CEOs must make rapid, critical business decisions while being increasingly inundated with data, trends, and conflicting information. In this age of information overload, how can you make sound judgments for your organization without the threat of falling behind?

On today's show, we are joined by Frank Cespedes, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, recurring contributor to Harvard Business Review, and author of Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing. Frank discusses key insights from his book and ultimately how leaders can separate fact from hype.

A good account segmentation will keep the lights on, but a great segmentation is how market leaders surpass their competition. How does yours compare?

On today's show, we are joined by Malorie Feidner, Senior Consultant at SBI, to discuss what it takes to achieve best-in-class account segmentation. Malorie shares the 3 key items every sales leader should prioritize, as well as the most common mistakes organizations make.

SBI recently held it’s Spring Growth Advisory Board meeting where less than a dozen market-leading Presidents and Chief Commercial Officers gathered to discuss the most pressing challenges in today’s environment. During the afternoon, the attendees shared best practices on the following topics:

• The Ascent to Chief Executive Officer
• The Evolution of Commercial Effectiveness
• The Workplace of the Future

On today’s show, Scott Gruher, Senior Partner and Revenue Practice Lead, shares key insights from the meeting that executives can begin implementing immediately.

To say your salesforce is changing is an understatement. Not only have there been shifts in adapting to a new virtual world, but your teams also need the time and attention dedicated to reaching their full potential now more than ever before. As a sales leader, how can you create a culture for your teams to thrive?

On today’s show, Roquita Williams, Head of Sales Effectiveness and DEI Partnerships at Habits at Work, joins SBI Consultant and Diversity Ambassador Jenny Sung to discuss the modern salesforce. Roquita shares impactful insights into what it means to be a sales leader in today’s world and how to create an inclusive and empathetic culture.

At SBI’s most recent Sales Advisory Board meeting, market leaders from a variety of industries came together in a virtual environment to discuss topics that are top of mind for sales executives:

• The Ascent of Sales Leaders to CEO Positions
• Executing a Back-to-Base Strategy
• Digital Selling in 2021

On today's show, Scott Gruher, Senior Partner and Revenue Practice Lead, joins us to share insights from the meeting that sales leaders can begin implementing immediately.

Legacy companies have been able to withstand nearly every possible economic condition over several decades, and yet even they have had to persevere through new challenges seen this year.

However, companies like Hexagon PPM have not been around for over 50 years by merely surviving difficult circumstances. Through the adversity, they have made their mark by quickly pivoting to market demands in any disruptive climate.

On today’s show, Hexagon PPM CRO, Steve King, joins SBI Managing Director Tony Erickson to discuss how PPM has responded to shifts in the market to thrive while maintaining their growth trajectory.

To kick off the summer, SBI held a virtual meeting comprised of an intimate group of market-leading B2B Chief Revenue Officers (Public and Private, $240M to $8B in Revenue) as part of their advisory board program. These global CRO's gathered to collectively share and learn from one another in an intimate, confidential setting.

In this video, Matt Sharrers, CEO of SBI, and Scott Gruher, Senior Partner, share insights from the powerful peer-group reflecting the sentiment of what is top of mind of global CROs. They discuss emerging best practices such as, what are the applications of digital? You first have to find your strategy.

Although many sales leaders have had to adjust to this new world since March, global companies have had to acclimate since January. With every challenge that came with reorganizing a regional market, also provided the chance to accelerate a very crucial digital transformation.

As an early adapter to this new normal, Deb Walton, Chief Revenue Officer at Refinitv, saw the opportunity to interact with customers and employees like never before. On today’s show, Deb joins us to discuss how the changes she had made out of necessity have quickly proven to be more effective and have established permanence for years to come.

In the world of a sales enablement leader, the primary goal is to keep the sales team efficient and effective. How that goal gets accomplished occurs with consistent resegmenting of the customer base, cleansing the pipeline, and accurately forecasting changes and opportunities in the market. Market leaders know that these actions were important even prior to the last 30 days and are critical now.

Jedd Williams, Vice President of Global Sales Acceleration at Poly, was in the midst of a transformation when COVID-19 shifted the sales strategy and operating norms. Hear Jedd discuss:

• Why resegmentation was the first step in adjusting go-to-market strategy
• How the forecasting process has changed and its effect on product build schedules
• Covering the install base by considering propensity to buy and propensity to upgrade

Well-established tech companies have typically developed a large, multi-layer partner ecosystem that they rely on. For a sales leader in this environment, problem-solving, and having shared responsibilities with these channel partners is the only way to succeed in moving the GTM strategy forward.

Today, Scott Peterson, SVP Americas at Mitel and veteran UCaaS executive, shares what is working for him in adjusting to COVID-19 market implications with his partner ecosystem:

• Packaging and pricing with different-sized partners
• Daily scrums with channel partners
• Deal flow and execution

We have seen first hand how the pandemic has devastated businesses around the world. However, as we adapt to a new era of commerce, many companies have found opportunities to reevaluate their strategies and thrive. For a CRO in the SaaS cyber security industry, market opportunity has increased.

On today's show, Bob Layton, CRO of Digital Defense, joins us to discuss the effect of the pandemic on software companies. Bob shares that while many aspects of their business remain unchanged, like their coverage model, they are finding creative ways to drive revenue and incentivize their teams.

Although the global pandemic is creating challenges that businesses have never dealt with before, many leaders had already felt imminent market changes prior to the outbreak. Executives are in the process of reimagining their go-to-market strategies and seeking to minimize disruption, given the circumstances.

On today’s show, Tony Erickson, Managing Director at SBI, joins us to share what market-leading CEOs and CROs are focusing on right now:

• Revising GTM strategy to optimize productivity
• Assessing channel mix and sales coverage
• Measuring progress through behavioral indicators

As we near the end of the first quarter of 2020, sales leaders anticipated a much different outcome for their Q1 goals. In the face of a global crisis, how can you not just keep the lights on but also take care of your team?

Joining us on today’s show is Chris Gosline, an Engagement Manager at SBI, to discuss best practices for providing quota relief and adapting compensation plans. Chris outlines three options that every sales leader should consider.

Today Meredith Kildow, Chief Revenue Officer of Consilio, joins us to discuss the ramifications of being a sales leader and how to design, manage and execute the integration effort when you combine multiple sales forces over time in a series of acquisitions.

Global Customer Officer and former CRO for Anaplan discusses how a revenue leader disrupts their industry to crush their revenue number.

EVP of Sales discusses how a business can move from a traditional offering and distribution channel into a new, hybrid approach.

Today we’re going to demonstrate how to drive revenue per sales head up, and time to productivity for new sales hires down.  Success for Andy in making his number quarter after quarter and year after year is tied to his ability to leverage insights from the field. Andy and his team implemented a Field Advisory Board to understand the needs of the field.  You'll find as you listen to this podcast that an advisory board and how to run it may be the key to success for driving revenue per sales head up.As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Sales Strategy section and flip to the Sales Enablement phase on pages 319 – 322 of the PDF workbook.

Joining us on the is Mark Lister, he is the Chief Digital Officer for Ness, a digital engineering company that designs and builds digital platforms and software that helps organizations engage customers, differentiate their brands, and drive revenue growth.

Today we're going to demonstrate how to make the digital experience a competitive differentiator. So, why this topic of digital experience? I mean, if there was a trend happening right now in B2B sales and marketing it is digitization, and how do you become a digital company?

Prospect and customer expectations have risen, and failure to provide them with an exceptional digital experience, for every single one it's going to result in poor revenue growth. So, some customers prioritize their digital experience over product performance when they make a purchase decision. So, this requires a deep understanding of the customers digital journey, and every single touchpoint along the way. So, mapping this customer digital journey is difficult, but it's mission critical, and when it's done correctly it's going to result in exceptional revenue growth. This is a trend you need to get on.

In today's show, Ryan and Matt demonstrate how an enterprise sales leader brings the best of the enterprise to a fast-growing tech company.

The buyer is changing, and the sales channels we go to market with must do the same. Buyers are more comfortable than ever purchasing virtually. Inside Sales organizations are handling larger deals than ever before. Today Mike Huseman is here to share his experience leveraging Inside Sales to virtually drive profitable growth.

Joe Vitalone, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Razberi Technologies, demonstrates how to develop and execute a sales strategy at scale through channel partners.

Our guest on SBI TV is Ryan Leavitt, the Chief Revenue Officer for LearnCore. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur who knows how to drive revenue growth which is the lifeblood of an emerging business. I can’t think of a better guest than Ryan to share best practices in sales prospecting to fill the funnel.

Ryan and I discuss how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities. Ryan shares his knowledge of lead production, specifically what percent of leads marketing produces versus what the sales team needs to produce on their own. And how prospecting and technology platforms are used to support prospecting efforts and produce sales leads.

This is a fascinating show where Ryan shares his prospecting methodology, lead cycle length, and his lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, in comparison to his competitors. Turn to the 11-minute mark of the video to watch how Ryan helps his sellers facilitate buyer investigation of their problems early in their purchasing process.

Matt and Ryan discuss how precisely Mike’s team makes this happen at LearnCore:

“Prospecting is all about discipline and setting goals. Your prospecting methodology won't matter if the team doesn’t put in the effort. It’ s a volume game, in which discipline is required for success. The biggest challenge of prospecting is finding the people that are going to put in that effort and are going to focus on it and be disciplined about it. What we do to find potential buyers early in the buying process on an outbound effort, is to look at queues that are common with our current clients and opportunities. And so, whether that's industries, whether that's shifting roles, whether that's mergers and acquisitions, or new product launches, those are all great ways to find the right buyers. The key question you need to answer is, “How are you going to get your 2,000 sales reps across the world to communicate the same message?”

Ryan Leavitt shares his advice on thinking through marketing productivity from the view of a Chief Revenue Officer:

“So, we try to look at productivity on a granular level. Sales cycle metrics are much more important when we start to dig into the industry, the lead source, and the size of decline in general. Because the sales cycles for inbound deals are going to be much shorter than the sales cycles for outbound bills. There's a reason that a potential buyer is searching there. They're educated and they're in a buying process. We need to make sure that our data is apples to apples. So, yes, sales cycle is very important, but we can't compare the sale cycle of a 500-person inbound company to a 500-person outbound company, or a 200-person company compared to a 20,000-person company. They're drastically different, but they came from the exact same lead source. So, we break it down into industry and company size, and from there we could start to optimize and look at the full picture. We look at lead conversion rates, opportunity conversion rates, sales cycle, average deal size, etc. After a period of time, we look at the success of the clients and bring it all the way back to how they came into the funnel to begin with.” 

Marketing is going to contribute ~30% of the pipeline, which means sales needs to generate ~70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. Lead quality and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep. Skip to the 24-minute mark of the video to watch Ryan describe what competencies he looks for in a new sales rep candidate, and how he gets the new sales reps from day one to full productivity.

Our guest today is Gabe Larson, the VP of InsideSales Labs for InsideSales.com. Having spent five years as the VP of Inside Sales, Gabe provides a behind-the-scenes look at building and operating one of the best sales development rep teams that we've ever had the benefit of examining.  InsideSales.com has experienced tremendous growth and the Sales Development Representative has played a significant role by filling the funnel with quality opportunities.

Listen as Gabe and I demonstrate how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities that will drive revenue growth for your company. If you prefer to watch a HD Video of the interview, click here. 

So why this topic? Marketing is going to contribute to about 30% of the pipeline, which means the sales needs to generate the remaining 70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. So, lead quality and lead to opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep. 

Gabe reveals, “Prospecting has become an interesting concept, especially in the tech space. How do you build that go to market strategy when it comes to structure? We've broken it down into three key areas: small business, medium business, and enterprise business. But to facilitate a bigger pipeline, we jumped on the train, and now have, what I consider to be one of the biggest innovations in sales in the last decade, and that is that sales development team.”

We begin with Gabe proving a sense of place by outlining the InsideSales.com sales organization and the various roles involved in prospecting for new customers. We then dive into the business case for the investment in building the Sales Development team of SDRs.  

In the middle segment of the show Gabe describes the prospecting process, the steps of engagement and how to make it easy to execute with technology.  We wrap up this segment by discussing the marketing support required to empower the SDR team, and how the SDR team support the marketing efforts to drive your buyers to your content and events. 

The SDR career track is a hotly debated topic among sales leadership, and we discuss the career opportunities the SDR role provides for the sales force.  Gabe explains: 

"There is a career track, and that's the great thing about stratification. You can come in as a mid-market SDR and move into an inbound rep, hone your skill, get the practice, and then move into that enterprise role. That's sometimes a year, a couple of years, but at that point, you're a pretty good prospector. Then if you want to jump into the closer role, you have the SMB track, the mid-market and enterprise. Very rarely do we push people obviously, from sales development into enterprise. But it was fantastic to move them into a mid-market or to an SMB type of role."

We summarize the show by describing the top metrics that indicate success and/or failure of the prospecting process.  Make sure to take the time to listen to the full postcast. The level of execution that Gabe describes will have sales leaders taking notes on how to execute and run a high performance SDR team.  

Joining us for today’s show is Walt Megura, Vice President of Emerging Industry Segments and Channels for Ericcson.  Walt is here to share his experience in creating new beachheads in verticals that provide future long-term growth to Ericsson. 

Today we are going to demonstrate how to ensure you have the right sales strategy and talent to enter new markets. 

Why is this an important topic? To grow revenue, companies are moving into adjacent spaces.  Assumptions made during the planning process make or break the success of the entry into new markets.  The selling motion that has worked so beautifully for you in other markets may or may not work in new markets. 

