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Building a Career as a Lifelong Learner with Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft

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In this segment of the Women in Sales Leadership series, I talked with Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President in the One Commercial Partner team at Microsoft where she is responsible for global partner channel management and programs, with a focus on driving digital transformation for partners and customers.

I talked to Gavriella about what it means to build a career as a life long learner, and why you should too.

I asked Gavriella about her different roles with Microsoft, from sales to operations and now as Microsoft’s channel chief. Here’s what she told me is the most important thing for everyone to keep in mind as they build their own careers. It is all about ongoing learning to keep growing your skills and opportunities.

Gavriella shared with me the constants she has noticed throughout changes in her career.

You will love Gavriella’s story about how she took the stage at Microsoft Inspire with tens of thousands of people, both in the arena and watching online, for a keynote address. She shared her major learning from that opportunity.

You’ll also learn what Gavriella feels she has learned in the past year or so. Things like leading teams through ambiguity, start with won’t change, how to create clarity or yourself on how you, personally, can help achieve that outcome, why you should not work in a vacuum and more.

Finally, Gavriella shared her advice for women just getting started on this journey as a lifelong learner.

Enjoy the interview!

About Gavriella:

Gavriella Schuster is a Corporate Vice President in the One Commercial Partner team, Gavriella Schuster is responsible for global partner channel management and programs, with a focus on driving digital transformation for partners and customers. Gavriella’s team is responsible for the high-touch experiences of Managed Service Providers, Hosters, Resellers, Distributors and National/Local SIs. She is also responsible for connecting, enabling, investing in, and rewarding partners through high-touch and low-touch programmatic experiences. She has extensive experience in sales, marketing, product management, and partner development with a strong track record of managing customers, partners, and teams. Over the last 20 years at Microsoft,  she has managed sales and marketing teams across the Server and Cloud business, the Windows Client Commercial business, Enterprise Services, licensing sales and marketing, field business development, training initiative development, segment marketing, worldwide partner marketing and training strategies and worldwide operations.

Connect with Gavriella on LinkedIn and Twitter

 

 

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Right Message, Right Support, Right Sales Content with Jim Burns

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I talked to Jim Burns of Avitage in this podcast about how to support B2B value selling sales teams with the right knowledge, communication support, and situation-ready content.

High-performing content is your First Product and Currency with which you earn attention, interest, engagement — this is the way you create value for buyers. Unfortunately, many executives aren’t aware of strategic imperative of high-performing content and the impact on their business. Since most content tends not to be sales or situation ready, it generally performs poorly, often negatively, which does not reflect well on the salesperson or the company brand.

Jim and I discussed:

How to assess the current state of your current sales content assets.

What Jim believes to be the underlying causes of why content doesn’t perform well.

The primary cases for using sales content:

  • Knowledge, Shared Learning, Preparation support
  • Communication Support
  • Situation-ready

How an organization should go about producing content that is high-quality, high performing and sales-ready.

What Jim recommends in terms of deploying content, or making situation-ready content easier for salespeople to access and use?

And much more.

Enjoy the interview!

About Jim:

Jim Burns is a sales professional with a unique expertise in sales conversation and content. For over 20 years his company Avitage developed sales content and software that improved the way sales professionals differentiated themselves and created value for customers through the way they sold.

B2B selling organizations of all sizes have benefited from breakthrough approaches Avitage provided to capture and incorporate selling knowledge into daily activities. They’ve learned how to create effective communication support and situation-ready content that fuels value selling models.

Avitage no longer produces content. They help organizations capitalize on methodologies and practices that create high-performing content, at scale, without compromise.

Connect with Jim on LinkedIn and Twitter

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What’s the Price of Free?

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A common content creation practice involves going to industry influencers to ask them to contribute their thoughts on specific topics that are prettied up and pulled together into an e-book, a Slideshare presentation or maybe a video. The intent of said content vehicles is to amplify the companies message, increase interest and demand, as well as generate leads. The strategy does work. I’ve contributed many times to various campaigns through the years, and I hear from the project organizers about the positive lift that the company gained in new lead opportunities to pursue.

But, what do the expert contributors receive in return? For the most part, exposure.

