Ampliz Podcast

Saurabh Madan oversees Moengage's go-to-market and customer success initiatives in South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Based out of Singapore, Saurabh has had over 15 years of experience in Sales & Business Development. He is a writer, tech enthusiast, writer, and sales coach.

At the B2B binge APAC edition, he spoke about one of the most significant challenges marketing and sales folks across the globe face – the mindset of the buyer. Companies have been trying to unravel the secrets of understanding the buyer mindset always. Many companies have tried various methods to do it and have succeeded relatively. However, the process isn't homogenous yet. It may work for one but may not work for another. So the experimentation has to go on.

Understanding of the customer starts with the discovery and backward to selling. Find there is a need or problem that requires solving. Find it and talk about then devise a sales pitch that works for them.  Directly jumping into a sales pitch is not justified for both the parties. You don't know what they want, and the customers are being taken for granted. A salesperson should never do that in his right frame of the mind.

Therefore, there has to be the right modus operandi of communication between the two. Discover more data points about the customer better. You are off understanding them. You have to realize that everyone is buying. Everyone in your funnel is buying.

B2C and B2B buy very differently, and the way you discover the mindset is also quite different. For a B2C, there is plenty of data in the form of Data-lakes and massive databases that can be tabled and presented in the form of graphs and charts to help you understand your enormous number of customers you are targeting.  Organizations employ large data engine to gain this inference.

But for a B2B, the idea is entirely different. Each one of them has a unique need and cannot be generalized to an enormous mass of customers. The more conversations you make, the better you understand your customers. You cannot generalize your product, but you can make slight customizations to suit your customers. To make those customizations, you have to understand the customers deeply. It needs many conversations. With LinkedIn, you can cluster many similar profiles, but it won't help you group based on the mindset. In a discovery call, try to understand the below few things:

1. What are you solving?
   
2. What are your customers' issues?
   
3. What is the problem they have identified and able to solve?
   
4. What are the problems they have identified and not able to solve?
   
5. Of all the problems they face and trying to solve, can you do better at solving the problems?
   
6. How will you impact them in terms of sales, revenues, KPIs, and other forms of impact?
   

Build your reputation with your customers so that they open up to you. To build a personal rapport, you have to be genuine and find that commonality between you and your client. Then make the relationship on the commonality. Unravel the mystery behind their needs and problems by continually talking to them and understanding them.

Mona Lolas is an accomplished Global Sales and Marketing Executive with over 25 years of experience in the IT industry. She has international exposure in conducting business in Australia, APAC Regional, and Global roles working in Vendors and Blue-Chip Companies. Mona has built new business lines, bringing new products to market and establishing vendor's presence in the Asia Pacific region. She holds extensive experience in go-to-market plans that directly support business growth objectives and drive significant and measurable ROI - increasing demand, driving sales, and positively impacting brand equity. Mona has led highly skilled marketing teams that deliver engagement with the channel and end-users and continuously learn through evaluation and iteration. Mona has a passion for promoting women in leadership positions and advocating empowering girls join the IT industry.

Mona showered Ampliz B2B 4th Edition with her immense knowledge and spoke elaborately on how important it is to align sales and marketing.  Alignment in sales and marketing comes from the top of the organization. The message has to be crisp and clean from top to bottom. The value you offer to your stakeholders should be communicated across your organization equally. CSO and CMO are the keystones in this endeavor of creating alignment. They have to communicate effectively to align both the teams.

Marketing and Sales KPIs should be focused on delivering value to your stakeholders while speaking the same language. Marketing will control the channels and talk about the language that aligns with sales and your target audience. It asks from marketing much focus on what they are doing, what they cannot do while maintaining alignment with the sales. Marketing activities should not spread too thin.

Prioritize the role of marketing and have the objectives mapped out and aligned with the overall aim of the organization. As said before, it should come from the top to bottom. The organization's purpose should breakdown slowly into department objectives to team objectives to personal goals.

Sudhir Nayar is the Managing Director of Commercial Sales at Cisco. For the past 30 years, he has led IT sales operations by creating skilled and empowered teams. In the process, he has mentored budding leaders for the Indian IT industry. Sudhir leads IT sales teams across large enterprises and SMB, built and transformed channels, developed a corporate strategy for leading IT companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco. He is always looking out to participate in industry forums to learn, share my perspectives, and interact with like-minded professionals on digital platforms. Sudhir is an eloquent speaker, great mentor, environmentalist, Strategic Leader Focused On Revenue, Growth, and Profit Maximisation.

At Ampliz B2b Binge, he spoke elaborately on how to build high performing and resilient sales teams. He has outlined five steps to building transformative teams.

1. Build trust within the team

2. Focus on the health of the business

3. Building a winning culture

4. Formulate a three-year plan

5. Effective communication

Listen more. The first time you meet your team, talk to teammates about their success, how can, as an organization, you can help them grow and ask how can you help them achieve the goals. When you ask them these sets of questions, they start opening up to you. Your teammate becomes a little chatty and starts trusting you. Go back to them and tell them what can be done now and what can be done later. Focus on their strength and try to leverage them.

Most businesses focus on topline and bottom line. However, as a leader, you should focus on what is coming in the future and prepare your team. Keep an eye out for the changing trends and communicate it to your teams regularly. Please encourage them to adapt to the changes and keep learning new things.

Build culture by inspiring them and giving them a sense of safety. When people feel safe and hopeful, they can choose to go beyond what is expected of them. Then your job changes form inspecting to inspiring people. Your work now is instilling hope in them. That is when the time arises, they give more than 100% of their abilities. Accept failure and foster growth and nurturing.

As a leader amongst leaders, you should have a six month, one year, and a three-year plan—Breakdown the big picture in your mind into bite-size achievable chunks to make things easier.

All the plans and the above-mentioned activities will fail if you don't have a concrete communication plan. Understand who are your key stakeholders are and what their priorities are. Focus on how you can align the priorities to achieve the goals. But it has to be adequately communicated. Therefore, have a communication plan that aligns with your key stakeholders and speaks their language.

Utkarsh serves as the Head of Business Development for SAP Asia Pacific and Japan. Based in Singapore, Utkarsh is responsible for market development strategies and sales programs across Asia-Pacific and Japan to realize the potential and future proof of SAP's long term vision. Leading with a customer-first mindset, he has a proven track record of developing sales and business development strategies that enable Intelligent and connected enterprises enabled through a best in class Experience Management.

Utkarsh is passionate about the digital economy and its implications for the customers and the broader ecosystem of SAP. In a leadership career spanning 15 years, he has worked on Product development and management, customer lifecycle, Business transformation, People Leadership, Sales, and Business Development.

At Ampliz B2B Binge APAC edition Utkarsh delivers insight into various kinds of experiences customers have. How understanding and leveraging experiences can foster growth? Providing expertise is the most critical factor that has governed the development of the most influential organizations in the world. Experiences are the interactions that people have with the organization. If you can manage it, you can provide the best possible experiences.

66% leave brands due to lousy brand experiences, and 95% share it on social media. Any occasion, good or bad, always escalates across communities. Whether you want it or not, the bad experiences escalate faster. Therefore, organizations prepare well ahead in time for various scenarios.

User experience and customer experience are two integral parts of the experience management. User experience deals with providing the best possible experience while using the product but the customer experience deals with the complete lifecycle of the customer. Customer experience goes from the first touchpoint to the last touchpoint in the lifecycle. In some cases may extend beyond it.

The industry is willing to spend billions of dollars on it. The experience is so important because it is the experiences that make you trust a brand and later on purchase from them. Experiences lead to a better social presence that leads to the creation of business opportunities. Research says there are seven touchpoints before someone becomes your customer. So you have seven chances to provide and build on great experiences. With each experience, you have an opportunity to get a customer. The loyalty increases, and you can upsell your products, which leads to the growth of the top line.

The question now arises how do you build experience. The answer lies in data. Organizations have to manage experience from end to end the journey of the customer. Measure every possible interaction. Experiment and save the data and apply measurable inferences to improve the experience. The biggest challenge and opportunity for an organization is to have a single source of truth or information. The challenge lies in administrating the relevant information. The most effective option is everyone has the information about the prospect and at what stage the potential is in. Having this knowledge provides the right opportunity to create great experiences.

Fernando Angulo has 10+ years of experience in digital marketing. He is currently Heads Communications at SEMrush Inc. Fernando is actively involved in the search marketing world and a regular speaker at Digital Marketing and Ecommerce conferences and events worldwide. He specializes in Competitive Intelligence and Competitors Research, SEO, and Paid Traffic Strategies for eCommerce and online business.

When 77% of the company focused on content marketing, only 48% can explain their strategy. It's mind-boggling to see that less than 50% of people have an in-depth understanding of content marketing. On average, they spend less than USD10000 on content marketing. The significant challenges faced by the organization is generating quality leads from the content and generating quality content.

The quality content is one that aligns one with your target persona. Organizations should spend time creating various formats of written content and find what aligns with your customer. Once you ascertain what your target persona want, optimize your content for SEO and target persona. The format becomes the brand language that can help you generate more qualified leads that resonate with you.

Follow the praetor principle of the 80-20 ratio. Spend 20% time writing or creating content and 80% of time distributing it. The main channels are social media, email,  and various other channels. The primary sources of traffic still search and direct traffic. The customers are looking for more valuable and conversational content, answers to their questions. They are trying for a more featured snippet. The featured snippets are the primary source of creating brand impact.

Measure the impact of your content through the social media channels, direct traffic, and the quality of leads generated. So have a flow set for your content marketing. Analyze your content and create a plan for it.  Then act on your schedule, monitor the activities related to your content, and maximize the impact by sharing on social media, optimizing SEO, and link building exercises.

Create long-form content with words exceeding 810 words. Cover the topic in detail and add as much value as possible. Answer as many questions as possible that genuinely answer to the queries of your target audience. Have a structure to your content and repurpose them to different formats to make it easily consumable.

Namrata Kapur is the Head of Marketing of the Cloud Integration Department of IBM. She is also the host of the vlogging series Marketer in tech. She is also a writer, speaker, and mentor.

At Ampliz B2B Binge 4.0 APAC edition, she shares nuggets of knowledge regarding measuring the KPIs that matter to business growth. Marketing goes beyond awareness today. It has every nook and corner of different processes.

All KPIs of various departments are interrelated. They have to club into a bucket so that they are focused on the right ROIs. ROIs are achievements of business goals. The business goals are leads generated, do prospects know your offering, how do you differentiate from your competitors, are different teams are aligned, and many others.