In this first segment we discuss how to ensure you have the right sales strategy and talent to enter new markets. To begin, Walt shares an overview of the business challenges faced as Ericcson sought to enter new markets.  For each new market, Walt describes how you determine the value of your solution to the market.  In other words, how did you validate that the ambition to enter the new market is supported by the capabilities of your solution? 

Walt then describes the strategies to enter new markets and outlines the different types of strategies.  Did you have an effectiveness (focus on penetration of the market with land & expand), or an efficiency strategy (profitable business)?

In the second segment we discuss how to assess sales talent and what is required for success in each of the markets you want to enter. How were the sales hiring profiles different that the proven profile of the core business? How do you evaluate existing sales talent, who has been successful in other markets for the new markets?

We wrap up the show by describing the points of differentiation to look for in each new market and how these factors impact the sales strategy.  The variance in sales cycles and buying dynamics will influence how you structure your sales force and the strategy you deploy.

In summary, Walt's interview provides a valuable context to help you avoid the trap of simply applying a proven approach from your core markets. Increase your probability of success by matching your sales strategy and talent to the new market. 

To evaluate your sales strategy for the new market, consider leveraging an interactive calculator that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate your Sales Strategy against SBI’s emerging best practices.

https://salesbenchmarkindex.com/revenue-growth-diagnostic

Did you set the quotas right to drive revenue growth?  The purpose of today's show is to demonstrate how to link the company objectives to sales targets through quota setting.  Leverage this use-case to evaluate how you set your quotas. John has a proven record of accomplishment of increasing profitable recurring revenues faster than his industry and his competitors in a crowded SaaS market. 

Our guest today is John Young, the SVP of Global Sales at NetFortris. vJohn is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with proven experience in quota setting to guide his sales team’s revenue attainment. Watch as John demonstrates how to link the company objectives to sales rep targets through quota setting.

Why this topic?  A company’s revenue goal needs to be intelligently allocated to divisions, regions, districts, territories, and sales reps. Unfortunately, it rarely is. Quota attainment, a metric tracked by most sales teams, often lies to executives. Reps who make quota do so because their quota expectation was based on the potential of a sales territory. Reps who miss quota do so because their quota expectation was not based on the potential of the assigned sales territory.

In the first segment of the program John shares the process for quota setting, and how to link the company objectives to the individual sale rep revenue goals.  The peanut butter spread approach is replaced with an intelligently allocated goal setting to achieve the company’s revenue goals across the sales team.

Listen as John describes (10:53) the qualitative and quantitative inputs required to accurately assign quotas.  John explains how to intelligently prioritize based on spend potential and a propensity to buy formulas play into your quota setting. 

We wrap up the show (18:32) by discussing how to gain buy-in internally with the sales reps and at the executive level for the quota plan.  This involves also having a clear workload capacity model built indicating how many live deals, accounts, and prospects a sales rep can handle. [p]

Joining us for today’s show is Jeff Harris, the Chief Business Development Officer for Millar. Today we are going to demonstrate how to drive revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down. 

Why is this an important topic? Getting an increase in sales head count is difficult. The expense cops expect all the current sales reps to be at quota before they agree to add any new heads. And when new sales people are hired there is little patience from the executive team members, who want each to generate revenue as quickly as possible. The sales enablement function exists to onboard new sales hires and to drive revenue per sales head up. Neglect sales enablement and forgo adding head count in the future. 

Our expert contributor is Jeff Harris, the Chief Business Development Officer for Millar, a medical device company. What makes today’s guest incredibly unique among sales leaders, is Jeff’s background as a former Chief Learning Officer. 

In the first segment we dive into the ideal the onboarding program for new hires.  Jeff describes must-have elements of an onboarding program to quickly ramp new reps to full productivity. 

Jeff outlines in the second segment how to enable the sales field with tools such as use-cases and battle cards. The onboarding training walks through the essential elements required to enable new reps.  These include items such as positioning statements, ideal customer profiles, marketing tools, and client references. Do you place them in a reps hands with the proper training?  

Driving accountability of your new hires requires a thoughtful certification program.  You are investing in them, they need to reciprocate. What gets inspected gets retained, and Jeff describes the sales readiness program. 

The final segment of the show describes the design and delivery of an onboarding program.  This includes your learning delivery process (blended learning, coaching, role playing, classroom, online) and curriculum design.

Joining us for today’s show is Steve Bonvissuto, the Executive Director for Innovation at MarketSource. Today, we're going to demonstrate how to improve the productivity rates of the sales team with smart sales systems design. 

Why this topic? Too much technology and the reps never ever meet with customers because they become data entry clerks. Too little technology and the reps waste countless hours administrative tasks that could have been automated. You kind of think about revenue growth, it sits between these two extremes. 

Steve is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with 30 years of experience transforming strategy and translating into results for Fortune 500 companies. Listen as Steve demonstrates how to build a sales technology strategy that will drive revenue growth and help you consistently make your number. 

In the first segment of the program, Steve shares the use-case of his company to illustrate the demonstration.  We begin with discussing the extent to which technology is changing sales performance.  

This dialogue delves into three different lenses of sales enablement. One lens being about the process in which people work, and the importance of an efficient and streamlined process to ensure the effectiveness of any technology. Another lens being the focus on driving productivity using the skills of the sales teams. This lens hones in on the strengths and weaknesses of sales teams and identifying where instructional design needs to be applied to increase the team’s skills and acumen. 

The final lens is about technology and making sure technical productivity is as high as possible. Making sure that when we look at sales enablement technologies we’re increasing our productivity, reducing time, and increasing quality. Steve explains how to deal with the confusion that the proliferation of technologies poses to a sales force: 

It's typical that see customers in this analysis paralysis phase, and for us, it's all about learning. We look at where in the funnel are we trying to have an impact; is it the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel? Then, what is exactly we're trying to accomplish? Are we increasing the skill or acumen? We like this idea of failing fast and developing a use case and trying something quickly. So, for us it's about testing as many products as we can, developing those use cases, and seeing what the outcome is. Within 30 days, we can determine whether something fits in our environment or a customer environment. 

The second segment of the show focuses on demonstrating how to improve the productivity rates of your sales team and the usefulness of sales outsourcing using smart sales system designs. Steve addresses sales tech integration and importance of a company’s CRM. 

If you think about the customer life cycle all the way from creating demand to servicing a customer for life, your CRM is a key component of that. You want your sales force or CRM to be a tool that your people want to use to do their job, not just another task they need to do at the end of the day in order to get credit for an activity. I would suggest that most companies look at their CRM and make sure that they're designing it in a way that serves the needs of each individual role in the sales organization. Then, bolt on tools are going to serve each of the areas of the funnel: predictive analytics on the front end, lead scoring tools front end, so that you have the highest possible quality leads and you're focusing on the right prospects and the right personas. 

We end the show discussing the question, “What is the best approach for the audience to determine the budget for sales technology?” Steve provides guidance on how to reduce the cost of sales enablement technology to further increase profit and sales efficiency. 

Joining the SBI podcast show is Nick Mehta, the CEO of software company Gainsight, the global leader in the customer success category. Many CEOs are moving their revenue models to recurring revenue as this type of revenue creates more enterprise value than transactional revenue.  As a result CEOs have become strategically focused on revenue retention, customer renewal rates, and customer life time value.

Nick literally wrote the book on customer success and with his company Gainsight, created the category. If generating more revenue that is recurring is on your strategic priority list, this show is for you.

Why this topic?  Business models are changing from transaction-based revenue models to subscription-based revenue models. Companies dependent on recurring revenue must pay special attention to customer renewal rates, revenue retention, and customer lifetime value. As a result, reactive customer service approaches, built to lower the cost to serve, are being replaced with proactive customer success approaches, built to increase the revenue per customer.

When your customer becomes more successful as a result of using your product, they buy more of it. And when your customer is unaware of how you have contributed to their success, they attrite. 

Greg and Nick leverage the How to Make Your Number in 2018 Workbook.  Turn to the Sales Strategy section and flip to Phase 15, Customer Success found on pages 411 – 416.

Listen to the first segment as Nick describes what is customer success, what type of businesses should be investing in it and what value customer success promises to create.

The second segment of the show is focused on how customer success lowers the cost to serve customers and increase the lifetime value of a customer. Also, how do companies fund a customer success department.

Our final segment of the show explains what is the profile of the leader of the customer success department, who should this person report to and how should this person be measured and compensated.

Joining us for today’s show is Jason Close, a key member of the team working behind the scenes of the successful Global Payments growth story.  Global Payments literally doubled their revenue growth in a short period of time.  Jason is here to share the story of how the sales leadership team made that happen.  Jason has a unique approach to enabling the sales team to outpace the competition. Jason shares his story by answering questions from the How to Make Your Number in 2018 Workbook to share emerging best practices. Access the latest Workbook to review the Sales Enablement phase starting on page 407 of the Sales Strategy section. [p]

Our guest today is Jason Close, the Senior Vice President of Global Sales Excellence for Global Payments. The leader in merchant credit card processing, Global Payments is a technology-driven company serving business owners. Jason will demonstrate how to drive revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down. 

Why this topic? Getting an increase in sales head count is difficult. The expense cops expect all the current sales reps to be at quota before they agree to add any new heads. And when new sales people are hired there is little patience from the executive team members, who want each to generate revenue as quickly as possible. The sales enablement function exists to onboard new sales hires and to drive revenue per sales head up. Neglect sales enablement and forgo adding head count in the future. 

Jason is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic as the sales enablement leader for a highly successful growth company. Listen as Jason demonstrates how to drive revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down. 

In the first segment of the show, Jason describes the business outcomes he strives to accomplish with sales enablement.  He then ladders this down to the strategic focus areas of the sales enablement team to accomplish the business outcomes.  And to give you context, Jason describes his sales enablement team and the relationship with the overall sales force.  Jason shares below:

As my team starts, we step into each of these regions, it's an assessment period of three to four months. We're looking at a myriad of different areas like their current sales processes, methodologies. Do they have a methodology? Quota setting, channel optimization, buyer segmentation, market segmentation, six or seven others. 

We're approaching this from as much of a holistic standpoint as we can. And we're looking for, where are we thriving? Where are we strong? Where do we have gaps? Where are we starting from scratch? And with that assessment period, we're going to be looking for those initiatives that are going to help us, again, really start piling on with the organic revenue growth. 

At the end of the assessment, we end up with 10 or 15 different initiatives. And we're going to whittle that down and hopefully create a two, three, four, five-year trajectory. So, are of the two or three things that we need to start today? What might we stagger to the beginning of next year and the year after that? But again, we're looking for that steady, upward climb as we develop more scalable systems. 

Jason starts with an assessment to understand what everybody's doing.  This helps the corporate office make sure not to miss pockets of excellence and understand what everybody's doing in the field and across the company. 

In the next segment of the show, Jason describes how he leverages a custom sales process to help his sales team win more deals, faster, and at a higher close rate. 

Jason describes the sales process in detail, and this quote stands out: 

The sales process allowed me to focus on a couple of basic things. And the first one that we stumbled upon was, the most important thing that we could focus on is, how many first-time appointments are our salespeople getting in front of on a weekly basis? Not monthly, but every single week. What would it look like if, based on each person's personal goals and what they needed to hit?  That's key, focusing on their personal goals. I've never put together a business plan for a rep where it didn't far surpass whatever minimum standard that I had for them to keep their job. We help them identify their number, then, based on their own numbers and metrics, how many new people do you need to meet with on a weekly basis? And once we find that number, it's just about asking permission, can I hold you accountable to your personal goals? We've identified what the metric is, what it's going to take for you to do that, and I want to make sure that you are not only hitting but you're surpassing those personal goals. 

Jason summarizes the show by sharing his onboarding program.  Listen as Jason describes how he takes a brand-new rep and brings them to full productivity.  You will want to take notes as professional sales development programs are discussed, including the content required to enable the sales team.

Joining us for today’s show is Todd Jones, an executive sales operations leader who knows how to support aggressive revenue growth. Today’s topic is focused on how Sales Operations improves the efficiency of the sales force.  During our discussion, Todd and I leverage our workbook, so flip to the Sales Operations phase on page 314 of the PDF to follow along. [p]

Our guest today is Todd Jones, the Vice President of Sales Operations and Enablement at Renaissance Learning. Renaissance is the leader in the education software space, a SaaS based offering, providing a learning assessment and development platform to the K-12 market education market. Todd is going to demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of the sales team. [p]

Todd is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of sales operations.  His background spans all aspects of sales, sales operations, enablement, and business management. Todd has more than 25 years of experience in sales operation leadership positions from marquee names within the technology space such as NetApp, QLogic, Symantec and now Renaissance Learning.

Why this topic on this day? Sales ops has become a catch all phrase. The sales ops leader gets assigned all the work no one else wants to do. Often underfunded and understaffed, sales operations leaders fail to deliver a meaningful revenue contribution. Yet, the best growth executives understand that sales ops is the most strategic sales function in the entire company. They understand that when deployed correctly, sales ops can impact revenue growth in a very meaningful way. Do not starve this vital department. If you do you're going to miss your revenue goal. [p]

Listen as Todd demonstrates how to improve the efficiency of the sales team.  We begin the show discussing the business outcomes a sales operation team needs to deliver.  Todd describes top-line growth and profitability as the number one priorities both within sales operations and the organization at large. The primary objective within sales operations is focusing on the skills development, the sales effectiveness, and ultimately driving the productivity and capacity of selling resources.

