Marketing Technology Landscape

A passion for business and leadership excellence

A passion for business and leadership excellence

 

TEC Group 422

TEC Group 422 comprises non-competitive CEOs and Presidents of both private and publicly traded organizations with a passion for business and leadership excellence.  Member companies are found listed in the top 250 companies on the 2015 ROB Top 1000, in the top 1/3 of 2015 Profit 500, in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ and have been finalists in Ernst Young’s “Entrepreneur of The Year Awards” for 2014 and 2015.

Joining TEC has enabled the leaders of these organizations, as a team, to share their drive and commitment to enrich each other’s ability to achieve their individual business, professional and personal goals. Members act as a private board of trusted advisors with no agendas other than helping each other share best practices, solve management issues, make better decisions and improve leadership skills.

• This group represents broad industry backgrounds and experience including construction, business services, retail, manufacturing, distribution, real estate development, finance, franchising and technology.
• Member organizations have combined revenues of over $3.0 billion and more than 4,500 employees.
• Member CEOs/Presidents lead publicly traded and private companies which operate globally with sales and marketing offices, operations, clients and suppliers in Canada, US, numerous EU countries, South Africa and Middle East.
• The group holds monthly advisory board executive sessions  during which the team processes issues and opportunities involving leadership challenges, branding and marketing , new business launches, financial re-organization, global expansion, organizational development, senior level staffing and reorganization, retail strategy, manufacturing, board strategy and management.
• Eight times a year the group benefits from workshops with experts covering a wide range of issues and topics.
• Monthly 1-2-1 private sessions are held between the Chair and each member focusing on business and personal growth.
• Members have access to an online best practices library, member conferences and a network of more than 1,100 Canadian and 20,000 global business leaders.

Members comment on how “loneliness-at-the-top” has been eradicated and how “stress reducing” it is to be part of a group of liked-minded leaders with whom they can share and discuss matters that normally they would need to deal with in relative isolation. They are experiencing the quality of their decisions, strategies and overall problem solving noticeably improving. Access to fresh thinking and challenging conversations with peers is enhancing their personal effectiveness. 

T.E.C. is not a social club. It is challenging; it is personal; it is hard work!

If joining a TEC group interests you, contact me and we can discuss if it is a fit.

• Over 1,100 Canadian business leaders have joined TEC groups
• Their companies generate $50 billion in annual revenues and employ over 100,000.
• T.E.C. Canada member companies outperform other companies in terms of CAGR by a factor of more than three to one. (Dunn & Bradstreet research).

                  Richard Peters, Chair



  
LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/richardpeters2
Direct: (416) 471-1956
E-mail: rpeters@tec-canada.com
Blog: Profit and Leadership

10 Mistakes You're Making in Building a Sales Team

Sales are the lifeblood of any business. Beating the plan yields optimism. Missing the number could mean a scramble for survival. Without sales, your business literally has nothing.

For this reason, I want sales to be scalable and predictable for our companies. And yet, “art form” is often a phrase used to describe sales. Art is neither scalable, nor predictable. Science is. When it comes to adding science to my sales team, I turn to my friend and advisor Mark Roberge, sales scientist, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, and author of the new book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100M.

Here are the ten mistakes Mark sees many businesses make when scaling sales:

Mistake #1: Hiring salespeople with your gut

Hiring rock star sales people is the most important aspect to sales success. Yet, so many organizations “wing” the entire hiring process. Every sales context is different and, thus, every company has a different ideal hiring profile. Appreciate the uniqueness of your sales context, establish a theory of the hiring criteria that will work for you, and be disciplined about scoring every candidate against that criteria. As you bring on salespeople, this process enables you to learn from your mistakes, iterate, and hone in on the perfect hiring profile.

Mistake #2: Under-utilizing the sales compensation plan

The sales compensation plan is the most under-appreciated tool in the CEO’s toolkit. In thinking back to the major strategic re-directions we navigated at HubSpot, many of them were instigated by aligning the sales compensation plan with the desired strategic change. Whether looking to enter a new industry, gain market share with a particular product line, or expand into a new geography, the sales compensation plan will be the most effective driver of change.

Mistake #3: Mis-aligning sales and marketing

Traditionally, sales and marketing are two groups that have not gotten along. Marketing perceives sales as a bunch of over-paid spoiled brats. Sales feels marketing sits around doing arts and crafts all day. In an age with the majority of buying journey’s starting online, this dysfunctional relationship is the kiss of death for a company.

