Marketing

Mike Epner

September 22, 2023 by

Mike has more than 25 years experience building and scaling professional services organizations, from early stage startups to global organizations. He has a gift for mentoring and motivating global teams, and has generated more than $1 billion in value across multiple services organizations. As the former President and COO of Traction on Demand, Mike grew the Salesforce consulting partner from 200 people to 1,500 people, overseeing sales, delivery and operations until the firm’s acquisition by Salesforce in April 2022. Prior to Traction, Mike was SVP of Consulting Services at Appirio, VP of Services at Borland, and CEO at TeraQuest Metrics. He has created deep partnerships with cloud pioneers like Salesforce, Google, and Workday, and is an accomplished photographer. He is on the board of the Texas Photographic Society and Zennify, a Salesforce and Databricks consultancy.

Why are you passionate about helping leaders of IT services firms?

One of the most gratifying aspects of being a leader is watching members of your team achieve things that they didn’t know were possible. When helping leaders in IT services firms, there are personal, economic and social achievements that can alter the course of many lives. For me, that is legacy – and why I do what I do.

You have a lot of experience as a leader, and a strong ability to mentor and motivate large teams. What factors are important when it comes to successfully leading large organizations?

Trust – a large team can immediately sense if your words don’t match reality. Building and maintaining trust in leaders and the team is paramount.
Communication – the “indirect network” becomes very important as companies exceed the 500 person mark. Leaders need to plan for this shift and change their approaches to recognize this – the founder-driven ways of influencing may no longer work.
Predictability – as a business scales, lots of things will change and leaders must alter course in response. Having real information when making these adjustments provides more certainty to decision making – and allows smart risk taking to capitalize on the opportunities that surface along the way.

What advice would you give founders who are just getting started in a highly competitive ecosystem?

Take the time to get the foundations that you will need to grow in place. These include your market differentiators, your economic models, your processes (sales, delivery, operations, etc.) and your strategies around people (who, where, key roles, etc.). Stay focused on what you will need as a business to establish ongoing advantages and evolve. The requirements of the company evolve every time you double your revenue and headcount.

Rich Lyons

September 22, 2023 by

Rich is an entrepreneur and growth expert with 30+ years of experience in IT, professional services and business development. Rich was the founder and CEO of Lyons Consulting Group (LYONSCG), a $50 million eCommerce digital agency and service provider that worked with global customers like GoPro, Patagonia, Herman Miller, and FootJoy. When LYONSCG was acquired by Capgemini in 2017, Rich went on to hold multiple roles across the company for the next four years. He served as EVP, Digital Commerce Experience Leader for North America, defined the firm’s global commerce go-to-market strategy, and led hyper-growth initiatives for Capgemini’s most important partners (Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Google and others) with the goal to grow $1B+ practices.

Rich now serves on advisory boards, and advises business leaders on how to improve sales processes and accountability. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University and founded the Lyons School of Transformational Business, teaching courses on sales, entrepreneurship, and leadership. He is currently finishing a book on Life Is Sales, has been married for over 30 years to his wife Dr. Gertrude Lyons, and is the proud father of two daughters.

Why are you passionate about helping leaders of IT services firms?

I’m passionate about helping others to not make the same mistakes that I made. Having worked since 1995 in IT services and eCommerce (Whittman-Hart, marchFIRST, divine, LYONSCG, Capgemini), I have seen a lot and have a great deal to share in terms of what was successful and what was not.

You founded the Lyons Consulting Group in 2003 as a digital commerce agency, and ultimately grew it to $50M+ before being acquired by CapGemini in 2017. How did your strategy evolve over those 14 years?

I had a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to be a $50M IT consulting firm by the time I was 50. Before selling to Capgemini, we started as a staff aug firm, and we pivoted and changed strategy many times over the 14 years that I ran the company. We got into eCommerce in 2005 and became the first implementation partner of Dewandware, now Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We shed all of our other IT consulting services in 2009 during the financial crisis and focused on only eCommerce. We added full creative capabilities, digital marketing/digital strategy, Magento (now Adobe) and Hybris (now SAP) as other platforms, and expanded internationally.

M&A in services isn’t easy, but Lyons Consulting Group has been a successful acquisition by CapGemini. What advice would you give to founders to help ensure a smooth integration for the team and customers?

My intention was never to sell, but the market changed rapidly. When we decided it was time to consider selling, we looked at both strategic acquirers and PE firms. It’s important to know the culture you’re going into, where you fit, what the future looks like to the best of your ability, and to ensure that your customers and employees will be well taken care of after the transition.

