Sales Pipeline Radio

Some of the questions Matt and Andy Crestodina discussed were: Why is SEO perceived as such a scary thing and does that perception need to persist for people to do it right? That is an excellent question that is very rarely asked. I think SEO has kind of a reputation as kind of a shady kind of industry, with kind of a checkered past, because the people who buy SEO service, they tend to be a very low information buyer, which means that the people who provide the service can get away with some less than perfectly ethical tactics. When the people who hire you to do something have no clue what you're going to do, that creates an atmosphere, an environment where it's ripe for people that are less than perfectly standup professionals to actually succeed. For example, people who hire SEOs often pay $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 a month, think they need to keep paying that money to keep ranking. That's never true, which means that there's a lot of SEOs that can kind of rest on their laurels and keep cashing that check, even though they might not be doing a whole bunch of stuff after the first few months, other than making the major improvements. On the topic of writing business books: the book becomes another reformatting of your content that is ultimately intended to drive demand, qualified demand, and preference and differentiation as well, right? The book just barely pays for itself. I think it sold like not even 10,000 copies total over the last however many years, but in a B2B sales context, which we all are passionate about this topic of sales, it's a great leave-behind. It's sort of a $10 business card strategy. We build websites. You meet with four companies to build your website. One of them left behind a book that blows your mind with everything you need to know. It's the driver's manual for the website and that gives you a competitive advantage in sales. It's extremely effective in that way. If I wanted to use it more for PR, I could just send it to people who I think might include me in something they're working on or invite me to their event. If I was more deliberate about trying to get sales, I could just send it to different professors who teach marketing hoping they might include it in their syllabus. But yeah, it's just another format for content. It's something that's part of a family of content. Your job is to create traffic champions through your content. You want to create a couple more traffic champions because there's always a few things that have a massive disproportionate effect on your total number of visitors. If your job is to create a couple more traffic champions knowing that that's going to create just way more brand awareness for you, then you don't want to just keep making more medium quality things. You want to go make a couple more great things. Listen to the full replay to get the rest of the insights and tactics. About our guest, Andy Crestodina: Andy Crestodina is a cofounder and the strategic director of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning web design company, which has completed more than 1,000 successful website projects. He is a top-rated speaker at national conferences who is dedicated to the teaching of marketing. His favorite topics include search engine optimization, social media, analytics, and content strategy. He has written more than 100 articles on content marketing topics. He lives in Chicago.

Brian Hansford hosting this episode with our guest, James Thomas, CMO of Allocadia Software. They will be focusing on MPM and will drill into how CMO’s need more discipline and rigor around managing the revenue pipeline, looking at past performance, and using the data to guide future performance. A bit about our guest: Experienced Chief Marketing Officer with a demonstrated success leading award winning teams in the high tech industry. Expert in marketing management, enterprise software, Software as a Service, pricing, packaging, messaging, inbound and outbound demand generation, go-to-market strategy, and strategic partnerships. You'll want to catch this episode live 11:30am Pacific. 8/17/2017

Our guest is Mark Granovsky, President and CEO of G2Planet which does Event Marketing and applies data science to a growing field. When people think of event marketing, they don't think of the latest and greatest and most technologically advanced campaigns in the world. I think when people think about big data, they think about marketing technology. They think about lead nurture programs. Then you have events which in many cases have kind of lagged. Talk about where event marketing is today in the 2017 B2B world and where do we need to take it to make sure that it aligns with the way that we're managing sales and marketing today. Mark answered, "I think it has been a laggard, and I think it's quickly catching up. I know when I first got into this business one of the motivating factors was every financial officer I ever talked to was frustrated with their event spend. They didn't know what value it was bringing. Tons of money going down that channel, but they didn't really understand the benefit they were getting out of it. Early on event marketing was very logistics focused, tactical, processing names, registrants coming to an event, putting badges on people. It was kind of pretty basic meat and potatoes. As marketing analytics have evolved and people have gotten smarter about looking at data and taking data and turning it into information, the events industry and the discipline has certainly caught up. " Matt later asked, "How should marketers should think about this in a complex sales cycle, right? I mean if you're not doing transactional sales, if you assume that the white paper didn't generate the sale, what do you recommend for marketers that maybe ... It's mid-August, but a lot of people are already thinking about 2018, to start to think from a strategy and a planning standpoint of how to do we incorporate events and event marketing technology into their mix." Mark says, "The event marketing discipline or the portal that we call it, it really is ... It's not the head on the dog. It's the body on the dog, right? It's got to follow the marketing objectives, the campaigns, the purposes. These things are manifesting inside of the events activations, right? Whatever those corporate marketing initiatives are, bright people are sitting down and they're spending time and they're saying, "Okay. How does this manifest inside of my event activation campaigns," whatever those objectives might be. Then once the link is created from the strategy office in the house down into the activation fields, event marketing being an activation field, now we're getting into planning and activities that support meeting of those goals whatever those goals might be. " Listen to the full replay for more insights.

Some of what Matt will be covering with Michael Pici, Director of Sales at HubSpot. How’d you get into sales, and when did you know it was something you wanted to pursue as a career? Hubspot has a highly-successful track record for sales, but you started from scratch with the sales product. What was that like? What do you look for in new reps? What attributes are most important and what others do you expect to teach/train once they start? What do you look for in potential new managers, especially from amongst your front-line reps? What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made and learned from over the past couple years? You’ve written lately about sales forecasting. Why do so many people get this wrong?

In this replay, we are very excited to talk with Jessica Fewless who joins us from DemandBase. We are going to be talking about the increased complexity of selling into B2B marketing; into B2B targets; the fact that the buying committee internally is getting larger, more complex. More than just picking off the right targets and speaking more precisely to the right people, organizing consensus inside of an organization to help increase sort of focus and velocity is what Matt thinks is a key part of ABM as well. He asked Jessica to talk a little bit about what that means and sort of that internal buying committee and how effective ABM can make sense of that. Jessica told Matt,"this is really where sales can feel the most support from marketing is around this entire buyer’s committee because typically what they are going to be doing is they are going to be focusing on that person with the budget authority, need and the time light, right? That whole BAND model, because that’s a person who is going to sign the contract, right? So that is generally where their efforts are spent; one – because that’s the only person they actually have access to. So sometimes they act as a gatekeeper to the rest of that stakeholder committee but two – they only have so much bandwidth so they need to focus on that person who eventually is going to sign their contracts." It was such a rich episode, we felt a replay was in order. About Jessica Fewless, DemandBase After 3.5 years at Demandbase (and 20+ years in B2B Marketing), Jessica has seen it all when it comes to Account-Based Marketing. Playing an instrumental role in Demandbase’s rollout of an ABM strategy, and educating over 1000 B2B marketers on the principles of ABM over the last 18 months, Jessica has become a resident expert. From building the right target account list and understanding the impact of ABM on marketing programs, to selling ABM within an organization and finding budget for your strategy, Jessica has worked with organizations to build, hone and measure the success of their own ABM strategies.

If you don't know him yet, it's time to know Grant Cardone. Join us for the provocative, maybe controversial conversation with a sales legend. While you are waiting for the show, don't miss his core package of MP3 books for your commute or flights. His success is legendary, his energy infectious. You do not want to miss this.

