Sales Pipeline Radio

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

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 Even

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 requ

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 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. T

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 yo

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 ex

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 leadersh

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 Marke

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 r

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 summari

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

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 contrac

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