A properly aligned sales and marketing team is a pre-requisite to a healthy business. Quantify the deliverables that marketing and sales should commit to one another. At HubSpot, we call this agreement the Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement, or SMarketing SLA. For example, marketing will deliver 1,500 leads per quarter that are contacts from Fortune 5000 companies within the retail, manufacturing, or technology industries. Sales will call these leads within 2 hours and convert 20% of them into sales pipeline within 30 days. Measure the SLA progress and share the report daily with the entire team. You are now empowered to manage your sales and marketing funnel every day!

Mistake #4: Not planning far enough in advance

It takes 2 months to hire a new sales person, 3 months to ramp them to full productivity, and a 4 month sales cycle to close a deal. This situation is not uncommon for a business. If anything, these timeframes may be on the aggressive side. Yet, even with these assumptions, it takes 9 months from the decision to hire a new salesperson to the time when they are fully productive. If you are a sales driven organization, your 2015 results are largely baked with the team on board in Q1. Most of the hiring you are doing now is driving your 2016 results. Plan ahead.

Mistake #5: Making forecasting, rather than coaching, the sales manager’s primary focus

Many sales managers spend the majority of their time managing the sales forecast and pipeline. This is a lost opportunity. Managers should spend the majority of their time coaching and developing their sales people. Effective sales coaching increases sales productivity. The best coaches diagnose the one or two skills that will make the biggest difference in a salesperson’s performance and customize a coaching plan to that skill. They use metrics to conduct the diagnosis. I call this process “metrics-driven sales coaching”.

Mistake #6: Motivating through fear rather than metrics

I always ask candidates why they want to move on from their current employer. Many of them complain about the fear-based, micro-management of their current environment. This type of militant management style does not motivate sales people, especially today’s millennial generation. Instead, automate a daily dashboard stack ranking the team on total dials, total connects, total discovery calls, total demos, total sales, etc. Send the dashboard out every day to the entire sales and marketing team and include the CEO. As a result, salespeople will be able to understand where they are gravitating from the “success blue-print” and self-diagnosis the areas in the funnel where they need work. At the end of the day, the salesperson, sales manager, and the company are on the same team. Enabling everyone with the daily metrics will provide the motivation and discipline you desire.

Mistake #7: Letting new salespeople shadow top performers

“Welcome to our company Bob. Do you remember our top salesperson, Sue? For your training, you are going to shadow her for two months.”

The shadowing approach to sales training is neither scalable nor predictable. In my experience, top salespeople are at the top for different reasons. They all bring a unique “super-power” to the table and lean into it heavily. A ride-along sales training strategy may dissuade sales people from leaning into their super-power. It may also encourage them to pick up bad habits from their peers. Instead, create a sales process. Certify salespeople by quantifying their aptitude with each stage of the sales process. Provide enough detail in the sales process to guide the salesperson but don’t make it too constraining that the salesperson cannot apply their “super-power”.

Mistake #8: Buying technology for management rather than the front-line salespeople

The majority of sales technology purchased over the last few decades has been purchased for the sales leader to conduct pipeline reviews and manage forecasts. The end result? The front-line salespeople do not use the software. Data integrity suffers and the original utility of the purchase is never realized.

In the last year, we have seen an explosion in sales technology that actually benefits the salesperson. It helps the salesperson sell faster by removing admin tasks and streamlines the processes they conduct dozens of times per day. It helps sales people sell better by illustrating the full buyer context to the salesperson at all times. Furthermore, technology that benefits salespeople is the best path toward capturing the data that sales leaders need to run the business. Try Hubspot's free product www.getsidekick.com as a starting point for your organization.

Mistake #9: Not experimenting enough

Every sales context is unique. Who do you sell your product to? How complicated is your product? How expensive is it? Is your product sold direct or through partners? Do most sales originate from inbound leads or outbound calls? Is it 1995 or 2005 or 2015? Varying answers to these questions call for varying approaches to the sale. Establish a baseline funnel. Form some theories on how the funnel can be improved. Devise and execute experiments. Iterate and improve.

Mistake #10: Relying on outdated demand generation techniques

When was the last time you bought something from a cold caller? How about from a piece of direct mail or unsolicited email?

Today’s buyer is empowered by the Internet. They are no longer receptive to outbound calls, emails, or advertising. In fact, buyers invest in technologies to keep these messages out of their lives. Today’s buyer begins their journey online, with a search in Google or question in social media. Yet, organizations continue to poor the majority of their sales and marketing budgets into outbound demand generation. Diversify your efforts with an inbound strategy.

Hire a journalist and team them up with the thought leaders and domain experts at your company. Have the journalist produce an eBook, a handful of blog articles, and a few dozen social media messages every month. Align the content with the questions your buyers have at the start of their journey. Help buyers find you.