Todd shares, “Sales operations often can be what I would categorize as the dumping ground for all things that need to be addressed, or challenges within the organization. As I entered the function here at Renaissance, I think as important as it is to understand what we will do, equally important to understand what we will not do to avoid becoming that dumping ground.” The strategic areas of focus for any best-in-class sales operations organization are really quite simple.

• Focus on the re-engineering alignment design of core sales processes, the system capabilities, and automation tools that align in support of those processes.
• Define a clear business management process and operational cadence that supports the objectives of the organization. The business management process covers how we operate, how we function as a sales organization, how we lead, inspect, and deliver on those commitments to the company.
• Ensure the coverage model and compensation plan for the sellers to take to market and manage their book of business are clear, well-defined, and aligned across the company.

Listen as Todd describes his forecasting process.  It’s tight and stage-gated. If you're struggling with forecasting accuracy, make sure to take notes while you listen to what Todd shares about his process and you'll receive tremendous value.

Joining us for today’s show is Bill Griffin, an Executive Vice President of Global Sales who knows how to Make the Number. Today’s topic is about winning more deals, winning bigger deals, and winning them faster. Bill uses the How to Make Your Number in 2018 Workbook to access emerging best practices as a guide for our questions.  Leverage the latest Workbook to review the Sales Process phase starting on page 361 of the Sales Strategy section. 

Our guest today is Bill Griffin, the Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Services for Aspen Technology. Aspen is the leader in process optimization software, primarily for the process industries, which include oil, gas, and chemical customers. This show is a can’t miss episode for executives who want to yield more deals, bigger deals, and greater success in making your number.  

Today’s focus on sales process has an emphasis on pipeline velocity and pipeline cleanliness. To increase deal sizes, improve your win rates, and shorten your sales cycles, you need to adopt a custom, proprietary sales process/methodology. Bill is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of deploying a custom sales process, as he came up through the ranks of Xerox and Autodesk, and has guided his sales teams to win more deals, win bigger deals, and win them faster.    

Why this topic? Standard, one size fits all sales methodologies no longer work. Your competitors can license the same sales methodologies from the same vendors you can, so there is no competitive advantage to be had by adopting the latest sales methodology from the sales trainee industry.

Listen to the interview with Bill from May, 2017 that demonstrates how to win more deals, win bigger deals, and win them faster.  

We begin the show by providing an overview of how Bill uses sales process to help buyers make purchase decisions.  He describes the sales methodology and the resources the sales team needs to execute the sales process.  Bill describes how to use the sales process to trigger access to higher end sales resources. 

We do that by making sure we're giving the customer the right resources they need at the right phase. What is important is that those stages trigger certain activities from your sales organization. I would not send out a pre-sales application engineer or solution engineer - we call it a business consultant at Aspen Technology - unless we've reached a certain stage in the process because it would be inappropriate. Just like throwing a quote out to the customer, doing a deep dive custom demo. You need to make sure you reach a certain stage in the process. By having those stage gates, you can make sure you are applying the right resources because your resources are expensive and limited in a global organization, at the right time in the sales cycle. 

In the second segment of the show Bill explains how a custom sales process shortens the sales cycle length, increases win rate, and improves the deal size.  Bill’s straightforward answer provides a sound guide to how this can pay off for you: 

You allocate your limited resources on deals that a higher likelihood that are actually going to be closed. And by doing that you're able to grow the deal because you're not wasting your time chasing deals that aren't going to follow through.

Bill provides an insight into how to track the right metrics that indicate success of a sales process. What are the leading indicators and ultimately the lagging indicators to show success.  

Joining us for today’s show is Sean Cataldo, a sales effectiveness leader who knows how to enable a sales force to hit the number. Today’s topic is sales enablement. Sean and I leverage the How to Make Your Number in 2018 Workbook to access emerging best practices as a guide for our questions. Access the latest Workbook to review the Sales Enablement phase starting on page 367 of the Sales Strategy section. 

Our guest today is Sean Cataldo, the Senior Director of Global Sales Force Effectiveness at Veritas Technologies. Veritas helps companies manage information to harness the power of that information regardless of whether it lives on-prem, in virtual systems, or in the cloud. Sean will demonstrate how to drive revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down. 

Why this topic? Getting an increase in sales head count is difficult. The expense cops expect all the current sales reps to be at quota before they agree to add any new heads. And when new sales people are hired there is little patience from the executive team members, who want each to generate revenue as quickly as possible. The sales enablement function exists to onboard new sales hires and to drive revenue per sales head up. Neglect sales enablement and forgo adding head count in the future. 

Sean is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic as the sales enablement leader for an enterprise software company. Listen as Sean demonstrates how to drive revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down.

In the first segment of the show, Sean describes the business outcomes that sales enablement is tasked to pursue.  He describes three business objectives for his sales effectiveness team:

The first is we are in fact charged with reducing time to productivity across our entire sales force. That's not just for new hires but also for existing hires and making sure that they are able execute on our new product introduction and go to market plans. The second area is around enabling our sellers and partners to consistently grow a quality pipeline. The third area is helping those sellers accelerate the velocity of that pipeline.  

To accomplish these objectives, Sean shares the strategic areas of focus to increase revenue per sales head: 

There are four strategic areas. The first is onboarding and that ties of course directly back to reducing time to productivity. We indoctrinate our new hires through a very rigorous program. It helps them understand our strategy, our vision, and how to bring value to our costumes. The second area is really ensuring that our existing sales force is able to execute on its go-to-market priorities, whether they're direct sellers, technical sellers, or in our channel. The third area has to do with our focus around sales process and tools, helping to ensure our selling motion is consistent and repeatable. The fourth area is around developing the selling skills that our teams need to be able to execute that process with world-class efficiency.

Listen to the entire podcast to drilled deep as Sean demonstrates how to executive against these areas of focus to accomplish the business outcomes. 

Have expectations gone up and left you wondering if you have the right strategies to support your revenue growth goals? Here is an interactive tool that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate your Sales Strategy against SBI’s emerging best practices to find out if: 

• Your revenue goal is realistic
• You will earn your bonus
• You will keep your job 

Joining us for today’s show is Chris Walter, a Vice President of Strategy who knows how to build a sales force. Today’s topic is dedicated to the topic of attracting and retaining top sales talent. Chris and I leverage the How to Make Your Number in 2018 Workbook to access emerging best practices as a guide for our questions. Access the latest Workbook to review the People phase starting on page 367 of the Sales Strategy section. 

Chris Walter is the Vice President of Strategy of Strategic Enterprise Services at MarketSource, a sales outsourcing firm serving both retail and commercial channels. Chris will demonstrate how to attract and retain A-Players who generate 5x more revenue than B-Players and 10x more than C-Players. 

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

Chris is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic coming from a business services firm that provides outsourced sales services. Not only is Chris a peer sales leader with a sales force of his own, but his “Product” is providing feet on the street for other companies. 

Listen as Chris demonstrates how to attract and retain A-Players who generate 5x more revenue than B-Players and 10x more than C-Players. Chris describes the level of talent required, and whether he requires an exceptional sales talent or great product/industry fit. 

In the first segment of the show, Chris describes the investments he making in sales talent to make the number.  Selecting the right talent to start with is where it all begins, and Chris shares his expertise in the evaluation criteria you should use when selecting sales talent. 

Chris describes the changing routes to market in the second segment, and the corresponding changes in sales talent required. The importance of digital marketing is shared in this quote: 

The impact of digital on the overall route to market is important. I've seen stats as high as 60-70% of the buyer's journey now is conducted digitally, so it's really important that companies adapt to that change, begin to work in both demand generation and prospecting through these digital channels, and it's important for the sellers to understand they need to prospect differently, leveraging social, being engaged in social conversations, and then really understanding the buyers are coming to them in a different mindset than they might have been 10 years ago as an example, so they really need to play more of a consultative role, more of a challenger type role because of where the buyers are at the point in time they're hitting the salesperson.

The time it takes to get a new sales rep to full productivity (100% quota) is discussed. Chris explains: 

Depending upon the mission, but we typically look for three to six months on average to get somebody productive, ramped up and productive. It'll be shorter if we're doing transactional sales engagements.  One or two call closes scenarios, obviously need to be a lot faster. If we're doing long sales cycles, complex selling, it's going to be longer, but that's the target that we shoot for on average across our various types of sales programs.

In the final segment of the program, Chris discusses how the onboarding process.  He goes deep into how to find the right blend between situational application of the knowledge and classroom study. 

Joining us for today’s show is Loren Brockhouse, a Senior Vice President of Global Sales who knows how to Make the Number. Today’s topic is about winning more deals, winning bigger deals, and winning them faster. It’s difficult to grow revenue faster than your industry’s growth rate and faster than your competitors.  Loren and I leverage the How to Make Your Number in 2018 Workbook to access emerging best practices as a guide for our questions.  Access the latest Workbook to review the Sales Process phase starting on page 361 of the Sales Strategy section.

Loren Brockhouse is the Senior Vice President of Global Sales for iiPay, an international payroll provider for enterprise companies. Integrated International Payroll (iiPay) is a cloud-based global payroll solution that reduces dependence on in-country payroll processors; and provides a comprehensive view into an organization’s global payroll landscape. This show is a must watch for executives with sales teams working to disrupt the status quo. Loren will demonstrate how to win more deals, win bigger deals, and win them faster.  

To increase deal sizes, improve your win rates, and shorten your sales cycles, you need to adopt a custom, proprietary sales process/methodology. Loren is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of deploying a custom sales process, as he uses it with his sales team to disrupt the payroll industry. His reps must get the attention of enterprise buyers and convince them to do things in a different way. He’s been successful upsetting the status quo with his sales methodology, so I have brought Loren on the show to share his use-case. 

If you would prefer to watch a HD video of my interview with Loren, click here. 

Why this topic? Standard, one size fits all sales methodologies no longer work. Your competitors can license the same sales methodologies from the same vendors you can, so there is no competitive advantage to be had by adopting the latest sales methodology from the sales trainee industry. 

Ultimately, the reason to install a sales methodology or sales process is to improve your win rate, grow your average deal size, and shorten your sales cycle. Loren and I begin the show by discussing the iiPay proprietary sales process. Loren describes how strategic selling questions are baked in at each stage, which enables his team to differentiate his solution from the competition throughout the buying process. It allows his team to speed up the overall sales process by establishing the point of differentiation early. 

The custom sales process is empowered by clear buyer-driven definitions between the stages. The entire sales organization has the same, broadly adopted criteria  for moving opportunities from one stage to another. Ultimately, the stages drive resourcing and forecast which is extremely important to any business, but particularly an emerging one. 

Loren makes the case for why sales leaders should develop a proprietary sales process. “If you (prospects) look at the website of iiPay and our competitors', the websites look the same. The value propositions are the same. So really, the main differentiation is when you engage with the client, and that absolutely must be felt and seen as something different.” Licensing the latest sales process from a sales training company is the same process your competitors can use, and is therefore a commodity offering and experience. The result of a licensed sales process is likely sameness and an over-reliance on the persuasiveness of your sales reps. 

The question the audience should ask themselves, is whether the sales team offers a different experience versus the top three or four other players in your space. In most markets the competitors are using the same words. So how do you differentiate, right? The answer for your sales force is to use a custom sales process built for your buyers and your specific company.  

Have expectations gone up and left you wondering if you have the right product strategy to support your revenue growth goals? Here is an interactive tool that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate your Product Strategy against SBI’s emerging best practices to find out if: 

• Your revenue goal is realistic
• You will earn your bonus
• You will keep your job 

Joining us for today’s show is Ralph Hawkins, a Senior Vice President of Sales who knows a thing or two about transitioning from direct sales to indirect sales channels. Today’s topic is focused on selecting the right sales channels and exploring the economic models for partner programs. Ralph and I leveraged the How to Make Your Number workbook to access emerging best practices as a guide for our questions. To access the latest workbook, click here to get started now.   

Let me tell you more about our guest. Ralph Hawkins is the Senior Vice President of Sales responsible for partner programs at PGi. Helping companies collaborate and be more productive by using conferencing and collaboration products, PGi is the world’s largest dedicated provider of collaboration software. With over 50,000 business customers around the world, PGi is the platform of choice for 75% of the Fortune 100. Ralph will demonstrate how to cover the market completely with direct and indirect sales channels, starting with how to make the transition. 

So why this topic on this day? Selling to customers directly when they want to buy from partners, is a sure-fire way to miss the revenue goal. Selling to customers through partners when they want a direct relationship with your company, can be equally devastating. Within the direct and indirect channel model, there are multiple sub-models to consider. Coverage model decisions have never been this complicated, for we live in the omni-channel era.  

Listen as Ralph describes how to transition from a 100% direct sales model to a robust partner model. Ralph describes the advantages to cover the market by leveraging channels to broaden the reach of your company. 

What’s impressive is the approach Ralph has taken to think about all the potential channels in a broad manner.  Ralph thoroughly thinks through going from agents, to private label, to classic resellers, and more. That's what it means. Covering the market completely requires going beyond the obvious channels of your competitors.    

Ralph and I discuss the economics of partnering.  Ultimately it comes down to possible partners asking themselves, "How much money can I make?" Ralph outlines two economic models that he's using, and there are several others. The royalty model Ralph describes is that something that you can could possibly take advantage of that's a lucrative model for the channel partner of a manufacturer. Then you think about the wholesale to retail model, your classic B2B sales approach, especially with a software company like PGi. This model is built on the spread between wholesale to retail. Sometimes that's more of a consumer approach to things, but it's applicable in certain market segments with certain channel partners. Listen as Ralph describes the approach to think through for your economic model.  

