Sales Pipeline Radio

Profit Center Marketing

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.

 

Selling ABM Internally with Jessica Fewless

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.  

Sales Story vs. Sales Pitch - Quick tips to create both

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:

1. What exactly is a sales story? How is it different from a sales pitch and can you give us an example?
2. Why do you think stories are so effective? 
3. What separates a great sales story from a simply good or average or boring one? 
4. Would you share tips on how to choose the right story to tell, and how to determine the right time to tell it?
5. 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?
6. How long should a sales story be?
7. 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?
8. What are some of the most common mistakes you see in storytelling?
9. 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 8^th 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.

 

The Perfect Close and 7 Deadly Sins of Closing - James Muir

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 

The many challenges of channel sales enablement & engagement with Justin Johnson

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.

The Continued Evolution of the Sales Enablement Function

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.

Unpacking insights from a bounced email to create 4 connections using ABM

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.

Social Selling Mastery Tips from Jamie Shanks.

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.

Stop selling & start leading - dialogic vs. diagnostic

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. deb.calvert@peoplefirstps.com

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

Augmented Intelligence vs. Predictive Analytics with Lara Shackelford

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.