Written by

Dave Kerpen

How I Founded a Top Marketing Technology Startup in Less Than 6 Months

Tiffany Pham, 

Alex Gold is the co-founder of Buzzstarter, a marketing technology company in San Francisco working with the world’s largest brands like Dove, Axe, Degree, Clear, Danone Activa, and Aeropostale to drive higher return on investment for their ad campaigns.

Buzzstarter is a distribution marketplace and exchange that, on one side, connects any type of brand content (such as videos or articles) with hundreds of thousands of users who, on the other side, share the content. He uses data science to optimize the marketplace connections.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, and a lawyer by trade, Mr. Gold’s background is in the entertainment and advertising industries working with Discovery Communications , Vuguru, LLC, and DDB Canada. I sat down with him to discuss his rapidly growing company and the future of communications technology.

After 5.5 months, you’ve had significant traction with some of the world’s most prominent brands? How did you get from 0 to 60 in such a short time, when most entrepreneurs need much longer to build momentum?

Great question. Two reasons: 1) addressing real pain and acute need and 2) maniacal research and planning. Brands are feeling real pain with online marketing right now. There are so many options, and target audiences are not migrating to one or two online destinations. They are splintering to hundreds of thousands. This gives brands, who are used to buying single destination advertising like television a massive headache but also a lot of fear of missing out or FOMO. So Buzzstarter comes in with a value proposition of: 1) a single destination site that will give your brand access to hundreds of thousands of channels; 2) a laser sharp and very open focus on metrics; and 3) increased ROI. People start paying attention. We back that up with an acute understanding of what specific needs are on our platform. We designed it with that in mind.

What were some of the tactics you used to launch Buzzstarter and get it off the ground fast?

We analyzed each step of the process: research, development, operations in a very methodical way. I suggest this to any entrepreneur. This may be in contrast to what you think about most startups, where one prominent entrepreneur described it as “putting on a parachute while falling down.” My Co-Founder Kenzi Wang and I spent months in customer development obtaining information on what our target users (brands and advertisers) wanted. We did not want to build a product on intuition and we shifted the focus numerous times in research. With development, we started two parallels: product engineering, which is typical, but also sales and advisory. Since we knew sales would take some time to get off the ground, we set about creating relationships on an advisory level with potential partners months ahead of time. We are lucky in a way that one of our first customers, Lou Paik, from Danone, has an incredible amount of vision and foresight in the digital space. This gave us a running start. And for operations, we carefully engaged in a trial period with many of our colleagues where they were asked to generate real value before permanent onboarding.  We have a great team as a result like our designer Zach Zorbas and our account manager, Melissa Aiello.

You work very closely with large brands. What do large brands gain from working with startups like Buzzstarter as opposed to their traditional established agencies?

Very timely and funny. Well, first, they usually get to have their dollar go further because startups offer better ROI and more efficiency in their offerings. Large brands get the benefit of the startups’ deep knowledge of up-to-the-minute innovation. Startups act as brands’ eyes and ears on the ground and in some instances form external innovation teams. Large brands can employ startups to source new trends and even partners. My brands ask me all the time what new emerging social media sites are out there as I get calls asking what Medium and Secret are (side note: sign up for Secret – it’s awesome). Dave McClure, the Founder of 500 Startups has always said, “Brands have access to customers and distribution, but like many large companies they don’t move fast and aren’t experts in tech innovation. Startups are tech-savvy and can impart and even transfer rapid innovation forward.”

Does BuzzStarter apply to just advertising? Can it apply to content creators like filmmakers or musicians who have a need to distribute their message cost-efficiently and can’t afford to do so through traditional means?

Yes, of course. We’ve never seen Buzzstarter as applied only to advertising.  We anticipate a very near future in which our plug-and-play platform assists in optimizing communications for nearly every creator of content: from an advertiser to a filmmaker to a musician to nearly any writer.  We are banking on the fact that as the number of means for communicating online increase, the amount of noise is also going to increase. What’s going to matter most is relevance and optimization.  Relevant audience targeting and optimization of message.

This is a great time to switch gears. What inspired your career move from producing creative content to leading a team of engineers and data scientists to drive efficiency in creative content  distribution through technology?

One word: the market.  Coming from the traditional entertainment side at Discovery and Vuguru, I saw that entertainment distribution windows were starting to narrow with the arrival of Netflix and Amazon.  But consumers were (and still are) moving faster than any one platform.   They are consuming content not just in one destination but in a multiplicity of applications, sites, and channels that are not limited to the social web or where you can buy exposure.  The only way to harness this — to truly harness these new market dynamics — was through data and technology.  I saw what Andreas Wigand was doing at Amazon  in regards to targeting audiences across different channels and was shocked that no plug-and-play solution existed.  If you wanted to target audiences on one blog versus another you needed to make separate deals.  On each social network, another separate deal.  That’s enough to give anyone a headache.  I knew there was a need to create a plug and play solution that allowed any content creator or advertiser the opportunity to distribute across all of these apps and social media outlets that no one else can get into.  And now we have the engineering and data science to make it work.  So, I partnered with Kenzi Wang, a growth engineer, moved to San Francisco, and started Buzzstarter.

