Joining us for today’s show is Kathy Juve, a marketing leader who knows how to create brand preference that attracts more deals into the funnel at a higher win rate. Today’s topic is Content Marketing and how to use content marketing to build brand preference that gives you a competitive advantage. Kathy and I leveraged the SBI annual workbook to guide our conversation, turn to the Content Strategy and Planning phase starting on page 190 of the PDF. 

Our guest today is Kathy Juve, the Chief Marketing Officer for Convergys. The world leader in contact center outsourcing, Convergys is a $3 billion company who has fueled growth through robust marketing and sales. What differentiates the contact center outsourcing is their ability to provide analytics, technology, and automation solutions to help large enterprises execute their customer contact strategies. 

Kathy is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of B2B content marketing. This is a rare show for B2B marketing leaders to learn from a CMO peer who is also a top expert on customer engagement.  Seth Godin’s research has revealed that becoming a superstar takes 10,000 hours of hard work.  I have a rare B2B marketing leader for you today who has 20+ years of experience.  That’s 40,000 hours of marketing leadership experience marketing the omni channel customer experience. 

Listen as Kathy demonstrates how to earn brand preference by satisfying the information needs of your target customers and prospects. This show illustrates that content marketing does more than drive leads into the funnel. Content marketing can satisfy the information needs of prospects and customers with the result of increasing brand preference.  This is a must hear interview for any executive with an organic growth strategy. 

Why this topic?  Old activities-centric marketing organizational charts create ineffective silos and prevent revenue growth. Modern outcomes-centric marketing organizational charts eliminate silos, provide seamless integration with the product and sales teams, and unlock trapped revenue potential. 

In the first segment of the program Kathy and I set-up the use case for Convergys to give you context for how to apply this demonstration to your unique business.  We begin by outlining the audiences that Kathy prioritizes and we identify the information needs of the customers and prospects.  Kathy has a strong understanding of the audience expectations and while listening to the podcast you should be asking yourself if your team has a similar grasp of your target audience.  Finally, we discuss where the audience goes to fulfill their information needs so that we can understand the challenge involved in driving the audience to an alternate source of information. 

Segment two establishes the objectives and business reason why content is created.  What business objectives does content accomplish?  Listen as Kathy explains her approach and you will understand that content marketing goes well beyond simply purchasing the latest analyst reports that support your business case.  

A unique discussion occurs by answering the question, what would you do with an extra $1M in marketing budget? Would you spend it on content marketing? This question unpacks the greater opportunity that eludes most companies.  

Kathy describes the content marketing staff allocated to develop content.  Listen to think through how your company has allocated staff to execute your content marketing strategy. This is typically where marketing teams lack the manpower to execute the strategy. 

Listen as we discuss the tools and process required to successfully execute content marketing.  Is your team writing content without the proven tools that best in class content creation teams are leveraging?  

We summarize the final segment by discussing the budget required for content marketing, and how the content marketing line item fits within the budget.  Most companies profess to be performing content marketing, but the budget doesn’t match the objectives. Finally, Kathy outlines how to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing program. 

Joining us for today’s show is Michael Speranza, a marketing leader who knows how to create an inspiring brand that tells your strategic story. Today’s topic is Brand Strategy and Planning for the purpose of building brand preference. You can follow along by downloading SBI's annual workbook and flip to the Brand Strategy and Planning phase on pages 174 – 179 of the PDF. 

As the Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy & Marketing for IPC, Michael Speranza has guided the brand strategy of his company through a major acquisition. IPC is a global B2B provider of technology solutions for the financial service markets. IPC provides communication, networking, and information governance solutions in the FinTech space. After IPC acquired their top competitor, Michael navigated his company through the brand evolution to help make this M&A investment pay off.

Michael is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of B2B brand strategy. Listen as Michael demonstrates how to create an inspiring brand that tells your strategic story. This show illustrates brand stewardship responsibilities, and is a must hear interview for anyone acquiring companies as part of their growth strategy.

Why this topic today? Your competitors are making the same claims and promises as you. They are even using the same words. Brands that are built on “who you are” and “what you do” do not result in above average revenue growth. Your brand impacts revenue growth when it gets activated by the sales force and becomes uniquely relevant to your customer and prospects.

We begin today's show by outlining a 360-degree view of your customers and prospects. This involves understanding where your brand lives and how your audience might engage with your brand. Michael describes the brand audit process, that helped inform the new brand strategy, with primary research.  IPC conducted in-depth interviews with customers, employees, and stakeholders, plus discovery workshops with many constituents, to identify key brand attributes of IPC and the acquired company.

The brand audit step in the planning process was essential to understand the current assets and momentum.  An ideal brand audit should cover all aspects of your customer and prospect engagement including: visual identity, brand, logo, content, web, print, and advertising, as an end to end program that touched every campaign. For IPC, from start to finish, this was a three month long process.