I contribute my expertise, which evidently these companies see as valuable or they wouldn’t ask me and others to contribute our knowledge, but what they offer us in exchange for our contributions is exposure. Oh, it sounds good when the company says they will get your name in front of thousands of people on their list, but the problem with exposure is this… exposure doesn’t pay the bills. There’s also no way of predicting if anyone consuming the content will even try to connect with you to learn more.

That doesn’t mean that exposure isn’t valuable, especially if you are in the early stages of making a name for yourself. At a certain point, though, the exchange should have a lot more value for both sides. I will still make a choice now and again to contribute something without being paid, but only if I’m receiving something else of value that I know makes the investment of my time worth it.

The content is ready, please market to your networks. For free.

As part of the content strategy I’ve described, once the publication is finished, the second ask is for everyone who contributed to the project to market the piece for FREE to their networks. Now the value exchange has become more lopsided. I’ve contributed my advice for free, and now I’m marketing the content for free.

Time has a dollar value.

And that lopsided equation becomes bigger when you factor in the time it takes to write something each time a company asks you to contribute your expertise. Answering your topic questions, writing a blog post, giving you a quote – these things take time. Once the publication is ready, it takes time to cue up and share with my networks or through my newsletter. You might be asking, why bother sharing the content then. Good question. It must have something to do with our human psychology. I suppose because we are “featured” in the content, we naturally want people to know about it.

In only one recent circumstance, has anyone asking for my free advice, free time and free marketing, offered to give me something of higher value than exposure. This one company offered, in exchange for my support, to give me the list of names they collect when running the content campaign. Now, that’s something that makes the exchange much more palatable. More than receiving exposure, I want to be able to actively engage with the people who downloaded the eBook, blog post or white paper I contributed my time to help create.

In the past year, I’ve been saying no more than yes to these requests. More and more of my colleagues are also pushing back. They either say no, present their fee schedule or ask for the list. In other words, we need to earn something for our investment of time, which is a fair exchange.

Pushing back has generated some interesting but not altogether surprising results.

Recently, I had an exchange with the CEO of a technology start-up who approached me – a stranger I might add – and asked me to write a blog post about his company’s technology and then link it back to their website. My audience is his target market and he believed they would be interested in his product. After briefly reviewing his website to learn more, I said I would help him and presented my fee. I told him that I receive too many requests for free, and there must be something in it for me too. A fair request, as far as I’m concerned. His answer was that just like I didn’t believe in doing the work for free, which he said he understood, he also didn’t believe in paying to advertise his product. Wait. What?

Another request came from a marketer who wanted me to contribute to their eBook. I asked if they paid for the contribution or were they providing the contributors a copy of the list of people who registered to download the gated content. No. They don’t pay fees. And, they can’t give the list to contributors because of their email policy that they don’t share emails.

Here’s the problem with all these FREE requests.

It isn’t an equal exchange of value and that’s not cool. When I contribute my expertise to your lead generation projects, I’m helping you put leads in your sales funnel but what are you doing for me beyond giving me exposure? I know this is a common marketing practice, and I think it needs to stop. If you want experts to lend credibility to your projects, projects that you are using to generate leads for your company’s products, you should be willing to give something in return that has tangible value beyond exposure. Free doesn’t cut it!

Why Partner Leads Are My Favorite with Jen Spencer, Allbound

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In this Women in Sales Leadership segment, I talked with Jen Spencer, VP of Sales and Marketing at Allbound about building partner relationships that drive revenue.

As a kicking off point, we talked about how Jen got started in sales and what she loves about the profession. Then we discussed:

Jen’s recommendations for engaging channel partner sales reps to drive qualified sales leads.

Some of the most common challenges sales teams face when the company sells both directly and indirectly.

The revenue benefits of building out a partner program and strategies for making that happen.

Finally, Jen shared her advice for women in sales who would like to move up in the leadership ranks, but aren’t exactly sure how to get started.

This episode is sponsored by Hubspot.

Don’t miss out HubSpot’s annual sales event – Inbound Sales Day – on June 6th! 30 leading sales experts will be sharing their knowledge and expertise. Register now for FREE at hubspot.com/inbound-sales-day

About Jen:

Jen is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Phoenix-based Allbound, an easy-to-use SaaS platform that helps companies accelerate recurring revenue with channel partners. Jen subscribes to the notion that “we’re all in this together,” and great communication leads to great partnership. She loves animals, technology, the arts, and really good Scotch.