In the second segment of the show we discuss how to prevent and address channel conflict.  Ralph describes in depth how to classify the channel coverage models based on your unique market based on buy preference and market dynamics.  

Ralph and I discuss how to leverage the various channels to reach certain market segments that the direct sales force can’t reach effectively.  Once a channel is working, we discuss how to scale up resources and we compare this to scaling internal direct sales resources. 

The show is wrapped up with Ralph describing how to select, recruit an onboard the right channel partners.  This serves as a thorough checklist to think through what your channel program may be missing.

I am excited to bring you a fellow CEO who made his way up through the function of sales. It’s rare to find a Chief Executive Officer with sales and marketing expertise.  Get ready to take notes of these rare insights from the owner of the corporate strategy who knows exactly how to leverage the sales function to achieve growth objectives.  Today we are going to demonstrate how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities. 

Our new Revenue Growth Diagnostic tool gives you the ability to test your corporate strategy’s ability to hit the number, and determine if you are likely or unlikely to make your number. 

Our guest today is Henry Schuck, the CEO and co-founder of DiscoverOrg, a sales and marketing intelligence platform. DiscoverOrg solves one of the biggest problems facing sales and marketing teams, and that's getting great data on the companies they're targeting. This includes the prospects at those companies, getting that flowing through their CRM and marketing automation systems and making it actionable for their reps to call on for their marketing teams to send campaigns on and to really drive the funnel. 

Why this topic?  Marketing is going to contribute ~30% of the pipeline, which means sales needs to generate ~70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. Lead quality and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep. 

We begin the show by learning about Henry’s sales and marketing team.  The marketing team at DiscoverOrg contributes 50% of the leads and 52% of the revenue, which is well above the benchmark of 40% for world class marketing organizations. 

The sales team at DiscoverOrg is 100% inside sales. We discuss the organization structure and approach to drive revenue.  Listen as Henry describes the prospecting process that SDRs use at his company to drive qualified leads. 

“At a point last year, we brought in a sales ops person who went through the entire prospecting process and really dialed it in. The prospecting process today starts with data that flows into Salesforce, leads that come from marketing that flow into Salesforce, get distributed to the right SDRs, go inside their queues. We use FrontSpin as a dialer. We use Outreach as an outbound email system. Leads sort of flow through that process and get followed up on and then go to an account executive. Each SDR, whether inbound or outbound, is responsible to hit a certain number of demos each day, really over the month, but each day. We're tracking that every single week.” 

Henry demonstrates how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities by executing a prospecting methodology that helps sellers facilitate the investigation of their problems early in the purchasing process.  Listen as Henry share his team’s recipe for success, and provides a comparison view on how his team compares to the competition in terms of sales cycle length, lead to opportunity conversion, and average pipeline per rep.  

In the final segment of the show we discuss what resources the sales team needs to successfully execute the prospecting process. Henry describes how his team leverages technology to make the prospecting process easy to execute. 

Finally, we conclude the show by outlining the key metrics to track to indicate success and/or failure of the prospecting process.  This is a show you will want to take notes and forward to your entire leadership team. 

Joining us for today’s show is Finn Faldi, a Partner Revenue Officer who knows how to go to market with the right channels. Our show today is focused on selling through partners, one of the hottest and most consistently requested topics from this audience of executive decision makers. 

Our guest is Finn Faldi, a Partner Revenue Officer for LifeLock.  The Partner Revenue Officer title is new and reflects the growing importance of channel to making your number.  Today’s topic is focused on the emerging best practices for selling through channels. It’s difficult to grow revenue faster than your industry’s growth rate and faster than your competitors. The Revenue Growth Diagnostic interactive tool will help you determine if you are likely or unlikely to make your number. 

I have the Partner Revenue Officer from LifeLock joining us to share with you, the audience of B2B marketing and sales leaders, the emerging best practices from the B2B2C world for B2B partner selling. Finn will demonstrate how to cover the market completely by utilizing indirect sales channels. I sought out the top expert on selling through partners to share emerging best practices. To do this I looked to business-to-consumer companies with a heavy partner mix in their sales motion. The reason being is that business-to-consumer companies almost always lead B2B industries in the adoption of new emerging best practices by several years.  

So why this topic on this day? Selling to customers directly when they want to buy from partners, is a sure-fire way to miss the revenue goal. Selling to customers through partners when they want a direct relationship with your company, can be equally devastating. Within the direct and indirect channel model, there are multiple sub-models to consider. Coverage model decisions have never been this complicated, for we live in the omni-channel era.  

The first segment of the show identifies the economic model required for each unique sales channel.  Finn walks us through the approach he uses at LifeLock, and how he splits the market between direct sales and channel partners. 

Finn describes the channel coverage model he deploys and the level of conflict among individual partners. In the final segment of the show, Finn describes how channel partners can reach market segments that his company could not reach without their selling efforts. The channel partners help LifeLock scale up sales resources to meet customer demand and cover the market completely. 

Finally, Finn summarizes with his proven approach to selecting, recruiting, and onboarding the right channel partners.  This is a great opportunity for you to listen to a Partner Revenue Officer describe the steps required for success and perform your own gap analysis on your own company.  

Would you like help with the channel approach of your company?  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. 

Joining us for today’s show is Brad Reynolds, an executive who knows a thing or two about running a strategic sales operations function that supports aggressive revenue growth. Today’s topic is focused on how Sales Operations improves the efficiency of the sales team to increase revenue per head.  During our discussion, Brad and I leverage our workbook, so flip to the Sales Operations phase on page 314 of the PDF to follow along. 

As the Director of Sales Operations and Enablement at Kimberly-Clark Professional, Brad is going to demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of the sales team. Kimberly-Clark Professional is the B2B arm of Kimberly-Clark Corporation with global brands such as Kleenex, Scott, WypAll, and Kimtech. Brad has been with Kimberly-Clark Professional the past eleven years, serving the past four years leading sales operations and enablement.   

Brad is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of sales operations. The Kimberly-Clark Professional sales team targets segments around the world such as industrial, office buildings, health care, and education with hundreds of thousands of end-users that we deal with daily. Listen as Brad demonstrates how to improve the efficiency of the sales team.  

Why this topic on this day? Sales ops has become a catch all phrase. The sales ops leader gets assigned all the work no one else wants to do. Often underfunded and understaffed, sales operations leaders fail to deliver a meaningful revenue contribution. Yet, the best growth executives understand that sales ops are the most strategic sales function in the entire company. They understand that when deployed correctly, sales ops can impact revenue growth in a very meaningful way. Do not starve this vital department. If you do you're going to miss your revenue goal. 

In the first segment of the show Brad and I discuss the business outcomes his team is charged to deliver.  We dive into the strategic focus areas of the sales operations team and Brad shares how he guides his team with a strategic focus to keep from becoming a reactive catch-all.  To operate strategically, Brad works closely with other functional leaders in HR, product management, finance, IT, and marketing to interlock sales with the overall corporation. 

Listen as Brad outlines the roles and the responsibilities of the sales operations team to demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of the sales team.  As a strategic function, we discuss the executive reporting requirement to provide the right level of information on sales performance at the right time to make decisions.  

To power the sales operations team, Brad describes the systems architecture required power the team.  Brad describes in detail the forecasting approach and process to provide accurate forecasts.  

We wrap up the show with Brad demonstrating a best practice approach to pipeline management.  Listen as Brad describes the process and how pipeline management reports are released; “We have district managers meet with their teams, our directors of sales have the same meeting with their district managers, the VP of sales meets with the directors of sales and yesterday, our VP of sales had his pipeline report with our North American President. We start at that level and we ladder the metrics and the measurements all the way down so that we're all looking at the same things.”

For your next QBR, bring your sales leadership 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. 

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. 

Joining us for today’s show is Biju Baby, a Vice President of Global Sales Operations who knows a thing or two about supporting revenue growth. His company has seen an impressive 54 quarters of sequential revenue growth and Biju has been an instrumental part of the team the last six years. [p]

Today’s topic is back office support, how to make your company so easy to buy from and sell for that you win more deals. To follow along download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the sales strategy section and flip to the Back-Office Support phase on pages 326 – 327 of the PDF workbook.  

Biju Baby is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of back office support as the Vice President of Global Sales Operations for Equinix. A public company with revenue of $3.6 billion, Equinix builds and operate data centers for customers to connect with each other. Listen as Biju demonstrates how to be a company that's easy to buy from and a company that's easy to sell for. 

Why this topic? Taking days to get a pricing decision frustrates customers. Delaying the closing of a deal because of lengthy legal reviews reduces win rates. Paying a sales rep incorrectly, and late, drives up turnover. It is hard enough to grow revenues faster than the industry and competitors. Try to not add to the level of difficulty by being hard to buy from and sell for. 

We begin the podcast with Biju explaining the three things he recommends to evaluate how easy your company to buy from and sell for.  The straight-forward advice from Biju is the starting point for you to evaluate your own company’s needs in this area. Listen as Biju explains how as you gather feedback from the sales force, how to distinguish between the signal and the noise. 

Listen as Biju provides a use case for how to make a company easy to buy from.  This involves pushing the pricing and approval process down into the field with identified thresholds and empowering the team to make those decisions in the field. Biju explains how to hold the field accountable to make sure that the thresholds are not broken. Most companies are not comfortable taking this approach and want to control everything at headquarters. The problem is that it becomes a bandwidth problem and things take too long. Listen as Biju explains how at Equinix they trust the field with such a critical decision, but also making sure that you're following up on a quarterly basis that the thresholds don't get broken. That's a great example of how to push the pricing and approval process out into the field. 

Biju and I discuss the length of time it takes for an approval internally.  Equinix is a global document that spans across 21 countries and operates in a country manager model, yet Biju's team can turnaround most decisions in 24-hours.  Think of the advantage that would give your sales team.  Listen as Biju and I discuss the steps required to put this in place.  

Time kills deals, yet we have all have experienced companies that make it difficult for you to award them business. If your company making it difficult to do business with you then it’s impacting your win rate.  Worse, ‘A’ Player sales candidates can sniff out companies that are difficult to buy from and sell for resulting in lost talent, and retention problems. Listen to this podcast to act on making your company easy to buy from and sell for. 

If you would like to spend time with me on the topic of making your company easy to buy from, come see me at The Studio in Dallas. The Studio is SBI’s multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art executive briefing center. Sessions at The Studio are experiential and are designed around the principles of interactive exercises, hands-on innovation, and peer-to-peer collaboration. The Studio is a safe-haven for learning and after just a few days clients leave with confidence and clarity your revenue growth strategies and sales and marketing motions to make your number. 

Today’s topic is focused on how to transition channel partners from perpetual license to cloud-based offerings. Our guest is Steve Blum, an executive sales leader who knows how to Make the Number with channel partners. What’s unique about today’s guest is that his company, Autodesk, does most their business through partners and has done so from the beginning.  Autodesk grows primarily through an indirect go-to-market selling model. I can’t think of a better guest to demonstrate how to work with channel partners as you navigate your way through major shifts in your business model.

During our discussion, Steve and I leverage the annual workbook for our conversation. Flip to the Channel Optimization phase on pages 290 – 298 of the PDF workbook.

Joining us in-person in The Studio is Steve Blum, Senior Vice President of World-Wide Sales for Autodesk. Steve has been a sales leader at Autodesk the past fourteen years, with the last seven serving as the head of world-wide sales. Steve will demonstrate how to bring a channel organization along through major transformations in the business model, such as shifts from perpetual license to cloud-based offerings. If you prefer to watch the live interview in high definition video, click here.

Autodesk’s channel business represents an astounding 75-80% of the total revenue, with the rest being direct. Steve is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of channel optimization. Steve’s team has a few named account organizations that calls on customers direct, but most his business coming through indirect channels.

Autodesk does business in 170 countries around the world. Steve begins the show by outlining his indirect and direct models of selling.  To be able transact business locally in local currencies, Steve requires people on the ground in all those countries, it requires an indirect channel. The channel approach gives him scale, coverage and ultimately it provides value to our customers.

Why is sales channel optimization important? Selling to customers directly when they want to buy from partners is a surefire way to miss the revenue goal. Selling to customers through partners when they want a direct relationship with your company is equally devastating. And within the direct and indirect channel model, there are multiple sub models to consider. Coverage model decisions have never been this complicated for we live in the omni channel era.

Listen as Steve outlines for our audience how to bring your channel partners along with you through major transitions of your business model. In this use-case, from selling perpetual licenses to Cloud solutions, you must think through how that’s going impact your partners. Channel partners, like most human beings, don’t like change. There’s going to be some resistance, but if you can work through it with your partners, you’re creating new revenue streams for them. New value propositions for them. And a new set of services that might make their business more competitive.

Watch as Steve and I discuss the short-term and long-term vision for a business predominately driven by channel.  As a public company, there are natural pressures from the street.  Steve discusses his long-term view he takes to ensuring his partners are successful in a win-win that ultimately best serves the shareholders.

One of the most fascinating discussions in my interview with Steve is how he prevents conflict between his direct and indirect channels. This is really built by trust that he has established with the channel and his direct team. Watch as Steve explains how to build trust that will serve as the foundation to navigate your way to making the number with an indirect and direct business model.

