B2B Sales and Marketing #FriTalks

Hando Sinisalu, the founder of Marketing Parrot, with extensive experience as an event organizer, and over the years, he has noticed that some companies tend to use their speaking opportunities during sponsored events to deliver sales pitches, which often end up frustrating the audience. This missed opportunity could have been used to build trust and establish relationships with potential customers.

In this conversation, we discuss why this happens and explore strategies for maximizing the value of event sponsorships. We'll be hearing both positive and negative examples of conference sponsorships, from preparation to activation and gain insights into successful event sponsorship strategies.

The USA stands as the world’s largest and most lucrative market. However, it is also a market characterized by intense competition and some of the highest marketing costs. In this conversation with Kristine Lamberga, CMO of SAF Tehnika, we delve into her insights about the US market.

SAF Tehnika specializes in the development and manufacturing of a range of high-end equipment, with its wireless data transmission technologies being its flagship offerings. Over the years, the company has successfully established a foothold in the US market. Interestingly, the largest part of the roughly 3,000 National Broadcasters in the United States are using SAF Tehnika microwave radios.

In this episode of #FriTalks, our guest is the founder of Mailigen and former VP of Product at Pipedrive - Janis Rozenblats.
He is joining us to share his valuable experience of building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and the practical aspects of using it to optimise marketing execution and ROI.

In our conversation, we discuss the following topics:
- How should we understand the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and what value it can provide to SaaS companies
- How to build an ICP and what data sources needed for that
- How to practically apply it across Product Development, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success

Marketing often feels like an endless uphill struggle. Moreover, marketing managers often complain of poor internal alignment, conflicting and ever-changing priorities and pressure for short-term results.

In this episode, Andrejs and Rolands explore the marketing planning framework that they tested and improved in well over 200 campaigns. Their framework stands on four solid pillars: alignment on revenue goals, comprehensive audience research, strategic Go-To-Market (GTM) planning, and regular review of planned marketing activities.

The decision-making process of B2B buyers has undergone significant changes.
Over the past few years, there has been a notable shift in the behavior of B2B technology buyers, marked by reduced trust in new vendors and their sales representatives. Present-day buyers exhibit a preference for conducting independent research, forming their own conclusions and using self-service options.
- In this episode, we explore the following topics:
- The shifts in buyers' behavior since the onset of Covid-19
- The objectives and tasks that buying groups aim to achieve
- The increasing significance of communities in the buying process
- The evolving role of salespeople in the modern buying landscape
- Strategies for how marketing can adapt to the changing behaviors of buyers

Increasing pricing is the single best and most straightforward way to increase business profitability.
Pricing is so important, that companies would be well advised to spend a lot of time and effort to set optimal pricing.
Yet, according to research, SaaS companies only spend 6 hours on pricing. No monthly, not annually, ever.
In this episode of FriTalks, we are joined by pricing strategist and founder of Soft Fight Emanuel Martonca.
We discuss:

• Why pricing is so important for SaaS?
• How an average SaaS company approaches pricing and what are the problems?
• How does pricing impact profitability?
• Principles of pricing
• Where do companies start if they want to review their pricing?

In this first FriTalks of 2024, Andrejs and Rolands look at key trends in B2B marketing and discuss what challenges and opportunities they bring for lead generation in 2024.

In the rapidly evolving digital economy and with the changing customer behaviour, marketing's role in B2B organisations is being redefined. Marketing teams are now expected to facilitate and enable growth more than ever before.

• We invited Jens Tinapp, VP of Marketing and Communication at Diehl Metering, to talk about the path of building a future-proof marketing team.
  We discussed:
  - How has the role of marketing evolved
  - How have the CEO’s expectations changed
  - What are the must-have skills and capabilities of the modern marketing team
  - What to keep in-house and what to outsource
  - How to bring an impact and build trust for the marketing team

In today's era of customer-driven buyer processes, the role of salespeople is evolving. What exactly are customers expecting from salespeople today and how can salespeople stay relevant to their customers while achieving long-term success?
Listen to an insightful conversation with Bostjan Strazer, a business trainer and ice pilot at Hansen Beck, where we address these questions and more.
We discussed the following topics:
- How have buyer’s behaviour and priorities changed
- What do they expect from salespeople?
- How has the ultimate goal of sales changed?
- What does it mean for the salesperson?
- What skills and behaviours does it require?
- How to develop it in a practical matter?