Connect with Jen on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Value Propositions that Sell with Lisa Dennis

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Being able to clearly communicate value to potential buyers is a real art and a key opportunity for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In this episode, I talk to Lisa Dennis of Knowledgence Associates about:

How value propositions are important to both marketing and sales people – and why this topic led Lisa to write her book.

Lisa’s primary research on value propositions and what she found.

The differences between the value props salespeople use versus what marketing uses.

The top 3 ways to make a value proposition really “speak” to a buyer.

The most important thing to consider as a marketer or salesperson when developing or upgrading a value proposition.

Enjoy the interview!

About Lisa:

Lisa Dennis who is President of Knowledgence Associates, brings to the table over thirty years of marketing and sales experience as both a practitioner and a consultant. The core focus of her business is to help clients to “see the world through their customers’ eyes.” She has consulted to companies like Citrix, CSC, Dell, FedEx, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Verizon, Wipro and many others.

She is co-author of the book 360 Degrees of the Customer: Strategies & Tactics for Marketing, Sales and Service. Her new book: Value Propositions that Sell: Turning Your Message into a Magnet that Attracts Buyers is due out in the Spring 2017.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/knowledgence
Twitter: www.twitter.com/knowledgence
www.knowledgence.com

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Executing with Excellence with Steven Rosen

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I talked with Steven Rosen at STAR Results about executing with excellence. Steven shares his perspective on what it will take to be successful in 2017. We also discussed the biggest challenge companies face in terms of Strategy and execution, what the research says about business execution, why companies struggle and what companies can do to improve execution against their goals.

About Steven Rosen:

steven-100kSteven Rosen, MBA and the founder of STAR Results, a leading sales management training and leadership coaching Company. He is the author of 52 Sales Management Tips – The Sales Manager’s Success Guide. Steven has been recognized as one of the Top 50 Sales Influencers.

LinkedIn Twitter  https://www.starresults.com/

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The Disconnect Between Social Media Spend and Business Impact

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Marketing, lightbulb, element.With spend on social media channels expected to increase to a 20.9 percent share of marketing budgets in the next five years, according to a recent CMO Survey, the big question is if that spend investment is translating into an increase in overall business performance? The answer appears to be not so much. In a C-Suite Study conducted by IBM, they reported that almost half of Chief Marketing Officers feel that they – and their teams – still aren’t fully prepared to meet the challenges of operating in social media channels.

If CMO’s aren’t feeling that their teams are fully prepared to deliver on corporate objectives, what could be getting in the way?

There is no clearly defined social media strategy that aligns with core business objectives. With no formalized social media strategy in place, you leave your social media teams flying solo without a clear connection back to overall corporate business goals. In the Harvard Business Review article, Fix Your Social Media Strategy by Taking It Back to Basics, they mention that a Google search provides 140 million results for “social media marketing tips,” but no matter how many headlines promise it, there is no one-size-fits-all social media strategy. Tips, instead of a clearly defined strategy, won’t cut it if you want to see real results.Though the marketing team may be taking the lead on the creation of the social media strategy, the company’s social media efforts need to impact sales opportunities and revenue also. Don’t leave this important business strategy to marketing alone.

There is a gap between social media activity and business performance. It is important to link your sales and marketing goals to social media KPIs. Buzz, clicks, likes and followers are good initial gauges of social media marketing success, but long-term success requires that you go much deeper. Ultimately, social media activity needs to demonstrate how the effort led to improvement in revenue outcomes, either in qualified leads to nurture, new customer acquisition or retention.

The team doesn’t have the right balance of expertise. Don’t assume that young 20 something is the right person to drive your social media strategy. They may understand the inner workings of Twitter or Snapchat, but that doesn’t mean they understand how to apply social activity to core business objectives. Make sure your team includes people who understand the technology and have solid business experience. You need both!

All data sources are not being integrated. Be sure that you’ve built a plan that includes the seamless integration of social media data with other types of customer information, such as the data that comes from sales, purchasing, social media, and other communication channels. Though you might be able to source potential sales leads via Twitter, how is that information then integrated back into marketing’s lead nurture process or the sales CRM system for follow-up and tracking?

