On today’s show, serial entrepreneur Jeron Paul, Cofounder and CEO of Spiff, explains how he started, grew, and exited 3 successful ventures. Jeron and SBI’s CEO, Matt Sharrers, talk about the elements needed to drive a growth culture, including a Revenue Growth Office that generates a universal fact base executive team leaders can use to make unified decisions, as well as tools that create visibility, connectivity, and improved employee experience.

On today's special edition of the Revenue Growth Help Desk, we celebrate Women's History Month and are joined by three inspiring women leading the charge in revenue growth: Debra Walton, Chief Revenue Officer, Data & Analytics, London Stock Exchange Group, Pilar Schenk, VP of Sales Strategy and Operations at McAfee, and Tracy Hansen, CMO at Chief Outsiders and President of ProGlove Inc., NA.

In this show, our esteemed panel shares their respective journeys that led them to their current positions and the active role they play in fighting against gender bias and inequities today.

At SBI we strive for all of us to reach our full potential by being diverse by nature, equitable by design, and inclusive by choice. Our curiosity to understand, value, and celebrate our unique strengths will improve outcomes for our people and our clients. This is an unwavering belief that guides how we build teams, cultivate leaders, and work with others. DEI, like revenue growth, is an all-the-time thing, not a sometimes thing.

In this special edition of the Revenue Growth Help Desk, we celebrate Black History Month and discuss DEI strategy with SBI’s CEO, Matt Sharrers.

Over the last week, we have seen the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the market, businesses, and communities. During these unpredictable times, one thing is certain; we cannot control these events, but we can control how we react.

In today’s interview, we are joined by Josh Horstmann, Senior Partner at SBI, to discuss how to adapt to the new normal. Josh shares a 7-step action plan and timeline to help executive teams mitigate business impact during the crisis.

For many B2B companies, the effort to continually maintain and improve their products has become too demanding. Evolving economic factors affecting these companies have pressured many to make the shift from being a product company to a platform company.

Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of Pulse Secure, joins us in this segment to discuss changing your mindset to successfully make the transformation from product to platform.

Digital has rapidly transformed the economy, and it is no surprise that having a digital strategy has a profound impact on revenue growth. With so many definitions and ideas of what a digital strategy is and how to implement one, companies find it difficult to find clarity and achieve consensus. Today, Scott Santucci, CEO of Growth Enablement Ecosystems, shares his experience navigating the digital landscape.

Brad Christian, Chief Customer Officer of Market Force, joins us to discuss the true meaning of customer experience. Brad and his team at Market Force have become pioneers in mastering customer experience. Listen to Brad discuss best practices for implementing a world-class customer experience design.  

SVP of Sales for Businessolver demonstrates the case for why a separate customer success function is necessary.

Joining us on the SBI Podcast is Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer for Cybereason, the world's most powerful cybersecurity analytics platform. 

Often called the "godfather of inbound marketing" for his work in taking inbound marketing from an idea to a movement of tens of thousands of people, Mike Volpe is one of the most sought-after B2B marketers. 

Today Mike is going to demonstrate how to replace leads with real opportunities for the sales team through the use of account based marketing. ABM is the effort performed by both marketing and sales to replace leads with opportunities for the sales team. 

Why is this an important topic? Demand generation and lead management does not work for companies with business models dependent on a small number of accounts, but who spend a lot.

Joining us for today’s show is Jennifer Bakunas, the Senior Vice President of Americas Sales for Monotype.  Jennifer has a wealth of experience, from spinning up successful start-ups to running enterprise sales teams. She took over the sales leadership role at Monotype last year, and we join her at the end of one year to discuss her successful transformation of the 100-plus person sales force.

Today we are going to demonstrate how a head of sales transforms a selling team to hit their growth objectives. 

Why is this topic so important?  The honeymoon for a head of sales ends quickly.  Successful SVP’s of Sales have one key thing in common.  They get off to fast start with a successful transformation that starts bearing fruit in year one. 

In the first segment of the podcast, Jennifer seeks to answer the questions: As a new head of sales, how do you approach assessing your sales leadership talent? More specifically: How do you assess talent at the individual rep level? 