Matt is inteviewing Nadjya Ghausi, Vice President of Marketing for Prezi. They'll take the topic of conversational sales presentations further. How a new approach to pitches can transform your engagement and results. With a shift in approach, presenters can turn their presentations into dialogues, making them interactive and interesting enough to keep viewers tuned in while their pocket-sized screens remain in the pockets where they belong. "They will also be touching on the recent study from Harvard University researchers, which sought to answer the question, "Does a presentation's medium affect its message?" The full content of that study can be found here." Tune in for this conversation of ideas. Prezi would like to give you a gift for listening - their Conversational Presenting eBook. About Matt's guest, Nadjya Ghausi As Prezi's VP of Marketing, Nadjya loves building all-star teams with the power to drive global market leadership. One of the things she values most at Prezi is the ability to combine technology, data, and innovative storytelling to develop an authentic brand. Before joining Prezi, Nadjya held leadership roles at E2open, Salesforce.com, Agile Software, and IBM, and was a management consultant at Gemini. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with an undergrad degree in Industrial Engineering (BSIE) from the University of Michigan. Nadjya believes the secret to staying motivated is having a list of dreams that’s always a little bit longer than her list of achievements.

We surveyed over 250 B2B sales and marketing pros to learn how they achieve and measure revenue success. Through their insights we’ve learned how B2B marketing teams are managing, optimizing and reporting their results under increasing revenue accountability. Our research shows the best-performing companies have marketing organizations that share revenue accountability with sales teams. Companies are missing sales goals when their marketing teams don’t have revenue accountability or responsibility! Matt is traveling, so we are fortunate to have our on VP of Client Services, Brian Hansford to host this week and go over the highlights from the report. Some of the points he'll be covering include: • 64.2% of respondents report their marketing organizations have increased revenue responsibility and are achieving or exceeding revenue goals • 71.3% of marketing organizations have increased accountability for revenue goals • 61.8% achieve or exceed revenue goals because their marketing org has increased revenue accountability • 63.6% experience improved sales performance their marketing org has increased revenue accountability • 75% do not achieve revenue goals when marketing doesn’t have increased revenue accountability • The #1 ranked success factor in achieving revenue goals is an effective marketing and sales partnership Listen live, catch the replay or catch up on the report in the meantime here >

Matt's guest is Author of Top of Mind and he is the Co-founder and CEO of Influence & Company. Business is never “just” business. It’s always about relationships. It’s always about a human connection. When you’re viewed as a valuable, trustworthy partner, the opportunities are endless. Position yourself for success by establishing and developing content-driven relationships that keep you and your brand Top of Mind. This will be a great conversation for you to walk away with tips and nuggets. Join us. John Hall is the co-founder and CEO of Influence & Co., a company focused on helping brands and individuals extract and leverage their expertise to create, publish, and distribute content to gain influence, visibility, and credibility with their key audiences. In less than three years, John has grown Influence & Co. into one of the largest providers of high-quality expert content to the world’s top publications, ranking No. 72 on Forbes’ “Most Promising Companies in America” list and named Empact’s “Best Marketing and Advertising Company of 2014” at the United Nations. John has a weekly column for Forbes and Inc. and has contributed to more than 50 publications, including Business Insider, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. He is the author of the best-selling book, 'Top of Mind'.

Best practices for tactile marketing, direct mail and more. Matt's guest today is Daniel Gaugler, CMO of PFL.com. Some of the talking points will be including: Why is direct mail back? What problem does PFL solve for its customers? When people say that direct mail is old school or irrelevant, how do you typically respond? Tell us how PFL is taking an offline channel and making it high tech. Demonstrating ROI is a key priority for marketers. What’s the biggest mistakes marketers make when measuring the success of their campaigns? Marketing changing rapidly over the past several years. What can marketers do to keep up? A bit about our guest, Daneil Gaugler: Daniel is a business-driven, entrepreneurial-minded marketer with an extensive background in: marketing automation, integrated marketing programs, direct mail, search engine marketing, eCommerce, email, and direct sales. He has a proven track record of implementing multi-channel marketing systems that leverage technology to drive awareness, acquire customers, grow sales, and improve the customer experience. Connect with him on Twitter

Matt's guest is Morgan J Ingram. Some of the talking points they are covering include: How to use video to create a great connection with your prospects Using social to build a relationship before the call or email Creating a brand by utilizing content throughout proper networks How ABM strategies can help sales and SDRs A bit about Morgan: He's a sales development manager at Terminus, where he builds the sales development team professionally and personally. He also does motivational speaking by helping people remove their negative thoughts to unlock their inner potential and stress the importance of not making excuses in their life.

Some of the points Matt will be covering with Terry Flaherty and Kerry Cunningam of SiriusDecisions will include: Why did SiriusDecisions update the demand waterfall? What's a Demand Unit and why does it matter? What's a Demand Map and what value does it deliver? What are the major changes/differences that Sirius introduced in this version of the waterfall? What has the reaction been to the new waterfall? What are some of the major things to consider when implementing the Demand Unit waterfall?

A bit about our guest, Paul Teshima: He is a successful technology executive who has run services, customer success, account management, support and product management. Paul is a firm believer that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and business culture can be built through storytelling. He has always have been a leader with a strong focus on sales and customer engagement. Helped lead Eloqua (marketing automation) as part of the executive team from $0 to over $100 million in revenue, through IPO and a successful acquisition for $957 million by Oracle. Now co-founder and CEO of Nudge.ai, a modern sales platform that uses A.I. to find actionable insights on your customers. Passion for building great teams and products that help customers grow their businesses. Twitter: @paulteshima

Some of the points Matt and Sangram are covering: In case some listeners have been living under a rock, what is account-based marketing and why does everyone in B2B need to know about this trend? Tell us about the Terminus technology. What problem does Terminus solve for its customers? Terminus just raised its Series B of $10.3M (total funding to date about $20M with Seed + Series A) can you tell us about the process and what you've learned working with VCs and angel investors? In 2016, you wrote "Account-Based Marketing for Dummies", launched #FlipMyFunnel, and were named to the Direct Marketing News 40 Under 40 list. You helped build a category for ABM. What can you tell your fellow entrepreneurs about product-market fit and the importance of being part of a larger community in your industry? Terminus has won a ton of awards. #1 Best Place to Work from the Atlanta Business Chronicle in 2016. Startup of the Year in 2016 and 2017 from the AMA Atlanta, #1 in Employee Appreciation from the AJC and #3 for its Top Workplaces. What's your secret to building such a great company? What's next for you and Terminus? BONUS: Terminus just announced their Series B and Top 45 ABM Superheroes .

Matt's guest in this episode is Jeb Blount. Jeb Blount is a long time sales trainer, prospector and the best-selling author of eight books including Sales EQ, Fanatical Prospecting, People Follow You, People Buy You. He is a Sales Acceleration specialist who helps organizations reach peak performance fast by optimizing talent, leveraging training to cultivate high-performance sales culture, developing leadership and coaching skills, and applying more effective organizational design. When Matt asked how the salesforce looks today he suprised us with his answer, "It looks the same as it did three years ago, five years ago - the things sales people are doing are the same things they did then. But, there are more ways to fill your pipleline and channels - more opportunities than ever before. Older salespeople are benefitting, but can be overwhelmed with the addition of so many places to interupt the day of prospects and connect." Channels are being clogged, though, because they are so readily available. Matt asked, "How do you break through using these tools?" Jeb tells us, "It's always been hard to break through, even when we had email and door knocking, before social became core channels. Prior to that - doors, phones and networking events." Listen to this - the story of Richard from the UK and how he was persistent until he got through. He KNEW Jeb was a buyer, he KNEW. It's a great success story of knowing your target market and not giving up. Through his companies – Sales Gravy, Channel EQ, and Innovate Knowledge - he advises many of the world’s leading organizations and their executives on the impact of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills on sales, leadership, customer experience, channel development, and strategic account management. Under Jeb’s leadership Sales Gravy has become a global leader in sales acceleration solutions including sales recruitment and staffing, sales on-boarding automation, custom sales training curriculum development and delivery, sales coaching, and online learning. As a business leader Jeb has more than 25 years of experience with Fortune 500, SMBs and start-ups. He has been named one of the top 50 Most Influential Sales and Marketing Leaders (Top Sales Magazine), a Top 30 Social Selling Influencer (Forbes), a Top 10 Sales Experts to Follow on Twitter (Evan Carmichael), a Top 100 Most Innovative Sales Blogger (iSEEIT), a Top 20 must read author (Yes Magazine & Huffington Post), and the most downloaded sales podcaster in iTunes history; among many other accolades. His flagship website, SalesGravy.com, is the most visited sales specific website on the planet.