Lack of cross-functional skill and leadership stymies success. Today’s marketing leaders must be adept at traditional marketing strategies, and they also need to be proficient in the use and understanding of how new technologies impact their efforts. I believe this applies to sales leaders as well. Reaching buyers through the traditional avenues of phone calls (rarely answered) and emails (often ignored) mean that everyone in sales is using the appropriate social media channels to engage buyers in advance of clearly defined sales opportunities.

Investing in social media marketing and social selling strategies is important and must continue. Buyer behavior is the key factor driving the importance of engaging prospects and customers on multiple channels. To justify that investment, though, also means that your social media/social selling strategy goes beyond the surface indicators of success and aligns to key business drivers like new customer acquisition, revenue growth, and customer retention.

Sales Messaging and the Sales Experience

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“The greatest inhibitor to sales effectiveness is the inability to communicate a value message.” – SiriusDecisions

Sales organizations make huge investments in hiring salespeople, getting them upskilled and productive quickly, implementing sales enablement and technology solutions, but when it comes to focusing on the quality of activities that create the sales experience from the very first touch point onward, there is a gap. A pretty big one.  I’m talking about the sales message that is delivered either through email or phone calls.

Automation has made it easy to crank out large numbers of emails each day, and often this is where salespeople start when they are pursuing their target list of buyers. Probably for a very obvious reason. Someone ignoring your email feels less like personal rejection than when making the phone calls. Still, most sales leaders tend to have a KPI (key performance indicator) that measures the number of phone calls made, in addition to the number of emails sent. And, I’ll just say right now that I think the focus on these two measurements as sales performance indicators is off base. Here’s why.

What does it matter if I call 100 people each day if this activity doesn’t result in a higher percentage of booked sales meetings? The answer is pretty simple. It doesn’t make sense.

If you are a salesperson who knows your sales performance is largely measured on calls made and emails sent, you’ll likely do whatever you have to do to hit those numbers. You may have checked the KPI boxes, but what you end up with is a lot of activity that wasn’t very effective.

On Dave Kurlan’s Blog, Understanding the Sales Force, I read a recent post of his that makes it clear that salespeople are having a difficult time bypassing gatekeepers and getting to the decision makers. His research indicates that when salespeople do not begin with procurement, they can only get through the gatekeepers to decision makers 13% of the time. But Dave filtered his research data even further to focus on salespeople brand new to sales and that percentage drops to 1%. Though it isn’t the subject of today’s post, ponder for a moment that many of the salespeople hired for Sales Development or Business Development Roles are brand new to selling. They are expected to reach decision-makers and set up the appointment for the account executive, but they get through to the targeted person 1% of the time.

When salespeople are making all those dials and sending all those emails, why aren’t sales leaders evaluating more carefully when the activity isn’t converting to actual sales conversations. Though I don’t have hard research data to back it up, my observations suggest that what happens is that sales reps are just asked to do more. Doing more of the same, however, isn’t going to lead to a better outcome. In Cracking the Sales Management Code, authors Jason Jordon and Michelle Vazzana tell us that “success is no longer found in making enough sales calls to reach your quota. That is a trial and error marathon that you may or may not win. Success is now found in making the right sales calls to achieve the right Sales Objectives to reach your quota – a quicker and more predictable path to the winner’s circle.”

The big problem isn’t the activity itself. Instead, it is the quality of the activity. Poorly conceived subject lines. Messages that do not contain an ounce of value for the target buyer. Messages that include gimmicks to get attention. Sales emails and phone calls more often than not are sender oriented, and usually, include a mix of look how great we are and a laundry list of features. Survey after survey confirms that buyers say these messages do not engage them. Rather than standing out, the salesperson’s message goes in the delete pile with everyone else’s. But, the cycle of poorly constructed sales messaging rages on.

Throughout the course of the sales experience lifecycle, many things can go wrong but if you can’t even get on first base, where do you go? What salespeople say in the first interaction with a potential buyer is critical to moving from touch to sales conversation. Maybe it’s time to stop wasting the opportunity!

Does Your Sales Message Scream Value?

