Sales Talk for CEOs

Most CEOs have a hard time running one successful company. Veronica Buitron runs two!

Her secrets boil down to simple, hard won lessons. First, you need a process for everything to be successful and to scale. Second, you need to trust and empower your teams.

Every CEO can learn from her episode.

Chapters:

00:00  - Introduction

2:26 - Tango Code: Redefining Software Development 0

03:53 - Automating Process for Scalability 

10:02 - Engineer...

Ariel came from engineering, he had been a product leader for quite a few years and then made the transition into sales. 

Initially when he moved into sales, he was running product marketing. And he thought sales was so easy, you just get all of the factsheets and  battle cards and the information on the features and capabilities and share that with the prospects that they will buy it. Of course, he learned quickly he was wrong. Run...

Samantha McKenna, a former employee of On24, was recruited by LinkedIn for her mastery of building a powerful brand on the platform. She started posting on LinkedIn in 2011, leading to recognition and a promotion. After two years, she broke her 13th record and decided to pursue her passion for making a positive impact. She left LinkedIn to start her own company, #SamSales, initially intending to work part-time, but quickly realized...

Sean Doyle applies behavioral science to marketing and the sales funnel. His model is called Centricity and he shares important lessons about alignment between sales, marketing and customer success to move deals through the funnel. 

Sean says, “Deals stall in the middle of the funnel because we aren’t giving the buyer what they need to make a decision.If you are still feeding them information about your product features and benefits...

Almost every company I know is struggling to bring new business in at the pace required. 

Why? 

Well, that is an interesting question but I think by now most of us know that our methods are outdated and simply don’t work. The better questions are how do we keep new business flowing in? 

What should be done instead of what we continue to do that doesn’t work? 

I’ve always had a fascination with weeds. They are amazing. Strong, resilient...

It’s been 14 years since Bob Vaez started EventMobi and he’s had considerable growth without investment from Venture Capital or Private Equity. How did he do it? It wasn’t always easy.

EventMobi’s early sales model was classic founder led with Bob doing it all from mining his network for leads to closing deals. 

His decision to bootstrap versus take external investment meant that hiring an experienced sales leader was out of the ques...

Wrapping up my 3rd season and I still can’t believe I started and built a successful podcast. 

The thing I love most is the conversations with the CEOs. They are so willing to share their story in the spirit of helping others. 

Whether they are near the beginning or the end of their journey it’s always interesting to learn why they started and how they grew sales. 

In this Season Finale we revisit some of the main themes that are esse...

Heidi Messer started Collective[i] with one goal: to bring more certainty and less volatility to sales and improve the livelihoods of every single employee.

According to Heidi, sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales. Higher productivity equals more certainty, so why not improve it. If sales improves every other department has more opportunity. 

In order to b...

Sean Burke shares his knowledge of building high performance sales teams gained through nine startups, seven exits and billions of dollars in value creation.

The first rule, you can only attract the best if you can show a definitive path to hitting quota. If you can’t show the math, why would they join your team?

Next, you are building a team not a collective of individual contributors. Part of this is defining your role and the role...

After eight years of trial and error, Daveed feels he has finally figured out the sales model for, Valens Global. 

He heard about the rainmaker sales model from a very successful law firm. The senior partner initiated discussions with clients that demonstrate the firm's expertise and ability to solve a particular problem. 

For Daveed it meant taking the lead with the customer to define the problem and the framework to solve it. His t...

Years of trust can evaporate in a matter of moments if you forget this simple rule. Dmitri Leichik learned the hard way that customers are not buying your product, they are buying your commitment to their success. The moment they perceive a transactional motive, you’ve lost.

Utilizing a founder led sales model, Twistellar has grown globally and still relies on Dmitri’s long term relationship strategy that in many cases takes years t...

Anthony Iannarino has some bad news for sales leaders who are depending on 20 year old sales models. They just don’t work anymore. 

“Tell me about your problems and let me tell you about my solution” won’t even get you a second meeting.”

Alvin Toffler, who wrote The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. The hard part is unlearning.

Sales teams must be retrain...

Jake Dunlap takes us from founding Skaled Consulting to his first successful sales hire. And yes, it did take 10 years to get it right.

It’s great to be a founder led sales company but founder led services delivery is a problem. This was the first major hurdle that Jake encountered in his fledgling sales consulting business and a barrier to scaling. 

It took years to structure a scalable services delivery model. The first big lesson,...

Matt Fok came up with his idea for eZ-Xpo, before the pandemic. He thought, what if you could continue the dialogue started at conferences virtually? Since his company was already selling an eLearning platform, he simply went to his existing customers to validate the idea. 

And then the pandemic hit. 

His founder-led sales approach paid off as he uncovered more and better ways to address the market need. By providing content and ongo...

My next guest on Sales Talk For CEOs is Brent Adamson and he’s got some revolutionary ideas about B2B enterprise selling. 

Brent explains decision maker confidence is the main barrier for B2B teams to close deals. The three factors eroding confidence are complexity, information overload and value opacity or consensus on the value of the desired outcome.

So stop selling product benefits. You need to propose a framework that starts wit...

My guest today on this episode of Sales Talk For CEOs is Karen Frame whose company Makeena, is on a mission to help people live healthier lives on a cleaner planet.  

She talks about the advantages of having a founder-led sales organization. 

The obvious advantage is being close to your customers and making sure that your product is solving a real problem for them. 

The not so obvious advantage is using scarce capital to hire a brand ...

Arman Eshraghi can teach us something about building sales teams from scratch. He is, after all, on his fourth startup Qrvey. So, what has he learned from one startup to the next? What has he changed and what stayed the same? 

One constant that remains true for Arman, if you, as CEO and Founder can’t sell your product, bringing in a sales team won’t solve the problem.  

Once you do bring in a sales team, Arman believes  sales teams o...

The world of selling has irrevocably changed. Buyers no longer want to be sold to and especially not as a result of a cold call. They want to get to know a company by getting to know and trust the people who work there. Starting digital conversations is the first step to build this trust. As CEO, it’s imperative that you lead by example.

In this episode Alice talks with Tim Hughes who explains how to change your sales approach from ...

My next guest is Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc. who is a case study in drinking your own champagne. He is here to talk about using his own platform to build his business and the breakthroughs that he discovered to make the platform more effective for him and of course the customers that use it.

Chris Beall takes us through his journey building the ConnectAndSell business model starting with his “Wartime” stance to pioneeri...