tactics that one can use as they enter and complete the annual sales compensation plan process.

Understanding the compensation plan process is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. Want more weekly sales and marketing insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe and leave us a review! Your feedback will help us improve our show and continue to bring you content that keeps you at the top of your game.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Claudine Bianchi, CMO of Percussion Software and someone who has been leading marketing teams inside of technology companies for 28 years, about how to generate a return on an R&D budget in agile marketing.

In our first segment, Claudine explains why and how moving from a waterfall, traditional-based marketing strategy to an agile, progressive-based marketing strategy increased the clock speed of the marketing team, the benefits of running an agile shop and the pros and cons of product development management reporting.

Next, Claudine delves into what her communication to the customer program is like and how she listens to customer. Claudia also discusses her approach to leveraging her networks to receive feedback and how much of your budget should be dedicated to marketing strategy and why.

In our last segment, Claudia shares with us her strategy in measuring the effectiveness of agile marketing applied to content and how quickly she and her team are able to adjust the editorial schedules to reflect performance.

Understanding agile marketing is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. Want more weekly sales and marketing insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe and leave us a review! Your feedback will help us improve our show and continue to bring you content that keeps you at the top of your game.

Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we’re joined by Doug Landis to tackle the topic of sales coaching. Doug’s a VP of sales productivity at Box, a software collaboration company that generates an annual revenue of 250 million, in large part due to Doug’s sales training and management training.

In today’s show, Doug gives us his sales equations, as well as tips on how to have a structured sales conversation between sales management and a rep. Afterwards, we shift gears and talk about timing: specifically, when should sales training and management training occur? We also discuss time allocation across your talent. How much time should you spend with your A-Players vs. your B-Players? What about your C-Players, are they a black hole? We conclude today’s show by looking at the two to three things you can do today to start giving your team the keys they need to succeed and hit their numbers.

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Today on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we’re joined by Tom Kane. Tom’s the VP of worldwide and service operations for OpenText, the 40th largest software company in the world, and today he joins us to discuss one of the most often-requested topics we receive from listeners: sales analytics.

Tom talks us through the four progressive steps of sales analytics: descriptive analytics (sales analytics that describe what has already happened), diagnostic analytics (sales analytics that tell us why things are occurring), predictive analytics (sales analytics that look at what might happen) and prescriptive analytics (sales analytics that tell an organization what to do). Through these four steps, you’ll see not only why big data is king, but more importantly, how it holds court.

Want more weekly insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe and leave us a review! Your feedback will help us improve our show and continue to bring you content that keeps you at the top of your game.