In this episode: Why do events still matter? How offline marketing and events should be measured and attributed like their digital campaign brethren Determining KPIs for event channels Choosing the right technology for your marketing stack Free Download: The Complete Guide to Revenue Event Marketing As a leading SaaS marketing executive, Alexandra has built and led multiple software startups from seed through Series B funding, while tripling revenue year-over-year. In her first year as chief marketing officer for Event Farm, she designed, built, and quickly executed high-performing demand and lead generation strategies. Event Farm helps companies that utilize events in their B2B marketing strategies attribute revenue to those events. Customers include large companies like Google and JP Morgan, down to SMBs. Alexandra believes in a value-add, content-first approach to marketing, allowing the companies she leads to be thought provokers and authentic educators rather than commoditized sales brokers. The Event Farm's content campaigns have earned them nominations and wins for multiple Killer Content Awards; more importantly, the content campaigns have led to an increase in leads generated by 1300% in the first three months. Prior to becoming CMO at Event Farm, Alexandra was VP Marketing at Contactually, a relationship-based CRM where she grew pipeline from $95,000 to $1 million/month in 18 months. She started her career working in sales and marketing for Fortune 500 company, NVR, where she marketed and sold $10.8 million in residential real estate in her first year and was nominated for Rookie of the Year. From there, she launched her own startups--the most recent being a digital marketing agency that worked with e-commerce, consulting firms, and international manufacturers to use data from its marketing stack to understand buyer trends and paths.

This is replay as Matt is at the conferences this week. Matt asked what AI means to sales and marketing leaders. Lara told us, "It's important to bring the augmented intelligence piece to help humans perform better. An example - a sales rep is working 4-5 deals critical for the quarter, with our software they can be notified if a change is noticed affecting their influence on the sales decisions by looking at more than past data." Our guest is Lara Shackelford of Altify. Altify sells to sales professionals. With their software, every sales rep can sell like your BEST sales rep. More reveals followed at DreamForce as it ties to AI and Einstein. Matt then asked if there is there a difference between augmented and predictive analytics and intelligence. Lara gave a quick overview: Predictive - predicts what will happen in the future based on a lot of data. This involves high quantity of data. Augmented takes knowledge and context into providing a solution and be able to flag insights to alert the human to be more effective and generate results based on the data and knowledge. This has been the missing piece - the CONTEXT. This helps guide the next best step. Catch the replay of this show to get more insights from Lara Shackelford.

Matt's guest is Caren Cioffi, Excecutive Vice President and General Maanger, Enterprise & Digital Marketing Business for Brightcove. In this episode Matt and Caren will not only talk about general best practices for video marketing, but where to apply it, how it works, why it's easy and how to convert it into pipeline. Caren is passionate about unleashing the power of video to drive reach, engagement and conversion for brands everywhere. Tune in to get her expert tips and takes on this topic.

We spend a considerable amount of time working with clients on their sales outreach and engagement processes here at Heinz Marketing. This has been more recently defined as the discipline of “Sales Development” and is something we believe every company should have a competency around. How you identify, engage, and convert new customers is fundamental to business operations and there are so many ways to do it poorly that end up frustrating prospects, employees, and sales leaders. To avoid the frustration and to get maximum return out of your sales development efforts, we have developed the following seven essential building blocks for high performance sales development. Host, Robert Pease, will be going through the list in this episode. Be ready to take copious notes. You'll be glad you tuned in. Original post on this framework is here > This episode dives in deeper based on reader feedback and questions.

Brian Hansford is coming off the bench this week to fill in for Matt Heinz for tomorrow's episode. Joining Brian is Dave Rigotti, VP of Marketing from Bizible. Bizible provides a powerful platform that measures marketing performance in driving revenue. Brian and Dave will discuss how new analytics and attribution technologies help marketers measure where revenue is coming from, the best performing channels, and the ROI for demand generation. These tools are giving marketers powerful insights to align closely with sales and pursue a common goal!

Let's start with what channel marketing is. It's called many things: local marketing, indirect marketing. It's someone that sells your product outside of your organization. It is a severely under-resourced segment with most marketing departments. If you pay a person to sell, and they hit the market with a number/goal, you know you either got your investment in them back, or surpassed, or lost the investment. When you go to indirect model: Product/thought leadership at one company or selling and marketing at another company, you now have two companies to align. $1000 invested - what does that turn into? Did it convert to $10000 or is it $1000 I didn't get back? This makes companies hesitant to invest in it. So, typically companies put one person on channel marketing. Example of a $2.2B company with 35K employees, 40% of revenue comes from channel, and they have ONE marketing resource. How can you be effective with that type of opportunity? For Example: marketing resource, Janet, is reactive to channel requests and does random acts of marketing. Everything she does is NOT strategic. She needs help with scale and a platform and infrastructure so they can market on their own. Cobrand, launch. Averetek does this in a frictionless way. This allows Janet to drive more through the channel because they can get their own materials. Listen to the show to find out where you and your company may be missing opportunities by not allocating resources effectively. This can be HUGE. About our guest: Peter Thomas is the founder and CEO of Averetek. This team of marketers, engineers, and product developers seek new ways to engage channel partners through software and services. Since its beginning in 2000, Averetek has grown to manage more than 70,000 reseller organizations and 300,000 registered users. In Averetek’s work with brands, Peter has found that companies focus too much time and money on the top 10% of their channel partners. The remaining partners simply need the right nudge to shift from opportunistic to strategic sellers. When brands devote more attention to the 90% segment, they drive more leads, close more sales, and grow their business. Peter combines his observations with partner behavior data from the Averetek platform, sharing this knowledge to help clients attract, engage, and monetize their partners more effectively.

If you haven't caught their podcast yet, it's not too late to binge listen to Robert Pease & Brian Hansford's show - Marketing Kranks on SoundCloud . Today they are taking over the show for Matt, who is traveling. The topic? All the ABM Noise.... the good, the bad, the ugly.

Matt's guest in this episode is Shannon Dougall, Vice President of Marketing at Uberflip. They just returned from the annual Content to Conversion Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. It combines content and demand generators together. What are you seeing in the field and trends? Seeing overall that B2B marketers believe that content is more important than ever. 84% of B2B marketers are looking to increase their investment in content this year. 55% of marketing budgets are spent in content investment. But they are saying their content is under-performing. Why? Possible answers are: 1. Their content isn't very good. 2. The experience surrounding the content isn't peforming. 3. OR they are not able to see the results to properly measure the success. For content to be successful, it definitely needs to be engaging. To do this, need to consider the medium - read, interact - either way, it needs to be insightful, relevant and something other than what the "other guys" are producing. The content has to be action-oriented. You have to have a piece of content that you expect something to happen at the end. This should be common sense, but it is often forgotten in the rush to meet the content quota and flood the venues. Get an actionable list of insights from Shannon from the full episode. Listen now. About our guest: Shannon Dougall has been called, “a marketer of the future.” She is an adventurer, scientist, and artist in the field of marketing. She had been compared to a Swiss Army Knife, using her experiences and learnings towards an all-in-one type of demand generation and customer acquisition that includes storytelling, blogging, lifecycle marketing, digital marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, positioning, pre-product/product marketing, app store marketing, content marketing, growth hacking, and analytics just to name a few. Shannon’s true north is to help business’ transform to realize their true potential.