This time, our guest is Frank Sondors, a B2B sales veteran with over a decade of experience at Google, Black Crow, SimilarWeb, and Whatagraph.
He recently launched his own company, Salesforge, to address a challenge he deeply cared about: templated communication.
Just within three months company grew from ground zero to fifty paying customers by leveraging low-cost lead generation strategies and channels.
Listen to our conversation with Frank to uncover his remarkable quick-win approach and learn from his journey. 

Zabbix is a widely known software system used for IT monitoring by thousands of companies around the world. Despite being open-source and free to use, the company has established a thriving business and a global community of dedicated IT professionals, all with minimal marketing investment. 
To uncover the secret of their success, we invited Zane Lasmane, Head of Marketing at Zabbix, to share her secret source.

Data centre business is often viewed as a commodity market with a few global players dominating, leaving very little room for profitability, especially if you are a small player.
Similar is seen in other sectors of IT business.
So, how can small players still differentiate their value proposition and grow profitable business? We discuss it with our guest, Marija Bergere, Head of Marketing at DEAC, the company which seems managed to find its recipe for success.
During our discussion, we cover the following topics:
• The current market landscape and the key challenges facing the data centre business.
• How geopolitical and economic situations have changed the requirements of buyers.
• The impact of these changes on positioning, offering, and go-to-market strategy.
• Changes in marketing objectives.
• What marketing needs to do differently to succeed in the future

In this episode, we discuss marketing and sales to highly technical buyers, such as engineers.
Research shows that highly technical buyers have very specific buying behaviour. They are willing to put extra effort into product research, and, compared to business buyers, they are rather averse to anything they perceive as being marketing or marketing prepared information.
Nevertheless, there is a clear path to market to this audience that we share in this episode.

In this episode, continue talking about expansion to international markets.
Our guest is Aldis Erglis, VP of Technology Strategy at Emergn, a global software development company that operates in various markets, including financial services, healthcare, retail, government, and technology. Their clients include large multinational corporations as well as smaller organizations. Emergn has offices and teams located in North America, Europe, and Asia, and they have a global network of partners and affiliates.
In our conversation with Aldis, we talk about the success factors of international expansion, including the following topics:
- Is the local presence a "must have" factor?
- strategies for differentiating your value proposition from well-established competitors
- tactics for building trust among enterprise accounts
- essential steps to take for planning international expansion

Most growth in the technology business is coming from as-a-Service business model. In this episode, we discuss how to move from the traditional one-off sales model to recurring revenue or as-a-Service business.
While highly attractive in the long term, this is by no means a simple journey requiring good planning, a strong ability to invest and a true obsession with pleasing your ideal customers.

In this episode, we talk about the following:
- Key metrics of SaaS business, such as LTV, CAC, ARR and more
- Cashflow planning consideration
- And organizational changes required

In this episode, we discuss the costs of expansion to international markets and other key metrics that tech company founders need to consider before planning growth in global B2B markets.

In this B2B Sales and Marketing #FriTalks our guest Olha Olifirenko, Product Marketing Lead at Newage.io, share the key learnings from her first-year journey of scaling a SaaS product to the global market. She also provides valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities that come with scaling a SaaS product and how to overcome them. This episode is an opportunity for anyone who is interested in taking their SaaS product global.

In this episode of our B2B Sales and Marketing FriTalks, we delved into the world of AI and its impact on B2B marketing. We examined how AI is revolutionizing the way businesses approach marketing strategies and how it's helping them reach  their target audience more efficiently. From chatbots to personalized content, we explored the latest AI technologies and their applications in B2B marketing. Join our conversation with Andriy Burlitky, Head of Business Development at Profisea, a seasoned marketer and AI enthusiast, to gain a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of B2B marketing and how you can benefit from it today.

It has always been a bit of a mystery for B2B companies to understand what actually drives their revenue. More specifically, how exactly does marketing contribute to the sales pipeline growth and which strategies, programs, channels and tactics to prioritize and which to drop.
Our guest, Steffen Hedebrandt, Co-founder of Dreamdata.io, joined us for a B2B Sales and Marketing #FriTalk, to share his insights from the recent B2B go-to-market benchmark study. And helped us understand “how can B2B companies better understand where their revenue comes from.”