One of the most significant ROIs is the Share of Voice. Share of voice measures how your presence compares across competitors. Do your activities contribute to the above ROI?

Are you driving the right traffic? Do the events or various activities bring in the right traffic? How are you actively pursuing them? What are your conversion rates to and of leads?

When organizations ask what is your plan for the next quarter. It means how you can reach the goals and your tactics—all your steps involved in the tactic need to have KPIs and ROIs. When you have all that information in place, it will help you achieve the goals.

The best way the organizations can achieve great ROIs iff the KPIs are aligned to it. The way to go about achieving the KPIs is to plan, execute, analyze, and adapt. Plan meticulously, perform consistently, analyze honestly, and adapt ruthlessly. There is no other way.

It does not matter you follow a funnel, pipe, or a flywheel; every stage you interact must have specific things you want to achieve or ROIs. To reach the ROI numbers, you should have small measurable KPIs so that you can measure and take necessary actions to realign your actions.

Adarsh Noronha leads Hubspot's growth efforts in India. Adarsh is responsible for HubSpot's sales and revenue across India and will be based in HubSpot's Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore. Before joining HubSpot, Adarsh was General Manager and Senior Sales Director at Oracle, where he led the customer experience business in India, helping enterprises in the region with digital transformation. Before Oracle, he served as Country Manager at Informatica and spent six years in sales leadership positions at Salesforce India.

At Ampliz B2B Binge 4.0 APAC Edition, Adarsh focused on the growth of the business through the flywheel concept. According to him, customers have changed the way they function and their behavior. They are more critical and impatient than before. They expect an immediate response from customer service representatives. Gaining their trust is the biggest challenge the marketers and sales folks are facing.

People trust their friends and colleagues. Therefore, word of mouth becomes the most significant source of truth and trust for the customers. The customers trust the information coming from their friends. Businesses are failing to adapt to this change.

Businesses have adopted inbound marketing method in totality. They are attracting, engaging, and trying their every bit to delight the customers. It is one of the biggest challenges they are facing. The funnel was the holy grail of the businesses. The issue with the funnel is that it focuses on sales folks rather than the need of the customer.  Flywheel centers around the customer with content and various activities built around it.

Flywheel focuses on customers and allows them to bring in customers that fit the bill with sales, marketing, and services built around customers. They start to rotate around the customer. It helps to attract more customers with the help of current customers.

Customer-focused flywheel engages, attracts, and delights the customers. They help to create experiences. The experiences make delight which they would want to share with their colleagues and friends. It helps in attracting the right kind of audience to your product. Customer delight is part of every section of the business, just not the customer success team. When joy becomes everyone's job, they become customer-obsessed.  Being customer-obsessed makes you put customer needs at the forefront and cater to them.

Being genuine is part of the delight. If you are honest, customers will come to you. The customers will accept you from their heart. Create every piece of content that resonates and shows that you understand them. The better you get at it, the more customers are attracted to you. You can convert them to sales easily. Be transparent with your pricing and build your transparency and credibility.

Sangram Vajre is the Co-founder at Terminus, 2x Author, Host of #FlipMyFunnel Podcast, and Speaker and loves doing #LinkedInLive. He is the foremost authority in Account-based marketing or ABM.

As one of the key speakers at the B2B Binge 4.0, US version, he sheds light on the three biggest mistakes the companies adopting ABM Strategy make. He also shares how to implement ABM strategy effectively, the right time to implement the process, and answers various queries of the audience.

So, coming to the mistakes most companies make are

1.  Too much focus on demand generation. Companies often forget that money is in the sales pipeline. Instead of just focusing on getting more and more people in the channel, focus on individual leads. Give them enough attention and care to convert them into leads. The more you focus on nurturing the leads, the better are your chances of converting them.

2.   Companies are spread too thin. Businesses try to focus on every product and service they have. Lack of focus is a significant issue. Take your best performing product or service to the market and evolve as the market needs. As you focus on a single product, you are very likely to care about every lead that comes for that product and will try to convert them into deals. The prospects will receive enough attention to become your customer. Focus all your efforts on a single product. If you are good at something in marketing, double down your efforts on that and make conversions happen. For example, if you are great at doing events double down on it and have fantastic events.

3.  Enterprises often forget that the brand drives the demand. Most companies are skeptical about spending dollars in the marketing budget during a crisis. During the crisis, be more data-oriented and focus on the areas of marketing that is yielding results. Improve and make more efforts on the channel. Make the best out of those channels. Once you start doing this, leads will start flowing in. During a crisis, people become strict with their spending. They want to put the money in the right places. Unless you market yourself in that way, businesses won't make a deal with you. So keep nurturing your brand during the crisis. Make yourself visible to others while you double down on the marketing efforts that are working for you.

Create the best possible marketing ecosystem around your product that makes your leads and customers feel valued. If they don't feel valued, they will not invest in your product even though you claim to have the world’s best product.  It can help you rise above the noise and will help you build the most significant possible brand you can be then.

Focusing your efforts in a single direction will take you a long way than a distributed focus over many things. Account-based marketing is about having focused efforts on leads and converting them to leads.

GuruPandian is chief of growth and product at Ampliz. He has extensive experience in working with B2B data companies like ZoomInfo (now DiscoverOrg Zoominfo).  He is a speaker and a great mentor.

Here at Ampliz B2B Binge, he speaks about how B2B data has evolved over the years and how it can help businesses achieve their goals. Today marketing has a sole focus that is growth. The growth always boils down to lead generation, lead nurturing, and sales, irrespective of whatever activities you perform every day. So growth is about what is your lead volume and deals velocity? It means how many leads are coming in every day and how quickly those leads are converted into deals.

Traditionally b2B data was acquired from events, website forms, signups, collateral downloads, LinkedIn, and many other places of interest. Most of the time, the data-points include the name of the person, email address, company, industry, designation, number of employees, and other factors. Traditional data partners not only help you find new leads but also append data and enrich existing data. Data maintenance is increasing, with so many changes happening around the world. Maintain a single cell of data costs as much as 100$ on an average.

Modern B2B data partners, in addition to the above traditional data, also try to provide behavioral data, proxy intent, better contact directories, and improved company firm-o-graphics information. They will personalize data for you. The sales intelligence will be customized for you based on your needs, the persona you are targeting. A right B2b data partner will have a global scale; maintain high data standards with capabilities to take care of personalized data requests.

Tibor Shanto is a Pre-Discovery Specialist driving conversion & pipeline creation via improved execution. He helps B2B companies translate sales strategy to reality and was often called a brilliant sales tactician, obsessed with implementation.

Tibor helps sellers align their process with buyers' decision and buying process. He specializes in prospecting and communicating value in a way that drives access to and action from decision-makers. Tibor makes his clients regularly see a double-digit increase in opportunities and pipeline values. He works with companies from Fortune 50 to start-ups achieve their revenue goals.

Tibor Shanto at B2B Binge 4th edition focused on three mistakes most sales reps make while prospecting on the telephone. The three mistakes he mentioned are, most of the time, easily overlooked by most sales reps.

1.  Accept who you are: It means understanding who you are and what do you represent. Understand what you are set out to do every day. Develop an understanding of your prospect and treat them as such. Your prospects are trying to do fit a lot in a day. Your call will interfere in their plan. Make their time worthwhile when they agree to talk to you. You should know that you are not the only meddling in their business. Therefore, develop an understanding of the challenges your prospect might be facing.

2.  There is nothing social about telephone prospecting: Think in a counter-intuitive manner. Understand that you are going to interfere in someone's schedule. They are also wanted to end those interferences and get back to what they were doing. So take a look from the customer point of view and understand what is of value to them.

3.   Expand your toolkit: The one who is prospecting has to understand that the channel you are comfortable with that may not be the case with your prospect.  Not everybody thinks like you.  Contact the lead through the channel they are pleased with. So you have to expand your expertise across various channels.

Leslie is the Vice President, Global Campaigns, and Field Marketing at Twilio Inc.  She has in-depth experience in Program Management/Management and proven success in planning and implementing worldwide channel partner programs and high-impact sales training programs to support strategic business initiatives. Leslie is also a great speaker, mentor, and trainer.

Ampliz invited her to the 4th edition of the B2B Binge event as one of the keynote speakers. She shares her journey from the beginning of 2020 in the campaign management and how the sudden changes like pandemic changed the way they functioned. Leslie also shares the critical learning she and her team acquired over the period.

Here are some of the lessons:

1.  Virtual reality is not a physical reality, so people may not understand your offering.

a.  Content is crucial. Keep it simple, compelling, and brief.

b.  Keep a check on your promotion strategy

c.  Keep your target audience engaged

2.   A virtual world is a self-service world, and engagement has to be reimagined.

a.  Manage the weird and have a strategy for engagement

b.  Deliver an experience on par with a physical event

c.  Get creative leverage your technology or product

3.  In a virtual world, be thoughtful, be inclusive, and be fun.

a.  Think beyond business goals to the time you are engaging your audience

b.  Hug the opportunity across geographies and time zones to reach new audiences

c.  Reach out, partner, share and learn.

Apart from these, she shares different learning about managing teams and works virtually.

JD GERSHBEIN has supported professionals and companies seeking a greater understanding of how LinkedIn works and how they can harness the site's full potential. He is a pioneer LinkedIn strategist, a widely-acknowledged thought leader, and a dedicated educator who acts as a facilitator of learning and brings the importance of personal branding to bear, especially in COVID-19 times. Drawing upon his background in marketing, psychology, neuroscience, broadcasting, and performance art, JD finds his passion for connecting people to new knowledge and new opportunities.

An early adopter of LinkedIn, JD has grown along with the medium, becoming one of its leading proponents. Transitioning from his traditional marketing practice, he rose to prominence as a LinkedIn profile writer and corporate trainer, before establishing himself as one of the most vivid and exciting personalities on the business speaking circuit. Through his events, writings, teachings, and broadcast media contributions, JD leads by example, inspiring people in all walks of firm striving to make their mark in the Digital Age.

At the B2B Binge event, he shares how one can leverage virtual networking to

1.  PIVOTING WITH PURPOSE: The coronavirus crisis has virtualized business, increased stress levels, and imposed new demands on our time and attention. LinkedIn, in combination with Zoom, has become our lifeline. JD is finely attuned to the pain felt by so many who, for whatever reason, cannot extract value from LinkedIn, are stuck on how to tell their story best, or cannot fathom the technology. He continues his commitment to minimizing this pain.