If you would like to spend some time with me on this subject of channel strategy, 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 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 Chris Fris, an executive who knows a thing or two about driving aggressive revenue growth. Today’s topic is focused on how Sales Operations enables the sales plan.  During our discussion, Chris and I leverage our workbook, so flip to the Sales Operations phase on page 314 of the PDF to follow along. 

Chris is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of sales operations.  For those of you who have followed John Gleason’s successful career at Ryder as Chief Sales Officer, Chris is the man behind the scenes enabling revenue growth. Successful sales operations leaders like Chris interface with the functional groups within your company to enable the sales plan to be successful.

As the Vice President of Global Sales Strategy and Operations at Ryder, Chris is going to demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of the sales team. Chris has served as the head of sales operations the past seven years at Ryder and before that led sales operations for DHL Express for fourteen years.   

Why this topic on this day? Sales ops has become a catch all phrase. The sales ops leader gets assigned all the work no one else wants to do. Often underfunded and understaffed, sales operations leaders fail to deliver a meaningful revenue contribution. Yet, the best growth executives understand that sales ops is the most strategic sales function in the entire company. They understand that when deployed correctly, sales ops can impact revenue growth in a very meaningful way. Do not starve this vital department. If you do you're going to miss your revenue goal.

Listen as Chris demonstrates how to improve the efficiency of the sales team.  We begin the show with an overview of Chris’ strategic areas of focus and his organization chart. Few people outside of sales operations realize the nexus for so many interlock points across the company.

The top three core processes that sales operations Vice President’s need to manage include: Pipeline management, territory design, and quota setting.  Chris takes the listener through his approach for each process and I fast frame each with the following headlines.

• The pipeline management process is that it needs to be buyer-driven. Your pipeline management is going to be accurate or inaccurate based on whether it's driven by the buyer.
• Your territory design process needs to be opportunity based. When you don’t take this approach then you have imbalanced territories.
• For quota setting process, do not let that be done by finance. Finance typically takes a peanut butter spread quota setting approach. That doesn't work. The rep in downtown Manhattan is going to have more opportunity than the person in Mobile, Alabama. The quota setting must be well thought out and the way that you do that is to intelligently allocate it out, based on pipeline and territories. Listen to Chris describe the process.

Chris and I discuss the approach for sales operations to analytics. We discuss the four-step continuum of analytics. Descriptive analytics us what has happened in the past. Predictive analytics predicts the outcome at some point in the future assuming all in the inputs stay the same.  Finally, Prescriptive Analytics is predicting the future and if you don't like the outcome, you can seek to change the outcome before it happens. Prescriptive is about prescribing a set of activities to alter the future.  This all requires systems, methodologies, data, talent and continuous improvement. Listen as Chris describes his team’s movement along the four-step continuum of the analytics journey.

Pay close attention to the detailed description Chris provides of the diagnostic analytical approach to sales win/loss. This is a great way to expand into diagnostic analytics if you're just at the descriptive stage right now. Understanding why you won, why you lost, you're really answering the question of why it happened.  You'll see over time recurring patterns and trends that will take you to the predictive and prescriptive approaches.

Joining us for today’s show is John Kedzierski, a Corporate Vice President of Marketing who knows a thing or two about going to market with the right channels. Today’s topic is focused on selecting the right sales channels by using one of America's great companies as a use case. John and I leveraged the SBI annual workbook to guide our conversation. To follow along, flip to the Channel Optimization phase starting on page 294 of the workbook. 

Our guest today is John Kedzierski, the Corporate Vice President, North America Services and Commercial Markets for Motorola Solutions. Motorola provides push-to-talk communication solutions across the business-to-business space. Examples include baggage handlers at an airline, to police and fire, computer-aided dispatch systems handling your 9-1-1 calls, to communications on military bases. John will demonstrate how to cover the market completely with direct and indirect sales channels.

So why this topic on this day? Selling to customers directly when they want to buy from partners, is a sure-fire way to miss the revenue goal. Selling to customers through partners when they want a direct relationship with your company, can be equally devastating. Within the direct and indirect channel model, there are multiple sub-models to consider. Coverage model decisions have never been this complicated, for we live in the omni-channel era.

Joining us for today’s show is a sales operations leader who knows a thing or two about impacting revenue growth in a meaningful way.  Shannon’s company has an incredible customer retention record of accomplishment that results in a robust Customer Lifetime Value for her company. 

Today’s topic is focused on sales operations and we are going to demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of the sales team. To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the sales strategy section and flip to the Sales Operations phase on pages 314 - 319 of the PDF workbook.

Helping me with our demonstration is Shannon Gregg, the head of sales operations for TeleTracking Technologies, a clinical workflow company. Shannon is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with 15 years of sales operations experience.  

Why this topic? Sales operations has become a catch-all phrase. The sales op leader gets assigned all the work no one else wants to do. Often underfunded and under staffed, sales operations leaders fail to deliver a meaningful revenue contribution, yet the best growth executives understand that sale ops are the most strategic sales function in the entire company. They understand that when deployed correctly, sales ops can impact revenue growth in a very meaningful way. Do not starve this key department. If you do, you're going to miss your revenue goal.

Listen as Shannon begins the show providing a foundation of the strategic focus areas of her sales operations team.  She begins with the strategic focus of reducing the administration time of your people in the field to increase their available revenue generating time. Shannon asks herself, how can sales operations create more time with efficiency and effectiveness to allow the sales team to get out there and do what they're doing best, which is closing deals and making money? To make this happen, her team provides predictable processes, operational resource planning, revenue projections, pipelines, forecasting and technology so that the sales team can use systems, tools and processes that give sales more time in the field.

Shannon describes how she tracks Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) to provide the executive team with a clear read on how much to invest to acquire a customer. The goal for most companies is to have a ratio of 4-5 dollars created for every one dollar of customer acquisition cost.  Shannon’s company enjoys long-term retention of customers that can be up to 25 years. This opens many options for the sales and marketing leaders to invest acquiring new customers.  The sales operations team who provides this ratio brings great clarity to the head of sales, the CEO, the head of marketing, and the product leader.

Enjoy the exchange with Shannon regarding the use of descriptive and predictive analytics.  Shannon describes how she is going beyond what happened to reliably predict the future.  Her team looks at traditional KPIs, velocity, volume, customer touches to understand exactly what's coming out of this team.  Understanding geographies and what's happening in the industry helps Shannon understand in how to redeploy resources, including where we should be pulling resources.  The insights from analytics also inform where to perform early stage of marketing and nurturing campaigns to generate marketing qualified leads. Shannon understands exactly what pathway sales operations should direct marketing to focus alongside the traditional sales process.

Joining us for today’s show is Eric Schwab, a Chief Revenue Officer who knows a thing or two about revenue growth. Today’s topic is incentive compensation planning to hit your revenue goal. As a guide to the conversation, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the sales strategy section and turn to the compensation planning phase on pages 308 – 313 of the PDF workbook. 

Eric Schwab is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of compensation planning as the Chief Revenue Officer for TEN: The Enthusiast Network. TEN is the company that brings us iconic media brands such as Motor Trend, Powder, Surfer, and HOT ROD to name a few. As a content creation and media solutions company, TEN has transformed from a legacy media provider into a new media company.  Eric has lead the sales team during this transformation. Listen as Eric demonstrates how to design incentive compensation plans that get you to your revenue goal. 

This show is a must-watch episode for any corporate leader wanting to tie the achievement of the corporate strategy to the day-to-day behavior of the sales force. This show captures how Eric recognized the tie between a revenue miss and how the sales force was motivated through the comp plan. Watch as Eric and I discuss the steps Eric took to design the right sales compensation plan that would drive the right behavior and reward performance. 

Joining us for today’s show is Chris Stoddard, a Vice President of Sales who knows a thing or two about generating revenue growth. Our topic today is Organization Design. What types of reps you need and the best organizational chart for you. To follow along, download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the sales strategy section and flip to the Organization Design phase on pages 282 - 284 of the PDF workbook. 

Joining us today is Chris Stoddard, the Vice President of Sales for Pulse Secure. Pulse Secure is in the secure access business of helping people, devices, things, and services connect to corporate networks through laptops and mobile devices and just about everything else. Listen as Chris demonstrates how to determine the right number of feet on the street. 

Why this topic? Too few reps and you're going to miss the revenue number, too many reps and you're destroy profits. Hire field reps when you need inside reps and frustrate customers. Organize in a hunter/farmer model when you need industry verticals or product specialists and the revenue goal will be harder to hit than it needs to be and so it goes and so it goes.

Business is booming at Pulse Secure under an innovative model of organization design. Sales leaders should keep an eye on this approach for a glimpse into the future as well as ideas on how to improve your current structure.  This new approach to organization design allows the structure to remain flat and empowers high performing Account Executives to be player-coaches and achieve tremendous teamwork.  

We begin the show with an overview of the traditional seven types of B2B sales organization models.  This provides a foundation for you the audience to think through the options and evaluate your own structure. Listen as Chris describes how he started with the Stratification Model of organization design. By stratifying the accounts into large, medium, and small, the sales force is assigned by the size of the account regardless of geographic boundaries. 

Listen as Chris describes how he adapted his stratification model into what he refers to as a Pod concept.  He wanted as little distance as possible between the most junior seller and senior leadership.  He created a selling pod, or selling unit with five core elements. There's an Account Executive or a senior salesperson. There is a territory Account Manager that farms existing accounts. Also included is an Inside Sales Rep and a partner Account Manager dedicated to servicing our channel and evaluating resellers. The final element of the pod is a Systems Engineer.  Typically, a pod is five core people and that can scale up or down based on the market opportunity.

The pod concept places a high level of accountability into that senior seller of each pod.  That senior seller operates as a player/coach to the members of their pod.  We look for someone who has historically been able to carry their own weight inside a sales model as well as act like a mentor and be part of the hiring process.  We avoid the middle layer of our management hierarchy and the senior seller is a first line of information back to leadership.

Consider this new approach in a pod concept where you have a highly empowered account executive who acts as a senior leader in managing a team of territory account managers, inside sales reps, partner managers and system engineering and keeping the organization flat.  Does this make sense for you, or could you borrow ideas from this model to enhance your existing model. Listen as Chris goes into depth on how to create enterprise value and how to determine the quantity for your sales force. 

Joining us for today’s show is Biju Baby, a Vice President of Global Sales Operations who knows a thing or two about supporting revenue growth. His company has seen an impressive 54 quarters of sequential revenue growth and Biju has been an instrumental part of the team the last six years. 

Today’s topic is back office support, how to make your company so easy to buy from and sell for that you win more deals. To follow along download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the sales strategy section and flip to the Back-Office Support phase on pages 326 – 327 of the PDF workbook.  

Biju Baby is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of back office support as the Vice President of Global Sales Operations for Equinix. A public company with revenue of $3.6 billion, Equinix builds and operate data centers for customers to connect with each other. Listen as Biju demonstrates how to be a company that's easy to buy from and a company that's easy to sell for. 

Why this topic? Taking days to get a pricing decision frustrates customers. Delaying the closing of a deal because of lengthy legal reviews reduces win rates. Paying a sales rep incorrectly, and late, drives up turnover. It is hard enough to grow revenues faster than the industry and competitors. Try to not add to the level of difficulty by being hard to buy from and sell for. 

Today we're going to discuss territory alignment and demonstrate how to balance customer requirements, company revenue expectations and sales rep workload to grow revenues. As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Sales Strategy section and flip to the Territory Alignment phase on pages 299 – 303 of the PDF. 

Joining us today is Jim Mears, the Senior Vice President for Motorola Solutions. Jim is responsible for the go to market teams in the U.S. and Canada.  Motorola Solutions provides mission-critical communications products and services to public safety and commercial customers around the world. This is done by providing them with real-time information, and by arming them with nearly indestructible handheld devices. Jim is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how to balance customer requirements, company revenue expectations and sales rep workload to grow revenues.

Why this topic? Some reps only make their revenue objectives by selling to the easy accounts. Yet others are spending too much time with accounts that do not fit the ideal customer profile. Yet still some sales reps have so many accounts to cover that they cannot serve all of them correctly. We call this territory misalignment and it is a common cause of missed revenue targets.

Would you like to balance your territories better or take a fresh look at what the customer requirements are? How about a debate around what the revenue expectations should be by patch and look at data to understand what the workload is at the sales rep level and how to match that up with the requirements of the territories themselves? If that's an exercise that you think might help you increase the probability of making your number, consider coming down to The Studio and spending time with us. I will put a room full of experts in the room and we'll dive into your data and you'll leave with optimized territories. 

Listen as Jim describes how Motorola adapted to changes in buying trends. It became evident in some areas that it probably didn't justify any longer a pure direct rep. Jim describes how he observed the trend and how he adjusted serving the audience through a combination of direct representation and manufacturer reps.  These partners rounded out the offering to customers on the service side and as sales agents for the company.

Jim discusses the objective criteria used when creating a territory. The first criteria include revenue in the territory, second was the level of competition, buying history, buying behavior, the post-purchase service needs, and finally the concept of the customer life cycle.  The final element involves understanding when a customer needs to engage with a salesperson and when maybe they don't. 

In Motorola's case, the customer engagement needs represent a five to seven-year cycle. In your company, it might be five to seven months’ cycle. Those are examples of objective criteria that you might use to design your territories. Are those the right ones for you? Maybe, maybe not. You need to understand what matters for your business and come up with your objective criteria when developing territories. Listening to Jim’s use case will help you think through the right criteria for your company. 

