Join us as we look back at how Alexine's journey from aspiring retail buyer to B2B sales leader shaped her career, inspired the founding of the Women in Sales Club, and sparked important conversations on diversity and inclusion in sales.

Alexine's goal after graduating from Purdue University was to become a retail buyer for a leading retailer, Neiman Marcus. Alexine's first manager within the Neiman Marcus buyer program suggested that Alexine might want to pursue a sales career based upon her performance in retail sales during her initial training program.

In college, sales was not highlighted as a potential career path and was often associated with the negative reputation of a used car salesperson. Alexine took this advice and took a proactive, driven approach to identify and earn an opportunity to join a training program for a B2B SaaS company.

Alexine finds certain innate personality traits have served her well in pursuing a career in sales, starting with being self-motivated and self-critical. Her task orientation and natural love for talking with people are also traits she credited for her sales success.

The catalyst for founding the "Women in Sales Club"? The original goal was just to find other women with who they could share their experiences, gain advice, and connect with other people in their field.

Clubhouse was the platform selected, especially due to the popularity of the platform early in 2021. The forum will expand to new forums including Zoom and live events. Clubhouse was viewed as a lower lift to jumpstart a new community.

When asked about any common themes that have been covered, one was diversity, especially how to attract and retain women on B2B Sales Teams. "Imposter syndrome" has been another topic that has been covered more than once. When asked if "imposter syndrome" really existed, and Alexine there are many interesting reads on this, and that exclusionary activities in the workplace may actually lead directly to this feeling of not belonging.

From the very beginning, Alexine and her co-founder, Gabrielle Blackwell were committed to making the forum inclusive, and that men were just as welcome to join. One of the questions asked was how the leading female voices in the B2B tech industry 1.0 influenced their journey. Alexine highlighted this is not the first and will not be the last forum for women in sales, and that they are simply trying to be as inclusive as possible, and provide a vehicle for learning and self-actualization.

Mark went on to provide his "hot take" that women might actually be better equipped for success in sales than men! Alexine shared her data-driven orientation, and that we have blended many of the cultural norms and personality traits that are assigned based upon gender. Her perspective is that sales is a highly "personalized" profession, and it is the individual's personality traits and goals that are the ultimate predictors of success.

For anyone interested in promoting and being an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion across the B2B Tech industry, this is an informational and thought-provoking discussion.

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In this re-released episode of Selling the Cloud, we revisit a valuable conversation with Ben Pastro, who dives into the power of partnerships in B2B tech.

Ben Pastro has a long history in professional services and systems integration in the B2B Tech industry, and has several insights and perspectives on the question of if and how to make partnerships successful for a modern B2B Tech company.

After investing 8 years at Oracle, a founding father of leveraging channel partnerships to accelerate revenue growth. Following Oracle, Ben joined Apps Associates which evolved from a traditional on-premise enterprise software systems integrator to a 100% Cloud based consulting firm focused on Oracle Cloud, AWS and Salesforce. Ultimately, Apps Associates was sold to Private Equity. Ben recently founded Anumetric to help founders and leadership teams at technology centric consulting firms looking to scale and operate more efficiently.

The value of a partnership needs to be viewed on both sides from the partners lens. In fact, having a shared focus on the customer’s business value is the best shared objective. In the world of annual subscription, recurring revenue, maintaining a focus on the on-going business value a customer is receiving is critical to the long term success of the partnership.

Traditionally, enterprise software companies would be more prone to “hand off the customer” relationship to the SI and implementation partner. Today, with the relationship being re-evaluated on an annual basis, the software vendor and the consulting partner are better served with sharing a long term orientation to the partnership and to the shared customer.

Partnerships should not emulate a relay race with a hand-off relationship, rather the partners should collaborate on the both selling process and the project implementation side. Specifically, the implementation partner should help to design the sales process when they will be involved in the customer implementation and ultimate success. The most successful partnerships for consulting firms start with an understanding and strong relationship with the software vendors sales resource(s).

If you are just beginning to evaluate a partnership program for your B2B SaaS or Cloud company, or are a B2B Tech implementation and integration services company, Ben is a great resource who has the experiences and insights to optimize partner programs for both B2B Cloud vendors and their consulting partners.

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Tune in as we revisit this episode, where Bob Scarperi reveals how proactive, data-driven strategies help sales teams target high-value prospects and enhance outbound success.

Data-Driven - a phrase we hear often in the B2B Cloud industry - but often as an output from sales activity versus as a primary input to outbound sales activity.

Bob Scarperi, has built a company that focuses on ensuring the right and complete account and contact data are in the sales resource hands before they being the outreach and lead generation process.

The amount of data available to revenue leaders is very deep and wide, however being able to figure out which data to acquire, deploy and use effectively has never been more complex and thus difficult.

40% of the time, the most junior sales resources, sales development resources are responsible for building and prioritizing the lists they use to conduct sales outreach. Often this results in low probability account being elevated in priority to those most likely to buy?

Why are we doing this to early-career sales professionals? Sources like ZoomInfo, D&B, Lattice Engines provide great data, but most organizations have not built a "playbook" on how sales development and account executives should use the data.

Often, the first step is at the corporate level, building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that defines the highest priority accounts to contact. Unfortunately, far too many companies have not defined the ICP(s) in enough detail that an xDR or AE is confident who they should be prioritizing in their outbound outreach and multi-channel cadences.

Procure a list source that allows sales resources to understand the firmographics of each account in their outreach list, which includes variables including revenue, number of employees, industry, and descriptive details about the company.

Once you have a conversation with the target account, seek to understand their buying mode, decision-making process, etc. Then, develop an "account score" that uses the firmographic and discovery information to highlight the priority of investing more time into that account.

Next, we discussed how intent data can add additional context to the account outreach prioritization process. First, use "technographic" information to see if their existing tech stack is favorable to your solution architecture. Intent data can often provide "false positives" if you do not compliment intent data with firmographic and buyer profile that aligns with your defined ICP and Buyer Persona(s).

Quality of account signal, complete account, and contact (buyer persona) data is the winning combo to optimize and maximize the return on investment for outbound activity.

When selling to larger enterprises, understanding the decision process and the roles of the multiple members on the buying committee, which on average exceeds 10 people. This makes the holy grail of understanding the buying process even more difficult, and yet today, even more critical to the probability of success.

CAUTION: data-driven can lead to data overload. Sales leadership needs to define the specific account information that is critical to make the initial outreach relevant. Identify and define the highest priority leading indicators, such as MQL to SQL conversion rate, SQL to Opportunity conversion, and Opportunity to Close rates. Having too many, or non causal metrics to the ultimate outcomes can lead to data saturation versus metrics-informed decisions.

Each company's environment is unique, so ensure your data driven culture is established, continously evaluated and then used to drive metrics informed decisions while eliminating the noise of too much or irrelevant data!

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