2.  LEVERAGING LINKEDIN TO RECLAIM BUSINESS MOMENTUM: Nothing like a global pandemic to derail the plans of businesspeople who had so much on the line and cloud the vision of a bright future. JD offers best-in-class LinkedIn training for companies struggling to execute their strategic plan and keep their teams engaged while working remotely.

3. DESIGNING THE LINKEDIN PROFILE THAT REFLECTS YOU IN THE NEW NOW: As one of the first independent LinkedIn consultants in the world, JD understands what it takes to communicate a value proposition through an online profile. He embraces a design thinking approach to LinkedIn profile writing, which positions his clients for the best possible impression and is engineered with their desired outcomes in mind.

Kate has more than 15 years of tech experience building strong businesses within different stages and industries. She believes deeply in bringing businesses to life in prospects and customers’ hearts and minds by creating compelling and consistent messaging throughout the customer life cycle. I have faith in its criticality for any business to bring the customer’s voice to every aspect of their business marketing, product, customer success, customer service, finance, and alignment with your customer. The customer experience doesn't begin when they make a purchase, sign the contract, or complete a transaction. It starts the first time they've heard your name.

At B2B Binge 4.0, she spoke elaborately on not only how to align different departments and speak the same language but also make it actionable. There is no point in aligning if you cannot take action around it.

To align all the departments to customers' needs, you have to listen to them ardently. When you listen to them carefully, the departments will understand what needs to be done. These actions will most likely be aligned to customer needs rather than personal goals. When you achieve customer goals and intend to provide delight to them, you will go beyond what is expected of you.

To go beyond expectations it needs more action. Alignment with customers not only provides avenues to take action but also opportunities for taking meaningful action. The effort that aligns businesses and their customer not only externally but also internally. To internalize alignment, it starts with the 1st point of contact, i.e., social media, events, referral, and other channels to post-closure of deals like feedback, upsell and cross-sell systems, and customer re-engagement tactics.

2020 is a revenue era. All actions taken by various departments have to align with how they are aiding in generating revenue by providing delight, not just by cutting costs. Investment in customer delight digitally is crucial for success in 2020. The customer has to grow with you. Therefore, CLTV matters. The realtime conversations matter. It has to be personalized. Customers expect brands to understand them and ask you to deliver how you know them and understand their needs.

The experiences have to be unified and omnichannel. Anyone who delivers these will be a winner because it is a different level of customer experience. The customer experience should have synergy across all the departments. There should be a single source of truth that brings alignment across the organization.  The faster and smoother is the flow of leads to deals better it is. The conversions are only possible through conversations and mapping customer needs. This map has to be synced across the organization to have meaningful conversations.

Camila Kaul is a passionate thought leader focused on digital consulting through insights and storytelling to create breakthrough, innovative digital strategies for companies. She is the head of Strategy and Sales Development for Google. She is also the founder of Just as Squiggle.

As one of the keynote speakers at the B2B Binge event, she focused on how a problem-solving mindset can solve the organizations’ most significant problems more thoroughly. She goes on to say that 35% of the skills are obsolete. If people do not upgrade their skills and get creative, more are likely to lose jobs or modes of earning.

Creativity is the most critical skill that can hold on its own. Creative people can thrive and flourish under challenging conditions. Creative thinking comes from practicing small steps of creativity and being open to ideas.

Unlearning and relearning becomes a vital part of the creative process.  As people age, they lose the creative edge. The key reason behind it is acquiring a restrictive mindset and having conflicting thoughts before taking any action.  It makes them risk-averse and prevents them from taking up challenges.

How do you decide which challenge to take up or face?

Before facing or taking up any challenging task, we usually ask the following questions and don't take it up. They are:

1.  What if we do something weird?

2.  What if we exaggerate the rules?

3.  What is the opposite of the rule?

Harris is the founder of Harris Consulting Group. He is one of the top leaders in Inside sales. He is a keynote speaker and trainer. Harris trains salespeople on Full-Funnel Sales and provides Operational Guidance. He teaches from SDRs with no sales experience to AE's with years of experience under their hood and the Customer Success Reps on how to upsell and cross-sell.

Harris helps organizations in streamlining their Sales Operations and Sales Process. He creates, audits them with recommendations that will speak to the unique use case and provide the right feedback and guidance.

He was one of the key speakers invited to the US version of the 4th edition of the B2B Binge Event. He helped us, and the ones who attended the event, understand customers at a psychological level.  He unraveled the mystery of what goes in the customer’s head when they are looking to buy.

Richard sheds light on why buying is an emotional journey. He explains the three ego states of buying.

a.  The child ego state (The emotional state): I want it. It is this egotistical state where all the decision originates.

b.  The adult ego state (The rational you): Weighing the decisions to pros vs. cons.  It gives the customer a reason to go ahead and make a purchase or book a meeting.

c.  The Parent Ego State (The critical self): it aids in choosing something morally excellent vs. evil. It helps focus on what is ethically right vs. what is immoral.

When a salesperson understands these ego states, it becomes easier for the individual to act like a child, adult, or a parent to a customer based on the mutual understanding of the problem statement. And as the discussion moves ahead and the knowledge between the sales rep and the customer becomes better and better, the ego state also changes. Each of them holds a different role then. This evolution of function has to be very organic.

Most of the time, customer act like in a child ego state, but sales rep perceives it as parenting or the parent ego state. Salespeople have focus and listen very closely to understand the ego state your customer is in. Instead of rebelling or acting rebellious while understanding or negotiating a customer, try to understand each other and arrive at a better ego state to appeal to their Child ego state.

Andrea Waltz is the Co-Author of the bestselling book, "Go for No!" an eminent Speaker and a Virtual Trainer. She is the founder of Courage crafters Inc.

At the B2B Binge event, she explains why a no is an opportunity made than an opportunity lost. What do you think about failure? How can you change the outlook about the loss?

She says, "Embrace the connection between the Yes and No." Yes, maybe the destination, it is 'No' that takes you there. A 'No' is a chance to improve and develop. Be authentic, and take feedback. When you take the input, you are going to hear a lot of NOs, but you will start building genuine relationships. In a business or career, authentic connections will take you farther in your career than anything.

Change the way you respond to rejection. Please take it as a possibility.  No means not now. Seek feedback and the answer to why it was a no. Seek the chances of improvement.  Rejection is not black and white. It is grey most of the time. Based on how you react to no, it can become an opportunity.

It is pretty obvious sales and marketing teams of any company just need growth and growth just comes from more revenue and more customers.

There are different stages in the funnel, at the top, you have the lead generation and you want to put as many leads as possible. Then you nurture it through your inbound marketing and other teams and then you want to close the deal. To make it even more obvious, you should have lead volume, so the more number of leads you put into the funnel, your funnel can get bigger. You can close more deals or you can increase the velocity which means the pace in which the lead moves through the funnel has to be expedited. So those are two ways in which you can make your funnel work better for you increase the size of the funnel or make it shorter and quicker.

There’s a slight problem as lead generation becomes a marketing responsibility. With the funnel that we have, we have a problem. Our customers are kind of leftover at the end, and we’re not thinking of them the way we should be. They have the power to be our most influential marketers or most helpful salespeople, and our most beneficial customer success people because they’re, you know, on the ground using your product, telling other people about it, thinking about when you buy something online these days, rarely do you not look at the reviews about it.

And those reviews are customers advocating for them. The product is not advocating for the product. And it’s a potent thing to activate your customers into being advocates for you. So we dropped the funnel a few years ago, and we said, you know, modern businesses, particularly in a product-led growth world, they use this flywheel approach.

Passion economy is not hating your stupid boss and then becoming one. Many people think that, okay, I don’t like my boss. Let me just do a passion economy. Let me just jump into entrepreneurship. It is not that case.

You are going to work with someone even tougher. You will be the boss. You are not becoming a businessman. You are a businessman. So it’s different if your reason for quitting a nine to six job and then starting a passion economy is just because your boss or your work is getting a little boring, tired of all the office politics, maybe not the best, option according to me.

Maybe you can pick something else and think about what comes naturally. Well, so in that case, Am I asking you to quit your nine to six job and then jump into passion economy. Maybe not some for someone who is from India for whom the whole template is all generalized.

The sales interview processes, in general, is never complete without touching this topic and then the capacity planning in general. So let’s get to the first one.

How do you attract the right talent? Now, there could be three different sales models in any organization. You know, when a company is pretty small, you’re thinking of a founder-led sales model with one or two salespeople. You want to make sure that you’re able to attract the right people.

Now is not the time to go on job boards. So as an organization, then you want to try your network. You want to make sure that you’re reaching out to your connections. You’re talking to your previous employers and seeing what sorts of people are there whom you could offer.

You talk to your investor network, LinkedIn groups, and communities, but don’t go to the job portal yet because, at an early stage, you need people who actually can hustle their way through, not so much a specialist in the initial stages.

When you grow the team slowly, with the sales model, it is just beginning with your two to five people. You need to have some predictability into what’s going to work for you. Rely on references from your employees heavily. That’s very important. They know what works at this organization, and they can help you find relevant people in no time.

Again, your network is the most important, keep on building and nurturing your connections. Business and startup communities are other ones. And if you look at the third one, which is when you have a well-defined sales process in place, then it’s where everything that you can think of comes in place, where all the sources, the job boards, the recruiters, the agencies, the LinkedIn and all of that comes in.

Now, you got to remember for startup founders, and it is imperative that you’ve got to build some thought leadership with time, as well as your company is growing. It’s equally essential to sort of attracting candidates mainly for this specific reason.

If you look at the tip, the top 1% of salespeople in any company are never looking out for jobs. I mean, these are the highest-paid employees. They probably, in some cases, earn more than the CEO. So they’re not looking out for jobs. They’re just doing very well. Their ex-bosses are calling them, and they always have a position available.

So unless there is something that attracts them with some thought leadership of some kind, it’s going to be hard for you to go back and look at what are the parameters to consider when hiring again to the new company.

When you start hiring, you can divide it by a variety of parameters, depending on

• What geography are you selling into? Are you selling an India, US, or Apac? Because cultural nuances can make much difference.

The hard thing today in B2B SaaS is that there are more solutions out there. All use the same channels and try to get the attention of the users. That is getting harder and more challenged. Only 4% of all B2B SAAS solutions are gaining one million ARR. Only now 4% are getting to 10 million. So Smartlook is on the way to that. But you can see that not many are on this way and it’s not an easy game.