Matt Heinz and Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of Cision tell more of the story. Introducing the B2B Marketing Communications Cloud – how consolidating your integrated communications can accelerate awareness, interest and sales pipeline contribution. About our guest: Kevin Akeroyd oversees the Cision executive management team across operations globally. He has more than 25 years of experience in reshaping modern digital, social and mobile marketing globally. Prior to Cision he was general manager and senior vice president at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Akeroyd and Oracle created the Enterprise Marketing Platform category and led it from the onset. Prior to Oracle, he held senior leadership positions at several companies, including Data.com, Salesforce.com, RR Donnelley, and Jigsaw.

Matt's guest in this episode is Shannon Dougall, Vice President of Marketing at Uberflip. They just returned from the annual Content to Conversion Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. It combines content and demand generators together. Some of the points they are covering are: Results from research highlighting the most important content features Examples of successful, sales-converting content campaigns Key B2B content trends for 2017 What are you seeing in the field and trends? Seeing overall that B2B marketers believe that content is more important than ever. 84% of B2B marketers are looking to increase their investment in content this year. 55% of marketing budgets are spent in content investment. But they are saying their content is under-performing. Why? Possible answers are: 1. Their content isn't very good. 2. The experience surrounding the content isn't performing. 3. OR they are not able to see the results to properly measure the success. For content to be successful, it definitely needs to be engaging. To do this, need to consider the medium - read, interact - either way, it needs to be insightful, relevant and something other than what the "other guys" are producing. The content has to be action-oriented. You have to have a piece of content that you expect something to happen at the end. This should be common sense, but it is often forgotten in the rush to meet the content quota and flood the venues. Get an actionable list of insights from Shannon from the full episode. Listen now. About our guest: Shannon Dougall has been called, “a marketer of the future.” She is an adventurer, scientist, and artist in the field of marketing. She had been compared to a Swiss Army Knife, using her experiences and learnings towards an all-in-one type of demand generation and customer acquisition that includes storytelling, blogging, lifecycle marketing, digital marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, positioning, pre-product/product marketing, app store marketing, content marketing, growth hacking, and analytics just to name a few. Shannon’s true north is to help business’ transform to realize their true potential.

Some of the questions Matt asked our guest, Ronald Brock included: Is sales something you’re born with? Is it something you can learn? And I think the perspective you take in this book is very much, I am quoting here you say you can take someone who is untrained, otherwise someone ordinary, sort of an average person who is starting in sales and transform them into someone of in your words – notable superiority. And so this idea includes a number of best practices and or secrets if you will to do that, is that still inaccurate representation? He starts out by telling us, "Well, every salesman did during my time period; reading a few books about selling then having no knowledge whatsoever and developing my own style. And what I discovered was it was fine but it worked for me and not for the people that I was trying to turn into salesman when I became a sales manager. And that involved me moving into developing a format that anyone could use rather than just the what you think of as the born salesman. So if you take someone who has very little charisma, they can be turned into a great salesman." Another tidbit from the show: Matt covered, "On one hand I think there’s a lot of great new intelligence and understanding of how sales operates in an increasingly complex world but on the other hand we are still people selling to people and I think some of the fundamentals of selling from Dale Carnegie, from Zig Ziglar can sometimes get lost. Are there any best practices or advice you would give people the sort of balance those two approaches, sort of the traditional with the new?" Ron says, "Well those particular complications dealt heavily with how to develop yourselves to be the kind of person that people want to deal with. It’s referred to as a halo effect. If you are a really attractive person, in some ways that means you’re also honest and forthright so somebody you should deal with." You'll have to listen to the episode for the full story and insights. Ronald Brock is the author of the book Gamebreaker: A guide to world-class selling. You can find it on Amazon.com you can also check it out and learn more about Ron at www.gamebreakerbook.com.

We have guest Lauren Vaccarello who is the vice president of marketing at Box. We are going to be talking a lot about software as a service, sales and marketing and how to do that effectively. This conversation on account-based revenue – targeting the right accounts, partnering with sales, the joys & failures & adjustments associated with execution. Lauren Vaccarello (@laurenv) is a business leader with a proven track record of building high performing marketing teams and accelerating revenue growth. With a strong background in demand generation, she excels at building scalable integrated campaigns that leverage cutting edge marketing techniques. Although performance is at the core of who she is as a marketer, she believes businesses need to tell compelling stories and build a brand if they want to own a category.

David Priemer is Vice President of Sales at Influititive. Psychology of sales - sales has evolved a lot ove rthe years. Vendors used to have all the information. The relationship between buyer and seller has fundamentally changed thanks to the Internet. Emotional intelligence and sales psychology has become tremendously important. Matt asked David what he recommended to sales managers, leaders and trainers about implementingand integrating a better sales psychology and sales practices. "Old ways are selling... we try our best pitches, we make calls..." This doesn't fly anymore. Time is too precious. Social Selling methodologies and tactics make the best use of everyone's time, including the target buyer.

Our guest is Shari Johnston who is the senior vice president of marketing at Radius and has an illustrious career in marketing. At some point we are going to talk about Santa.com I promise but before we get to that we will talk a few other things. Some of what they discussed included: Where are the places that you are putting bets on to drive marketing results in 2017? What are some of the best practices you see working that can help B2B companies continue innovate and be successful and proactive on the acquisition side but really to take a full lifecycle, full lifetime value approach to the customer? What does it take to run and execute marketing in that fast-paced environment where you are expecting and hoping, the entire company wants fast results but that doesn’t always jive with buying cycles, doesn’t always jive with just what it takes to do marketing, right? How do you balance that tension? What about the cultural changes that are sometimes involved in helping organizations, helping sales, helping executive team, helping a board rethink how to look at what marketing is doing more on the quality versus quantity standpoint? Were there any growing pains or I guess like migration pains as you moved the way marketing is perceived from a volume-based story to a quality at conversion-based story? Was that difficult for even sort of sales counterparts let alone C-suite and board to understand and get behind? Listen to the show for the answers and more.

Our guest is Jon Miller, CEO and Co-Founder of Engagio. Here are some of the questions Matt covers: When did you see the ABM wave coming? At what point did you start to realize that lead-based wasn’t going to cut it anymore? One of my biggest concerns with the term ABM is the “marketing” part of it, but “everything” feels to broad. How do you think about that? Culture is a big part of making ABM work internally. How do you encourage people to make the right internal moves to be successful with ABM? This isn’t all-or-nothing right? How does ABM integrate with other key marketing priorities moving forward? About our guest: Jon Miller Jon is a marketing entrepreneur and thought leader. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of Engagio, an account-centric platform to orchestrate and measure Account Based Marketing and Sales Development efforts at named accounts. Previously, Jon was a co-founder at Marketo (Nasdaq:MKTO), a leader in marketing automation. Marketing technology innovator, with previous leadership roles at Epiphany and Xchange, plus board/advisory roles at Scripted, Newscred, and Optimizely.

Attribution, analytics and analyzing data is today's topic. What does the report say? Does it accurately display the past and does it accurately help us predict the future? Marketers are in a world of big data. We've gone from nothing to overload. So there is a lot to help marketers in high tech and not in high tech of how to best use the data available to them. "How do I interpret the data?" Perhaps a better question is, "What answers and knowledge am I seeking to move forward?" You need to organize the metrics to interpret the metrics. The questions of what you seek are critical. Do we have the fundamental metrics that the business needs to understand the health of the business? Within the channels of my function, how do I use metrics to ensure that my efforts are working? Do we have the capabilities to answer the adhoc questions that come up in business? Listen to this show to get a more organized list of what you need to know first before you even pull the data. About our guest, Jeff Day: Jeff is a Marketing and Product Management executive with a focus on startup and high-growth technology companies. Jeff excels at applying the right mix of marketing for the right stage of company in order to maximize growth. With 20 years of proven success with companies such as Highspot, DomainTools, Apptio, Enodo Software, HP, PolyServe and Intel, he has run all aspects of marketing and delivered industry-leading software and hardware products. He is passionate about working with high growth product companies to help drive marketing and product strategy, build happy and productive teams and maximize company success.