When it comes to a successful integration, communication is KEY – early and often, with clients and employees. We visited all of the customers that we could, and reached out to the others with phone calls. We held all-company meetings for the announcement, with many follow-up meetings to answer questions. Through all these, we tried to reassure our customers and our employees how they could benefit from the acquisition. For customers, it meant access to additional offerings and services. For employees, it meant additional training and other resources and opportunities that only a larger company could offer.

With more than 30 years of sales, alliance and business development experience, you’ve seen a lot. What are the biggest mistakes that services companies make when scaling sales?

Hiring saviors is the biggest mistake I see services companies make. Be sure to vet new hires, especially sales managers. I am a firm believer in metrics, so I believe that metrics and activity tracking should be a part of every sales compensation plan. Also, Alliances can be a huge channel for sales and leads – don’t undervalue this channel. And don’t undervalue a good alliance manager who knows the ecosystem.

Companies looking for that next phase of growth often decide to “go up market”, but it’s not always easy. What are the biggest challenges sales teams face when trying to break into and win business in the enterprise?

I always wanted to serve the whole market, so I believe it is a natural progression. Get happy clients and references in the midmarket. This will naturally lead to larger clients in the enterprise space. The key is happy, satisfied customers. Earn the right to be in the enterprise space. Everyone likes to hear a story with measurable results. Sales teams need to learn to tell these stories, with the results and benefits.

Latané Conant

March 29, 2022 by

Latané Conant is the Chief Revenue Officer of 6sense, a RevTech leader that’s seen annual triple digit growth under Latane’s leadership and was recently valued at $5.2 billion. Prior to joining 6sense, Latané was the Global CMO and GM of Americas for Appirio, where she repositioned the company from cloud computing to customer experience, supported global expansion and helped pivot the company to verticalized selling. She has literally written the book on how to use data and insights to drive predictable revenue growth in B2B businesses, and is the founder of CMO Coffee Talk, a 2,000-person community of marketing leaders. Her background in product and services sales, combined with her unique experience in accounting, e-commerce, CRM and HR tech is not the typical CMO background. But then again, there’s nothing typical about Latané.

Why do you think marketing is such a critical function in people-based, services businesses?

Often CMOs underestimate their role in defining, developing, and maintaining a great culture. Brands build from the inside and manifest outward, which is why marketing must be very intentional about company strategy and culture. In a service based business this is EVEN more critical for differentiation and margin.

A lot of early stage companies struggle with establishing a solid GTM strategy and plan. What advice would you give to founders in this area?

First, find a category. Customers, partners, analysts, investors, and employees need to put you in context. You may not be an exact category fit, but this is where positioning comes in. Without an existing category, it’s going to be a long, expensive road. And being a category of one doesn’t help.

Second, use data to identify patterns in the market. Look at intent data to see what keywords and ecosystems are trending. Find a segment where you can differentiate and win, and then expand.

Third, before you hire a huge expensive sales team, test your hypothesis, adjust and test again. You need to understand your clear and defensible differentiators. Once you do, train the entire company (not just your sales team) on them.

Finally, don’t go it alone. Understand the extended ecosystem of what people buy around your offering. Develop meaningful and focused partnerships.

When it comes to B2B marketing strategies, you often say that in-market is the new inbound. Why do you think inbound marketing is dead, and how can companies get started with Account Based Marketing?

Demand generation and inbound marketing was born in the 1990s. For the next 20+ years, marketing produced content and interested buyers filled out a form with their email address to get it. Marketing then emailed them until they took a meeting. It worked pretty well then. Not so much now. Today there is a ton of great content available to buyers. It’s easy to get lost in the noise and if you make it too hard to get, buyers will simply go elsewhere. It’s also inefficient. You have no idea whether that “lead” is an ideal fit for what you’re selling, whether they’re ready to buy, or who else is involved in the buying process.

This is why so many companies are moving to Account Based Marketing, focusing less on leads and more on accounts and people, using the digital breadcrumbs out there to find buyers who are truly in-market. This requires an understanding of anonymous web activity (e.g. activity on your own website, research being conducted on other sites, activity on review sites like G2, etc.), which requires certain tools and skillsets. We’ve found when people move to this approach they have 2X bigger average contract values, 20% better win rates, and 30% better cycle times. If you wait for an inbound lead, it’s probably too late.

As a CMO, if you’re looking to build out a marketing organization, where would you start first? What would be your first 5 hires?

I think you simply hire the 5 best people you have ever worked with and the rest works out. A’s hire A’s…B’s hire C’s. So make sure you have A players on your team to start and build around them.

