Strategic planning

Joey Poarch

October 25, 2022 by

Joey has worked in technology consulting for more than 20 years, spending the last 14 of those focused on presales and solution architecture. He has worked as a consultant within large companies like PeopleSoft and within several fast-paced consultancies like Appirio and MTX to build their pre-sales teams, improve estimation methodology and tools, and work hand-in-hand with finance, operations and delivery to maximize profitability. He now leads the pre-sales team for Zennify, a consulting firm focused on helping financial services firms adopt Salesforce and nCino. Joey has also held leadership roles at Topcoder where he was the VP of Platform Services. Outside of work you will find Joey mountain biking in the mountains of Southwest Virginia or playing music with his band Chasing Fall!

Why are you so passionate about helping professional services businesses?

Working with and within professional services teams offers the opportunity to work with a variety of different customers across industries. I enjoy the continuous learning that requires, and the ability to share that knowledge across different customers, verticals and industries.

At what point in a company’s lifecycle do you believe the sales solution architecture skill set and roles should be built out? What advice do you have for companies starting this journey?

Organizations should be thinking about how they will support pre-sales on Day One. Day One for a startup might not mean dedicated resources as everyone has multiple responsibilities, however, creating clearly delineating between sales and delivery processes is important. Once you have a four or five-person dedicated sales team, there needs to be a plan for how they will be supported, and putting that structure into place doesn’t happen overnight. Fully onboarding a pre-sales resource is going to take 6-12 months, so make sure to plan your pre-sales team growth in lock step with your sales team.

Because solution architects play such a key role in both pre-sales and successful delivery, companies struggle with where to put these individuals or teams organizationally. What advice would you give companies as they make this decision?

Presales solution architects are typically part of the sales team, but almost always have a delivery background. In my experience, pre-sales should be dedicated to sales and not have a utilization target. Giving presales resources a delivery target can make for a contentious relationship with both sales and delivery because there isn’t a clear priority. Having dedicated resources for presales means they can focus on winning business and avoid conflicts of schedule and priorities set from multiple parts of the business.

Maintaining rate cards, including rack rates, discounting guidances and margin expectations tends to be a tough topic for companies to tackle. What advice do you have for companies just getting started with this process?

When starting out I recommend trying to keep ASM (as sold margin) calculations as simple as possible. Keep the number of roles to a minimum and figure out your average cost rate of onshore, nearshore and offshore resources. Work closely with your finance and operations teams to establish your ideal margin, and define your thresholds that would require approvals. Keep approval thresholds to two or three max. Keep it simple.

Katie Brown

September 23, 2022 by

Katie has been a “go-to” change agent in the cloud computing space for more than a decade, always on the hunt for processes that need to evolve, ideas that need to see the light of day, and more scalable ways to service customers. She started her career in technology as an individual sales rep, where she quickly noted the need for more intelligent marketing support. This led to her founding the firm’s first marketing practice, and eventually to leadership roles at Xerox and Appirio where she managed everything from solutions, to strategic programs, to global methodology and operations. She is currently leading Okta’s Expert Acceleration practice, where she is responsible for the quality and scale of its global expert ecosystem. Katie resides in Rochester NY, and when she’s not taking on risky home renovation projects, she likes to throw big family parties and support local politics. To burn off steam she likes to box and dance (not at the same time).

Why are you so passionate about helping professional services businesses?

Services are where the promise of the product is fulfilled. For many product companies, their service partners are their strongest advocates, eager beta testers and , frankly, a candid outside voice about the realities of a product in a customer environment. Plus, there is nothing more gratifying than engaging with a team of experts who can be a trusted, nimble guide to a future state.

Most IT services companies now offer some level of productized IP, from a packaged methodology to a true product, but few do it particularly well. Why do you think that is, and what can services companies learn from product companies to drive a better outcome?

Technologists developing IP at a services firm tend to focus on the “what”, not the “why”, of the offer. And when there is a “why”, it’s not all that different from what else is out there. Like any product, customers need to know why this solution really matters to them and why it’s special. Put some of your best/most grizzled customer-facing folks (e.g. account managers, sales reps) on the case to help crystallize the actual benefit language to customers that will translate well in the deal cycle AND in delivery.