Listen as Michael describes how the B2B brand is lived by 1,400 IPC employees to convey a single, compelling story that inspires customers and prospects. Michael recognizes how important it is to support the sales force and overall employee base when you relaunch a brand. 

Would you like to sit down with me and my hand-picked team of B2B brand strategy experts?  Come see me in Dallas at The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. To grow revenue faster than your industry and competitors every month, quarter and year is hard to do. A visit to The Studio increases the probability of making your number because the sessions are built on the proven strength and stability of SBI, the industry leader in B2B sales and marketing. 

Joining us for today’s show is Mike Doobay, a Chief Executive Officer who knows a thing or two about creating new markets through product development. Our guest today has grown his company by creating new markets. He will demonstrate how to attract new customers to an existing product, and how to convince current customers to buy more of an existing product. We leveraged the SBI annual workbook to guide our conversation.  To follow along, turn to the Product phase of the Corporate Strategy on pages 72 – 77 of the PDF.

Joining us today is Mike Doobay, the Chief Executive Officer of Affinitiv. Anyone in the automotive industry will know Affinitiv as the leader in helping OEMs and dealers retain customers, build loyalty and drive sales.  Affinitiv does this through a combination of predictive analytics, integrated technology, and in-field experts. Listen as Mike demonstrates how to create new markets through the development of new products, how to attract new customers to an existing product and how to convince current customers to buy more of an existing product.

Mike is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic that dives deep into the product portion of the corporate strategy. Mike’s leadership is a fascinating story of impressive growth that serves as a solid use-case to demonstrate growth through new products. The benefit to our audience of CEO’s, marketing leaders, sales leaders, and product leaders in the B2B space, is that you should be thinking about all the different ways to bring innovation to your customers to spark revenue growth.

Why this topic? Not all revenue growth is equal. Some revenue growth creates more enterprise value than others. Revenue growth that comes from increasing market share for a product does not create much long-term value because competitors can easily retaliate. Revenue growth driven by increasing prices of certain products comes at the expense of the customer, who can retaliate by buying less and seeking substitute products. Revenue growth driven by products that create new markets, attract new customers and convince customers to buy more is the most valuable type of revenue growth.

Listen as Mike explains how the corporate strategy focused Affinitiv as a specialist to be unique and therefore drive impressive growth. Mike is competing against these much larger marketing services firms that are generalist, yet Mike’s team knows the automotive industry better than a generalist because Affinitiv is entirely focused on that industry. The corporate strategy Mike outlines tells his sales and marketing team what markets they will compete in and how they will beat the competition.

When thinking about, “How am I going to grow?” you should have a command over your business. What is your market share? How do you segment your market? What’s the spend? Who has the propensity to buy? who are my competitors? What is my competitive differentiation? Mike’s demonstration is a use-case of a CEO who knows what he’s talking about, and you should aspire to be like him if you’re able to answer these key questions for your team.

Would you like help developing your growth strategies or fine-tuning your product development approach? For your next executive offsite, bring your team to come see us in Dallas at The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. A visit to The Studio typically results in getting three months of work done in three days. The immersive sessions accelerate everything, dramatically reducing the time it takes to diagnose a problem, develop a solution, and create an implementation plan. [p]

Today’s guest is a product leader who knows how to set-up the sales team for a successful product launch by developing the right product messaging. A great product alone is not enough for success.  The interlock between product, marketing and sales requires collaboration to develop compelling messaging to overcome the biggest competitor for most companies, which is Do Nothing.  Overcoming the status quo requires story telling, and today's guest has a launch process that will place you on the right path during pre-launch.   As a guide, download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the product strategy section and flip to the Product Launch and Messaging phase on pages 143 – 146 of the PDF. [p]

Why this topic? 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. [p]

Joining us is Toby Williams, SVP, Chief Product and Strategy Officer for Ellucian. Ellucian is the world’s leading provider of software and services for higher education institution, serving more than 2,400 institutions and 18 million students worldwide. Listen as Toby discusses how to create messaging to defeat the status quo. This starts with market problems that the solution is solving and to capture it through the customer lens. [p]

Toby is responsible for driving product management and strategy, corporate development, M&A, business development, partnerships and cloud business. In the first segment of the show, Toby provides a detailed review of the product launch process at Ellucian. We discuss ‘Why Change’ and the story required to defeat the status quo. 

The second segment covers messaging frameworks and ‘Why Change Now?’ Toby describes how to use the client voice and stories to tell the story. Toby and I discuss the power of leveraging the clients voice to deliver how the solution has helped their institution. Not only the buyers, but the users of the solution by positioning the users as heroes has resonated in the market. 

In the final segment, Toby answers this hypothetical question; If a new company hired you tomorrow with a mandate to launch new products, what would you do, in what order, and why? Toby describes a programmatic approach that creates order. Listen as Toby outlines an action plan in depth that describes the steps to launch a new product. The new benefit is cross-functional organization readiness. 