One of the main metrics should be measured and that is customer acquisition cost versus customer lifetime value. It should be one to five and one to three. Smartlook is at one to three, up to one to five. It is doing to optimize it like for customer acquisition cost. It’s really good to have marketing automation in mind.

Smartlook has launched one in-house mobile analytics solution. In the beginning, Smartlook has only 20% user adoption rate and it has scaled to more than 40%.

On the other side, the customer lifetime value you should have solutions to your Saas platform. If you talk to your customers at functionalities, have customer success, they are really increasing your customer lifetime value and also finding that’s connected to your channels to find the right customers.

One of the most important things is a shortlist. The higher your solution is priced, the more people will search for alternatives. So if you have a big and huge competitor, be everywhere where people are searching for alternatives and you end up on the shortlist. Certainly, 72% of bias will expense shortlist by searching you as suppliers.

How do you make the complex B2B sale easier? And there are five things that I want to talk with you about, like being informed, having insights. I understand that people buy with their emotions. How to map it and make it all easier? How to lead as a salesperson?

I believe that the sales profession is a helping profession. We all do our best when we lead instead of trying to push the type of selling that isn’t very comfortable for any of us.

So let’s talk about what is going on with the B2B sales today. In B2B sales, more people now than ever are participating in the buying decisions. So if you have a complicated deal, there are, I don’t know, eight or ten people that have to talk to you and talk to each other to make this decision together. But there are also lots of other people talking to those people and giving them ideas. So it has become even more complicated.

The buying process has become more formalized, especially with crunched budgets and people being a little bit more nervous about spending money, and buyers want to reduce their risk.

In simple words, personal branding is online presence. But it has become a buzz word that we often hear. Most of the people understand the personal branding. There are so many people who tell that they don’t have a personal brand now. I highly disagree with that because if you do have any kind of social presence online you have a Personal brand.

It is very important to take care of your personal brand because that’s the very first impression someone is getting off you right there seeing your LinkedIn profile as a professional and they need to understand what you’re all about. So in simple words, a personal brand is your online reputation.

There are two ways to build your brand on LinkedIn.

• Connecting and networking
• Creating content

When it comes to connecting and networking, you can connect with other people from a similar industry or connect with people who might be your potential clients. Before you connect with someone and before you even create content, make sure that your profile is shining and it’s optimized. So that’s the very first step for a strong personal brand. Then the next thing is to have a really good profile to create content and start connecting with other people showing them that you’re active now.

There are several techniques to create the powerful contents.

This technique is simple. You have a piece of content and you’re trying to repurpose it. You should think “how can I make it into something else?” “If it’s a video, can I make it into a blog post?” Try to define your purpose funnel what is going to happen once you have made a piece of content. Because a lot of people are screaming we need new content. It’s actually about being smarter and repurposing what you already have.

When the pandemic hit everywhere, people started saying, “don’t sell”, “don’t sell”. Nobody can sell anything. Just help people, don’t sell, and stop selling. But the fact is that selling is helping. But bad selling should not happen.

Bad selling is when people are just pushing products without understanding their requirement. It’s when you connect with someone on LinkedIn and they pitch you with their product and services and try to set up a meeting to just pitch you. That’s bad. Selling. Being consultative, you prove that you understand their requirements and offer solutions to their painpoints. That is when the selling will be admirable.

Consultative selling is focused on the buyer and not just the buyer, but the buyer’s world. If you can know enough about your buyers to know who their customers are, an example in the pandemic, if you knew that your buyer only sold to hotels and airlines and restaurants. They were probably not people that you wanted to talk to right away because they were in a crisis mode.

However, if they were other people who are involved with telecommunications and remote work, they were going crazy and they were busy. The idea that you should personalize and sell individually. Don’t just spam people with the messages but know who you are calling.

Often we think the more expensive our product or service is, the more information we need to give. We need to create scopes of work, contracts, legal ease, and massive implementation plans. And that actually will hinder and delay your sales cycle.

One of the reasons why this was created is because people got confused. They could not comprehend what a proposal should be. A plan is not a scope of work or a letter of intention or a contract or any lengthy word documents.

Ultimately what it will do is make your client’s eyes glaze over, and they will be like, I don’t want to go through this. This proposal looks like work, a lot of it. Maybe when I have the time to go through this, it might be the right time to implement.

Do not confuse your proposal with any of these other documents.

Your proposal has a particular place in the sales cycle, and therefore it is a selling document. It is there to sell.

There is a huge difference between reel life and real life. When it comes to sales, being practical and natural is more effective than being artificial. Julie has years of experience in the film industry and also she has gained expertise in selling on camera.  Generally, when people come in front of the camera, either they become so stiff that looks artificial or so nervous. Sometimes, to show confidence, people try to act being relaxed and sit in a relaxed position. 

While it is good on one hand, on the other hand, it creates an impression of having low energy or not interested in talking right away. Both are not good to work as a salesperson. The ideal position is to sit up straight and even to lean forward about 10 or 15% because that looks like you're on the edge of your seat waiting to talk to this person or waiting to hear what they have to say. So that's the type of energy you want to bring to the sales calls. So you have to bring a high level of energy and then you have to know how to use it within the confines of this stage.

 Two Top Techniques Julie has shared two top techniques that will help us to be natural and confident in front of the camera. 

• Eye Contact 

Eye contact is important while you are on camera because it helps to build a relationship and increase friendliness. When you don’t look at the camera or you don’t keep eye contact, it feels like you are not that attentive and not paying attention. When you are on a video call and talking to your prospect, adjust your camera, and keep proper eye contact that will give your prospect confidence on you. 

• Make the camera your friend 

The above sentence may sound silly but the truth lies behind it. If you don’t feel the camera is your friend, it will be an obstacle between you and your customer because of which your customer may lose confidence in you. In order to make the camera your friend, name it and try to talk with it frequently. On a psychological level, it gives you confidence that you are talking to your friend and your customer. Your confident and energetic talk will attract your customers.

Your brand is more than just your appearance. Many people think it's like your glasses, the cool hat that you wear at work, your fonts and colors, and various other things. Yes, that does have a factor in it, but your brand is what makes you tick. It's about you.  

Three things define your brand. Remember this one year try to start and build an online presence in a community and brainstorming ideas for content.  

1. Your core values:   Three things define your brand and from a moral standpoint as well. What do you want people to remember you?  

a. I want people to know that I'm real and genuine. I talk about real-life things that have happened in my past, what defines me as a person, and what makes me tick. 

b. What do you want the people to know you for? I want people to know me for being helpful to others and take that initiative because that's what I love to do.  

c. A judgment-free zone: My inbox, my comment section, everything is open. Because I've made committed many mistakes throughout my life, I want people to know that they can be you know they can share their personal stories with me.   

2. Your uniqueness:  I want you to ask yourself, "what makes me different?" and express that uniqueness. You have your share of experiences, your past, and the challenges that have made you who you are today. Talk about that. You know you have failed in life, yet you've turned them into real-life lessons and implemented those learnings. You know you are funny, quirky, and creative. Express it and follow your uniqueness throughout your content. To truly stand out and set yourself apart from the rest.  

3. The company you work for and a product and service that you sell:  If you own your own business, you kind of learn the lines here between personal branding and company branding. But it has a lot to do with one another. The reason is that when you're selling a product or working for a company, people will associate your brand with that company and the product. You're selling it's just how it is, especially if you have it plastered all over your LinkedIn. All that good stuff, so ask yourself does the company you work for has a bad reputation in the market, and you don't want to be associated with them. Then having maybe not now but having an exit plan is probably the best thing for you.  

 You sell and endorse a product that you don't believe in. That's huge, and if your company and your values are to provide impeccable customer service, then you have to follow through with your commitments to your clients. In the age of social media, the consumer has much power in the market. Therefore, one bad experience can affect your brand and your company's brand. So, you need to know and believe in the product you're selling. You also have to stand by your company's values and build a good reputation.  In that sense, so implement these three points while you're putting yourself out there. You know you're building a community. There was a time that we did not mix business and pleasure in personal life. It was us who didn't do it. We only really celebrated our wins and not our past failures. We were fake. 

Content should make sense, and today we consume differently. We consume based on emotion because we are all humans. We long for real connections.   What real people want is authenticity. To be truly authentic is not to be like the rest; just celebrate what makes you unique. Your followers will genuinely get to know you. When people watch my content, they genuinely get to know me as a person. It is how you place your unique footprint on a personal brand.

What is Customer Experience? 

Every time someone interacts with you as a part of their experience and it forms feelings. So the experience lives as feelings, then they become thoughts and then they become stories. These stories are what our customers tell each other about us. That is when they share their experience in online reviews and customer testimonials. Hence it is a slightly abstract thing that these are some of the ways that it becomes manifest though and some of the ways that the experience lives.  

Customer experience is basically synonymous with the brand experience. Your brand is what you promise to your customers. When you meet customers’ experience, you build your company brand. People are forming feelings and thoughts and telling stories about what it's like to work with you all of the time.  How to make the experience personal? 

As Ethan focused on feelings and thoughts of the customers, making the experience personal is important which can be your differentiator from others.  According to Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel that feeling is the foundation for our thoughts and ultimately our behaviors.”  Hence here are the ways to make the customer experience personal.  

- Face to Face meeting 

- Micro Conversation 

- Video relationship

How to do LinkedIn lead regeneration? 

 For LinkedIn, this is what most people do while trying to generate a lead. You send an invite. If you think the person is a prospect and you, most of the time, you don't have any note. If you have, it will have something like "Hey, I found your profile interesting." or some random note like that, which is spammy and which is cliched and repetitive.  The other person doesn't care who you are; they probably accept you as well. And out of a hundred invites that you send, 30 will get approved. And the moment they recognize what you do is send a message, copy paste a high level, 3000-word essay. Then say in the memo, "if you're interested, let me know. "  

Every day I get on LinkedIn, I get bombarded by sales pitches. I have no problem with sales pitches as long as they are right. I get bombarded for sales pitches about random B2B tools. Random things which are not related to me, and this happens, right?  What you have to do is relationship building, so let me tell you one way of doing it, right. I'm going to keep it very straightforward. You send an invite back with a personalized note. How can you personalize a letter? You can talk about multiple things, things that are in commonality.  Let's say you are a marketer. The person is a marketer as well. So what do people use in marketing? 

So you can talk about, Hey, I extensively use Google analytics or extensive use of Facebook ads. And I've just figured out the right way of campaign budget optimization. I would love to jam with you and see if there's anything that we could figure out together.  Find common ground and that common ground. It cannot be broad. If not able to find common ground. 