"How I approach talent assessment when I come to a new business, is to assess who you have, and then where the gaps are, and who you need to add. I think the best way to do that is to just dig in,  sit down, and meet one-by-one with every single individual on the sales team. You get to know them. You get to know their background. You get feedback on what they feel like the performance conditions are. What's working. What's not. And then you compare that to the results, and do a stack ranking of the team, because they've all likely existed at that point under the same performance conditions." 

Jennifer goes on to provide an overview of her account segmentation scheme, go-to-market strategy, sales process, buyer personas, and assessment of the performance conditions of the sales force. We talk through the transformation initiatives Jennifer put into place to lay the foundation for success and how she made sure the new initiatives were adopted. 

Jennifer outlines in the second segment how to successfully communicate with the sales team, as the new head of sales, to keep them informed and focused on the right things. 

We discuss how to approach segmenting your accounts to focus on the accounts that can produce the highest revenue yield in the shortest amount of time.  Next we cover the topic of  ales organization design, including type of reps you need, the best organizational chart, and the number of heads. 

The final segment of the show describes how elite sales leaders insert themselves into pricing strategy. Jennifer describes how to approach assessing your pricing strategy and common trouble spots to look for. She specifically outlines a proven roll out strategy for your newest pricing initiative.

Joining us for today’s show is Oni Chukwu, a software executive who knows how to make the number. Today’s topic is Go-to-Market Strategy. Oni 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 Corporate Strategy section. Flip to Step 5 Go-to-Market that includes Coverage and Channels as well as Pricing and Packaging phases. [p]

Our guest today is Oni Chukwu, the Chief Executive Officer of etouches, the premier leader in event management software. The event management software covers everything from venue sourcing all the way through analytics and serves over 1,500 customers in 50 countries. Oni will demonstrate how to sufficiently cover your markets by selecting and optimizing your sales channels and packaging your products correctly. 

Why this topic? Not covering your addressable market entirely will result in missed revenue opportunities. Traditional routes to market are being replaced with innovative ways to reach customers. Packaging your products the same way as your competitors results in perceived commoditization and a race to the bottom. 

Oni is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic as an executive leader with an exceptional history of accomplishment in leading companies to grow faster than the industry and the competitors. Listen as Oni demonstrates how to plan your corporate strategy to: 

• Sufficiently cover your markets.
• Select and optimize your sales channels.
• Price and package your products correctly. 

Category Bundling represents a company that's moving from a company that has several products, and they're bundling these products potentially up into solutions. They're presenting bundles to the customer. Oni describes his thoughts regarding product bundling:

It's an evolutionary step where you're going from the product company to a solutions company I think it serves us very well, because as a company we're on the innovative edge. We're constantly adding products, constantly innovating. Giving our customers value for what they pay us. I think it makes sense for our customers, and given that there's segments of customers and you're not serving just one industry. There's segments of customers that needs certain things, and certain solution sets that you can actually package and make it more meaningful to them.

Joining us for today’s show is Natalie Fedie, a Vice President of Customer Success who knows how to grow and retain customers. Today’s topic is dedicated to the topic of Customer Success. Natalie 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 Customer Success phase starting on page 411 of the Sales Strategy section. 

Natalie Fedie is the Vice President of Customer Success for Granicus, a digital engagement software company focused on the government sector.  Granicus serves over 3,000 government agencies at all levels of government, federal, state, local, and city government. Natalie will demonstrate how to grow revenues by retaining, and growing, customers by proactively managing the customer life cycle.     

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. 

Natalie is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic having been involved in setting up customer success teams, and leading them to reach their goals of growing customer revenue.  The first segment of the program is focused on providing an overview of a highly productive Customer Success team.  Natalie speaks about the customer renewal rate and what to expect for your company. 

“We are a subscription model. We have annual contracts. Some are multi-year contracts. Our renewal rate is typically in the high 90% on average. Over half of our revenue comes from our existing customer base and that was through expansions of contracts and upsells and cross sells.”

Listen as Natalie describes where the customer success team resides in her company’s organization, who Natalie reports to in the corporate structure, and the number of reps.  Many members of the audience are weighing decisions on where customer support should reside, and listening to Natalie describe the pros and cons of different parts of the organization she’s reported will help you think through factors to inform your decision.