Territory misalignment is a common cause of missed revenue targets. Download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017.  Turn to the Sales Strategy section starting on pages 258 of the PDF. If you would like to spend some time with me on this subject, 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 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. 

Today’s show is a demonstration on how a Chief Strategy Officer can help a sales team. A common challenge among sales leaders is taking strategic imperatives the CEO has laid out in the corporate strategy and translating that into an operating plan. The head of strategy can help sales leaders solve this problem.  As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Sales Strategy section starting on page 258 of the PDF.

Joining us is Julian Lighton, Chief Strategy Officer at Renaissance Learning. Renaissance is the leader in K-12 education technology enabling teachers, curriculum creators, and educators to drive phenomenal student growth. Julian’s experience includes leading strategy at Hitachi, Cisco, Neustar, and Rovi, which is now TiVo.  Before that Julian was a partner in software and services at McKinsey.  Julian is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how the strategy officer can help a sales team.

Julian describes Value Creation Planning as a framework to understand how a company generates value for its shareholders.  This breaks down into a series of value drivers and underneath that a series of KPIs or metrics. For a sales leader, the top value drivers are going to be market acquisition.  The includes finding new logo customers, net new customers, driving wallet share, cross-sell, up-sell and finally renewals if you're in a subscription or services business.  Listen as Julian demonstrates what a sales leader really needs to understand to move each of the KPIs attached to the value drivers.

Why this topic? The best sales leaders we see blend strategy and execution masterfully. The average sales leaders we see don't understand strategy, even though they think they do because they think a collection of sales tactics is a strategy. This is not their fault. Most of them have never been trained on strategy development. This is where a partnership between the sales leader and the chief strategy officer can be a great partnership and produce great results.

The greatest contribution to the sales team by the head of strategy is to hold the strategic problem together (as opposed to breaking a problem apart).  This involves asking, "Which is the greater priority? Therefore, what am I really supposed to be doing?”  This approach keeps the problem from disintegrating and being left with five different problems.  Asking these questions prevents problems that aren’t commonly defined and fractured resources working on different things.

The final segment of the show addresses the elephant in the room.  Often sales leaders think strategy is disconnected from getting the job done. They're worried about hitting this month's quota. Why should a sales leader care about strategy? Listen as Julian outlines three reasons sales leaders should care about strategy. 

Evaluate your connection of the corporate strategy to the sales strategy at a deeper level.  Downloading our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017.  Turn to the Sales Strategy section starting on pages 258 of the PDF. If you would like to spend some time with me on this subject, 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 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. 

Today’s show is a demonstration on how to cover the market completely with both direct and indirect sales channels. As a guide, download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Flip to the sales strategy section of the PDF and review the Channel Optimization phase on pages 290 – 298. [p]

Joining us today is Rodney Foreman, Senior Vice President of Informatica‘s partner ecosystem. Informatica is the world’s number one provider of data management solutions, in the cloud, on-premise or in a hybrid environment. More than 7,000 companies turn to Informatica for data solutions that power their businesses. Rodney is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic having run multi-billion-dollar channel businesses with thousands of partners at IBM the past ten years, and now Informatica. Listen as Rodney demonstrates how to cover the market completely with both direct and indirect sales channels.[p]

How do you select, recruit, and on-board the right channel partners? Rodney describes the process that works. How do you attract the best partners who your competitors want as well, that have a customer base they have already been selling into? Once channel partners are selected, listen as Rodney describes on-boarding and activation to drive value and results from resellers. [p]

Why is sales channel optimization important? Selling to customers directly when they want to buy from partners is a surefire way to miss the revenue goal. Selling to customers through partners when they want a direct relationship with your company is equally devastating. And within the direct and indirect channel model, there are multiple sub models to consider. Coverage model decisions have never been this complicated for we live in the omni channel era.

We also discuss how to identify partners that may not sell your product set or technology today, but they have an adjacent product. In this case, they’re selling where your product fits well with what they’re already selling. It’s an opportunity for you and the partner.

The show is summarized with Rodney sharing the three things you want from a vendor.  Rodney details those three things that should be incorporated into your checklist questions to be successful in the channel.

Today’s show is a demonstration on how to organize the sales team. This podcast is 51-minutes of high protein clarity on how to determine the type of reps you need and how to organize the sales team. Coupled with this deep demonstration is a workbook where you can go deep with your own sales force.  Download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to pages 282 - 284 of the PDF to review the Sales Organization Design phase of the workbook. 

Joining us today is Mike St. Clair, Vice President of Sales for Rentokil North America. Mike is responsible for revenue and market share growth throughout the US, Mexico and Canada for pest control, brand protection and interior landscaping.

Some of you are struggling with how to determine how many feet on the street you need, what type of reps you need, and which org model is the best one for you. My hope is that by demonstrating how to do this you can avoid costly mistakes. 

Why your sales organization model is important? Without enough headcount, making the case for the right quantity is required to hit your quarterly number. Where and how you place your reps must be right. Listen to Mike demonstrate the seven dominant sales organizational models, and why he did, or did not, select each at Rentokil.  

Here are the specific seven sales organization models Mike will demonstrate: 

• Stratification (big accounts, midsize accounts, small accounts in a pyramid)
• Hunter/farmer
• Geography
• Product specialists
• Vertical industry specialists
• Role specialists
• Hybrid (2 or more of the above combined) 

Using Mike's company as a use case, validate that you have the right model, and evaluate whether alternative or hybrid approaches are better for you. We go into each of the seven types of sales organization models. Listen to each and identify which model you are using for your sales force today.  

[p]

Today’s show will demonstrate how to improve the efficiency of a sales team by getting new hires productive quickly. Dave begins the interview by providing three key steps to fill open sales positions, and shrink the time from open position to day one.  The rest of the interview is focused on quickly moving from day one to productivity.  To help you follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017 and turn to sourcing and onboarding on pages 290 – 292. 

Joining us today is Dave Wirta, the Chief Revenue Officer of Greenway Health with 1,800 employees. Supporting 75,000 providers and 8,000 individual practices, Greenway Health is helping to transform how healthcare is delivered by providing technology solutions. Greenway helps physicians and staff focus on delivering healthcare to their patients and not worry about technology and the business side of the equation. Listen as Dave helps his peers by demonstrating how to improve the efficiency of a sales team by getting new hires productive quickly. 

Dave's time to fill an open positions is only 30 and 90 days. That's an outstanding number considering the competitive market Dave operates within. A big part of the success in recruiting occurs during the interview process when the career path is described. Candidates can visualize what success may look like for them, how they will get there and where that leads them. Being able to speak about a a concrete career path shrinks the recruiting time because the candidates get excited. Listen as Dave describes in detail this concept of developing and articulating career paths.  

Why this topic? Starting a new year typically involves onboarding new sales hires. A long new hire productivity cycle can lead to a missed revenue target, and we don’t want that. There is a way to do this, and when done correctly, this can ignite revenue growth. 

In the first segment of the show, watch as Dave responds to these three questions: 

• How long does it take you to fill an open sales position and what have you done to shrink this?
• How long does it take for a new sales hire to reach full productivity and what have you done to shrink this?
• How do you measure new hire time to productivity (time to break even, time to first sale, time to quota etc.)? 

Dave shares his expertise on some advanced concepts in the final segment. Outstanding guidance is provided to these questions faced by every sales force: 

• How do you ensure the new sales hire fully understands his or her role and responsibilities completely?
• How do you make sure the new hire has clear direction on how to develop his or her career day one on the job?
• How do you make sure the new hire is placed in winning conditions? 

The second segment discusses the appropriate level of quota for a sales rep during the onboarding process. Dave also discusses the controversial topic of what to do with quota levels for open positions. The development and ownership of the onboarding program caps off the second segment. 

Today’s show will demonstrate how to get sales improvement programs adopted in a matrix organization. To help illustrate today’s topic we will think through sales enablement within a matrix organization using Frontier Communications as a use case. As a guide for sales enablement leaders to increase revenue per sales head, download our 10^th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to page 319 of the PDF.

Joining us today is Ian Petersen, the Senior Vice President of Sales Operations and Enablement at Frontier Communications.  Frontier offers broadband, video, voice bundles for small businesses, and advanced business communications for medium and large businesses in 29 states with approximately 28,000 employees.  Ian is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic with experience in matrix organizations at Sun Microsystems, Oracle and now Frontier.  Watch as Ian demonstrates how to get sales improvement programs adopted in matrix organizations.

Sales enablement leaders who work in a matrix inside of an enterprise company often feel that they can’t be successful because they don’t have direct authority over resources. It’s not true. If there is value, you can get people to adopt to your programs, and the way that you do that is you get things done through others. Listen as Ian describes how to develop the skill of getting things done through others.

Why this topic? Large enterprises are investing heavily in sales enablement, yet many are not realizing the full value of these investments. One of the causes of this unfortunate outcome is the matrix organization. The matrix is required in these large enterprises to simply deal with their massive scale but this creates an added level of difficulty for sales enablement leaders.

Listen as Ian describes reporting to an EVP of operations inside of an $11-billion company. Most sales operations and sales enablement leaders report to a head of sales, Ian describes implementing programs within a matrix organization.  The complexity involved is getting sales leaders and managers to adopt enablement programs when you and your boss don’t have any authority over them. Ian outlines how to achieve adoption of programs in this environment.

Today’s show is a demonstration on how to organize the sales team. There’s not enough headcount, but how do I prove it?  To go deeper on organization design, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to pages 282 - 284 of the PDF to review the Sales Organization Design phase of the workbook.

Joining us today is Mike St. Clair, Vice President of Sales for Rentokil North America. Mike is responsible for revenue and market share growth throughout the US, Mexico and Canada for pest control, brand protection and interior landscaping. Mike is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how to organize a B2B sales team.

Without enough headcount, making the case for the right quantity is required to hit your quarterly number. In addition, where and how you place your reps must be right. Listen to Mike demonstrate the seven dominant sales organizational models, and why he did, or did not, select each at Rentokil. Mike will go into depth on each model.  Listen to each and identify which model you are using for your sales force today. Using Retokil as a use case validate that you have the right model, and evaluate whether alternative or hybrid approaches are better for you. 

Some of you are struggling with how to determine how many feet on the street you need, what type of reps you need, and which org model is the best one for you. My hope is that by demonstrating how to do this you can avoid costly mistakes.

Here are the specific seven sales organization models Mike will demonstrate:

• Stratification (big accounts, midsize accounts, small accounts in a pyramid)
• Hunter/farmer
• Geography
• Product specialists
• Vertical industry specialists
• Role specialists
• Hybrid (2 or more of the above combined)

This podcast is 51-minutes of high protein clarity on how to organize the sales team.  Coupled with this deep demonstration is a workbook where you can go deep with your own salesforce. Download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to page 282 of the PDF to review the Sales Organization Design phase of the workbook.

Today’s show is a demonstration on how a chief strategy officer can help a sales team. A common challenge among sales leaders is taking strategic imperatives the CEO has laid out in the strategy and translating that into an operating plan. The head of strategy can help sales leaders solve this problem.  As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Sales Strategy section starting on page 258 of the PDF.

Joining us is Julian Lighton, Chief Strategy Officer at Renaissance Learning. Renaissance is the leader in K-12 education technology enabling teachers, curriculum creators, and educators to drive phenomenal student growth. Julian’s experience includes leading strategy at Hitachi, Cisco, Neustar, and Rovi, which is now TiVo.  Before that Julian was a partner in software and services at McKinsey. Julian is uniquely qualified demonstrate how the strategy officer can help a sales team.

The greatest contribution to the sales team by the head of strategy is to hold the problem together.  This involves asking, "Which is the greater priority? Therefore, what am I really supposed to be doing?”  This approach keeps the problem from disintegrating and being left with five different problems.  Asking these questions prevents problems that aren’t commonly defined and fractured resources working on different things.

Julian describes Value Creation Planning as a framework to understand how a company generates value for its shareholders.  This breaks down into a series of value drivers and underneath that a series of KPIs or metrics. For a sales leader, the top value drivers are going to be market acquisition.  The includes finding new logo customers, net new customers, driving wallet share, cross-sell, up-sell and finally renewals if you're in a subscription or services business.  Listen as Julian demonstrates what a sales leader really needs to understand to move each of the KPIs attached to the value drivers.

Why this topic? The best sales leaders we see blend strategy and execution masterfully. The average sales leaders we see don't understand strategy, even though they think they do because they think a collection of sales tactics is a strategy. This is not their fault. Most of them have never been trained on strategy development. This is where a partnership between the sales leader and the chief strategy officer can be a great partnership and produce great results.

The final segment of the show addresses the elephant in the room.  Often sales leaders think strategy is disconnected from getting the job done. They're worried about hitting this month's quota. Why should a sales leader care about strategy? Listen as Julian outlines three reasons sales leaders should care about strategy.  

Today’s topic is understanding how executives make purchase decisions.  Failure to understand, exactly, how the executive decision makers inside your target accounts buy will result in poor win rates, long sales cycles, and you missing your number.  To follow along, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017.  Turn to the buyer segmentation phase on pages 274 – 276 of the PDF. 

Joining us is Gary Ackerman, the SVP Head of Global Sales at Pepperjam.  Pepperjam is a performance marketing company focused on helping global advertisers drive e-commerce sales.  During the interview, Gary will demonstrate how executives make purchase decisions by using Pepperjam as an example. 

Executives are changing the way they make purchase decisions. Some are altering their evaluation criteria. Others are involving more people in the decision-making process. Some are changing their preferences for how they want to engage with your sales team. Decentralized decision-making is becoming centralized, and centralized decisions are now being made regionally. And on and on. Failure to exactly understand how executives are buying will prevent you from growing revenue.

