Joining us for today’s show is Milan Malivuk, the Director of Growth and Acquisition Marketing at Intellitix. We are going to take a deep dive into one of the hottest topics in B2B Marketing: Revenue Attribution.&nbsp;&nbsp; Simply put, Revenue Attribution is the ability to trace each dollar of revenue back to the marketing or sales activity that originally sourced the opportunity. Why this topic?&nbsp; CEOs and Chief Revenue Officers need to understand what sales and marketing activities help influence a revenue booking. Once you can quantify the value of those activities, then you can attribute revenue back to the activities that produced the revenue and use those insights to guide your marketing and sales investments. Our guest today&nbsp;has a proven record of accomplishment in revenue marketing and the ability to tie marketing investment to revenue.&nbsp; Few B2B marketers have fully closed the loop to attribute revenue to each touch.&nbsp; This podcast episode is a resource to understand how to implement revenue attribution.&nbsp;  In the first segment Milan describes covers the fundamentals to bring clarity to the subject and why it's important.&nbsp; Marketing Contribution is often confused with Attribution.&nbsp;&nbsp;  How do you describe Revenue Attribution? What is the business value of Revenue Attribution to you as a marketing leader? What is the value of Revenue Attribution to the Chief Revenue Officer, the CEO and the Board?&nbsp;  Segment two goes deep with Milan on how to implement.&nbsp; Literally, Milan is one of the few marketing leaders who has implemented real revenue attribution measures.&nbsp; Listen to the show to hear the process Milan undertook to make it happen, including:&nbsp;  How did you prepare your team? What changes were required with sales operations to close the loop? What activities were required by your team to implement, and did you implement Revenue Attribution in stages? What technology was required?&nbsp;  The final segment explain the output of revenue attribution. What should the reports include and how to present to the executive team.&nbsp;

Revenue Attribution: Connect the Dots between Marketing Spend and Revenue

Our guest today is Gabe Larson, the VP of InsideSales Labs for InsideSales.com. Having spent five years as the VP of Inside Sales, Gabe spends a lot of time giving us a behind-the-scenes look at building and operating on the best sales development rep teams that we've ever had the benefit of examining.&nbsp; InsideSales.com has&nbsp;has experienced tremendous growth and the SDR role has played a significant role by filling the funnel with quality opportunities.&nbsp; Listen as Gabe and I demonstrate how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities that will drive revenue growth for your company. If you prefer to watch a HD Video of the interview, click here.&nbsp; So why this topic? Marketing is going to contribute to about 30% of the pipeline, which means the sales needs to generate the remaining 70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. So, lead quality and lead to opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep.&nbsp; Gabe reveals, “Prospecting has become an interesting concept, especially in the tech space. How do you build that go to market strategy when it comes to structure? We've broken it down into three key areas: small business, medium business, and enterprise business. But to facilitate a bigger pipeline, we jumped on the train, and now have, what I consider to be one of the biggest innovations in sales in the last decade, and that is that sales development team.” We begin with Gabe proving a sense of place by outlining the InsideSales.com sales organization and the various roles involved in prospecting for new customers. We then dive into the business case for the investment in building the Sales Development team of SDRs.&nbsp;&nbsp; In the middle segment of the show Gabe describes the prospecting process, the steps of engagement and how to make it easy to execute with technology.&nbsp; We wrap up this segment by discussing the marketing support required to empower the SDR team, and how the SDR team support the marketing efforts to drive your buyers to your content and events.&nbsp; The SDR career track is a hotly debated topic among sales leadership, and we discuss the career opportunities the SDR role provides for the sales force.&nbsp; Gabe explains:&nbsp; "There is a career track, and that's the great thing about stratification. You can come in as a mid-market SDR and move into an inbound rep, hone your skill, get the practice, and then move into that enterprise role. That's sometimes a year, a couple of years, but at that point, you're a pretty good prospector. Then if you want to jump into the closer role, you have the SMB track, the mid-market and enterprise. Very rarely do we push people obviously, from sales development into enterprise. But it was fantastic to move them into a mid-market or to an SMB type of role." We summarize the show by describing the top metrics that indicate success and/or failure of the prospecting process.&nbsp; Make sure to take the time to listen to the full postcast. The&nbsp;level of execution that Gabe describes will have sales leaders taking notes on how to execute and run a high performance SDR team.&nbsp;&nbsp;