You’ve run large, growth-focused marketing organizations for both product and services firms. Is there a difference in terms of where marketing should focus and/or what kind of marketing leaders they need?

It’s a very different investment profile! Service margins are usually smaller, which means the percentage of revenue spent on sales and marketing is typically lower in a services company. This means you have to be more efficient with your spend, and sales and marketing alignment becomes more critical. Sales and marketing need to share the same world view on the overall bow tie funnel (acquisition through expansion) and jointly identify where and how to invest. Marketing dollars can take longer to generate results, but are typically more sustainable and programmatic.

Marketing directly to your channel partners also becomes more important. Software providers create categories and they invest in the top of the funnel / market education. As a services partner, your job is to reinforce how successful customers will be using the product and enable the channel sellers, which requires great sales enablement and top notch customer marketing.

While services marketing leaders may have different priorities, budgets, org structures and programs than product leaders, the role of the CMO is still the same. They are the Chief Market Officer, and they have to understand the market better than anyone else. This is why the best CMOs focus on data, market insights, customer experience, customer marketing & building communities.

Beth Torrie

November 9, 2021 by

Beth is the founder of Torrie Communications, a firm specializing in analyst relations, positioning & messaging, as well as customer-centric marketing. Beth has spent 20 years in technology, helping companies large and small differentiate and grow their business. With 5 successful exits under her belt, Beth has a reputation for transitioning goals into results. She specializes in using customer-driven differentiation, market research, industry analysts and upstream influencer programs to fine tune and amplify the right messaging and increase revenue. You can listen to her podcast about analyst relations here.

Why are you passionate about helping services businesses?

Services organizations have unique challenges in that they need to differentiate on their people, expertise, certifications, support and services. Many times, minor tweaks to packaging and positioning can make a big difference in revenue without major investments.

You have been working with industry analysts for 20+ years, building analyst relations programs inside organizations and now as a consultancy. When is the right time to start a formal analyst program, and how should companies measure success?

Analyst Relations programs are resource intensive in terms of research contracts and executive time. It is important to start when you can answer the most important questions: Who is your ideal client and why? What do you offer that no one else does? Can you share five customer success stories that highlight your differentiators?

Where do you think companies go wrong when it comes to getting a better return on their analyst investments?

Research contracts are very expensive; I see a ton of folks simply not using them, or not using them enough to justify the costs. If your organization purchases a research contract, the value of that contract needs to be justified on a regular basis. It’s also really important to identify the goal of the research relationship. Is it influence, learning or both? And then to make sure every interaction is working to meet one of those goals.

How do you help your clients work with analysts to become a more frequently recommended vendor?

When analysts hear a well-honed value proposition, they connect that value with problems they hear in the market. Analysts speak with hundreds (or more) clients who need vendors to help them. The first step is to create a clear, carefully constructed differentiated message to help the analysts understand how your services help your clients. When you share that message, plus a great roadmap and customer references who can back it all up, you’ll have the attention of the analyst. Analysts genuinely want to connect end user clients with vendors who are going to help solve problems. Then it’s a matter of engaging those analysts in a consistent and collaborative way that influences their agenda and perspective on you and the market.

You’ve built customer reference programs for a number of companies over the years. Where should companies start when it comes to building a program like this?

Any company looking to grow will need references for sales, investors, partners, analysts, press and more. It’s important to have a centralized source of who the best customers are, their status, their NPS (even anecdotally), transparency and reporting for the requests the organization is making for each reference, and if possible, the results of those reference calls. Customer reference programs take a unique level of organization and communication, but it starts with assigning an owner, and it should be someone senior. There should be a discussion at the C-level at least every month to monitor this topic.

Heidi Spirgi

January 29, 2021 by

Heidi has spent her career helping organizations tap into the power of their workforce. She is the former Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Cornerstone, a talent management technology company whose solutions are used by 75 million people around the world, and has held leadership roles at The Marcus Buckingham Company, ADP and PeopleSoft. In 2004 she co-founded Knowledge Infusion, a strategic HR consulting firm that was acquired by Appirio and eventually became the foundation for Appirio’s Workday cloud services practice. She has been recognized as a Top 100 HR Tech Influencer by HR Executive Magazine, and is a sought after expert on how leaders can promote gender equality.

Why are you so passionate about helping people-based businesses?

People are the heart and soul of any business, but no more so than in services. Tools and technology lack value on their own, it’s the people behind them that really make the difference. People-first businesses, whether products or services companies, are also just a lot more fun to be a part of and lead. When you look at employees as humans first, workers second, teams are a lot more trusting, collaborative, engaged and motivated. That’s when innovation flows!