Are the people you want to connect to creating content on LinkedIn? Have they shared anything on LinkedIn? All you have to do is find something that they wrote very recently.  Let's say I talk about, I spoke about, you're sending me a custom note. I spoke about Facebook acquiring 10% of the equity stake in Jio. You can talk about it.  "Hey Bill, I found an article on the Facebook acquisition of Jio, and I find it very interesting. We'd love to get in touch."  

Now I know for a fact someone who send me an invite has put in some effort. 8% of the total invites that go out have a personalized message. So the moment you put a message, your chances of getting accepted already goes up. Put a very personalized message; the chances go for triples or becomes four X of it.  The moment they connect, you don't send them a sales pitch. My friends, if you send them a sales pitch, it's the same story all over again, right?

First and foremost, with the situation right now, people are worried about the present and future situation. Salespeople should focus on right now on getting emotional about the sales process and not about the outcome. And when you get focused on the process, that's where the results come in. You should focus on the sales intro; the questions you need to ask, are some of the crucial things. For example, right now, the most important thing is to be creative and innovative through your process. 

The questions you need to ask yourself are:  

1. So do you know how to send videos 

2. Do you know how to leverage social media 

3. Are you doing the right 

4. Are the subject lines you are using right now are impactful 

5. Can you help everyone right now across the board  

 If people say, outbound is dead. No! It's not. It just now requires more research more creativity and innovativeness across the board more than ever before. So these are the key things that need focusing on right now from an outbound perspective.  Everyone is still using outbound. It is not dead yet. 

However, there is a drastic change in the way it was done in the past. Here are the four things that you need focusing on 

1. Have a process 

2. Focus on the process 

3. Don't be too emotional about the outcomes 

4. Be creative and innovative  

Being creative and innovative means right now is what something different is that you can do. So, how can you interrupt patterns? What could you be doing differently is videos, can be sending direct mail (digital mail instead of physical mail) right because people may be afraid of doing it. These are things that are extremely helpful for right now, and people have seen great results. With so think about what is something that you can do that's creative, innovative everyone.  

Understand what your buyers are currently going through. Do a client roundtable. You will get many insights about what the clients are going through. Now I can have personalized messages around that, and now I can have questions around that. I'm right now not only way more creative, but also, I'm talking directly in the buyers' language. It is what matters the most right now.  

Write it all down in a spreadsheet or a sticky note. You now know and understand what the buyers are going through right now. That's a way to do outbound still because you have to speak their language at this point.   Also, the critical factor is ICP's ICP. So what that means is the people that you're targeting right now are their buyers still making money. Because if your customers' customer is not making money, then your buyer is not going to buy whatever you're selling. So think about the ICP's ICP.   

The next thing is "Binge growth, not Netflix." I've been saying this a lot lately, all right. It is time to be focusing on upgrading your skills. There's now a separation of the average sales rep and the prodigious sales reps. If you were just going with the motions, this is not a time for you. Right now, you have to be diligent in your process; otherwise, you're just going to get passed by other people who have been diligent on that process.   Lastly, the thing you have to say at the end of the day is, if you can prospect through this you can get through anything. Your resume becomes bulletproof.

The question that most content marketers and inbound marketers run into is how do you stand out. I think when we ask this question while thinking tactically, there's so much more to it than meets the eye. Ultimately we need to answer what is inbound? Because inbound is so much more than just creating concepts. It's actually about creating value through our content and creating experiences that are so memorable that people want to come back for more.   

Therefore, it starts with your goals because inbound is a top of funnel thing. You should not necessarily be trying to sell. When you're doing inbound, what you do need to be focusing on is traffic and subscriptions. These are things that are easy to measure, and then some softer skills awareness and engagement. You know you're nailing it if your traffic numbers are high. You are getting your topics right if your subscriptions are extraordinary. You know you're building fans once you see awareness, word-of-mouth, and that your reach is extending. You know you're standing out and if you see real conversations taking place both with you and about you. You know you're building the relationships that will ultimately drive results, but there's no one way to do this. 

There are a series of tasks that you need to be focusing on to make this happen.   So, it always needs to start with quality content. If you get that you're going to attract readers, they will subscribe. You're going to build engagement that will forge a relationship. It will ultimately even attract people who want to be part of your brand, write to you, and show up on your blog. Those are the tasks you need to be doing.   How you do it is going to help your audience, your brand, the product you offer? It's just that you almost need to be testing to figure out the hell now here's what is working for me. At Saleshacker, the thing that I focus on most is quality content, and to achieve that goal, I don't have a team of writers. What I do is I seek out experts who genuinely know their stuff. So we get precise solutions. We don't get general fluffy content and because we don't want to be part of the echo chamber.   

So, if we want genuinely original, precious content and to achieve that, we end up narrowing the focus going deep rather than broad now. It will create value for your audience, but you also need to be aware you have to provide value for your own business. You have to be driving growth. It's important not to get distracted by the bright shiny topics that you might want to cover to achieve results. You need to stay on brand. You need to know what your talking points are. You need to understand what actions you are trying to drive and create content around that.  Now that you've understood that you're providing value for your audience and your brand. How do you create quality? 

There are two ways to do that: 

1. You're going to do a ton of editing. All of your content needs to be easy to read and easy to provide very high value. 

2. Plan your content in four to six weeks in advance. Now that may sound like it's going to tie you down, but in reality, it frees you up.

How to make an opening call?

This COVID19 pandemic made a huge change in every business. When it comes to sales, the prospects hang up the calls when they hear from salespeople. Lauren has shared with us a few quick tips on how to make an opening call and engage a prospect. 

Swift Intro 

A great introduction is always short. Our introductions need to answer who we are, what do we want and why should they care? But right now selling during the pandemic, we have to add an important point. Why should they care right now? Why should they take your call right now? One of the biggest mistakes that we see in sales called introductions is that people immediately are leading with a pitch. The swift intro is all about adding value in those first couple seconds of the intro and we start with their names, then our name in an abbreviated version because we need to fit this in 10 seconds or less. 

Swift question 

 Three swift questions should be asked followed by swift intro. The questions should be connected to each other to engage prospects and to show real care toward them. In this pandemic, the question should be like is everybody's still working from home? How many folks in your team? How's that been going? 

Three Goals 

The next step is to concentrate on the third goal which is the sales pitch. 1st goal is to introduce yourself and 2nd goal is to establish a human connection by asking the follow-up questions. That is a tremendous opportunity. Finally, the third goal is to pitch based on the scenario. It slows down your sales cycle, but it will work better if we keep it focused on the goal of building a relationship. To build a good relationship, don’t go for formal talk, share something personal with your prospects and allow them to feel comfortable to be open up. But most of the salespeople don’t do that. That is why Lauren teaches how to reframe the pitch to create empathy in this situation. She conducts the team engagement and development program. 

Three punches of team engagement and development (Meeting, training, call coaching)

 She adopts three punches for this program. Generally, if a leader wants to re-strategize the outreach, it's going to start with a meeting. But Lauren gives less emphasis on this part. She emphasizes training than a meeting. Training takes three or four times longer than just a meeting. It allows people to dig in and share their experiences, get their hands dirty or roll up their sleeves with the content they might role-play. A meeting is one way. Training is always two way. Now the third step of the three punches is to do some focused call coaching on these messages for the period after the training. This is where they engage their managers to follow up, to listen to calls, to give feedback along the way.

How do you work efficiently form home being a salesperson?  

1. Prioritize your time and have a routine  Prioritization is very important because it helps to balance work and life. The work-life balance is a unicorn for everyone because it doesn’t exist. Hence, rather than trying to have a work-life balance where we trade one for the other, find a way that we can integrate these things. Now, there's another reason why that is important. When we have a process, when we have a routine, it reduces our anxiety and stress. And it also reduces the friction that we have to take those first steps toward something.  

2. Use a notebook instead of technology  To have a routine, she notes it down with the help of a pen and notebook. Because there is no need for technology, an app, and a fancy thing like that. Technology distracts you. The advantage of using a notebook and pen is you can work if you don’t have the Internet or power for the time being.   

3. Write your plan and break it down into different milestones  She writes her plan and she starts her yearly plan first. Then she breaks it down into quarterly milestones. Those quarterly milestones are then broken down into monthly milestones and priorities.    Making this plan takes about 15 minutes a day. It reduces your stress and anxiety. When you have reduced that stress and anxiety, it allows you to control your emotion, which is another thing that's important for all of us right now in these uncertain times and scary times. By doing that, you can be fully present at the moment with people, buyers, and the clients that you are working with. Because of that Carole’s sales increased by nearly 70 % which is a massive amount.  

4. Have 3 priorities in a week The weekly plan is something that needs to be noted down in the notebook. She starts with a little sticky note planning the week. Once she identifies what are the top three things that have priority for the particular week, she dumps it out from the brain to paper. She prepares schedules Monday through Friday. Each of those days is broken up into A.M. and p.m. She usually moves the presentation and workshops to A.M.  All these plans she does on Sunday night, and looks at her entire week and have a snapshot of where her priorities are going to be. It reduces her anxiety and stress of making things happen in this way.

How has B2B sales & marketing Evolved?  He has brilliantly split the B2B sales and marketing trends into three waves.  

The 1st Wave - Online  He segmented the 1st wave between mid-nineties to mid two thousand when people started visiting online and gathering tons of information. Companies went online, started their own websites, had a social presence, etc. All these increased in 10 years (the mid 90s to mid- 2000s). Customers had access to tons of content for the first time because no companies have websites.  The started reading different contents, started having a social presence, etc. This enabled a huge flurry of activity in the first wave, but this lead to deal distance got a little bit bigger. Big data companies started helping during this phase by having a lot of contact directories and company firmographics details online.  

The 2nd Wave – Inbound  2nd wave has been segmented between the mid-2000s to early 2010 that led us to an inbound way. This is the timeframe when the big events like HubSpot were started, the iPhone was launched, etc. So as a company you had an option to increase a lot of different content formats, video, audio, texts, and infographics.  There was a huge flurry of activity in automation. Emails, nurturing campaigns in social and other stuff started being automated. Customers had the option to change the whole process. They made it like a buyer-led journey. They wanted to be more informed, more educated and they wanted to learn at their own pace, not at the pace at which companies want. So this increased distance between the company and customers a little more. 

