Sales Strategy & Enablement by Revenue.io

Andrew Sykes is the Founder of Habits at Work, and author of an excellent book titled, "The 11th Habit: Design Your Company Culture to Foster the Habits of High Performance." This is such a fun conversation. I love it when I have the chance to talk with people who I believe really get it. Who live in reality, not the fake world of so many sales trainers, and understands what it takes to connect wi...

Gopkiran Rao is the Chief Strategy and Marketing Office at MindTickle. In this episode we discuss why now it is more important than ever for organizations to effectively and appropriately – engage their customers and prospects in conversation, not in sales cycles. We explore what that means in terms of the business acumen and agility that sellers need to possess to effectively engage in today’s en...

Zorian Rotenberg is the CRO at Infotelligent. In today's episode we dive into how and why a CRO is different than a VP of Sales. Titles are thrown around pretty easily these days. But as we dig into, there are substantive differences between the two roles and Zorian shares some details about how they should be viewed. Which includes his very interesting perspective that good CROs are like a "Hedge...

Ralph Barsi is the the VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io and one of my favorite people in this sales universe. In this episode we talk about Ralph’s music career. As in rock and roll. His band has been together for 30 years. They toured in the past, still play gigs, and are getting ready to record a new album. I watched some videos online and they rock! No conversation with Ralph ever takes pla...

Rob Johnson is the Managing Director for Onit, leader in the enterprise legal ops space. Rob sent me one of the more interesting pitches to be a guest on this show. He said he wasn't trying to promote anything. He just wanted to talk about the challenges people face when they have dyslexia and the opportunities it presents for sellers. In this episode Rob shares his story about developing into a t...

Lars Helgeson is the Founder and CEO of GreenRope, developer of the Complete CRM. Today we discuss why managing data in a business is a leadership issue first, and a technology issue second. We also dive into why Lars believes traditional CRM systems are a giant waste of resources for companies that aren’t large enterprises, and why companies can’t treat their CRM as just a data utility but have t...

Catie Ivey is the regional Vice President responsible for all new logo acquisition in the mid-market space for DemandBase. In this conversation dive into a number of interesting topics: (1) How she had an epic fail on her first sales interview, a s did I, (2) how she’s dealt with self doubt, (3) why she believes that working in sales has given her the ability to accomplish more than she ever dream...

U.S. Congressman Bill Foster is my guest on this special inauguration episode. Representative Bill Foster represents the 11th congressional district in Illinois (In the Chicago area) and serves on the House Financial Services Committee where he chairs the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. He also serves on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus, which is examining the Federal govern...

Mike Smerklo is an entrepreneur, investor and author of the book, "Mr Monkey and Me". In this episode we hear the story of Mike's struggles with self-doubt as he grew from an entrepreneur and CEO at a small business that he grew into a category-leading publicly traded company. Plus, we dig into the SHAPE mindset framework that is at the heart of Mike’s fun book about conquering the self-doubt that...

Dan Crum is author of the book titled "The CIA Method" about best practices in hiring and recruiting for sales. Dan has had one of the most interesting journeys into sales. He started as a polygraph examiner and special investigator for the CIA. He administered lie detector tests to people the agency was going to hire. From his experiences Dan learned that the key to effective hiring is to have a...

Chris Anthony is the Vice President, US Consumer Goods and Marketing Cloud at Salesforce. This is another in a series of conversations I’ve been having on this show about mental health, sales, and business. In June 2020, on the 15th anniversary of his sobriety, Chris went public with his story for the first time. He took this step, publicly revealing a private story, in order to help end the stigm...

Nick Runyon is the CMO at PFL.com, a leader in the Tactile Marketing Automation space. In this episode we get into everything Tactile Marketing Automation. You know, sending things to prospects and customers as part of your playbook. We talk about how PFL got into this space. Normally I don’t spend a lot of time on founding stories but this one is very interesting. Tune-in to learn how PFL evolved...

Vince Beese is the head of Enterprise Sales at Kustomer (which was just acquired by Facebook). Vince has been selling big deals into the enterprise and leading enterprise sales team in the SaaS space for a long time, so settle in for a great conversation about the big changes we’ve seen in enterprise sales this past year. We'll dive into which changes we think will be permanent and which were, or...

