On this weeks’ SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we spoke with Greg Shepard, the chief strategy officer at Pepperjam. Pepperjam is a global digital marketing and performance technology firm, and Greg is responsible for evaluating trends, client feedback and internal requests to foresee opportunities for new product development. The topic of our conversation was injecting buyer behavior into the product strategy. Listen as Greg explains how he uses these insights to build and execute his product strategy.

During the episode, Greg will answer questions such as:

• How do you determine what buyer problems to solve, and what behaviors prove evidence of these problems?
• How do you determine if your product will beat the competition in the market?
• How often should you put your product in front of the buyers to get their opinion on the solution?
• How do you forecast wallet share?
• How do you test for product-market fit within each of your submarkets?

Buyer behavior is changing constantly. And these insights must be considered when it comes to new product development. It’s your best chance to ensure you are developing products that your buyers are willing to invest time, energy and money to solve. Listen as Greg describes how he uses buyer behavior data to successfully develop his product strategy

Your sales operations team must improve the efficiency of the sales team. Instead, sales ops has become a catch all that gets assigned the work no one else wants to do. On this week’s SBI Sales and Marketing podcast we spoke with Burke Lippert, senior director of sales operations at Spok. Listen here as Burke explains how she built an effective sales ops team from the ground up.

During the episode, Burke will answer questions such as:

• What business outcomes should a new sales operations team strive to deliver?
• What should the strategic focus areas of a new sales operations team be?
• What should the forecast and pipeline management process be for a new sales ops team?
• What should the processes for critical activities like territory design and quota setting be for new sales ops teams?

When deployed correctly sales operations can impact revenue growth in a meaningful way. But it must be properly staffed and built. Listen as Burke discusses the best way to do this. She will explain why you should not starve this key department. 

Do you have a list of dream accounts to target? Many marketers strive to replace leads with opportunities for the sales team using account based marketing. We recently interviewed Leo Tucker, the senior vice president of global marketing for PGi. Listen as he discusses his approach to account based marketing.

During the interview, he will discuss topics such as:

• Why it’s critical for sales teams to sell to a list of targeted accounts.
• Why current demand generation efforts fail to generate enough revenue.
• How to improve the relationship between sales and marketing through account based marketing.
• How to get personalized content and messaging in front of right buyers at the right time.

If you live and die by the big deal, growing revenues faster than your industry and competitors requires a shift in your strategy. Listen here as Leo explains how to transition to account based marketing.