Was the transition from being a creative to being a technologist challenging?

Yes, it was, although I find my creative side to be an immense asset.  Initially, it was hard getting my head wrapped around the concept of scalability at inception.  Building a technology platform requires that every function and action be scalable to a target market with minimal labor. By contrast, developing a television series or a film is iterative, customized, and often personal.  Coming into the tech world, this was a jarring difference for me but as soon as I learned the ropes, I started to jump. In fact, I use my more creative skills every day in iterative product focused problem solving and roadmapping.  I have picked that up directly from the story-editing and development process.  It allowed us to craft a user focused story faster and launch the company sooner.

Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs coming from the corporate world?

Yes. This may sound trite, but you have to be an optimist. You also have to be open to a flexible schedule. You may have heard it before, but working in a startup is backbreaking and awful. There are many times you may want to give up. This means you constantly need to be an optimist.  You always have to keep your eye on the positive aspects. Sometimes, admittedly, even blind optimism helps. The other thing you need to be open to is a flexible schedule. Coming from the corporate world, you may be used to 9-5 meetings and some weekend work but startup life is everywhere, all the time, including time you may think is off.  This may sound obvious, but I have met many a new entrepreneur who came from the corporate world only to attempt to run their startup the same way. Not my advice. Be flexible in your schedule and time. It’s the mental barrier that makes such a difference.

5 Must-Have Qualities Of The Modern Manager

  
As the world of work continues to change so do the qualities and characteristics of the managers who are going to be leading our companies.  Work is not the same as it used to be and we are seeing dramatic changes in both behavior and technology not just in our personal lives but in our professional lives.  This means that just because managers were successful in the past doesn’t mean they will be successful in the future.  When it comes to evolving the way we work managers need to possess five qualities to help their organizations evolve and succeed in the future of work.

Follow from the front
The future management model is all about removing roadblocks from the paths of employees in order to help them succeed.  This extends beyond managing people to empowering and engaging people.

 The traditional idea of management was based on leading by fear and the notion of command and control.  Employees used to work hard to allow their managers to succeed and now it’s the managers turn to make sure their employees succeed.  As I’ve said many times, employees are the most valuable asset that any organization has.  In the past managers said “jump” and the employees said, “how high?”  Now, the managers are jumping with employees.

Understand technology

This isn’t the same as technical expertise.  I’m not saying that it’s important for managers to all of a sudden become IT professionals. However, managers do need to understand the overall technology landscape and how it is impacting the way we work.  This means having a good pulse of what is happening in the consumer web as well as understanding which social and collaborative technologies are making their way into the enterprise and what the implications of that are.  Managers who have a good understanding of what is happening with technology will always be able to adapt and evolve ahead of the competition.

Lead by example
It used to be good enough for managers to say they supported something.  A manager would just need to approve the budget and say “go for it.”  When it comes to collaboration and the future of work that is no longer enough.  Managers need to commit to more than just funding collaboration.  They need to be the ones on the ground level using the same tools that the rest of the employees are using.  There is no way that employees can change and evolve (nor should they) unless they see their managers doing the same.

Embrace vulnerability
This goes hand in hand with being open and transparent.  Our organizations were modeled after the military and if there’s one thing that a commander wasn’t, that was  vulnerable.  However, times have changed and we aren’t running our organizations like the military anymore.  We go our whole lives (especially men) learning how to be the opposite of vulnerable and we always have this “shield” up to keep people from seeing us when we are vulnerable.  However, Brene Brown, author of “Daring Greatly,” says that vulnerability is about having the courage to show up and be seen.  According to Brown, “Vulnerability is the absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity.  There can be zero innovation without vulnerability.”  Being vulnerable isn’t about being weak it’s about being courageous; a key quality that every manager must have going forward.

Belief in sharing
Traditionally managers sat at the top of the organization and had access to all of the information required to make decisions. Managers would dole out the orders and the employees had to execute on those orders without asking any questions.  Today managers cannot believe in hoarding information but in sharing information and collective intelligence.  Managers need to make sure that the employees can connect to each other and to the information they need to get their jobs done, anytime, anywhere, and on any device.  Managers now rely on employees to help make decisions instead of isolating them from this process.

What other qualities do you think the modern manager should possess?

Jacob Morgan,

Jacob is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Social and Collaborative Tools (McGraw Hill).