 The 3rd Wave - Noise  The 3rd wave that fell between 2011 to 2020 when we went from higher-end 50 companies in sales marketing technologies to 8,000 which was a huge jump. Right now we're in the middle of a crisis where we are rediscovering new roads as well. How is this affecting all of us in the B2B data segment? Because customers also going to leave a lot of digital footprint across different platforms  Though we didn’t have tech talk earlier, the footprint and the exhaust increased in this nice space, and this cemetery, the next pillar in the distance. It went from two blocks to five blocks and it kept increasing. Though B2B companies are trying to send you more data in different ways, the noise is not going away. We have lots of noise now. So what's next?  

What is the 4th Wave?  What's the fourth wave and the more important question is that why has this distance increased between the company and the customers?   Every small and big company wanted to have more and more data, more quantity and quality though they don’t know to measure it. Every small and big company is using tons of tools to automate the whole marketing process, bombard people, and the distance between a customer and the company has just increased nonstop.  So the 4th wave is you need to have a scale in a B2B data environment, you need to have personalization So you need data in the hundreds of millions at the same time. You need that personalization. Also, you also want the expert research. So your data partner should be both a combination of a platform, like a product or a data product like somebody who can tailor and give you intelligence more.

Here are some of my sort of rules for founder's, mainly for early-stage marketing teams.  

 1. You need to be obsessed with your buyer. So that means learning everything you possibly can about them, knowing what matters to them. The biggest thing is actually to stop making assumptions. At times when you are a founder, you're solving a problem that you had. You assume that you know everything there is to know about your buyer, and it turns out you don't.   Your buyers can be very different from you, and your ideal buyers are going to change as you grow. So make sure that you make research part of everything you do. Make sure you're not only talking to your buyers but also talking to the people who wind up not buying from you as well. It is the key, and I like to refer to this as relationship building at scale. So genuinely make build relationships with your ideal customers.  

2. You need to care about marketing often. You might if you're a founder. You might be a technical founder, and you might care a lot more about the product. You just don't think about marketing and sales. You hire someone else to do it. But culture is a top-down thing, and if you don't show your team from the beginning that you give a damn about marketing. That you're doing the work to learn what's going on and What you need, you are going to fall short through a whole thing. So you want to cultivate that marketing talent. If you have a marketing team of one hire a coach, they need help they need. They need assistance to hire a marketing coach that can support them.  

3. Don't compete for dominance when it comes to content. Don't do the same thing that everybody else is doing like fingers crossed that you're going to rise above it. Instead, find a niche of content that no one is covering. So look at what all of your competitors are doing, see what you both have in common. Then find the angle or the approach to content that no one else is covering. Dominate that, it's the thing that will set you apart, and it'll make your content journey a whole lot easier and a whole lot more successful. Find your niche and own it. 

 4. When it comes to marketing, especially early, you need to think 10x, not 10%. It can be hard for you perfectionists out there, so stop freaking out about every little typo. People don't care about it. Think about the big picture. Think about the things that are going to move the needle. Do big projects that have real potential. Don't worry about the small stuff because it's not going to get you to where you need to go. Focus on big things that have the potential to make a difference to your ledger that is your pipeline.   

5. Find your gang on the playground. What I mean is to find your strategic partners. Look at your industry and find the companies that are maybe solving a complementary problem to the one you are addressing. Perhaps you both can work together to kind of offer something that solves an even bigger problem together. Pull your resources if there is another startup that is going to team up with you so that you can maximize your assets and your reach. Invest in building Co-marketing and strategic partnership relationships. 

 6. Invest in your brand: With your brand, you can build a corporate brand far faster. Your brand can have a far greater reach than your company brand in the early days. People want to buy from people that they trust. If they see a founder who's the content they love, admire, and trust, they are a lot more likely to buy your product. Look at companies like DRIFT and GONG, and they have leadership teams that have been out there. They have built these powerful personal brands, and as a result, their growth has just been an absolute rocket ship.

• Evolution of sales 

If you look back 18 or 20 years back, there's always been this fundamental disconnect between marketing and sales and other parts of the organizations. Everything was much siloed. Everything was gold, very differently. Marketing was gold on brand, PR notices, and pipeline generation. When you look at sales and sales is gold on closed business, not necessarily conversion of leads but not in the way the marketing team was. 

 • The dichotomy in the organization 

This dichotomy has been continuing for decades and no questions were asked on this. This is because of the long journey of the customers or the life cycle of the customers. For example, a customer would buy software for a lifetime. Once they made the software purchase, they own those licenses, then every three, five, seven years, they would purchase maintenance renewals. They never had to repurchase the software unless it got an end of life or something of that nature. So by default, what you had was this lifetime customer value of five-plus years. So marketing was only focused on new logos. Now no one focused on this long term service because they were going to be around for five-plus years. So, it was way more expensive to try to switch any time after that first initial purchase than it ever was. Just to wait for the maintenance renewals to come and just renew the maintenance. So you think five, five-year lifetime customer value, at a minimum, you have this very sustainable business and very low term.

 • Alignment in the organization 

These days, customers have lots of options. They are now paying monthly or annually. So switching the vendor is pretty easy. If customers are not satisfied with the service, the move to another vendor. That is when you see marketing and sales have to react to this. They no longer are fractured as last time.  So these teams suddenly had to work much more closely together. But the reality is we now need customers to adopt the solution. We had to take really good care of them. And not only did we now need to be focused on new logo acquisition, but we needed to also understand how we could maximize the existing revenue and every single account that we encountered.

Scott Douglas Clary is the SVP Marketing & Sales at ExciteM and Strategy and Growth at Grass Valley. He hosts the Success Story Podcast. Scott is Professor at AmityBS. He is also part of the Forbes Council & Revenue Collective. Scott has contributed significantly to Forbes, WSJ, Hackernoon, DJ, The Startup as an author, and other published work.  

10X, by definition, is to increase your business by a factor of 10, increase your revenue by a factor of 10, whatever that KPI is. And obviously, not many companies can do that easily. And the playbook for that depends on the company's context, industry, the environment, what you're selling to your customers, and various other factors. 

Irrespective of any industry, the concept stems from how you sell to customers. So when you want to 10X growth in your business, you want to increase your business by a factor of 10. Every company has its sales and marketing strategy. Then there are all these different types of branded sales strategies.  You have challenger, SPIN, and the list is of endless sales strategies. And that's really like your sales playbook. You understand your customers, their pain points, you solve your customer's pain points at whatever solution you are selling. That's sort of how sales work.

That's not going to have 10x business. What do we have to do more than just a regular sales strategy? If you think about how we solve customer's pain points when we deliver our sales campaign to a customer, we focus on our marketing, our branding, our narrative, our messaging, our inbound or outbound, our operations, our tech stack, or our sales enablement to help our sales reps, and spend more time selling and whatnot.  

When you realize how many things are involved in selling to a customer, it's much more than just one conversation. You have to understand the behaviors, all these different parts of commercial business units. You have to focus on and what you have to align your messaging across. What I mean by that is a great sales leader, a great marketing leader, a great revenue leader.

They're going to build out an end to end process that leaves no point of interaction with the customer up to the imagination. Traditionally, when you look at a sales organization, and a marketing organization in many circumstances, those business units are usually siloed.

So let's walk through the traditional sales process. A customer hears about your product. Perhaps they go to a landing page, submit their email address on a form that becomes a marketing qualified lead that gets passed over to sales.  An SDR/BDR calls out to that customer. And, and then, they book a demo, and he follows up, and account executive follows up. And that's sort of like the traditional linear sales process.

If you realize and take that mindset as to how you sell to a customer, after they become a marketing qualified lead (MQL), they get passed over to sales. And it's almost like you're after marketing, selling with them now. It's the onus on sales to close that deal, and that's how many businesses work.  To have 10X growth of your business, you have to understand that customers don't buy that way. So why are you selling to them like that? According to research, between 50-70% of the customer journey is completed while finding the product information.

They need to buy a product before they even speak to somebody from your organization. Because they're going to your website, your social, and any sort of peer review website, they're getting all of these stats, speaking to their peers, and they're looking at references before they engage with you. Then they go to your website, they put in a request for a sales demo, and now your sales rep speaks to them.

Vinaya Prakhala is the Founder & President of Sales Enablement Society, India Chapter. He is also the VP of Deskerra, which is a suite of various business enablement solutions. He comes with over two decades of experience in sales across the globe. He is a great speaker and mentor.

Here, he shares a glimpse of what got him going in his 25 years of a long career. Through his experiences, he shares why individual startups fail to perform in sales and why certain startups perform exceptionally well in sales.

He shares his six steps to building a sales strategy for any organization, either struggling with or trying to improve their sales. They are:

1. What is the product or service?

• Your primary offering, what is it? Have you clearly defined your product? Are you communicating with your customers? Do both of you and your customers have the same understanding of the product?
• How well have you packaged it? Is it logical? Does your packaging of products or services make sense to your customer? Take feedback from customers.
• What's the asking price? Pricing is crucial, assign value to your package. Is it free, or freemium, or premium?
• What are they willing to pay?

Be clear, complete, concrete, concise, and correct.

2. Where is it being sold, and to whom is it being sold? Understand your target audience and define the target market, Outline your total addressable market (TAM), Potential addressable market (PAM), Serviceable addressable market (SAM), and Serviceable obtainable market (SOM). What is it? I wish to get out of the market? Set goals for the market. These goals help you define your SOM and find the right direction to approach that market.

3. How is it being sold? Find your GTM strategy, ideal customer vertical, and an ideal buyer persona. List all the individuals you are going to pitch (create an emotional story, not a product feature list). At this stage, you decide if you will base your marketing strategy on inbound or outbound, after which set up your sales process to reach your customers effectively. Based on the outcome of the tasks performed till now, decide if you would go the ABM way right out of the bat.

4. When are you going to sell the product? Timing is everything in sales. Define your call timing (When you will you call the customer), social selling (put the right message and content across in the right time), ABM timing (Time when you will upsell, cross-sell, down sell to specific account so that they keep buying from you), and Budget (Define what is the maximum time and resources you are going to spend after a lead till you choose to give up on pursuing the lead)

5. Why will anyone buy it? Find your niche and answer what differentiates you from your competitors. List down everything that separates you from logo and messaging to every inch of your product and brand. Don't hard sell; be kind to your customers. These customers will be your product evangelists.