Our guest this episode is Don Gregory, the founder of On-Target Consulting. Some of the points covered are: The importance of gathering market insights, marketing intelligence, doing research to understand what the markets is interested in. About the importance of having those insights at the front of the process to guide and help navigate product development, message development, et cetera. If you are highly confident that you know your customer, you know your marketplace, your competition, emerging trends with your consumers, you can argue that you don’t need to get insight early on in the process of going to market and figuring out how to take products and services to market. The reality is that most companies and most leaders really don’t have that insight. What makes it worse is that many of the companies in my opinion who are providing market research are providing facts and data, they are really not driving to try to understand the consumer, what the consumer is looking for whether it be B2B, B2C, it really does not make any difference, the process is the same. Matt asked, "Why is it so important to make sure you are approaching this research right? Maybe a different way of asking that is what it is sometimes dangerous to have company insiders do their own research?" Don responded with, "Their bias to start with. And they don’t know that many… I do the research completely inside and go out I bring a natural bias to me, with me as I do that investigation. And the rigor has to be impartial and has to be neutral. When I am looking for an answer to a question, I have to have integrity in process and in actions to make sure that I work an honest answer to what I am looking for versus – here is my assumption on what the answer is therefore am going to ask the question to assume and get the answer that I am looking for. And it is subtle because when you are on the inside I don’t think you understand that bias that you carry and that’s why I think the rigor for having somebody or some organization from the outside who has the expertise in looking in at business situations as well as the business savvy to really look and understand sort of what the key questions are. Once you understand what they key questions are, the areas of investigation are, then to effectively find out the answers to those questions." Listen to the full episode to learn more.

Matt's annual, "What he read in the year" episode is here. This is a great place for a filtered reading list. Some familiar authors in this list and some you may not have had a chance to read. I love the One True Barbecue and how it applies to business. Have recommendations? Add them in the comments. Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini Anything on the science of influence is absolutely fascinating to me – whether it’s about influencing fans, customers or myself. Cialdini’s book Influence is a classic, and this sequel/prequel is a must-read to understand how your sales team (and marketing/content teams) can set the conditions for influence and conversion better in 2017. The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need by Anthony Iannarino If it weren’t for all the other great sales books on the market (this year and in recent years), I’d say the title of this book is 100% the truth. Anthony is one of the very best sales bloggers and speakers working today, and this book summarizes much of his very best advice. I highly recommend expanding your sales library, but if there is just one book on the shelf, this should probably be it. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette A fascinating and fast read, with numerous business lessons included. What differentiates a trend from a fad? How can you tell you have something sustainable and repeatable? The story of the rise and fall (both fast & dramatic) of the Beanie Baby craze is chronicled with a great combination of business advice and juicy insider stories. A fun read with value. High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results by Mark Hunter The most important, eternal, fundamental sales skill is prospecting. Whether you’re working ice-cold leads or warm inquiries from your marketing team, you’re still prospecting. Activity and volume isn’t enough. This book features new trends and research, plus a proven framework of habits to accelerate your sales pipeline-building results in 2017. More Sales, Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Today’s Crazy-Busy Sellers by Jill Konrath Every one of Jill’s books have been fanastic, but this might be her best yet. She’s previously covered how to work with crazy-busy buyers, now she addresses the problem every single sales rep I know has – how to make best use of their time to increase active selling time, external impact and results. The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog by Rein Fertel I’ll give away the punchline – according to Rein, the only “true” barbecue is 1) whole hog, 2) cooked over wood in 3) a masonry pit. A difficult combination for amateur BBQ enthusiasts to replicate, but this amazing book covers the history of whole-hog BBQ while simultaneously covering the history and anthropology of the Carolinas. If you like BBQ or history or good story-telling, you’ll like this book. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight What separates this book from so many other business autobiographies is its focus, candor and detail. It’s not an ego-driven puff piece, nor does it sugar-coat what growing a business is like. The book starts with Phil’s inspiration to start the business, and ends before the IPO. In between, he highlights the numerous times Nike almost didn’t make it, almost ran out of money, almost went out of business – yet somehow figured out (or stumbled into) how to keep moving forward. It's a story of humility and gratitude. One of the best books I’ve read on the real story of entrepreneurship in a long time. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eli Goldratt This book was originally written in 1984, but I re-read it earlier this year to reinforce Eli’s Theory of Constraints. Think about your business today – what’s the #1 constraint keeping you from growing, that when alleviated would help everything else work more efficiently? This book is a great example of business fiction (if you’ve read Five Disfunctions of a Team, you know the format). Spinach in Your Boss’s Teeth: Essential Etiquette for Professional Success by Arden Clise This book is a differentiator. It covers what all too often is a lost art of habits, manners, mannerisms and more that get noticed, differentiate you as someone special, and can material help you win more business. Maybe not on your “mainstream” business reading list but it should be. Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens Published as a set of letters to a struggling and fellow former SEAL, this book pulls deeply from ancient literature and lessons on what resilience means, how it applies to our lives, and how to apply it to make ourselves better – personally, professionally and in all points between. This is the last book I read this year and might be my favorite of the bunch. REQUESTING YOUR ASSISTANCE - Trying to find who orignally said, "The Path to Su

Matt Heinz and Sales Pipeline Radio producer, Paul Roberts talk about Profit Center Marketing. Here's how you know if you are doing it right. IF you can related to any of the next three points, it's time to make a change: If your marketing team is more focused on picking the right t-shirts for an event, rather than driving opportunities into the sales organization. If your marketing department resembles an arts and crafts department. When you report on operational metrics as opposed to business metrics. CEOs don't care about clicks and retweets, about your open rates and probably don't care about your qualified leads. So changing the thinking to changing it up to become a profit center requires this type of question: What do we have to do to get a blank check from the CFO of marketing? "Give me a dollar and I'll make you three." THAT will gain their interest and they will then ask, "How long can you do that? Can you do it every month?" THIS is how you get the blank check. Keep listening. Matt will give you a to-do list to head toward this goal.

The buying committee internally is getting larger and more complex. We are talking about account based marketing and strategies to get into the fold of these more complex groups of decision makers. What is Account Based Marketing to you? Jessica says, "Account Based Marketing (ABM) is really understanding who is your target audience and building a marketing mix around going after that target audience. And, along the way, building your sales force in the mix so you can align the sales messages with the marketing strategy. THis helps them close more deals, faster and with a larger contract value. It makes your entire sales orgnaization more efficient. Instead of throwing them over the wall and hoping they make it, ABM lines up the budget behind those targets and budgets with these goals." A number being quoted regularly is that six people are typically involved in the purchase process. Many times it's way more than that in enterprise companies. You need to focus on the person who is actually signing the contract, but you have to gain buy-in by the committee. This reuqires that sales brings the same message developed by marketing. Jessica has a list of tips in this show. Get your pen out. About Jessica Fewless, DemandBase After 3.5 years at Demandbase (and 20+ years in B2B Marketing), Jessica has seen it all when it comes to Account-Based Marketing. Playing an instrumental role in Demandbase’s rollout of an ABM strategy, and educating over 1000 B2B marketers on the principles of ABM over the last 18 months, Jessica has become a resident expert. From building the right target account list and understanding the impact of ABM on marketing programs, to selling ABM within an organization and finding budget for your strategy, Jessica has worked with organizations to build, hone and measure the success of their own ABM strategies.