Today’s topic is how to deploy a sales process. The purpose of a sales process is to win more deals, win bigger deals and to do it faster.

Standard one-size-fits-all sales methodologies no longer work. The competitors can license the same sales methodologies from the same vendors you can, so there is no competitive advantage to be had by adopting the latest sales methodology from the sales training industry. To increase deal sizes, improve win rates and shorten sales cycles, you need to adopt a custom, proprietary sales process/methodology. 

Joining us is Lori Chmura, Vice President of US Sales for Cordis. Lori has over 28 years of business experience, and has deployed a version of a customized sales process during her tenure. During the interview, Lori will demonstrate how she has deployed a new sales process. 

Today’s topic is forecasting accuracy.  How to install a thorough forecasting and pipeline management process. 

Joining us is Evan Randall the Vice President of Sales Operations at Tableau Software. Evan is doing ground-breaking work in forecasting accuracy.  Listen as Evan breaks down the approach to drive forecasting accuracy.

The first segment of the show is focused on individual deal level forecasting. Evan describes how he uses predictive analytics to determine what is likely to happen.  He describes the importance of having a sales process with a level of simplicity to achieve adoption.  A well adopted and easy to use sales process enables you to collect good data. 

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 transitioning from sales training to sales enablement.  Sale enablement is about driving revenue per sales head up and time to productivity for new sales hires down.

Joining us today is Brad Kerst, Senior Director of Global Sales Enablement for Intuitive Surgical, a medical device company.  Intuitive Surgical is the leader in surgical robotics, manufacturing and selling the da Vinci® Surgical System.  Brad and Greg discuss the difference between sales training and sales enablement. 

Sales training is the focus on three core areas of technical product knowledge, industry knowledge, and sales skills and execution.  By comparison, sales enablement is a focus on the process and analytics to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales force.  Listen to Brad explain how both are interlocked, with training as the background and context and the enablement side is the execution. 

Brad goes into detail explaining how sales training and sales enablement are symbiotic.  Sales training develops the skills and sales enablement defines the behaviors and skills and generate the insights necessary to drive and maximize results.  In the final segment of the program listen to Brad describe his training certification process and blended learning approach.

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. 

Getting an increase in sales head count is difficult. Additionally, when new sales people are hired, there is an expectation to generate revenue growth as quickly as possible. Essentially, sales enablement’s responsibility is to onboard new reps and drive revenue per sales head and time to productivity. SBI recently spoke with Kent Cissell, the senior vice president of sales operations at Heartland Payment Systems on this topic. Listen as Kent discusses sales enablement and why it’s key to the success of your overall sales strategy.

Kent oversees a varied sales operations team which includes the traditional sales enablement function at Heartland, one of the largest payment processors in the US. During the interview, he will answer questions such as:

• What are the business outcomes that the sales enablement team needs to deliver?
• What is the strategic focus of the sales enablement team?
• How are new sales reps onboarded, and what kind of sales readinesss program should be in place?
• How is sales enablement content developed and used?

Sales enablement is a key piece to your sales strategy. Neglect it and forgo adding sales head count in the future. Listen as Kent describes to how develop and execute a successful sales enablement strategy. And if after listening, you want to learn more, you can download our workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. It’s your step by step guide to a complete sales strategy, which includes a strong sales enablement program.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast we speak with Dave Longaker, the chief revenue officer at Rovi Corporation about how to determine the best sales organizational structure.

We start the discussion by determining which of the 7 B2B sales org models is best to achieve revenue growth. Dave will discuss how to determine the types of roles, and the sales headcount need for each. Furthermore, he will explain how sales leaders should deploy their sales capacity against the market opportunity.

Dave will continue by discussing how to determine which sales channels buyers want to buy from, and what level of sales specialization they are willing to pay for. And he will walk our audience through how to effectively transition from one sales organizational structure to another in order to best achieve revenue growth.  

Want more weekly insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe to SBI’s Sales and Marketing Podcast 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 speak with John Suh, the chief executive officer at LegalZoom about how to connect your corporate strategy with your sales strategy.

We start the discussion by determining how to define your organization’s mission, vision, and brand. We’ll also explain how to determine your sales plan to hit your revenue growth objectives. And how to select the best sales organizational structure to make your number.

Mark will continue the conversation by discussing how to ensure the sales team is articulating the corporate strategy. John will also explain how to tie sales objectives back to the corporate strategy and how to ensure the sales team is living your brand in every interaction.

Want more weekly insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe to SBI’s Sales and Marketing Podcast 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 speak with Todd Doolittle, the recently appointed head of sales operations at Concentra, about the challenges and opportunities faced by new sales ops leaders.

We start the discussion with Todd’s biggest struggles experienced in the first 100 days of becoming the sales ops leader. He’ll explain how and why he prioritized his sales ops team’s efforts immediately. And he’ll go on to describe how his team gets a lot done with minimal headcount and budget.

Todd will continue the discussion by describing how he deals with unrealistic expectations and timelines, and how he says no without receiving any political blow back. Todd will describe how his sales ops department is a key piece to Concentra’s overall sales strategy, and how he partners with the sales leader to accelerate the organization's rate of revenue growth.

We conclude our talk by looking at the first three actions newly appointed sales operations leaders can take right now to immediately make an impact, and to be seen as a strategic part of sales and operations planning.

Want more weekly insights like this to help you make your number? Subscribe to SBI’s Sales and Marketing Podcast 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 discuss how to implement a sales organizational structure with Todd Skiiles, senior vice president of sales and solutions at Ryder.

In our first segment, Greg and Todd discuss how to implement a hunter farmer sales organizational design. Todd shares how he decided to implement this model, and what the results of this shift in org models have been. He also explains how to assess your current sales team against new profiles in the org chart, and how to make adjustments if needed.

In our second segment, Greg and Todd discuss whether or not it is necessary to make adjustments to the sales compensation plan to accommodate the new sales org design. He’ll also explain how this change effected Ryder’s overall sales strategy, specifically how it changed his team’s interactions with Ryder’s customers.

In our final segment, Todd summarizes all the above information into an action plan you can apply to your sales organizational structure implementation.

Ready to Make Your Number?

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 sales and marketing content that keeps you at the top of your game.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we discuss sales strategy, specifically how to lead a very large sales team in the business services industry, with Stephen Mohan, senior vice president of Republic Services.

In our first segment, Stephen shares the organizational structure at Republic Services and explains why he chose this model. He also shares how his sales team integrates with the operations team and explains the pros and cons between a centralized functional sales structure versus a decentralized branch sales structure.

In our second segment, we discuss the challenge associated with drawing the line between sales and customer service.  Stephen talks about who owns the churn number, cross-selling and upselling at Republic Services and what their approaches are. He also discusses the role of customer service in his organization.

In our final segment, we summarize everything we discussed into three actions audience members can take immediately to operate their sales strategy.

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.

SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast Episode Summary

On this week’s SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we analyze SBI’s Eight Disciplines of Sales Execution with J. Scott Tapp, the EVP of global sales, marketing and field operations at PGi. Using Scott’s company as a guide, we analyze each step and apply it to a real-world B2B sales situation.

In our first segment, we cover step one, connecting your B2B sales strategy from the CEO to the sales rep. We discuss how Scott ensures his company’s sales strategy is aligned from the top of the company to the bottom. In step two, we discuss how to track your reps’ daily sales execution objectives. In step three, we discuss how to achieve those objectives by encouraging proper sales behaviors.

In our second segment, we continue with step four, where we break down common issues in a B2B sales strategy, and we analyze the best way to overcome or outright prevent these sales hurdles in your strategic planning process. Step five covers strategic alignment among your functional peers to aid in the success of everyone. In step six, we discuss how to take feedback from customers, employees, prospects and more, and convert that feedback into a useable sales strategy.

In our final segment, we discuss step seven, where Scott details his annual planning process and his tips for a successful strategy, and step eight, which covers multi-year planning. We finish up the podcast by giving a short summary of today’s topic, and Greg shares his thoughts on the best way to successfully align your company with all eight disciplines.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, Greg Alexander, CEO of SBI, and Steve Rutledge, senior vice president of global sales operations at Genesys, discuss how to develop and execute a sales operations strategy using SBI’s revenue growth methodology.

We start by discussing how to establish objectives and identify which internal processes the sales team owns and outline the biggest obstacles to success.

We also hear Steve’s views on the difference between sales ops and sales enablement and how the two should work together.

In our final segment we cover key takeaways and practical advice on what to do if you were put on the hot seat tomorrow and challenged with how to develop and execute a soup to nuts sales strategy.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Ted Grulikowski, vice-president of the B2B unit at Market Source, the world’s leading sales outsourcing company, about taking a new product to market by recruiting and managing a team of resellers.

In our first segment, we discuss how Ted helps his clients grow their reseller revenues (2:38) & how he helps them overcome the common obstacles they face when trying to increase their revenue growth with resellers (3:30).

In our second segment, we look at the process of determining an ideal reseller profile (8:10), scoring & quantifying individual reseller value (9:36), determining an efficient coverage model (10:53), recruiting resellers from competitors (12:15), avoiding channel conflict with internal sales teams when outsourcing (14:15), recruiting reseller partners (15:30) & organizing internal channel groups (17:04).

In our final segment, we discuss learning from mistakes (19:20), identifying and mitigating risks when planning a growth strategy (20:25), and then outline three key takeaways that will help you achieve the sales growth you need to make your numbers in 2016 (22:40).

Today's guest on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast is Chris Bittner, the Senior Director of Global Sales and Channel Strategy at Autodesk.

We asked Chris to help his peers support their company's sales strategy by discussing channel selection and channel optimization. We cover important tactics of channel management, including product channel fit, which channels the end customers what to buy from, the ideal channel partner profile, and how to deal with channel consolidation that's going on these days. By the end of our episode, you'll learn the three things you absolutely need to do to have an optimized sales channel.

As we begin the last month of Q1, sales leaders should be focused on executing their strategy. In order to execute, you must enable your sales team with the tools they need. Click here to listen to our podcast on this topic. It is an interview with Bill Quinn, the Chief Operating Officer of the global sales organization at Broadridge. Broadridge does just under $3 billion per year in annual sales. Bill describes how he drives excellence in sales enablement throughout this large organization.

During this interview, he will answer questions such as:

• What should the objectives of the sales enablement team be?
• Who should own sales enablement?
• How do should you develop sales enablement content?
• How can you drive the adoption of the sales enablement program?

The sales enablement team needs a well thought out strategy to support the sales organization. But too often organizations have a series of tactics masquerading as a strategy. It causes execution issues, and the effort becomes fractured across the organization. If you want to be sure you get it right, click here and listen to Bill’s insights. His experience will help set sales enablement leaders up for success.   

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. We're joined by Paul Loftus, the Vice President of Sales and Revenue Retention at the tax and accounting division of Wolters Kluwer, to discuss building a sales strategy that helps support your sales transformation all the way through.

In our first segment, Paul shares with us an example of a current sales transformation he’s experiencing, what caused the need for it in the first place, the objectives of the transformation and its results.

Next, Paul walks us through the nitty gritty process of how he carried out the new sales strategy in order to implement the sales transformation. We also discuss how to engage with customers, the changes made to the organizational structure, how he and his sales team managed to launch a new sales channels during the transformation, as well as, how he handled the company talent profile augmentation. We then touch on the obstacles and mistakes Paul encountered thus far in implementing the new sales strategy transformation.

In our last segment, Paul sends us off with three immediate tactics sales teams can implement to successfully execute a sales transformation.

Understanding sales strategy is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. We're joined by special guest, Dave Howard, Senior Vice President of Sales Operations at FIS, a global leader in banking and payment solutions, to discuss sales operations.

In our first segment, Dave draws on his 15 years of experience in sales and operations planning to discuss how sales operations leaders can set their companies up for success by developing a great sales ops strategy.

Next, Dave talks about the three sales and operations planning objectives he sets for his sales ops team and his rock-solid sales operations processes.

In our last segment, Dave discusses his company’s approach to data architecture, sales analytics, dashboards and technology tools. He then shares insights on how his sales ops team interfaces with the rest of FIS’s 40,000+ employees.

Understanding sales operations is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. We're joined by Lori Chmura, the Vice President of US Sales for Cordis, to discuss how to deploy a custom sales process.

In our first segment, we discuss how modern purchasing methods have outgrown the traditional sales process and how Lori has tailored her sales process to meet her customers’ changing purchase behaviors.

Next, we look at the pain points in following the consumers along their buying journey, exit criteria, rep adoption and tracking metrics

In our last segment, Lori shares her usage of modern tech to ramp up inventory tracking, her approach to sales training and the first three steps to building out a modern, bespoke sales process.

Understanding sales process is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. We're joined by Chris Lonnett, the Vice President of Sales Operations at Motorola to discuss how to use data to drive sales operations.

In our first segment, Chris shares how to determine what data you have vs. what data you need and how to identify where the gaps lie. Chris says using this information as a chief resource, can help take your sales strategy to the next level.

Next, technology support is explored and Chris explains how an IT partnership has changed the culture of how data is stored, shared and implemented within a sales operation sales strategy.

In our last segment, Chris wraps up our conversation by offering three immediate tactics you can apply to your sales operations to start making your number.