The other critical strategies for building your sales structure for a startup are:

1. Objection handling
2. Negotiation
3. Lead qualification (BANT, ICPD)
4. Lead to LOGO: MQL to SAL to SQL to LOGO
5. Sales technology used
6. Outsourcing Sales

He later lays down the guide to increase your sales exponentially, the Dos and Don'ts of sales for startups, build a sales team, and various other vital questions.

Sue Barrett, the founder of Barrett Consulting Group, is a well-known name in the sales circle for creating sustainable sales systems. She is an educator and a leading strategist. She is here to shed light on the selling systems that create lasting success. Sue reveals below how to remove chaos and build processes for sales that can be repeated and brings sustainable success to the business.

According to her, most sales processes are random in nature. Some ways allow you to model sales success. If you can shape sales success, you can repeat it with minor tweaks. It will make success repeatable.

What is a sales system?

A sales system is an open system that lives and breathes inside the organization and interacts with markets, clients, workers, and society. Marketing is the interface between customers and sales. A sales system is a well-coordinated super highway driven by:

• Intention
• Strategy
• Communication
• Information
• Behavior
• Tools/Technology
• Actions

It flows effortlessly between the customer and the organization.

Types of sales systems today in business

All the organization has some form of sales system. Some are well-polished engines, and some are not. Invariably there are two kinds of methods:

1. An amalgamation of tools, vague guidelines with multiple salespeople is doing their own thing without a proper direction.
2. A tightly managed team with a laser focus on numbers. With a set up of right protocols, and too many administrators with any breathing space.

Why do you create sales systems?

Either a business establishes the sales system by design or default. The question you need asking is, how operational is your sales system and is it working for you? Most execs try to reply to this question by lead to a deal conversion rate or the number of leads in the system.

Even though the numbers may look good, it fails to answer if the system will sustain itself if no leads are generated through external interference (new leads through cold calling, social media, and any other similar sources). Can it be sustained through an existing group of customers? The answer is no in most cases.

How do you turn it around? How do you convert the answer to yes?

The answer is creating sales systems.

Before creating a system, develop an understanding of your customer, have a feedback loop system in place that can help you align your sales activities, and prevent you from losing focus. The execs are mostly fixated on the number to find what they can control and what they cannot, and make the forecast more predictable.

The input and output measures that most execs focus on are:

1. Input Measures are: behaviors, activities, and quality
2. Output measures: numbers, quarterly targets, results

It makes it quite evident that somewhere down the line, sales get misaligned with business goals while focusing prudently on the number game.

Ljubica is the marketing director of the APAC region at Hexagon PPM. She is a strategic marketing leader with a focus on increasing revenue generation, creating customer journey, building brand, and great go-to-market strategies.

Here she sheds light on one of the most discussed topics of the late and one of the teething issues businesses are facing. That is having a sales-focused marketing team that can increase the bottom-line of the company. She explains how an organization can develop a robust revenue-focused marketing engine. She also speaks about what COVID19 changed for the marketing and sales department.

The organizations have to understand the value and the experience they are willing to deliver at the various stages of the customer lifecycle. Now due to the pandemic, most of the interactions have turned towards virtual systems. Marketing and sales teams dependent on the legacy systems will need to upskill themselves and move towards technologies like VR and video streaming.

What affects a revenue Engine?

Before jumping into the models, tips and others understand that 10 factors affect any organization in their revenue generation engine. They are:

1. Strategic Orientation: It is the firm's focus in the strategic direction. It focuses on how they are going to implement the strategy and maintain the balance between long and short-term business strategies.
2. Customer: How focused is your organization on customer-centricity? Keep your eye on your ICP.
3. People and skills: Your employee and their craft aligned to the task.
4. Job Design: Align the right people to the right job, so whatever you plan to execute gets executed timely and correctly.
5. Budgeting: It contributes to overall revenue goals more focused on ROI.
6. Culture: It's about how your customers and employee feel about your organization and how they feel about the organization.
7. Process: It focuses on how easy was it to follow the methods implemented, does it align with company goals, and does it improve efficiency.
8. Technology: It shows the tech stack implemented by the company and how it aids in achieving the goals.
9. Communication: It refers to the messages both direct and subliminal going across the organization to all the stakeholders.
10. Analytics and reporting; It is the different tracking systems implemented to fine-tune the process and perform better.

Kiran is a Stanford graduate and currently holds the position of Director Sales Enablement for the APAC region at Salesforce. He comes with a diverse set of sales experiences acquired in the career span of close to two decades.

Here he shares:

1. How he had an illustrious sales career?
2. Why do people fail to convert leads to deals?
3. What did he learn in sales in the past twenty years that you can implement in your business?

Most of the companies are focused on increasing the depth of a lead pipeline. However, the businesses have failed numerous times to do so because they missed connecting to the business needs of the lead most of the time.

How do you qualify needs?

Tap all your lead sources from marketing, lead generation team, partners, Customer references, and even from the prospects you are currently taking. Have enough sources of leads. Do not hesitate to ask for recommendations from the customer.

Have a CRM in place to nurture and prioritize the leads that need your attention. Focus on the highest priority lead that is likely to convert.

Connect with leads within 24-48 hours because 7 out of 10 times the leads choose the vendor who connects with them first. Making the first move becomes even more vital as you set the benchmark for other vendors who arrive later; you get the first-mover advantage.

It is not only essential to qualify the right leads but also to remove those whom you cannot satisfy or work with your current capabilities. It improves your lead conversion rate, and you spend fewer resources on the leads that won't convert to deals.

How do you connect to the business needs of the customer?

Connect with people in high places in the organization. After that, go down to the next level below and follow the sequence until you reach the person who is responsible for acquiring your product or give you an in-depth understanding of their needs. Leverage social media to its fullest extent to do so.

Connect with all the stakeholders even try reaching out to the customer of your prospect to give you a better understanding of the problem lead is facing. It will not only help the lead but also the customer of the lead. Try to connect with everyone involved and will benefit from the resolution directly or indirectly to have a clear view of the bigger picture.

Sometimes when a lead approaches, you find out if the lead is an evaluator or a key decision-maker. Your pitch will change according to who is interacting with you. The same story won't resonate with everyone. Each has to be treated uniquely. To differentiate between the two, ask your prospect about the process you need to follow in specific deal value. It will give you a clear idea of the people involved and who is likely to be the key decision-maker in the process.

"Do not lead with a solution; lead to a solution."

Remember not to speak in terms of features and benefits. Even your competitors are having almost the same features. What differentiates you is the value you bring to the table and how well it connects to the actual problem the prospect is facing. Build relationships and credibility for the future.

Jonathan is the CEO of the GrowthHackers.com. He is an expert in his domain. He is a social media influencer, thought leader, and author to various thought-provoking articles for the growth of startups and businesses.

In this video, he shares little nuggets of knowledge from his vast experience on how different channels of Communication (Social media, instant messaging, Websites, and various others) can intertwine with each other and work cohesively to form marketing ecosystem.

He explains how a marketing ecosystem can drive traffic to the website, provide an immersive experience to the audience, and drive revenue. He also shares how one can create a sustainable Marketing Ecosystem, takes care of business without much effort from your side, and hence, lower the risk of conducting business.

Jonathan shares his framework for creating growth hacks that work for you. He defines the fundamental matrices that help you measure the KPIs for your automation. He also explains the Pirate Metric or AARRRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral) Metric and Marketing led product Growth Metrics (This metrics here focuses on improving the product as the marketing team gathers data on the customer wants).

He lists down the key metrics that you should always track or keep an eye out for (Traffic, Leads, Sales, ROI, CLV, Cost per Lead, and Cost per Sales) for your marketing ecosystem and your business to grow. He also sheds light on how to develop the growth mindset to push you during good and bad times.

He has also taken on questions related to brand building, the best organization that has done it to the best in recent times, how they did it, and various topics related to growth hacks and building startups.

Iris Chan is the Marketing Director at Seismic for the Asia Pacific (APAC) & Japan. She has a vast experience in building, leading, and nurturing global marketing teams. She is a keynote speaker and author.

She shares from her valuable experience what are the key ingredients to bring a marketing team together, how these marketing teams enable growth spurt in b2B organizations in specific. She also sheds light on how cohesive marketing teams benefit organizations and customers in having an immersive product experience.

The essential five qualities she speaks about are:

1. Marketing and sales alignment with a collaborative mindset: Iris shares how great marketing teams have managed to double the revenue of the organizations. According to her, a central repository of content that becomes a single source of truth for both marketing and sales, which can not only help align sales and marketing but also have synergy in customer experience or buying experience.
2. Focus on personalized and connected buyer journey: Great teams create buyer journey from initial customer contact to closure of the deal. Marketing automation tools are a significant part of creating these journey maps. Customer journey maps enable faster, personalized, and connected buyer experience while affirming to brand compliance.
3. Use Insights to optimize customer engagement and marketing operations: High performing teams improve performance through insights. It enables marketing teams to know what resonates with the prospects, tailor conversations, drive better engagement, and optimize the content through efficient operations. You can deliver the right content at the right time. Great teams create predictive content that is relevant to the buyer. It allows you to recommend the right content to the buyers, improve success ratio, and replicate success.
4. Measure marketing contribution to revenue: Great teams that measure the metrics that matter the most, not the vanity metrics, like more than a lead generated to revenue generated through marketing because 40% of marketing budget goes to content development.
5. Adapt resilience in storytelling: Good team works as a unit; they can pivot as the situation changes unexpectedly. You have to become a great storyteller.

She also shares vital team-building exercises that build synergy like virtual knowledge sharing sessions to create synergy and enhance the overall skill of the team. Iris also sheds light on hiring great marketing teams based on the stage of the business.

Gurupandian leads product and growth at Ampliz. He comes with over a decade of experience working in the data industry, and leading global product and marketing teams focused on growth and revenue.  He shares his nuggets of knowledge and expertise on how sales and marketing teams can benefit from having a great b2b data partner.

What do sales and marketing teams need?

All marketers and sales folks focus on speedy growth in customers and revenue. Growth is dependent on a lot of engines or gears that run the growth engine. Faster the gears rotate quicker the growth. For gear to turn faster, the fuel is data.

The B2B data can come from the website forms event registrations, Demo signups, collateral downloads, social media, and many others. The data derived from the above channels aren't enough to put the finger on any of them and say that this is my prospect that will convert. You need much additional information to go along with it to complete the picture of who is the right lead. Accurate contextual data helps in a good Lead Qualification process.

How can a B2B data partner help?

Filling the missing data in leads is where most marketing and salespeople spend their productive time. This lost time can never be taken back and utilized on more productive work. Lead qualification and their priority rely on some vital data fields.