How to Run a High Performance SDR Team

Our guest on SBI TV is Ryan Leavitt, the Chief Revenue Officer for LearnCore. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur who knows how to drive revenue growth which is the lifeblood of an emerging business. I can’t think of a better guest than Ryan to share best practices in sales prospecting to fill the funnel. Ryan and I discuss how to fill the funnel with real sales opportunities. Ryan shares his knowledge of lead production, specifically what percent of leads marketing produces versus what the sales team needs to produce on their own. And how prospecting and technology platforms are used to support prospecting efforts and produce sales leads. This is a fascinating show where Ryan shares his prospecting methodology, lead cycle length, and his lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, in comparison to his competitors. Turn to the 11-minute mark of the video to watch how Ryan helps his sellers facilitate buyer investigation of their problems early in their purchasing process. Matt and Ryan discuss how precisely Mike’s team makes this happen at LearnCore: “Prospecting is all about discipline and setting goals. Your prospecting methodology won't matter if the team doesn’t put in the effort. It’ s a volume game, in which discipline is required for success. The biggest challenge of prospecting is finding the people that are going to put in that effort and are going to focus on it and be disciplined about it. What we do to find potential buyers early in the buying process on an outbound effort, is to look at queues that are common with our current clients and opportunities. And so, whether that's industries, whether that's shifting roles, whether that's mergers and acquisitions, or new product launches, those are all great ways to find the right buyers. The key question you need to answer is, “How are you going to get your 2,000 sales reps across the world to communicate the same message?” Ryan Leavitt shares his advice on thinking through marketing productivity from the view of a Chief Revenue Officer: “So, we try to look at productivity on a granular level. Sales cycle metrics are much more important when we start to dig into the industry, the lead source, and the size of decline in general. Because the sales cycles for inbound deals are going to be much shorter than the sales cycles for outbound bills. There's a reason that a potential buyer is searching there. They're educated and they're in a buying process. We need to make sure that our data is apples to apples. So, yes, sales cycle is very important, but we can't compare the sale cycle of a 500-person inbound company to a 500-person outbound company, or a 200-person company compared to a 20,000-person company. They're drastically different, but they came from the exact same lead source. So, we break it down into industry and company size, and from there we could start to optimize and look at the full picture. We look at lead conversion rates, opportunity conversion rates, sales cycle, average deal size, etc. After a period of time, we look at the success of the clients and bring it all the way back to how they came into the funnel to begin with.”&nbsp; Marketing is going to contribute ~30% of the pipeline, which means sales needs to generate ~70% of the sales opportunities. Pipeline per rep varies too much without a standard prospecting process used by all. Lead quality and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates suffer when prospecting is left up to each individual sales rep. Skip to the 24-minute mark of the video to watch Ryan describe what competencies he looks for in a new sales rep candidate, and how he gets the new sales reps from day one to full productivity.

How the CRO of an Emerging Technology Company Drives Revenue

Joining us for today’s show is Hassane El-Khoury, the CEO of Cypress, the leader of the semiconductor industry.&nbsp;Hassane’s mission is to establish Cypress as the global supplier of choice for innovative companies in high-growth markets. Today we are going to demonstrate how to define which markets you will, and will not, compete in.&nbsp; If you prefer to watch the interview in HD video on SBI TV, click&nbsp;here.&nbsp; Why is this an important topic?&nbsp;Being in fast-growing markets is the largest driver of revenue growth. Least important is market share growth. Yet, many executive teams tend to focus most of their attention on gaining share in their existing markets. While it is necessary to maintain, and sometimes increase, market share, changing your company’s exposure to growing and shrinking market segments should be a major focus.&nbsp; The first segment will seek to answer the question: How have you prioritized high-growth markets?&nbsp; &nbsp;Hassane provides an overview to validate the claim that exposing your company to rapidly developing markets is the easiest way of growing with the highest probability of success. &nbsp; In the second segment, Hassane outlines what traditional routes to market exist in his addressable markets, as well as innovative routes that disrupt those markets and his company’s competitors. Hassane also covers which channels he uses to target buyers, for each market segment (direct field sales, inside sales, global account management, key account management, VAR, systems integrator, e-commerce, phone, etc.).&nbsp; The final segment of the show describes the different areas market growth can come from, such as&nbsp; market expansion or taking share from your competitors. Hassane goes on to describe the current demand drivers of his company’s addressable markets. Additional Resources If you would like help filling your pipeline with opportunities, SBI’s team of experts can assist.&nbsp;Bring your leadership team to&nbsp;see a hand-picked team of experts&nbsp;in Dallas at&nbsp;The Studio&nbsp;, SBI’s executive briefing center.&nbsp; Here is an interactive tool that will help you understand how your sales strategy stacks up.&nbsp; Here is an&nbsp;interactive tool&nbsp;that will help you test and rate your Sales Strategy against SBI’s emerging best practices.