You have a track record of creating strong, high-performing team cultures. What factors are important when it comes to creating a strong culture?

The first thing is to ensure people, leaders included, have a beginner’s mindset. If you approach everything as a student, rather than believing you know everything at the outset, you don’t close your mind off to new ideas. This was one of the reasons why Knowledge Infusion was so successful. We had industry expertise and a passion for our work, but we didn’t necessarily have a playbook for the kind of consulting we wanted to do. And that’s not a bad thing. The second thing is to create an environment where it’s safe to take risks. I tell my teams to actively seek those OSMs (oh shit moments) where you try things you haven’t done before and have no idea how it’s going to end. It’s in those moments that you grow and create breakthroughs for the business.

What advice would you give founders who are just getting started in a highly competitive ecosystem?

Don’t try to be all things to all people. When you expand your offerings too fast, suddenly it becomes more difficult to differentiate. The market doesn’t understand who you are or your unique value proposition. You still need to be opportunistic, but in a thoughtful way that allows you to identify the downstream trade offs. It helps to establish a set of guiding principles, a set of beliefs that act like guardrails to keep you on track when those shiny objects and short cuts seem tempting. And try to act bigger than you are — invest in marketing to establish your brand and build credibility early on. If you’re competing against the big guys, you have to look and act the part and B-level marketing will sink you.

Emma Sprague

January 25, 2021 by

Emma Sprague is a partner at KNP Communcations, a private firm that helps its clients become great communicators by providing in-person and virtual training and coaching for organizations and individuals globally. Before KNP, she founded Upswing Strategies, a media and communications firm.

Why are you passionate about helping entrepreneurs?

It takes guts (and time, and heart, and so much resilience) to launch an idea out into the world and fight for it to thrive. A lot of that has to come from the entrepreneur, but there are places where guidance and investment from others are essential. I’m grateful to be in a position to help entrepreneurs, both with my first-hand experience launching a business and because that business is focused on helping good people with good ideas deliver their message, tell their story, and make their pitch with the impact they desire. I am animated by the process of helping people shape their most authentic and compelling way to communicate and to lead, and to feel confident in both.

You’ve done a lot of social science research into why people listen to and follow some leaders more than others. How can founders hone their speaking and presentation skills to be a more inspirational leader?

Leading is a lot easier and more effective when people want to follow, when they are inspired, when they admire you and feel you’re headed somewhere together. That feeling is informed by the emotional character judgements we innately make about one another. Is she my kind of person? Does she have the ability to influence my world? One of the best ways to inform that judgement and inspire is by communicating your vision, your values and your story well and authentically. Becoming a magnetic speaker demands deliberate attention to how you prepare, how you show up, and how you deliver. That approach requires harnessing your individual strengths and personality, honing strategies that align your words, body language and voice with your message, and building a routine that ensures you approach each engagement with energy and poise.

During the pandemic companies had to shift quickly from in-person to virtual events. What can we learn from the companies who’ve been successful in this new format? How do they keep engagement high?

The first thing to do is acknowledge that virtual engagements – while powerful in a lot of important ways – are a really difficult mechanism for holding people’s attention and making true connections. That means the bar is much higher and you have to be all the more intentional in building a plan that meets your goals and captivates your participants. And that’s exactly where you start – what is your team hoping to get out of this and what do you want others to get out of this? If those answers aren’t crystal clear, you will flop and be lost in the sea of virtual panels rattling on behind someone’s email screen. Once your goals are set, some good things to consider: shorter presentations and shorter events; super engaging speakers only; incorporate multiple formats; get people on their feet; find ways to break through the screen; and build individual follow up into the plan.

You are a mentor and coach for Bates’ Bobcat Ventures entrepreneurship competition, and are deliberate about reaching leaders early in their careers. What advice would you give to founders on how to help and source future leaders?

I love working with students and young people. Confidence in public speaking, and so many other skills that make better leaders, better entrepreneurs, are ultimately a matter of routine and practice. The sooner you introduce and build those habits, the more they become second nature, muscle memory and mindset. I like to introduce students to a more holistic way of communicating – not just the words, but your energy, your movement, how you feel about what you’re saying – tactics for welcoming and handling nerves, and telling stories as a tool for persuasion. My advice to founders: think about what skill you wish you’d mastered earlier in your career and pass it on. Where to start: connect with schools you attended, incubators in your region, and by word of mouth. Coach one person and more will come. The long view goal is to create better prepared leaders for our teams and our world.