When it comes to running great campaigns, it again depends on the quality and depth of data that you have accumulated. Your marketing database is the result of your years of toil. Nothing hurts the business more than an outdated database. It cripples with rising opportunity cost and complexity of acquiring the updated information every day.

Data cleaning and validation is a cyclic process. With more and more people switching jobs rampantly, it becomes an important and equally difficult task. 30% of the data goes inferior every time you acquire it.

Customers are engaging with multiple parties and are exposed to the flood of messages every day. It has led to a shorter attention span and challenge for the marketer to find innovative ways to hold that attention. Marketers today to catch the attention are prioritizing leads on the go and hyper personalizing the campaigns like the latest hiring, tech stack changes, and many others.

Choosing the right data partner

The capabilities that you should focus on getting the right B2B data partner are:

1. Global Scale: Find their spread. Keep in mind that the partner you are looking at in not spread too far and too thin. There should be a right balance between the range and the depth of data you need.
2. Data Standards; Check the kind of data standards the company follows, like how quickly they refresh their data, do they respect geographic restrictions or laws while acquiring data, and many others.
3. Custom Project handling capabilities: Keep an eye out for custom data capabilities. Just having a list of emails and names is not enough anymore. Seek out what all can your partner customize for you so that you get a list of contacts that works for you.

Gunnar is the Senior Partner and Alliance Manager for APAC with Hootsuite. He has more than two decades of experience in working with Channel Partners and forging partnerships. Gunnar is a great mentor, and he is passionate about social selling.

In this video, he shares are critical constituents of a great channel partner and how one can use it for social selling. He says,

"In B2B customers do not buy products; they buy an outcome or something that can help them overcome a challenge. Sometimes these challenges or the required outcome cannot be achieved or overcome by the capabilities of a single vendor. That's where you need the channel partners who can glue different solutions together to help the prospect overcome the challenge or achieve a required outcome."

He calls his method a Triple Win with Partnership. With partner (Reseller, Referral, and Ecosystem), customer and you revolve around "Solve Customer Challenges" at the center.

Gunnar defines social selling as:

"A set of social media activities conducted by educated and enabled sales teams that create meaningful moments to build and nurture relationships."

Channel partners help create a social media ecosystem that allows listening to the target audience, learn about them, deliver the right content at the right time, and eventually pitch the product when the leads receive an adequate amount of lead nurturing.

There are various ways one can help their partners to do social selling effectively.

Foster Engagement: Improve social media capabilities of partners through up-skilling and collaborating with them on social media.

Social Selling Program: Here, you enable vendors to brag about you confidently and also concerned to end customers on social media.

Listen Together: Listen to user-generated content (UGC) to build credible content and do it together with your partner so that you develop a better understanding of each other as well as the end-user.

Employee Advocacy Program: These include the capabilities of your partners that help you work efficiently and make conversations that aid you in converting leads to deals.

Reverse activities: Reverse engineer the process you and your partner followed to get a product evangelist. Check what worked and what didn't work for you at that time. Work alongside your partner to create a successful workflow or a success model. Tweak and replicate it with other customers to enjoy lasting success and build great partnerships.

Gunnar, from his decades of experiences, shares the best ways to choose a partner, the qualities to look for in a partner, benchmark their performance, and how you can build a lasting mutually beneficial relationship. He also shares the key metrics that you can use to measure the effectiveness of the channel partner's social selling activities, and how to work along with them to improve gradually.

Davinia Khong is a B2B marketing leader, a keynote speaker, and is the senior marketing leader for the APAC region at Backbase. Davinia drives lead generation and branding efforts for Backbase. Here she describes the challenges in the first six months of a marketing leader and makes an impact.

She shares the common traps a b2b marketer should avoid in initial days, the guiding rules behind a great career, and the marketing tips and roadmap for growth.

Three common traps that a marketing leader should avoid in the initial days are:

1. Failing to focus: It will be information overload for an initial couple of months. Everyone will have their idea of how the marketing department should function. You are bound to be overwhelmed by the number of meetings, the flood of messages you are going to receive. Keep your focus and prioritize what is required. Do not say yes to everything. Stick to your game plan and list your achievements down to showcase your department heads.
2. Failing to get the wins that matter to your boss, sales, & CEO: Talk regularly with your higher-up folks every week. List your achievements so that you stay true to your game plan and aligning with the overall business strategy. Play to your strengths.
3. Failing to ask for help: Do not get stuck in the bubble where you feel everything is going great. Build a relationship with your higher-ups so that they will give honest feedback on your performance. Do not take these to heart, instead use them as stepping stones to grow. Ask for additional help if you need to perform.

Three guidelines to avoid the above strangling traps are:

1. Prepare, start before day 1: Speak to people who are better than you for guidance and mentorship. Especially with a secure network. Talk to agencies on their case studies. It has a ton of information and hidden jewels.
2. Know your baseline: Dig into the KPIs and matrices. Identify what needs measuring; find out the quality of the audience and leads. Ask people about advice. You will get an idea of how they view marketing.
3. Pitch the destination: Visualize what you want to achieve, and believe in it. Do not reinvent the wheel; just make it better. Test what is working and repeat it. Ask people for feedback during development and keep the Communication open.

Three marketing tips and strategies for marketing leaders

1. An influencer to influence: Before getting an influencer on board, you should understand that the medium is the message. Today the same word can be repeated, plagiarized blatantly. But the uniqueness of an influencer cannot be repeated.
2. Short-term vs. Long-term: Have both the activities (short and long-term activities) planned. Keep an eye on the goals and pivot as the situation changes
3. Spearfishing vs. casting the net: have a mix of content or messaging both for particular customers and the broader audience, respectively.

The 180 days roadmap for marketing leaders:

Quick Wins (60-90 days)

1. Always be on the top of "Paid and Social Media" "Events/ meetings (Physical/Virtual)" Email Automation, Videos
2. Look out for public relations and media partnership
3. Leadership profiling

The wow factor (150-180 days)

1. Aim for delivering on the Influencer and pillar asset in the first half of the year. Then you can reap the benefits of the activity during the latter part of the year.
2. Prepare a teaser launch. Integrated E2E

Prepare your Pilot projects (30 -180 days)

1. Assign and recruit people and agency resources for your pilot projects
2. Discuss the viability of the pilot projects and check on your MarTech Stack.

She also shares various other tips for marketing leaders in sailing them through the tough times and pushing career beyond limits.

Sarah is the founder of Tribal Impact and author to the award-winning book “The Social CEO.” She is a keynote speaker, mentor, and authority in devising an inbound approach for businesses. She shares with us a general and in a very compact way to create an inbound strategy for our company. Sarah delivers to us the importance of having an inbound approach and how to minimize the risks involved with an inbound approach. She also shares the key ingredients of a great inbound strategy and the key metrics that help an organization understand if the inbound is working for them. She also shows how inbound can be interactive, not interruptive, or customized to an extent where you don’t look creepy. Sarah sets up a very holistic view of the digital inbound that delivers excellent value and generates revenue sustainably.

Nathan Latka a household name for anyone in B2B SaaS and Startups. He is one of the biggest influencers, celebrated authors, most recognized podcasters, and the proud owner of the Latka Agency. He is also the founder of the SaaS database Getlatka.com. He has interviewed more than 2200 SaaS Ceos to his credit. He talks about various B2B Saas models and how to choose a SaaS model that works for you. Pricing and delivery model are critical to a successful SaaS model of Business, Nathan describes them and shows how to implement effortlessly. He shares ten most effective SaaS models that most organizations follow and additional 5 SaaS models that can propel your growth. He also shares the insights he has gained from interviewing over 2200 Saas companies.

Marissa is the founder of a much-acclaimed consulting firm called the Marissa Pick Consulting. She is the Digital Marketing Strategist, Keynote Speaker, mentor, and one of the foremost authorities in influencer marketing. Marissa delivers and shares here her immense knowledge on the influence, impact, and the future of the influencer marketing for B2B. She lets us into the secret sauce of having a great influencer marketing. The COvid19 crisis, the viewership, and the consumption of media have changed drastically, which has affected and will continue to affect the B2B Influencer marketing. Marissa sheds light on how to create opportunity out of a crisis and build a great influencer marketing for B2B.

Gurupandian leads product and growth at Ampliz. He comes with over a decade of experience working in the data industry, and leading global product and marketing teams focused on growth and revenue.  He shares his nuggets of knowledge and expertise on how sales and marketing teams can benefit from having a great b2b data partner.

What do sales and marketing teams need?

All marketers and sales folks focus on speedy growth in customers and revenue. Growth is dependent on a lot of engines or gears that run the growth engine. Faster the gears rotate quicker the growth. For gear to turn faster, the fuel is data.

The B2B data can come from the website forms event registrations, Demo signups, collateral downloads, social media, and many others. The data derived from the above channels aren't enough to put the finger on any of them and say that this is my prospect that will convert. You need much additional information to go along with it to complete the picture of who is the right lead. Accurate contextual data helps in a good Lead Qualification process.

How can a B2B data partner help?

Filling the missing data in leads is where most marketing and salespeople spend their productive time. This lost time can never be taken back and utilized on more productive work. Lead qualification and their priority rely on some vital data fields.

When it comes to running great campaigns, it again depends on the quality and depth of data that you have accumulated. Your marketing database is the result of your years of toil. Nothing hurts the business more than an outdated database. It cripples with rising opportunity cost and complexity of acquiring the updated information every day.

Data cleaning and validation is a cyclic process. With more and more people switching jobs rampantly, it becomes an important and equally difficult task. 30% of the data goes inferior every time you acquire it.

Customers are engaging with multiple parties and are exposed to the flood of messages every day. It has led to a shorter attention span and challenge for the marketer to find innovative ways to hold that attention. Marketers today to catch the attention are prioritizing leads on the go and hyper personalizing the campaigns like the latest hiring, tech stack changes, and many others.

Choosing the right data partner

The capabilities that you should focus on getting the right B2B data partner are:

1. Global Scale: Find their spread. Keep in mind that the partner you are looking at in not spread too far and too thin. There should be a right balance between the range and the depth of data you need.
2. Data Standards; Check the kind of data standards the company follows, like how quickly they refresh their data, do they respect geographic restrictions or laws while acquiring data, and many others.
3. Custom Project handling capabilities: Keep an eye out for custom data capabilities. Just having a list of emails and names is not enough anymore. Seek out what all can your partner customize for you so that you get a list of contacts that works for you.