If you need more help with Product Launch and Messaging, download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to pages 143 - 146 of the PDF. To request a workshop with an expert simply sign up for a MySBI account and check the box in your preferences to request a workshop.

Joining us for today’s show is Eric Janssen, a Chief Revenue Officer who knows how to build a team to make the number. Eric is a success story having served as the sales leader for several successful emerging growth companies.  I can't think of a better guest to demonstrate how to build and develop the right team to make your number. Eric has been a long-time consumer of SBI's content and he reached out to me with a quick note thanking me for the show. I was looking for a sales leader guest from an emerging market space to come on the show, so Eric was the perfect guy. 

Today’s topic is focused on talent and we are going to demonstrate how to attract and retain ‘A’ player talent. This is not a trivial matter since ‘A’ players typically generate five times more revenue than ‘B’ players and 10 times more revenue than ‘C’ players.  During our discussion, Eric and I leveraged the annual workbook for our conversation. Flip to the People Plan phase starting on page 285. 

Helping me with our demonstration is Eric Janseen, a partner and the Chief Revenue Officer for Intellitix. If you have attended a large music festival or sporting event, you have likely experienced Intellitix technology.  Events as such as Tomorrowland, Coachella, and the Ryder Cup are powered by Eric’s company. Intellitix makes the guest experience more seamless for over 20 million fans a year by layering ticket-less technology into the event.  They are best known for putting your ticket and wallet onto a single wearable, typically a wristband. Eric is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with experience building teams and crushing his number year after year in emerging technology companies.  

Why this topic? Relying on the heroic efforts of a few eventually catches up with you. When 20% of your sales team produces 80% of the revenue, something has gone wrong. The labor expense associated with the sales team incurred by the company has to be justified or headcount reduction is warranted. Tolerating under-performers and hiring mistakes and very long new hire productivity cycles all lead to missed revenue targets and typically also lead to job loss for the head of sales. 

Having a great product is table stakes and is not going to sell itself.  For an emerging technology company the dependence on talent is high. In the first segment, we discuss Eric's business and particularly the reason why we have Eric on the show today is because he's an owner and leading the sales team of an emerging growth company. The challenges you have in an emerging growth company are very different than the challenges that you may have in a Global 2000.  

The second segment an overview of how Eric makes a new hire productive. Eric throws them in the field to get them out actually doing the work of helping to put one of these events together. This gives the new seller the context and expertise to speak about what it takes to the target audience. 

Eric and I discuss how to address poor performance in the final segment of the show.  Eric outlines a development plan and how he builds ‘A’ player talent for his company. 

Would you like help building a winning sales team?  Come see me in Dallas at The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. A visit to The Studio typically results in getting three months of work done in three days. The immersive sessions accelerate everything, dramatically reducing the time it takes to diagnose a problem, develop a solution, and create an implementation plan. 

Today’s topic is how to make marketing scientific through a marketing operations department. Shift from art to science to prove marketing’s contribution to revenue with scientific fact. If you would like help with making marketing scientific, visit The Studio, SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. A visit to The Studio increases the probability of making your number because the sessions are built on the proven strength and stability of SBI, the industry leader in B2B sales and marketing. 

Joining us today is Arnaud Kraajvanger, the Vice President of Marketing Insights and Operations for Genesys. Genesys provides customer experience contact center solutions.  More than 10,000 companies in over 100 countries trust the industry’s #1 customer experience platform to orchestrate seamless omnichannel customer journeys. Listen as Arnaud describes how marketing operations is in a unique position with more data than ever to have a significant impact on the business. 

Listen as Arnaud describes how to measure the effectiveness of the marketing team. Arnaud’s team works with all functions within marketing and develop specific KPI's for each and track the KPI’s throughout the buying cycle. To follow along, download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017.  Turn to the marketing operations phase on pages 248 – 251 of the PDF. 

Why this topic? Well, data is everywhere, channels are exploding, technology is changing, executives require more detailed reporting and marketing can no longer rely in intuition, and experience is no longer enough. 

During the show, Arnaud provides a brief overview of how each key area of marketing is tracked.  For brand awareness, share of voice is tracked. From a public relations standpoint, social shares are the KPI.  For analyst relations, the degree of analyst coverage and ranking compared to the position of the competition.  

For DemandGen KPI's there is a focus on opportunities pipeline and wins, with an emphasis for us on driving new logo pipeline.  Arnaud describes how the marketing operations team is transitioning more to a revenue marketing model where it's less about just the numbers of opportunities, numbers of leads, but having everybody focused on the revenue outcome. What is the dollar value that you're generating in pipeline, open pipeline, and wins? The other DemandGen metric that is more sophisticated is influence of deals.  How does marketing influence the win rate through marketing engagement?