The second segment of the show is focused on how a customer success team gains early adoption of your products, and how to gain expanded adoption.  Natalie provides guidance for how to sell additional products to successful customers. 

Our final segment of the show explains how a veteran customer success team with a proven record of accomplishment recognizes the signs of churn before it happens.  Natalie explains the early warning signs and how her team acts.  In addition, we explore the early signs of a customer who is ready to buy more.  Just asking for more business isn’t going to do more than just capture active demand.  Listen as Natalie describes how a customer success team proactively develops latent demand and then spots trigger events to help customers solve problems.  

We wrap up the show discussing the profile of a customer success manager.  What do you look for in candidates, and how should you compensate a CSM. We dive into the major question of whether a customer success manager should carry a quota and how to structure their compensation plan. 

I'm excited to introduce a Chief Executive Officer who knows how to direct his sales force to the highest opportunity revenue sources. Executive leaders of every function should prepare to take notes from today's guest who will share how to think through the highest value creation sources of revenue.  In the race to make your number, sales leaders will naturally bet on every horse that can deliver a revenue dollar. Your corporate strategy can quickly erode to the easiest revenue dollars to capture, regardless of the long-term value and profitability.  That's where the CEO comes in to guide his or her sales leader to the revenue dollars that create the highest value long-term. 

Today we're going to demonstrate how to create clarity throughout the entire company by getting everyone laser focused on the real drivers of revenue growth.  As a guide to the discussion, download our 10th annual workbook, How to Make Your Number in 2017. Turn to the Corporate Strategy section and flip to the Objectives phase on pages 54 – 59 of the PDF workbook. 

Joining us today is John DiMarco, Chief Executive Officer for Cedar Document Technologies.  John and I share the same Alma Mater, Georgia Tech and John is a CEO who came up through the ranks of technology development.  What I found fascinating about this interview is the precision with which John breaks down revenue growth to provide clarity to his sales leader.  John's Company is a provider of hosted customer communications management services to large enterprises. Cedar serves as a hub to manage all enterprise communications for how an enterprise client talks to its customers and how those customers interact back with those clients. John is uniquely qualified to demonstrate how to create clarity throughout the entire company by getting everyone laser focused on the real drivers of revenue growth. 

Listen as John and I dive into the into three main types of CEO-driven revenue growth strategies.  We address each with examples to identify the real drivers of revenue growth from the CEO seat.  John and I discuss the differences between market expansion, market exposure and market share. I list those three in order because market expansion is the quickest way to create enterprise value shareholder wealth inside of your firm. To illustrate this point, this is where the CEO knows the market so well that he or she can place the boat right over the fish. 

Market expansion is Cedar’s main strategy where John has recognized he’s in a market where there are tail winds and he needs to make the most of the opportunity. The market exposure example market demonstrates how John is listening to the market, seeing a movement to mobile and trying to expose his company to that new source of growth.  The final strategy of market share gain doesn’t apply to Cedar since it’s an emerging market.

Why this topic? Organizations that have too many objectives and priorities essentially have none. They risk accomplishing nothing of significance. A CEO strategy often does not get executed because the sales, marketing and product leaders are in their silos pursuing what they feel is important. This causes strategic misalignment and results in sub-par revenue growth. 

There's a completely different sales and marketing approach required to accomplish each revenue growth strategy.  Sales and marketing leaders that don’t know these details are working blind. Enjoy the dialogue of the Cedar use case to identify your growth strategies. 

If you would like to spend time with me on your revenue growth drivers, come see me in Dallas at The Studio, 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 understanding how to leverage sales development reps to generate leads for the sales team. If you would like to implement an outbound marketing program with a team of SDRs, consider having one of our experts spend some time with you in workshop. To get a feel for what's covered in that workshop, download our 10th annual workbook that we use in these workshops.

Joining us is Heather Young, the Vice President of Sales and Business Development for Rimini Street.   Rimini Street is a leading global provider for a third-party enterprise support.  This includes maintenance and support for SAP and Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion and RETEK software.

Why this topic? For many B2B companies, inbound marketing is not producing enough leads for the sales team.  As a result, many marketers have added a team of SDRs, sales development reps, to drive outbound marketing efforts in an attempt to meet the never-ending need for more leads.