At Okta, one of your focus areas was to accelerate the understanding and use of new products by external partners and your own internal customer success organization. What were some of the most effective tactics that you used to do this that services companies can adopt for their own IP?

For implementers, its labs, labs, labs! Oh, and lab guides. Get consultants hands on early and help them understand the early use cases for this IP. You will be surprised about how much they figure out (and QA) from there. For success orgs, involving them in later stage product design is key, so they can help to formulate the customer value taxonomy around that product. Putting together a cross-functional team of customer-facing roles and product teams before going to market is another effective way to propel knowledge across the organization. This will also reduce your dependence on lengthy and costly enablement programs that many times come in too late for the experts to truly scale up knowledge.

Many companies gather but don’t effectively leverage insights from NPS / CSAT feedback. What steps can companies take to better integrate feedback collected into their delivery approach?

First, gathering customer feedback and CSAT data needs to be a job. Someone needs to own it, and more importantly, when results come in, embed it as part of the organizational workflow. The owner should NOT be the project or account team, but sit at the practice, functional or geographical management level. The action can be owned by many people, but translating the feedback into action should be a measurable task with a name accountable. Also, create an ambitious, global target and report on it quarterly. A single, easy to understand target sustains attention. And finally, pay attention to whom you are NOT getting feedback from. Project health scores should consider not just survey results but also a lack of response.

Latané Conant

March 29, 2022 by

Latané Conant is the Chief Market 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.

Joe Norman

November 19, 2021 by

Joe has spent 15 years working in and building managed services teams, and is currently the VP of customer success at IBM. He began his career as a marketing automation consultant and customer engagement manager, eventually moving on to lead the managed service organization at Appirio, a Salesforce and cloud consultancy. Joe brought that experience to 7Summits (acquired by IBM), where he was responsible for defining and growing the company’s managed services offering, partnering with sales to drive adoption and double sales. These experiences have given Joe a modern outlook on managed services — one that understands these offerings are critical to customer success, not just an extension of sales or training. Joe lives in Southern Indiana with his wife and two boys. In his downtime, Joe enjoys playing and working on guitars, spending time with his family, and enjoying all things music.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

How often have we heard, “it’s business, it’s not personal”. Anytime you are dealing with people, it’s always personal (the degree to which we compartmentalize that is a different story). Through my time working in and leading various managed services teams with varying methodologies and philosophies, I’ve seen, first hand, that if you focus on people and relationships, you can withstand the inevitable ups and downs of any engagement. Happy workers make happy customers. Hiring the right people, providing them with the appropriate foundation and organizational philosophy, and giving them enough room to make decisions (and mistakes) results in engaged employees and thrilled customers.

You’ve built out world class managed services teams and offerings at 7Summits (now IBM) and Appirio. What are the one or two most important considerations in the early stages of building a managed services offering?

The first is to start strong: With a new offering, nothing fuels the sales cycle like positive customer testimonials. You need to convince customers that your people have the experience and skills to get the job done well, with as little hassle as possible. Build a core team of senior people who can think on their feet, operate in conditions that aren’t fully defined, and who are willing to wear multiple hats. Ideally, as the offering grows, these people will become your management layer. Early on though, they are your spine. Look for people who WANT this opportunity, see the value of these offerings, and are bought into your mission statement.

The second is to recognize your most important customer isn’t always external….it’s also sales. This is more than just enablement. You will be asking folks who carry a quota to spend time selling an offering that, most often, results in smaller opportunity amounts. Spend time with each seller explaining the value to them, as well as the customers. Sell your team and convince them that with a little effort up front (with your help along the way), they can get repeatable revenue that carries very little, if any, day to day hassle.

More organizations are looking to provide managed service offerings as a way to stay close with customers and as a source of ongoing, predictable revenue. How should leaders think about differentiating their specific offering?

Resist the urge for your value proposition to center around cost. If the only thing you have going for you is that you have low rates, growth is going to be hard fought. With today’s connected workforce, any customer who has basic needs that could get by with your junior folks is likely better off just hiring. The best case scenario is you get a one time sale before they realize this. In nearly every space there is a major player who can afford to go cheaper than you, to the point of losing money if the relationship is valuable enough to them.