Storytelling is a compelling way to build interest, get to know prospects, build trust and create connections. Paul Smith is THE utlimate storytelling coach. He's a best selling author of three books on this topic. Learn this tool to put everyone at ease, give you more enjoyment from prospecting and building relationships and make you more memorable. Some of the questions Matt will be asking Paul Smith: What exactly is a sales story? How is it different from a sales pitch and can you give us an example? Why do you think stories are so effective? What separates a great sales story from a simply good or average or boring one? Would you share tips on how to choose the right story to tell, and how to determine the right time to tell it? You suggest in the book that great stories -- even great sales stories -- have a surprise ending. Why is that necessary? And how do you create a surprise ending in a story that isn’t surprising? How long should a sales story be? One of the questions you asked professional buyers when you interviewed them was, “What is it that makes a sales pitch sound like a sales pitch?” How did they answer that question? And how can you avoid sounding like that? What are some of the most common mistakes you see in storytelling? Is it okay to make up a sales story? Or does everything in a story need to be 100% true? About our guest: Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on organizational storytelling. He’s a keynote speaker, storytelling coach, and author of the books Sell with a Story, Parenting with a Story, and the bestseller Lead with a Story already in its 8th printing and available in 6 language around the world. Paul is also a former consultant at Accenture and former executive and 20-year veteran of The Procter & Gamble Company. As part of his research on the effectiveness of storytelling, Paul has personally interviewed over 250 CEOs, executives, leaders, and salespeople in 25 countries, documenting over 2,000 individual stories. Leveraging those stories and interviews, Paul identified the components of effective storytelling, and developed templates and tools to apply them in practice. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, Time, Forbes, The Washington Post, PR News, and Success Magazine, among others. Paul delivers professional workshops and keynote addresses on effective storytelling for leaders and salespeople. His clients include international giants like Hewlett Packard, Ford Motor Company, Bayer Medical, Abbott, Novartis, Progressive Insurance, Kaiser Permanente, and Procter & Gamble.

James Muir, the author of The Perfect Close. He's an accidental salesperson. Started out in operations assisting the sales team. He was drafted without knowing how to advance a meeting to the next stage. He created this method as an outcome of his own experience. Statistically, what happens is no question is asked to advance the sales. 50-90% of sales meetings end without a salesperson asking for any commitment, depending on the industry. This number is way higher than those who ask "incorrectly" - at least they ASK. What is it in the psychology of sales or people that prevents them from asking for the sale? If salespeople are not comfortable with the method they've been taught - manipulative - they won't do it at all. Teach them away that is in alignment with their personal values, there is no difficulty asking Visit puremuir.com - free report - 7 Deadly Sins of Closing In this episode, James Muir covered: 1. Fear of asking too early or being pushy. 2. Fear of the "No". Both of these involved in feeling manipulative or moving the process too fast. You need to have an idea of your ideal outcome of the meeting, but you should also have a couple of positive alternatives. Catch this full episode for more tips and check out James' site - puremuir.com

Host, Robert Pease welcomed Justin Johnson, CEO LeadMethod. This is about the challenges and opportunities of a scaled distribution model - through partners, resellers, distributors, outside reps. Some of what LeadMethod tackles is the fundamental challenge unique to channel partners distribution vs. opt in, direct method. To get the critical feedback to better understand who is where in your pipeline. This is a challenge they tackle to add to your efficiency. There are so many different elements that companies are creating in order to come together to collaborate and communicate that sometimes it falls apart. How do you get enough data to draw conclusions on what is actually working with partner networks? It becomes a black hole of information. Engaging the distribution group and collecting the critical feedback --THIS is key. You have to look at why CRMs were built. Understanding what the the customer bought, who they bought it from; and then it morphed into a lead management system. But they take a lot of training. Listen to more of the clarification and reasoning behind channel sales enablement in this episode.

Our guest today is Jim Ninivaggi, Senior VP of Strategic Partnerships at Brainshark, Inc. Some of what we are covering in this episode is: How do you define sales enablement? Can you walk us through the evolution of the sales enablement function? What did it look like five years ago? What’s the state of sales enablement today? Where do you see sales enablement one year from now? What are some key, top-of-mind issues that sales enablement leaders are focused on? What are some issues they may not be focused on but should be? About our guest: Jim Ninivaggi is senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Brainshark, Inc., a leading sales enablement solutions company. He has three decades of experience studying and driving sales productivity. Prior to Brainshark, Jim founded and led the sales enablement research practice at research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions – publishing hundreds of research briefs, reports, and blog posts during his 10 years at the firm, and helping shape and raise awareness for the sales enablement space. Ways to connect with Jim Ninivaggi and learn more about Brainshark: Brainshark, Inc. (www.brainshark.com) – a leading provider of sales enablement solutions for training, coaching and buyer engagement, helping companies close more deals faster. Brainshark Integration Engine – newly announced, this connects all the content, data and applications in organizations’ sales enablement ecosystems. Continual enhancements to Brainshark for Coaching, Brainshark’s award-winning sales coaching solution. Brainshark for Coaching empowers sales managers to coach their teams anytime, anywhere – so reps are prepared to capitalize on every sales interaction.

Campaign refined emails are the key. Can't just put it in the byte bucket. Everyone is too busy. Lead Gnome is that solution to find the pockets of value the rest of the market is ignoring. Matt didn't see any solution to accomplish what he needed, so he built it. It's looking for insights into the internal buying machines. Surprising enough you can gain a lot of insights from "out of office" messages. You will basically be given the org chart of the company. They looked at trigger events and campaigns around bounces. A bounced email happens when someone leaves the company. "Matt's no longer with the company, but Sally is here..." This gives you a lot of information and opportunity for an introduction and you can look for Matt at his next company, which is probably in a similar position. You can get two contacts from the one bounce. Who did Matt replace? Where did Sally leave to take Matt's old job? This is 4 contacts from one bounce. This is about unpacking the information in the body of the email, this is not scraping. This is human written information in the body. This was just in the first 8 minutes. You need this replay! About our guest, Matt Benati: Matt Benati is the CEO and Co-founder of LeadGnome, an innovative Account Based Intelligence web service that mines email responses to deliver account-specific contacts, enhance existing leads, and provide actionable sales intelligence. Matt is a passionate believer that sales and marketing alignment, transparency, and communication optimize revenue generation, and he champions this philosophy in his teams and writings. He participates actively in the market-changing FlipMyFunnel, Account Based Marketing, and Account Based Everything communities. Matt is a contributor at the Account-Based everything hub. Matt’s previous positions include VP Marketing at LogMeIn, VP Global Marketing at Attunity and senior roles at Netezza and IBM. You can follow Matt on Twitter at @mattbenati.

Our guest, Jamie Shanks tells us he was doing Sales 2.0 and went BK doing so. He needed to change with the buyer and he was missing that step. Social Selling became a survival mechanism. He reversed the selling process to leverage social media. That's how it started. 03:45 : Matt asked, "What is your definition of social selling in late 2016 and what does it mean for professional sales people?" Jamie asked us to picture three circles, like a Venn diagram. The intersecting middle is what social selling is. There are three types of sales processes Insight based selling Trigger based selling Referral based selling Conversion of those three processes is what social selling is. His new book is Social Selling Mastery and is available on Amazon. It has become a go-to resource for social selling. 05:45 Matt asked if Jamie still sees the companies that continue to block social media sites in house and see it as a distraction. REALLY? That still goes on? You may be surprised at Jamie's answer. You'll have to tune in to hear his observations. "I get that we have those tools and that they can amplify our messages and brand to our customer..." About our guest, Jamie Shanks, CEO, Sales for Life: Jamie Shanks is a world leading Social Selling expert, responsible for pioneering the space. Jamie Shanks has trained 1,000’s of sales professionals from Fortune 500 companies to solopreneurs.