Jake Dunlap is the CEO of Skaled. In this episode Jake and I discuss an article he posted on linkedin about 5 predominant myths in sales. You’ll really want to listen to this conversation because I think it’s safe to say that, well, I had a few issues with Jake’s myths. However, I really enjoyed sparring with Jake because this is the type of open discussion that needs to happen more frequently in...

Stephen Diorio is the Executive Director at The Revenue Enablement Institute. The pandemic has been an eye opener for business leaders, many are doubling down on changes made during the transition to remote selling in order to increase client access and coverage while retaining the cost savings. Stephen and I dig into whether it’s realistic to assume that remote selling can be a cure all and drive...

Whitney Johnson is the author of the book: Disrupt Yourself. Master Relentless Change and Speed Up Your Learning Curve. Right off the bat, let me tell you that I love this book. If you’re in sales in any capacity and you’re struggling to Improve your performance, and perhaps need some additional motivation to make a change, then you need to read Whitney’s book. Whitney and I cover a lot of ground...

Liston Witherill is B2B sales consultant, trainer, and host of the Modern Sales podcast, on which I was honored to be a guest. In this episode Liston and I dig into the topic of building better sales habits using the science of habit formation. This whole topic of habits is a favorite of mine. Where many people see skills, I see habits. Habits practiced over and over can become skills. The ability...

Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of one of my favorite books The Coaching Habit. On this episode we talk about his new brand new book, The Advice Trap. Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever. Today we talk about the three main problems with giving advice: (1) your advice doesn’t work; (2) solving the wrong problem; and (3) proposing a mediocre solution. As a result, you risk...

David Brock is CEO of Partners in Excellence and the author of the excellent book, The Sales Manager's Survival Guide. David is a self-described ruthless pragmatist and he joined me on this episode to talk about developing an effective sales execution framework. As Dave describes it "Increasingly salespeople and managers struggle to make sense of all the things they are being asked to do, and how...

Roger Connors is a 4x NYTimes and WSJ bestselling author. In this episode we talk about his latest book Get a Coach, Be a Coach. Roger believes that outdated, old-school, one-on-one professional coaching models make effective coaching scarce, expensive, and hard to justify for the masses. It works for a few, but not for the many. What’s the answer? Roger proposes a new model for coaching called Se...

David Priemer is the author of the new book "Sell the Way You Buy: A Modern Approach To Sales That Actually Works (Even On You!)" On this episode we discuss how salespeople can arm themselves with progressive strategies for connecting with modern buyers.  Plus, we dig into why so many sellers find themselves executing tactics they sense are outdated, ineffective, and inconsistent with their person...

Mark McInnes is author of the book Tactical Pipeline Growth: Winning the Outbound Battle for New Business. Mark’s a contrarian on the myths and bad practices that have built up around prospecting. It's why I liked his book. For openers we talk about why it’s better to have too few prospects in your pipeline than too many. I happen to agree with this. The low levels of quota attainment and win rate...

Tyler Lessard is the VP of Marketing and Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard. As you might expect, Tyler and I are going to spend most of our time talking about video messaging. However, before we get to that, Tyler and I talk about his time at Blackberry, and some of the lessons that he learned from that experience of seeing the king of the hill dethroned by smartphones. Then, we get into what it t...

Jeff Santelices is the Chief Revenue Officer at MindTickle. In this episode we start with what it means for a seller to be sales ready. Then we delve into the topic of sales learning and the levers managers can pull to improve sales performance. Next, Jeff shares the KPIs that he relies on to manage his team and reveals the one KPI that everyone uses that is totally useless. Finally, we talk about...

Mike Weinberg is a consultant, speaker and author. His latest book is Sales Truth: Debunk the Myths. Apply Powerful Principles. Win More New Sales. Mike and I always have a ball talking about sales. And, I warn you, this episode runs a bit longer than normal because once we got started talking it was hard to stop. Today we're going to debunk some of the popular myths about sales that are popular o...