Understanding sales operations is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. We're joined by Omar Choucair, CFO of MultiView, who has successfully integrated multiple sales forces, each with a unique sales strategy. One of the biggest problems companies encounter is employee turnover and customer defection post-acquisition. In order to combat this, Omar lays down his step-by-step process for examining the current strategy for both companies, then leveraging your knowledge to prevent sales upheaval. In our first segment,

Next, we discuss the transition of sales operations from the former companies into a single cohesive strategy. Restructuring your sales team to accommodate both old and new teams and developing new best practices is a vital part of retaining the best employees and customers.

In our last segment, we discuss product strategy and what products you should keep versus cut. Despite potential losses, it is important to determine which products will aid your organization and which will hinder it. Any that are not vital should be removed.

Understanding sales strategy is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Spencer Hodson to discuss developing a cohesive sales strategy using the SBI 5 Step Sales Strategy Methodology.

During this interview, we discuss how to:

• Set sales quotas using market segmentation, customer type, product category, and sales team.
• Drive adoption of your sales methodology.
• Design the org chart and determine the head count number.
• Staff the sales operations and sales enablement team.

We use SBI’s workbook “How to Make Your Number in 2016” to guide our conversation.  Specifically, pages 155-192 which gives the details of SBI’s 5 Step Sales Strategy Methodology.

We look at how Spencer uses his version of it at his company.  The benefit to you all is you get to see a “demo”, if you will, on how to use this tool. At the end of this show, if you want to use the SBI Workbook yourself, we show you how to get it.

If you want to develop a best-in-class sales strategy, this episode is a can’t miss.

Of course, building a sales strategy is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Vincent Gatti to compare our perspectives on putting together a cohesive sales strategy.

During this interview, Vincent walks us through SBI’s 5 Step Sales Strategy Methodology, demonstrating for us how he has applied his version of this to his sales process to:

• Collect the needs of the market, accounts, and buyers.
• Connect the CEO’s corporate strategy to his sales strategy.
• Work with the product team to understand which products should be sold to what customers at what price point.
• Partner with the sales and marketing departments to cover leads into revenue.
• Get the HR department to help him put a team of A players on the field to win the game.

If you are building your sales strategy for next year, listen to hear from one of your peers how to use the 5 Step Sales Strategy Methodology.

Of course, building a sales strategies is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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.

Welcome to the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Bal Dail to discuss how achieving strategic alignment between your corporate strategy and sales strategy can lead to you hitting your number with little internal friction.

Bal Dail is the Chairman and CEO of JDA Software, the provider of the broadest portfolio of supply chain solutions. During this interview, we discuss:

• His opinion why very few CEOs have come up through sales and the problem this can cause when trying to make your number with an effective sales strategy.
• A definition of the term “strategic alignment” and why it is critical to your success.
• Ways upon which a CEO can:
• • Drive market research output into sales strategy
  • Educate the sales team on the markets to compete in, the accounts to sell to, the buyers to meet with, the products to position, and the competitors to beat.
  • Make sure the leaders of product, marketing, sales, and HR are working with strategic alignment.

We use SBI’s recently released workbook titled “How to Make Your Number in 2016” to guide our conversation. Specifically, pages 51-70 which details SBI’s 8 Step Corporate Strategy Methodology.

We walk through the model while Bal explains how he uses a version of it at his company.  The benefit to you all is you get to see a “demo”, if you will, on how to use this tool. At the end of this show, if you want to use the SBI Workbook yourself, we let you know how to get it.

If you want to make sure your sales strategy is in tune with your corporate strategy, listen to this podcast and hear how one of your peers has done so.

Understanding strategic alignment is just one small part of hitting your number year after year. For more weekly sales and marketing insights like this, 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 take a fun approach to a series topic: how to make the most of your honeymoon period as a new VP of sales. To guide us through these treacherous waters, we’re joined by Eric Vermillion, a Senior VP of sales who also happens to be in the thick of his honeymoon period with his company, Blue Cat.

To frame today’s conversation, we’ll walk through a hypothetical use case starring Vic, a made-up persona who just finished his first six months at new company as VP of sales and is now ready to launch a set of initiatives. We look at why Vic should throw out his old sales playbook in favor of a sales strategy tailored to his new products, customers, competitors and channels. We talk about how Vic can ensure his initiatives have strategic alignment with his new company’s missions and values. We also look at hiring practices and how Vic can avoid the common pitfall of trying to fix problems by throwing fresh bodies at them. Other topics we cover: knowing when to ask for help, not passing the buck, getting too wrapped up with hitting big numbers, overbuying software, sales management, avoiding unnecessary consulting and how to handle the compensation plan. Tune in, and take notes as we walk Vic (and you!) through your honeymoon period and we’ll see you on the other side!

Understanding how to excel as a new VP of Sales 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 getting into the nitty-gritty of sales management, specifically, sizing your sales force for success. We’re not tackling this topic alone though, Lee Kirkpatrick joins us today to help us through the weeds. Through his experience as CFO working for Twilio and a variety of other fast growing tech companies, Lee has become an expert in sales forecasting and sales management.

In our conversation, we tackle the key topics such as measuring the return on investment from a sales team, diagnosing when misses are due to a lack sales force, stacking the size of your sales team against the distance of your goals, auditing customer acquisition cost, dividing a sales territory without losing talent and the three most urgent things you can do right now to start sizing your sales force up to the new fiscal year.

Understanding sales management 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 Tim Robertson, US Vice President of Sales and Marketing at DHL, about territory management and, more specifically, designing sales territories.

In our first segment, Tim starts us off by sharing what he believe is the most fundamental part of territory management in terms of territory design, which is analyzing the performance of sales territories at DHL. This beginning stage sets us up to plan both the sales strategy and market segmentation process of designing your plan.  By looking at these two channels you understand their performance metrics and can ultimately drill down to the territory level.

Next, Tim discusses how he predicts the available spend of each market segment, how to acquire a specific type of customer to and how to reach a point where you can calculate how much it would cost to acquire that said customer. Tim then shares what his primary design principle is when designing sales territories.

In our last segment, we wrap our territory management discussion with Tim by talking about how to balance your newfound sales territories and Tim gives us a breakdown of his team’s monthly management system that they run, and also how they rebalance and spot-check the goals and quotas for each of the sales territories at DHL.

Understanding territory management 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You want to hit your numbers and still have a life outside of the office? This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast, we’re joined by Phil Aaronson, the director of sales enablement at Oracle, to discuss how he maintains a healthy work/life balance while still hitting his numbers year after year.

We start our conversation by looking at how a sales enablement leader can set healthy boundaries within his or her organization, and we share tips on managing and maintaining reasonable expectations. We go on to identify project management roles and responsibilities that are often misaligned between the sales leadership and sales enablement teams, which leads to repetition and grind. We also talk through strategy development and the controversy around writing a sales enablement charter into your sales enablement strategy and discuss if there’s merit to the approach. Next, we discuss something that’s very hot right now: the idea of writing a sales playbook to prove your worth. We conclude by talking with Phil about his opinions on watermarks, certification and gamification as tools to keep your team honed-in on their goals.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, Mike Balow, the executive vice president of sales at Cypress Semiconductor, joins us to discuss job security, something that may seem like a myth for a sales executive. However, with 29 years of employment across only four companies, the three-year sales executive lifespan is a trend Mike’s managed to buck, and today he’s here to help you do the same.

We begin our conversation by discussing how to establish yourself with a new company, a process that starts with evaluating a potential employer’s hiring practices, culture and values and ends with bringing in the right people to round out your team. We also discuss spotting which sales planning and hiring practices to bring with you to a new organization and which ones to leave in your back pocket. Mike also discusses how he applies the skills he developed as an engineer to his role as a sales executive, such as applying pre-thinking and in-depth planning to functions such as designing a sales plan or product launch. We also discuss how to negotiate common challenges, such as resource management, sales planning and growth expectations, and look at how to build a strong tenure by developing strong partnerships with your business units. We also look at the key elements of a product launch that lends itself to sales. We then wrap up our conversation by talking about the first things you can do, right now, to cement your position and push your company towards its goals.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Mark Turner, SVP and GM of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region for Genesys, about how to set up a sales strategy to avoid going from hero to goat overnight due to poor sales forecasting and pipeline management.

In our first segment, Mark discusses what his experience has been like being a part of and witnessing 120 end-of-quarter cycles in the software business, and we touch on the three different flavors of surprise that come at every end of quarter.

Next, Mark shares with us his team’s best practices in running effective quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and the role the sales operations team must play in order to achieve end-of-quarter sales strategy success.

In our last segment, we recap our sales forecasting and pipeline management processing discussion with Mark and share a few takeaways that can be implemented into action and your sales strategy immediately.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Paula Shannon, the chief sales officer and executive vice president of Lionbridge Technologies, about how to keep your team invested in a sales strategy as the year progresses.

In our first segment, Paula shares what she feels is the right level of detail that a sales leaders should be requesting from their direct reports to gauge execution. A part of Paula’s company sales strategy consists of a weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence of strategic reporting on sales strategy and a lot of focus on the details of day-to-day sales pipeline management.

Next, Paula discusses how she keeps her CEO, CFO and the whole team on board throughout the year by executing a strategic sales strategy. Paula explains how she believes proof lies in the data and how she and her team focus on studying the historic data available to them to identify trends that later translate to a sales forecasting strategy. 

In our final segment, Paula helps us understand the delicate balance that lies in being both customer focused and company focused when change arises.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with, Stuart Kerst, vice president of sales operations at Hewlett Packard (HP), about how to increase the available selling time of a sales team to move the needle in an optimized sales process. 

In our first segment, we look at the industry standard of how much time a sales person should spend selling versus non-selling, and then we ask Stuart to share his point of view on how he believes sales reps should spend the 2000 hours available to them. Stuart walks us through technology’s role and how automation helps achieve the ideal balance. Stuart also touches on the role CPQ takes in the strategy development to support these strategic opportunities.

Next, we focus on the root of the sales cycle productivity issue and how Stuart was able to increase the customer face time. Stuart shares with us how it begins with their annual process that includes a customer satisfaction review with their salespeople to find out where the pain points lie.

In our last segment, we discuss how to reduce misalignment between the sales and marketing by aligning metrics of tracked data and how sales ops can say no to the field and not lose political capital.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we speak with Rick Balkind, the head lead of the sales enablement department for Pegasystems, about the intricacies of building and managing a sales enablement team. We discuss everything from the lead-generation process, RFP response team, new sales rep onboarding program, the design of a sales process, implementation of a sales methodology, and enablement of the sales management team. 

In our first segment, Rick shares with us how to ensure new programs and initiatives are being adopted in Q2-Q4, which numbers should be tracked to make sure sales enablement is impacting the business quarter-to-quarter and why it’s important to grow a sales pipeline in order to support growth.

Next, Rick discusses how the sales management role of sales enablement developed over time and how a cross-functional evolvement team became of it. Rick then walks us through the content of their quarterly meetings.

In our last segment, Rick breaks down his strategy development behind measuring an account workflow in assuring the pipeline development takes place as planned. Every quarter, each sales representative must create an account plan, which will later be scored. We end our segment by hearing Rick’s vision of the future of sales enablement.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Chris Cole, CEO of Intelligrated, about the role the CEO plays in the development of the sales strategy.

In our first segment, Chris shares how he managed to gain success and revenue with his company during a difficult economic cycle by listening to customers and crafting products and services that helped his customers succeed. He also discusses how strategically aligning your sales strategy to your customer needs is essential to your overall strategy development.

Next, Chris shares with us how he and his company differentiate themselves from others by offering more to their customer than just the product itself. In many ways, his team acts as strategic business consultants to their clients and, in return, they witness a very high percentage of repeat customers.

In our last segment, Chris discusses why developing a successful sales strategy requires the perspective of internal and external resources.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Jeff White, chief revenue officer of Extreme Networks, about designing a new sales strategy within the first 90 days of a new job.

In our first segment, Jeff describes how to become intimately knowledgeable of your business and how to properly analyze an organization in order to pinpoint where the transformative work needs to happen for a new sales plan.

Next, Lee walks us through Extreme Network’s corporate strategy, which focuses on being a product innovator. He also discusses the importance of arming your company with subject matter experts in order to gain a deep understanding of your customer and then being able to align your selling strategy accordingly.

In our last segment, Lee sends us off with tips on how to manage day-to-day sales and marketing deliverables while executing a 90-day sales strategy transformation.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we spoke with Samir Joglekar, EVP of sales at Renaissance Learning, about how to lay out a new organizational structure for a company.

In our first segment, Samir shares the first things you should evaluate when looking at your organizational design in order to reconstruct the way your departments are currently set up.  

Next, Samir offers guidance on how to incorporate a new channel to a long standing enterprise in order to gain a deeper connection and build better relationships with customers.

In our last segment, Samir sends us off with some tips on how to ensure you’ve supplied your team with the right resources for them to execute and maintain a newly implemented organization structure.

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.

This week on the SBI Sales and Marketing podcast, we speak with Lee Wood, SVP of sales operations, planning and strategy at Thomson Reuters, about building a successful sales operations strategy.

In our first segment, Lee covers the basic structure of a sales operations department, the number of people needed, what roles they perform and how they are structured.

Next, we walk through how to identify, design and create a set of reports that consistently satisfy the needs of the executive leadership team and how to continue running your quarterly and annual strategic planning process. This includes sales training and why Thomson Reuters chooses to keep a sales enablement function as a part of their sales operations strategy.

In our last segment, Lee shares with us the reasoning behind his personal decision to make the leap from sales management to sales operations.

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.