Sales and sales training have been our guest, Deb Calvert's, passion since she was a child earning money for extra weeks at summer camp. You need to catch the beginning of this show to hear how she was originally motivated to get into sales. She talked about 8 reasons we'd ever ask a question are summarized in DISCOVER (this is an acronym). Most sales people only ask questions for 3-4 reasons. If you open it up to all 8, you open yourself up to be of real value in the conversation and prospects will share the same with you. Let's start within the first five seconds of meeting someone to make you more elegant and effective at advancing sales.Shoot her an email and she'll send you this list of questions. [email protected] Her site has a lot of free tools to getting prospects to the point of curiosity fast to learn more about what you are offering. Visit PeopleFirstPS.com She has a great book: DISCOVER Questions(tm) Get You Connected – LISTENER SPECIAL! BOOKMARK this page. It is continuously updated. Some of what she and Matt are talking about the survey that asks you "When were you at your personal best?" This goes through March. This is how she gathers valuable information. A bit about Deb Calvert: Deb Calvert, “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected” author, Top 50 Sales Influencer, UC-Berkeley instructor. Deb leads the Stop Selling & Start Leading movement and offers sales training, coaching and leadership development programs. Deb is certified as an executive and sales coach and is a Certified Master of The Leadership Challenge®. Building Organizational Strength by Putting People First. We focus on the people parts of business, including: - Coaching for Executives, Managers & Sales Teams - Leadership Development for Leaders at Every Level - Training for Managers and Sales Professionals - Consulting on Team Effectiveness, Sales Productivity, Sales Selection - Keynote addresses on DISCOVER Questions®, sales productivity, leadership connectivity Specialties: - MBTI Certified Practitioner - Certified Executive Coach, the CEC (ICF) - Full curriculum for sales team training, customized to your industry & market - Author of the DISCOVER Questions® book series and questioning model

Our guest is Lara Shackelford of Altify. Altify sells to sales professionals. With their software, every sales rep can sell like your BEST sales rep. More reveals followed at DreamForce as it ties to AI and Einstein. Matt asked what AI means to sales and marketing leaders. Lara told us, "It's important to bring the augmented intelligence piece to help humans perform better. An example - a sales rep is working 4-5 deals critical for the quarter, with our software they can be notified if a change is noticed affecting their influence on the sales decisions by looking at more than past data." Matt then asked if there is there a difference between augmented and predictive analytics and intelligence. Lara gave a quick overview: Predictive - predicts what will happen in the future based on a lot of data. This involves high quantity of data. Augmented takes knowledge and context into providing a solution and be able to flag insights to alert the human to be more effective and generate results based on the data and knowledge. This has been the missing piece - the CONTEXT. This helps guide the next best step. Catch the replay of this show to get more insights from Lara Shackelford. More about Lara Shackelford: Lara is a leader in marketing strategy, innovation and execution, building market prominence for some of the largest technology enterprise companies as well as the most innovative Silicon Valley startups. She is known for creating a culture of success that enables brands to clarify, amplify and elevate their share of voice in a crowded marketplace. As EVP and CMO of Altify (Formerly The TAS Group), Lara is responsible for driving market leadership, global awareness, alliances and channels, demand generation, product marketing, content marketing strategy, and strategic events.

Our guest today is Joe Chernov. He's VP of Marketing @InsightSquared. He also lends a hand to startups and wildlife causes when he can. Diving right in, he says, "It's unbelievable what you can get done if you don't care if you get fired!" Talking about his experience at Eloqua, "If we were to publish something that is valuable, we could edge our way into deeper coverage by the media." Scorecard - even though we're not supposed to keep score: 16 articles after spending 2 years developing a product and writing up the release. An infographic got 800 articles. Very eye-opening. Joe says, "Content marketing is what happens when a marketing department shifts its thinking from knowing that the company that signs their paychecks needs to shift to the customer signs the paycheck." That shift in mindset turned collateral into an ebook, a self-serving whitepaper into a more valuable, lengthy piece of content. Shifting strategies from serving the executive to serving the buyer changes everything. Q. Is there a concern we are flooding the world with content so much so that it will no longer work at some point? A. There is more content marketing happening which makes it more and more difficult for signals to be heard, but that's only the surface. 50% of a company's content never gets used. It puts more pressure on originality. We've rested on our laurels a bit. Definitive guides, whitepapers - been done years ago by the industry leaders. Q. What are the ways you distinguishing your efforts at InsightSquared to stand out? A. Trying to apply some of the ethos that makes good content marketing - serving the BUYER. Applying it to direct mail. Rather than a coffee mug or t-shirt with logo on it. Something more original. If we close loosely - demo, in funnel - we try to accelerate them coming back. Postcard: Come Running Back - link on back to enter your shoe size. Gets them a pair of Nikes WITHOUT logo. The deal isn't done. Think creatively. Be memorable. Keep the conversation, interest and value going. Hear more solutions, reveals and ideas in the full replay. Get to know our guest, Joe, a bit better. TWITTER | LINKEDIN

Nationally respected business etiquette coach, Arden Clise is our guest for this episode. She has just published her book, "Spinach in your boss' teeth" available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and on her site: CliseEtiquette.com . This is a great gift for your team or for you. Many of the tips SHOULD be obvious, but perhaps you weren't paying attention when your mother tried to clue you in. She covers dining, online etiquette, business tips to make your value shine. Her specialty is assisting clients to confidently and comfortably navigate business situations. Some of what we covered in this episode includes these highlights: When is it appropriate to use your digital device in a meeting? Boomers are really bothered by people pulling out devices in meetings, texting, etc. If you are in a meeting, do not pull out your phones in the meeting. Start with that. If you are leading the meeting, set the tone at the beginning of the meeting. "Please put your devices away during this meeting." When you pull devices out, not only do you miss subtle clues and information, it signals to them that the phone is more important than the person in front of you. This should be obvious. It's become a pacifier for people in meetings - something to fidget with. We know some people use it as a note taking device.If you have to use your computer/device - let them know that's what you are doing - taking notes and then ONLY TAKE NOTES - DO NOT get distracted. IMPORTANT FACT: Use pen and paper - you actually learn it better, retain more AND there is not doubt you are taking notes and not pretending to take notes while checking the game scores or Facebook. When you are using a laptop/tablet to take notes, you are not able to be as present and you miss some of the non-verbal cues. Multi-tasking is a myth. Non-verbal cues can be the difference between building the relationship and wasting everyone's time. On the phone: Without body language cues, we have to rely on our TONE on the phone - a warmer tone - really helps. SMILING while you are talking. It immediately puts warmth in our voices. Sounds corny, but it works. PLEASE JUST STOP saying my name every few seconds - it is SO phony - it makes us cringe. Use the name of the person ONCE perhaps twice, beginning and end, but that's it. Interrupting people. Without body language you can't tell when they are wrapping up. Let them pause and end before you jump in! You will get your chance. A bit of air in a conversation can draw more attention to what you say next. Use that to your advantage. Dining etiquette: Find out if your guest has food restrictions. No sense taking vegans to a steakhouse. Don't put the decision of "where" on them. Suggest a great restaurant for them after you know their restrictions or preferences. Make the arrangements - make it easy on them and arrive early. Avoid the awkward check grab - have cashier/maître d run card as you're leaving and arrange with server ahead of time. Round table full of settings - which parts are yours, which are your neighbor's? Simple thing to remember: BMW - Bread (left) meal (middle) WATER (glasses on the right). Networking question: Hug or handshake? Ask, "Can I give you a hug?" - let them make a move - if you already know them and have met. Handshake is ALWAYS appropriate. Who is the book for? ANYONE who has ever wondered how to handle etiquette dilemmas in the workplace. Amazon or Barnes & Noble or CliseEtiquette.com to buy the book. Visiting Arden's site will allow you to sign up for her newsletters, too. You'll have to listen to the full episode and TAKE NOTES.