He also answered other key questions:
How long does the average B2B customer journey take?
How many touches are there before closing a deal?
How many stakeholders are involved in a customer journey?
Does the first touch channel influence the customer journey?
What B2B companies can start doing today to have a better visibility of their revenue drivers?

Despite being a relatively small player on the global landscape, CloudServices became one of the leading Microsoft partners in the region, with hundreds of clients across Europe and Central Asia.

Our guest Iryna Moiseyeva, CEO of CloudServices, a company out of Ukraine that specializes in Microsoft Data and Analytics technologies talked about her experiences, challenges and success factors.


We will also answered the following key questions:
1. What are the main challenges while scaling to other countries and regions
2. How do you differentiate yourself from local, well-established players
3. How to make enterprise customers talk to you and establish trust with you
4. How to prioritize time and effort between direct sales and marketing
5. What to avoid doing when starting expansion activities

We will be discussing our experiences, mistakes and learnings from over 200 campaigns and how our approach has changed, with the environment becoming more complex and demanding.
We will be highlighting the top 5 mistakes made and how they have impacted us and our business, how to avoid them and how to use them to your advantage.

IT services can be a highly profitable business in the home market.  However, expanding internationally is a completely different game.

In this episode, we welcomed Rinalds Sluckis, CEO of Digital Mind with 18 years of learning and experience in running an IT services business in international markets.

Over this time Rinalds has opened and closed sales offices in several  markets and his company Digital Mind recently acquired Alna Business Group, thus significantly expanding its product portfolio and geographic coverage.

In our new episode, try to uncover the overlooked power of PR in B2B with our guest Mike  Maynard, managing director of Napier Partnership Limited and marketing/PR expert.

In our conversation we covered the following topics:
1. What do we understand by PR in B2B?
2. Why should companies include PR into their marketing mix, especially in the digital era?
3. When can PR be most impactful?
4. How to measure the impact?
5. Can PR generate sales leads? Or how it can help sales?
6. Where to start if you are a small tech company or a start-up?

Cloud has introduced many new opportunities for resellers, IT service providers and system integrators, but also new challenges in staying competitive and profitable while scaling the business.

In this episode of the B2B Sales and Marketing FriTalks, we explore how to scale Cloud business effectively with Gabor Vass, Partner Business Development Lead at Microsoft.

We discuss the role of the resellers’ “Intellectual Property” and how it impacts the Go-To-Market approach, what some of the key challenges are that you need to look out for, why it is crucial to think of an entire customer lifecycle journey when scaling your business, and what sales approach is most appropriate for your solution to scale.

There are over 1000 unicorns in the world today, valued at more than $3.5 trillion combined.

What ingredients or variables do successful startups bring in the mix of their dream and company to make it work in the end? 

What are the must do's, must have's and must not do's in order to become part of the select group?

Our guest Michael Kogeler, Vice President of EMEA Scale-Ups and Unicorns at Oracle, shared his thoughts on the winning ingredients of the Unicorn formula. Before joining Oracle, Michael spent a number of years in Microsoft and AWS, working with high potential Software Vendors and Startups. His insights and shared approach are true gems not only for early startups but also for well-established businesses. 

Cold sales outreach technologies and processes have matured in the last few years. Some companies see results so good that it is difficult to believe. We decided we wanted to get to the bottom of this.  

Our guest is Ivars Pavlovics, an "outreach hacker" with extensive practical experience in highly effective sales outreach campaigns for B2B.   

In this episode, we discuss the following: 

• What is cold outreach? 
• How does it work? 
• Which businesses are best positioned to benefit from it? 
• What are mistakes to avoid? 
• How to start?

Every software company wants to think that it is the unique features that make them successful. And every customer wants to believe they make their choices based purely on the ‘best’ product. Both are wrong. As an industry matures, its products all take on the same capabilities. Increasingly, how the product is packaged, marketed, and sold becomes the differentiator.
Can the way something is presented cause somebody to change their position towards the software dramatically? Probably not, as the software’s capabilities will determine the overall position. But could the decision be influenced by the way the system was presented? Absolutely.

In this episode of Sales and Marketing FriTalks, our guest is Inga Sartauskaite, Sales Director at Companial (formerly 1ClickFactory) shares her experience and tips for delivering product demonstrations that sell.

We discuss the following topics:

• ‘Demo Crimes’ and techniques to avoid them.
• Successful structure of every demonstration.
• Tips for engaging different types of personas during the demonstration.
• Techniques to manage the attention of the audience.
  