Remember that at the end of the day, it’s a people business. Staff your team such that your offering is easy to use, flexible where it must be, and results in quality work without putting burden on the customer’s internal team. If you do this, not only is the difference in cost going to be easier to explain, it can become a strength. Lastly, don’t be afraid of who you are. Especially early on, there will be temptation to stretch to meet growth needs. Remember, what you need is positive customer experiences. Tread carefully and don’t be afraid to not be the answer for every situation.

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.

Bob Maller

September 27, 2021 by

Bob is the President and Chief Culture Officer of Collaborative Solutions, and an expert at growing teams, practices and partnerships in the fast-moving cloud computing space. To call Bob an IT services veteran might be putting it mildly. He started his consulting career in the ‘90s at global consultancies Accenture and Deloitte, before going on to manage consulting teams at PeopleSoft. That experience served him well when he joined Collaborative Solutions as its second employee. Over the years he’s grown Collaborative to more than 1100 employees and Workday’s longest tenured partner. Along the way, he’s also created a firm well respected for its work, culture and dedication to diversity, winning a ridiculous number of Best Places to Work awards. Collaborative was acquired by Cognizant in 2020, and Bob continues in the same role at Collaborative as Cognizant’s standalone Workday practice.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

When we developed our core values at Collaborative, the clear first value was People. While it can be cliche to mention People as a core value, it’s the businesses that truly nurture and develop their people who are most successful — especially in services. Real magic happens with collaboration, which is why when you’re building a firm or a practice, teamwork is such a critical trait. The “smartest” or most-skilled person may not be a fit for your organization if they don’t thrive as a member of a team.

As the second employee at Collaborative Solutions, you grew the firm from a niche PeopleSoft federal contractor to a ‘crown jewel’ of the Workday ecosystem with more than 1000 employees. What was the most challenging part of that early journey and what was it when you reached scale?

In the early days, the challenge was to differentiate ourselves. As we became a Workday partner, the fear was that we would build a practice and the large SIs would swoop in to hire them away. This is why hiring the right people and building a sustainable, employee friendly culture was, and is still, critical.

Our first acquisition (a Workday consultancy in Australia) was also an interesting milestone. Integrating them into what was then a North American-centric business and making them feel a part of the Collaborative family took real work.

At 500+ employees, I no longer knew each employee, which was a very weird feeling. We needed ways to stay in touch with each other and keep engagement high. So we launched the Collabie Convos series (intimate video calls with 15-20 employees) to discuss a variety of topics. We also put a lot more emphasis on developing the people in the firm to become leaders and great ambassadors of our culture. It cannot just be the senior leadership team who sets the tone for the culture.

You’re a huge advocate of culture and inclusivity. What is the key to scaling culture as the company grows, expands and evolves?

It starts with formalizing and promoting your core values. In the early days, it’s about defining and discovering those values as a founding team. As we got larger, it became very important that every employee around the world knew what our core values were and why we had them. We reinforced them daily and worked them into our processes. They weren’t just words or phrases on a wall in an office.

Selecting and developing the right leaders within your practices is also critical, and should constantly be reviewed. These are the leaders that new hires will look to, even more than the executive team. Do you have the right leaders? Do they exemplify our core values? Did we promote people into areas they cannot handle and would be better suited as individual contributors? We, as leaders, cannot be afraid to ask these questions and make adjustments along the way.

When it comes to inclusivity, it simply needs to be a priority – a focus from the top down. I’d also highly encourage instituting a buddy and/or mentoring program to indoctrinate people into the company and to ensure that they have someone to help navigate their careers within the company.

Keeping employees engaged is never easy, but it can be even more challenging during rapid growth and downturns. What are some things leaders can do to keep engagement high throughout a company’s lifecycle?

The first thing is to survey your employees, but just as importantly, do something with the results. Show your employees that what they told you is valued and, if it needs work, that it’s being addressed. I am a big believer that surveys are anonymous and people understand that improvement is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. For trust to flourish, leaders need to be vulnerable and transparent. Talk to your people more often than you think, through a variety of mechanisms. Use video as much as possible when communicating important things (as opposed to a flat email that no one really reads).