Jim Obermayer sitting in for Matt today with guest, Ken Thoreson, of Acumen Management Group. Their firm is focused on execution, discipline, accountability to the sales organization. He has just published his fourth book in a series: SLAMMED: for the first time sales manager. The other three in the series are: Recruiting High Performance Sales Teams Leading High Performance Sales Teams Creating High Performance Sales Compensation Plans Some of what is covered in the book includes: How do you on-board a new sales manager? Within 6 months, new sales managers are usually slammed. Leadership and management skills playing together don't usually get taught. Lifespan of a sales manager is about 18 months.Marketing will go back and write a new plan, but the sales managers get fired. New sales managers seem to focus on micro issues, tracking numbers and activity, and forget they need to have emotional leadership and inspire people to execute. It is the manager's job to instill work ethic, intensity, high levels of performance and interest in creating high levels of results. The sales manager typically will ask, "What are you going to do today? What are your goals for the day?" The stunned sales person stammers a defensive reply, "I'm going to get on the phone...I'm going to call prospects.." At the end of the day, what determines the level of success you had for the day? On AcumenManagement.com there are a ton of free tools, including, Top 40 actions a sales manager must activate to create predictable revenue." Jim asked Ken,"What is the biggest challenge you see a new sales manager has in the first 2-3 months?" First, you have to set priorities based on the situation. Assume you are walking into a turnaround role - sales are poor...observe, reflect, make a few changes so the team sees that things are getting fixed. Then you go about setting priorities, goals and then expressing your vision of what you want to achieve over the next 90 days to 6 months. Most act too quickly or chew off more than they can achieve. If you are walking into a role where you are replacing someone successful. Then it's sitting back again and understanding the players, building trust first. Ken finds that there is a lot of talk in struggling organizations about "them" and "us" or "those people." There is a line between WE as a team. That line needs to be broken down immediately for the vision, direction and belief of where you are going. This is building culture. Listen to the full episode to get more insights.

Content Marketing, the term didn't exist 12 Years ago - let's review - We used to create a 10 second TV ad to send consumer to a website to fill out a form. We've evolved into industry, job level, geographic filters, rather than simply send the inquiry to IT. The precision of targeting has become so much more sophisticated. There is then a splintering of attention. We are talking MICROSECONDS for the initial and ongoing conversations. "The noise and clutter are at insane levels." NetLine addresses the HUMAN side of business. Problem-solving centric. You speak to the millisecond mindset. Perhaps you convey this with an image that displays the problem-solving you will do for them in the ONE glance to get them to stay and read more or take another action. As you've grown in NetLine, what have you learned? "DELEGATION is key. People take it for granted that it's easily done. This is something that would impede my success if I insisted on controlling all aspects. This includes being more communicative in my team and with our partners." 9:45: Where are you seeing some of these things going - precision of campaigns, splintering, attention span? "This backs into the stage of the consumer lifecycle. Video is certainly really hot right now, but it's not predisposed to lead generation." He also covered infographics, user expectations that a lot of this should be ungated. eBook success has been huge. If they are done well, they take complicated topics and distill them into humanized value points with more personality." This is the evolution of whitepapers. To get more "where we were, where we are going" insights, listen to the full episode. About our guest, David Fortino: David Fortino, SVP Audience and Product at NetLine Corporation brings a wealth of expertise in developing strategic distribution partnerships. His core strength lies in expanding targeted and contextually relevant audiences through strategic relationships and channel partnerships spanning leading industry marketplaces.

It starts with the sales managers, and it then goes to the training, coaching and support THOSE managers receive. How can they pass it down unless they know it as they breathe? Steven Rosen has over 15 years of executive experience. His fresh approach to corporate leadership, strategy development, execution and team-building in the pharmaceutical and packaged goods sectors defined his success. His expertise in aligning sales and marketing initiatives to achieve key business results and exceed customer expectations has continually exceeded sales objectives from his days as a sales rep to his achievements as a VP of sales for Alcon and Biovail. If you manage sales managers, check out starresults.com and sign up for any guide you can find there, including the The 2016 Managers' Survey: Key takeaways Coaching Key performance Hiring Business acumen Leadership The answer to sales related problems can be an app, a program, a widget - but it may not solve the problem of RESULTS. Sales Management coaching drives more sales. Managers ranked the lowest on coaching. 53% of companies are providing some sort of coaching, training and development. Only 44% of companies had a well-defined, well-understood coaching program.

Let's start with her first book, Predictable Revenue. Page 42 - formula in the Predictable Revenue book. Dogear it, bookmark in your Kindle version. This is what you need to focus on. Her latest book, Predictable Prospecting, is the result of the thesis of page 42. She spent five years developing this book by working with clients in the field to consolidate and fine-tune, grow the formula, scientifically focus to get benchmark of conversion rates and ratios that will add up to a predictable revenue framework.And then honing in on specific pieces, buckets, and components to put this channel in as part of a mutli-channel marketing effort to generate revenue in targeted accounts with the highest likelihood of closing with the highest revenue potential. Blending the knowledge of marketing, flipping it sideways and pulling out the pieces that will resonate with those at the top of funnel - this is one stream - OUTREACH for large accounts that close quickly. Premise in Predictable Revenue is the separation of roles. Let's start with Hardworker = habit, consistency That is the role of a prospector. They have to make calls, they have to have conversation. Top of funnel we worry about 5 different levels of awareness. unaware disruptive awareness problem aware - but not sure what the solution is or could be found solution found where to get the solution How do we figure out where they are, how do we start the conversation and how do we move them along? Catch this full replay here. Marylou tells us, "I’m Founder of Strategic Pipeline, a Fortune 1000 sales process improvement consulting group. Our client roster includes prestigious companies - Apple, Bose, AMA, Talend, CIBC, Gartner, Prudential, UPS, Logitech, Orkin, AAA and Mastercard. I’m also co-author of the #1 Bestseller Predictable Revenue. It's sold over 50,000 copies with 250+ reviews (avg. 4.3 stars). And my new book (McGraw-Hill August 2016) is titled Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your Sales B2B Pipeline. I specialize in optimizing top-of-funnel sales process and implementing predictable new sales opportunity engines. My approach walks clients through a 7-point outreach process/framework that is part behavioral, part predictive and part creative (persuasive storytelling)." Connect with her: LinkedIn Twitter Website

Mark Hunter is here to talk about sales. His new book: High Profit Prospecting, and his best seller give him the credibility that you need to listen in, take notes. We dove right in. If you have to discount the price to close the deal, that means you are prospecting the wrong people. You can't make a WalMart shopper into a Nordstrom Customer. Social Media without Social Community is Social Stupidity. It's a conduit. You must have something to share that is of value. Think about this, too - how to leave an 8-11 second voice mail message. Stop embarrassing yourself. Matt reminds us that phone and email are NOT dead. The phone is the most valuable tool he uses. Stop being afraid to prospect and defaulting to social media. Don't hide behind social posts, tweets, likes, and emoticons. PICK UP THE TELEPHONE. It's an amazing tool when used right. You should learn one piece of information about them in the first call and begin to engage them. Do you have call or prospecting reluctance? Why? You don't have to close them in the first call. Your objective is to earn the right, privilege and respect to be able to call them again. COLD calling is dead. NOT CALLING, COLD CALLING is dead. You need to know something about them, their industry, their pain. There are valuable tips in this episode, questions you need to ask yourself and your reps. About Mark Hunter: (LinkedIn) (Twitter) (Website) Mark Hunter is "The Sales Hunter." He helps companies and salespeople find and retain better customers. He is also the author of the best-selling book, High-Profit Selling. He is recognized as one of the "Top 50 Most Influential Sales and Marketing Leaders." All of this has him traveling globally nearly 230 days per year, working with companies to help them grow their top-line sales and bottom-line profits. He is known for his sales growth strategies and consultative selling approach to business. Mark Hunter is frequently quoted in the media and is a keynote speaker at major conferences on the subject of sales and sales leadership. His sales techniques are in use today by salespeople on 5 continents and in more than 100 different countries.