In this episode, we talk about how the rapidly changing digital landscape and customer behavior redefine requirements for marketing automation as we know it.
Our guests are Olha Olifirenko and Sanjulian Nis from the Ukrainian product-led company Newage.io and we discuss:
- what trends drive the change and how to prepare for it
- what is engagement automation and how it is different from marketing automation
- what benefits B2B marketers can expect from the engagement automation approach
- how to get started with your journey to engagement automation

This is our 1st-anniversary episode, and we devoted it to discussing the lead generation vs. demand generation approach.

During the conversation, Andrejs and Rolands share their insights and try to understand:

• what is demand generation and how is it different from lead generation?
• how to measure the success of these two?
• can one exist without the other?
• what approach is better for B2B markets?
• what makes them work or fail?

The Norwegian market is considered one of most desired by many companies, especially in the IT industry. Still, is it worth it and what does it take to succeed in the Norwegian market?
We have invited Anneli Andersen, the Owner of Export2Norway, who is helping companies enter the Norwegian market, to share her insights and recommendations.

We discussed:
- Whether the Norwegian market can give outside IT companies what they are looking for
- Can the "low cost" strategy sure success or what else is required to win local customers
- Where to start, what channels to use to establish your brand
- Is localization necessary for your marketing, your product
and more.

Making leads flow into your CRM is just halfway to growing sales. Another essential part is to qualify and nurture them so leads convert into paying clients.
In this episode of Sales and Marketing FriTalks, we talk about some of the best practices of the follow-up process:

1. Should all leads be followed up
2. When the follow-up should take place
3. How to structure and measure the follow-up process
4. How to prepare for the conversation.
5. and more

This time our guest is Kevin Sahin, the co-founder of ScrapingBee, a web scraping API that grew to $1M ARR in 2 years with the help of content marketing.

During the conversation, Kevin is sharing his path to creating engaging content for a very demanding audience as developers, particularly we cover the following topics:

• Finding out what truly matters for your audience
• Looking outside of mainstream SEO tools for content planning
• Balancing between volume and quality
• Aspects of content distribution 
• Making reading your content fun 
• What most companies overlook while creating content

In this episode, we discuss essential marketing and sales strategies for acquiring first prospective customers. We look at both inbound and outbound approaches and talk through the practical aspects of each. This episode can be similarly helpful for early startups and experienced marketing and sales teams.

Market research and industry surveys show that lead generation is the most important marketing objective in B2B.

But how to manage marketing and what to reasonably expect from it?

In this episode of #FriTalks, we discuss the role of today’s modern marketing from the company management perspective.
How to measure and benchmark performance, how much revenue to budget for marketing, what results to expect and how to make sure investments in marketing are money well spent.

This time we are delighted to have Inga Sartauskaite joining us for a Sales and Marketing FriTalks to share her insights on building a repeatable and remote sales practice.
Inga is a Sales Director for Central and Eastern Europe at Companial (formerly known as 1ClickFactory).

Together with Inga, we try to figure out:
- Is building a repeatable business practice different than traditional sales practice?
- How to make your sales team ready for repeatable sales process
- What is the required profile and competencies for the salesperson
- What are the main challenges of selling remotely
- How to cut through the digital noise and make prospects talk to you
- How to handle objections and turn them into sales opportunities
- How to differentiate lead management approach to make most of your sales capacity

In this episode, we have Vedran Soloja joining us to talk about what it takes to make prospective buyers not only recognize the problem but also take a step further and act on solving it.

Vedran is Senior Marketing Communications Manager at Microsoft, responsible for demand generation for security and productivity solutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

During the conversation, we dig deeper into the following topics on positioning and selling solutions like security to small and mid-size businesses (SMB):

• Why do businesses prefer keeping the status "quo" even if the threat or problem is obvious
• How can marketing help activate "dormant" prospects to act
• What marketing programs should be considered for creating demand if you are selling solutions like security
• What channels are most appropriate for the CEE region

Any marketing is worth only as much as its ability to support the company’s sales. Therefore, strong alignment between marketing and sales is critical to benefit from a modern marketing approach.

In this episode of #FriTalks, we look at modern marketing from the perspective of sales.

Our guest is a multiple award-winning sales expert, trainer, and author of two books Vigants Lesausks.

