Today’s topic is how to build a high-performance sales culture where sales talent thrives. Joining us today is Vicky Oxley, Regional Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Comcast NBC Universal.  Vicky leads the West Region for Comcast, the nation’s largest TV, high speed internet and voice provider for residential and business customers. 

Peter Drucker famously said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and nowhere else is this truer than in sales organizations.  Yet, unfortunately, many sales leaders neglect investing in the culture of the sales department and this results to poor performance. This episode hopes to help prevent this from happening to you.  

Vicky describes the sales culture she has created to help talent thrive.  The program begins with an overview of the Comcast corporate and the specific sales culture.  Listen as Vicky explains how a customer experience culture strives to passionately driven to make every customer interaction the best possible. 

Today’s topic is how to evolve your strategy to stay ahead of the market. Joining us today is Jeff Ray, the Chief Executive Officer for Ellucian. A worldwide leader, Ellucian provides software and services to the higher education market. 18 million students around the world are touched by the software tools.

Why this topic? Strategic time horizons are changing. 5 year strategies are getting compressed to 3 year strategies and 3 year strategies are getting converted to 1 year operating plans with quarterly agile iterations. This time compression requires the CEO, and his executive leadership team, to build the capabilities associated with strategy evolution.

Listen as Jeff and Greg discuss how revenue growth, return on invested capital, and cash flow linked. Jeff describes Ellucian's advantage of a vertical market focus and the benefits to allocating resources.

Today’s topic is  new product launch. Joining us is Andy Wright, Executive Vice President of New Product Development at Cypress Semiconductor.

Cypress Semiconductor is the number one manufacturer of memory used in electronics.  Chances are that the device you are using to read this article right now is powered by Cypress.  Andy is responsible for corporate wide design and driving P&L for all design activity worldwide.

Andy and Greg discuss how to conduct a successful product launch.  A product launch hinges on being able to tell stories that compel your customers to act by answering the key question, “Why change?”.

Product launches fail to generate revenue when sales people and channel partners are not involved in messaging development during pre-launch preparations. When messaging is developed in isolation it is not compelling enough to get your customers to act. Stories told directly to customers by well-trained sales channels enable customers and prospects to answer “Why change?,” and this stimulates latent demand while leading to exceptional revenue growth.

Listen to Andy explains how his team works to identify launch risks early on. He controls launch risk by rapidly sequential phase gating. As each phase gate he evaluates whether he goes through the rest of the R&D phases.  

During the interview, Andrew will answer these questions:

• How should you determine your new product launch goals?
• How do you ready the entire organization for the launch?
• Where does sales enablement live, and who should own it?
• How should you measure success or failure of a new product launch?