Navigate Your Company to Rapidly Developing Markets

Our guest on SBI TV is Dan Levinschi, the Head of Marketing for PandaDoc. Dan is a revenue generating marketer who knows how to quickly transition from marketing strategy to execution. Dan and I discuss how to move from marketing strategy to execution. Dan describes his process for developing a marketing strategy, and how he interlocks the company’s corporate strategy, product strategy, and sales strategy with his own. Dan also shares his rollout strategy and how he presents it to the marketing team to ensure that each person understands the overall strategy, their role, and how their execution fits into the overall strategy. To follow along, leverage&nbsp;SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018&nbsp;PDF Workbook&nbsp;and turn to the Marketing Strategy section starting on pages 236.&nbsp;To download the full transcript in a word document,&nbsp;click here.&nbsp; In today’s captivating show, Dan shares his method for transitioning from the planning phase to the execution phase of the marketing strategy, specifically how to ensure that the right KPI’s closed loop reporting is built into each new activity. Turn to the 13-minute mark of the video to watch Dan discuss how a marketing leader validates that progress is being made on major initiatives without micromanaging the team. Matt and Dan discuss how precisely Dan makes this happen at PandaDoc:&nbsp; “It is very important for me personally knowing what everyone on the team is doing without being too invasive. The number one thing that you need to have is&nbsp; a playbook for how your department functions. If people don’t understand how your department functions, it doesn’t matter whether they’re on your team or on a separate department, you’ll always run into the problem of people not knowing what you do essentially. You also have to build an internal Wiki page with all things marketing, just for internal for the company.&nbsp;Then you need to have a project management system in place. If you’re a startup on a budget, you can use something like Trello. Another thing you have to focus on are the core problems and helping your team to understand the impact of their work. Some people just go to work for a paycheck and do the minimum necessary. If they understand very well what the impact on the work is, they’ll be more motivated to work diligently. I find that when people are motivated they don’t need strict management, you can give them a lot of responsibilities and freedom and they’ll spend their time on the right things.&nbsp; Dan Levinschi shares his advice on encouraging the marketing team while also instilling the team with a sense of accountability.&nbsp;&nbsp; “The way we normally work is to hold open forums. I think that the best ideas are born when you have a number of viewpoints in the same room. What we do is, whenever there’s an argument about whether we should continue a project or not, the results are not there, the real question I’m asking is: “What is the immediate impact on business short term and long term?” If the impact is minimal, which you can generally quantify through specific metrics, it all comes down to revenue. Then it’s a simple argument for me to win. For example, if the impact is short term but in long term this doesn’t make any sense, maybe we should kill the project and reiterate. To summarize, I’m a performance marketer, so I believe in numbers. If you cannot prove it to me in numbers, then the argument generally ends.”&nbsp; Having a solid strategy in place sets a company and a department up for success. Understanding and utilizing marketing metrics in your strategic process can make the difference between success and failure. Skip to the 20-minute mark of the video to watch Dan describes how he establishes accountability with his marketing team, how he manages individual contributors, how he reports progress to the CEO, and how he measures the success of his team’s strategy.&nbsp;

How to Move from Marketing Strategy to Execution

Mike answers questions out of SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018&nbsp;PDF Workbook&nbsp;to provide an in-depth view into how the top revenue leaders guide Go-to-Market new product launches. To follow along flip to the Corporate Strategy section and flip to the Go-to-Market area found on pages 80 - 93.&nbsp; Today we are going to demonstrate how to Go-to-Market with a new product. We will cover the topics of sufficiently covering your markets, selecting and optimizing your sales channels, and finally, pricing and packaging your products correctly. If you prefer to watch the interview in HD video on SBI TV, click&nbsp;here.&nbsp; Why are these such important topics? Traditional routes to market are being replaced with innovative ways to reach customers. So, evaluating&nbsp;whether you have the right channels in place for a new product launch is vital for driving revenue growth. Revenue growth driven by products that create new markets, attract new customers, and convince customers to buy more is the most valuable type of revenue growth. Download the full interview transcript in a MS Word document  here.&nbsp; The first segment will seek to answer the question: How do you evaluate whether you have the right channels in place for a new product launch? Christopher provides examples of when he launched a new product&nbsp;and added new channels, and when he used an innovative route to market that gave him an advantage and resulted in a substantial revenue lift.&nbsp; Christopher outlines, in the second segment, how to package your new products to differentiate yourself from the competition. Christopher goes on to advise the audience on how to identify and validate the true points of differentiation in your product, and how to bring that product differentiation to life. The final segment of the show describes how to avoid these pricing mistakes when launching a new product. Price your products in a way that does not scale with customer growth and this will result in revenue leakage. Price your products in a way that is difficult for your sales channels to explain the change to your customers and watch your sales steadily decline.&nbsp; Christopher details his approach to determining the right pricing strategy for a product launch, pricing at different levels to different customer segments, and equipping the sales force&nbsp;with value-based messaging and negotiation strategies to defend the price point.

How Top Executives Prepare for a New Product Launch

The SBI Sales and Marketing Podcast is a weekly dive into the latest insights and business strategies in the world of sales and marketing. Every week Greg Alexander, CEO of SBI, invites the top CEOs and Marketing and Sales leaders from a variety of industries to discuss how they make their number year after year, so you can do the same. Subscribe for your weekly dose of business news, management & marketing, and sales insights to keep you at the top of your game.

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