Vigants has over 20 years of practical sales experience in large international companies (IBM, Microsoft, Ericsson) and startups.
Currently, he is an active sales team lead in the industrial lighting area, mentor for multiple fast-growing startups, trainer, and investor.

We discuss the following topics:
- What sales team usually expects from the marketing
- How to improve collaboration between the two
- What tech companies need to do to scale sales
- And how to manage complexity generated from increased sales activity

LinkedIn indeed is the best place to meet and engage B2B audience, but how to build a solid ground for your brand on the platform and make your marketing efforts profitable?

For this #FriTalks episode, we invited Ketrina Ozola, Linkedin marketing strategy manager at Httpool, to discuss key building blocks of a successful LinkedIn strategy for Tech companies.

In the episode we talk about:
- Best practices for LinkedIn company page
- Ways for building the audience with the help of organic and paid activities
- Right mix of different campaign stages like Awareness, Engagement and Lead Generation in your strategy
- Dos and Don'ts based on real-life experience from the Tech sector

In this episode first, of #FriTalks in 2022, we look at the latest developments in B2B marketing and, together with guest experts, discuss a strategic approach to growing business in 2022.

In particular, we discuss the following priorities:

• Sales and Marketing Alignment
• Lead generation vs. building trust and creating demand
• Adoption of martech stack

In this episode, we welcome back Gints Mednis, a very experienced partner channel manager with a track record of building Sonarworks' global partner channel from scratch.

Not every company needs a partner channel, but a partner channel can be one of the best ways to scale their business for those who do. In this episode, we discuss:

- How to evaluate if you need a partner channel at all?
- How to select prospective partners?
- How to structure partner offer: what to give and what to ask?
- How the partner recruitment pipeline looks like?
- And finally, what to do if a partner fails to meet the business goals

There are tons of different KPIs on the marketing and the sales side. And it can easily occupy most of your time and resources to measure and report on them. But what exactly does it make sense to measure and why?

In this FriTalk, we discuss the most important KPIs to monitor at different sales and marketing pipeline stages. We also talk about how even minor changes in the performance of one element can influence the success of the overall efforts. And how to build a truly meaningful approach to pipeline planning and performance management.

Our guest is Evgeniya Chernetskaya, CMO at Microsoft, responsible for marketing execution in 24 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and we discuss marketing and sales approach in the enterprise space.

During our conversation, we discussed the following topics:

• How marketing and sales are different in Enterprise vs SMB
• Can the sales team alone be successful?
• Pre-requisites for fruitful cooperation between marketing and sales. How to set it for success?
• Practical aspects of Account-based planning and execution
• Lead management and hand-off process between marketing and sales teams
• How to measure marketing impact on enterprise deals and how to keep both teams accountable?

An average company pays for 137 SaaSes, and this number is growing by 30% annually. So a new one replaces something, something built on, something new bought to solve new problems - and this process is similar to how a person climbs up Maslow's pyramid.

In this episode, we discuss the concept with Andrey Burlutskiy, Head of Marketing at Master of Code Global.
We try to figure out how SaaS companies can find their place in the needs pyramid of their potential clients and what is needed for that, including:

• how to understand the landscape of your target customers
• what defines the UVP and how to make it work on different levels of the Organisational pyramid
• the role of the customer journey, looking beyond the sales
• and many more

Listen to our full discussion!

In this episode we continue the discussion with Olga Bakanova about building social media marketing for B2B companies, we will discuss the approach B2B companies should consider for building the audience.

In particular, we talk about:

• can we trust recommendations coming from media channels
• how to determine which channels are right for your activities
• what insights we can get from social media to better understand the audience
• role of the community and how is it different from followers
• is organic reach enough and where paid (or boosting) should be used

This time, we invited Olga Bakanova to discuss the role of Social Media in business development and understand how to make it a truly effective part of the overall marketing execution.

Olga had an integral role in the Microsoft marketing strategy and led the social media hub, focusing on 33 countries from Central Europe Europe to CIS. She is eager to share her strong IT marketing experience in B2B with profound expertise in social media marketing, in what she describes as “her continuous passion for marketing”. Just recently, Olga has joined Adifo Software as a Growth Marketing Manager to accelerate the growth of the SaaS company on a global scale.

During the episode, we discussed:
• What is social media marketing (SMM) from a B2B perspective
• What are the main benefits of using social media in B2B
• How is it different in a global enterprise vs a small-medium size company
• How to find and engage your audience if you are not a global brand