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According to an eBook on Expert Prospecting Tips from Witty Parrot, one in every two B2B salespeople are left to their own devices to generate leads, which creates a bit of a problem since buyers easily block their prospecting efforts. It is time for salespeople to look in the mirror and accept that there is a reason why this is happening.

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“According to sales management, the salesperson’s ability or inability to communicate value messages is the biggest inhibitor keeping salespeople from achieving quota.”–SiriusDecisions

Can you really blame buyer’s resistance to dealing with salespeople? Their experience is, more often than not, a waste of their precious time. The inability to create a value message is at the heart of this problem. Feature dumps don’t cut it, and simply making more phone calls, sending more spam emails, or broadcasting your pitch to more people on social channels aren’t helping you. Your sales messaging has to change.

Today’s traditional sales approach is to broadcast communication that is nothing more than vendor centric sales pitches. That broadcast could be via the phone, email, social networks or during the sales call. Rather than breaking through the competitive noise and generating a return on effort, poorly crafted sales messages earn salespeople a place in the delete pile. Worse, they are doing harm to their professional brand and that of their company. You have one shot at making a good first impression throughout every stage of the sales process. Why wouldn’t you want to make it count?

Don’t do this!

Here is an example of an email I received recently that illustrates my point. It completely misses the mark, and frankly, I can’t imagine any decision maker agreeing to a sales meeting after reading it. Let’s see what you think.

“Good Day!

XYZ Services is a technology services company which provides “CEO’s, CFO’s, Operations, Sales, and Training Managers” the ability to share content by educating, energizing, mobilizing, motivating, and training their consumers, prospects, and employees.  Our new product called Whatever and Whatever are tools that will transform your business into focused energy!  The link above is a “Manager” who conducted a Webinar Training on XYZ’s Educational Services.  It was extremely successful for her and her business/company.  I would greatly appreciate 15 minutes of your time to learn more about your company and how you currently communicate within your organization and if you’re experiencing the “White Water Mentality.”  My goal is to help you get more Psyched up and in Sync!  Do you need increased productivity, a wider audience, and more business sales?  Let’s invest some time and see where WE can GROW together.  Change is inevitable.  Vision means rallying the troops!  I look forward to collaborating with you soon!”

There are so many problems with this email.

For starters, I have no idea what this company actually does. Do you? Something about a content sharing platform that lets you educate, energize, mobilize, motivate and train people. Their service is supposedly for five different types of company leaders, but the message is not customized for any one of them. This email should really be five different emails with a message that is focused on what each leader would actually care about.

This dandy new tool will transform your business into focused energy, which sounds ridiculous and means nothing. The seller does attempt to include a success story, but there are no specifics about the actual success the manager supposedly had. Did she bring in new leads? How many? Did she secure meetings with 15 decision makers on her target list? What percentage of new business did she close? Specific metrics grab attention. By the way, most people will not click on links when the email comes from a stranger. Communicate value in the message assuming people won’t go and visit your website.

This salesperson wants a phone call to learn more about my company, which he could easily do by reading my LinkedIn profile. If you are going to get 15 minutes with your target buyer, you want to make that time count. Don’t waste it asking the buyer to educate you about their business. Do your homework and figure it out. Use your meeting time to progress the opportunity not halt you in your tracks.

This seller also wants to know how I communicate within my company and if I’m experiencing “white water mentality”. What does that mean? Finally, he ends his email with “change is inevitable” and “vision means rallying the troops”. Hum. Should I be insulted that he thinks I’m stuck in my ways and have no vision?

Stop with the nonsense.

This nonsensical email is filled with jargon, buzz words and lacks any clarity as to the value this seller can bring to my business. I have a picture in my mind of what a sales meeting with him would look like and it’s not pretty.

When crafting sales messaging, keep these tips in mind:

  1. Know your audience.
  2. Make the message personalized, focused and relevant.
  3. Skip the jargon and buzz words.
  4. Include metrics to support success stories.
  5. Get another perspective before sending the email or presenting your story.

If your aim is to source new sales opportunities, change your message. Focus on quality not quantity. It takes work to get the message right, and I believe this is one area where sellers can create true competitive advantage for themselves. So, will you?

Hey, while you are here, don’t forget to download your FREE copy of my Message Matters e-book from the home page. Learn tips for transforming those messages into something that works.

 

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