Helping Sells Radio

Sangram Vajre is the co-founder of Terminus, the company that has defined the category of account based marketing as we know it today. Sangram is also the founder of the #FlipMyFunnel movement, and get this...he is a 2X author and 2X guest on Helping Sells Radio (Ep68). Whoop! We talk about his knew book, ABM is B2B: Why B2B Marketing and Sales is Broken and How to Fix It.  Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Tom Lipscomb of The Successful Customer, and advisor to numerous SaaS startup CEOs and customer success teams, shares what it takes to gain credibility as an executive beyond one's functional area and get a seat at the table.   Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

First there was direct touch customer success. Assign a smart CSM to help a smart customer. That's the first motion of customer success. Then there was tech touch. That is the second motion of customer success. Omid Razavi joins Helping Sells Radio to introduce the third motion of customer success: product success. Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Tiffani Bova, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller "GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter about the Choices That Will Make Or Break Your Business" joins Helping Sells Radio to help us understand how customer experience is core to having a strong growth IQ. A positive customer experience is core to all other growth strategies. Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Travis Marsh is co-author of "Reinventing Scale-Ups: Radical Ideas for Growing Companies." Guess what we talked about? Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

It was a Kristen Hayer's idea. That we should bring our podcasts together and do a live, joint podcast at a customer success meetup. Well, we did it. And we recorded it. Here it is. Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

I was just following the Agile Australia conference hashtag (#agileaus) on Twitter when Sandy's name came up. When I read about her conference talk is saw words like self-organizing teams. OK. I know that one. That's what scrum teams do well. But then I saw the term self-selection. Self-selection? Does than mean I can put myself on my team at work I want? Mostly, yes, according to Sandy Mamoli. And Sandy knows about self-selection. She wrote the book on it, "Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel." Obviously, I had to get her on the show to talk about it. Sandy Mamoli is an Agile coach and founder of Nomad8, a small but perfectly formed Agile consultancy in Auckland, New Zealand. She's a former Olympian, a geek, a gadget junkie, international keynote speaker. She has a masters degree in artificial intelligence and knows quite a lot about Agile. As you can tell from the interview, I didn't know anything. This interview truly was about me asking Sandy a bunch of questions to learn how s

Harry Maziar may not be a technology professional as you and I would describe it. I don't care. He knows more about helpful selling than I'll ever know, which is why I wanted to talk to him on Helping Sells Radio. After a successful career in sales, then running sales, then as president, then as chairman of a publicly traded NYSE company, Harry wrote a book called, Story Selling: Sage Advice and Common Sense About Sales and Success. The book is full of memorable and useful advice, like "I must do something" will always solve more problems than "something must be done" and "self discipline is the original do-it-yourself job." After you read Harry's book, you can't help but call a customer and try to be helpful.  Learn more about Harry: Get his book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071GB716T/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1   We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.  Thanks so much fo

Fresh off the plane from the CS100 Summit in Sundance, Utah, Cole Sanders, senior customer success manager at ClientSuccess, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about what it's like being a customer success manager for customer success managers. Imagine that. You are serving customers who are doing the same job as you. No pressure, right?   Learn more about Cole:  On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cole-sanders-40a72912/   We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.  Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts Stitcher Spotify Follow us on Social Media: ServiceRocket YouTube Twitter Facebook Linkedin Instagram Bill Cushard Twitter Linkedin Instagram Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd: Write a review where ever you get your podcasts. T

Fresh off the plane from the CS100 Summit in Sundance, Utah, Carlos Quezada, head of customer success at Aruba talks about how he had the instinct to build a customer success team with a data person first. "I wanted to know what I was looking at before implementing solutions." Carlos used data to understand the customer based, so he could segment customers, and design the right solution for each. There are major lessons here for how to build customer success at scale with a very small team.  Learn more about Carlos:  On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cquezada/   We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.  Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts Stitcher Spotify Follow us on Social Media: ServiceRocket YouTube Twitter Facebook Linkedin Instagram Bill Cushard Twitter

OK, so maybe agile and digital transformations are not specifically about helping sells. On the other hand, if our organizations and teams are not agile, don't respond to customer needs quickly, and are unable to adapt in uncertain times, we may not have any customers to help anyway. This is why I wanted to talk to Pamela Meyer, author of Pamela Meyer, author of Agility Shift: Creating Agile and Effective Leaders, Teams, and Organizations. She says the majority of executives say that agility is a critical organizational capability. That's you. The irony is that most organizations aren't agile. They aren't doing it. If they are doing it, it's coming from a mindset that isn't agile. That's a hard pill to swallow. Leaders know they have to be more agile, responsive, and nimble. But there is still a belief that agility is risky. "What if we make bad decisions?" This is the wrong mindset because actually agility is about minimizing risk while delivering value faster to customers. We talk to Pam

Kristen Hayer and I were at the ClientSuccess CS100 Summit this week in Sundance, Utah. We used some of our time together to plan our live joint podcast. This is a recording of part of that prep. You may have heard about a live joint podcast I am doing with Kristen Hayer of Strikedeck Radio. Kristin and I will be at the Customer Success Networking Meetup on September 26 in Palo Alto hosting a live podcast. Join the meetup here: https://www.meetup.com/customersuccessnetwork/events/263040347/ Learn more about Strikedeck Radio here:  https://strikedeck.com/strikedeck-radio-customer-success-live/   Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Scott Brown, author of (C)lean Messaging: A framework to help startup founders talk to humans, didn't actually turn acorns into gold. He was trying to explain to me how to apply one of the principles from his book. The key to being remembered is to combine a message with a picture and a story. One of the stories in the book is of a company that applied this principle and came up with, "We turn acorns into gold." It makes sense when you read it. To help me understand this principle even more, Scott turned the podcast around and starting interviewing me to help me create my own (C)lean Message. And this exercise is proof that knowing something is next to worthless. Applying it....that's an entirely different story. If you want more help, understanding what this (C)lean Messaging is all about....listen to the episode and wrap your head around this: Scott's (C)lean Messaging Framework, looks and operates like a business model canvas, but for crafting your message.  Learn more about Scott: His website:&

I have two questions for you? First, if you wanted your customers to love you, what would you do? Would you call them more? Improve your service? Introduce them to others? Second, if you wanted your employees to love you what would you do? Get to know them at a personal level? Promote them? Pay them more? Help them advance in their career? In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, I talked to Steve Farber about his new book,  Love is Just Damn Good Business: Do What You Love, In The Service of People, Who Love What You Do. Your first reaction might be a little like mine, "Customer love? Really?" Until you think about the questions above. That changes things. Those questions take a touchy feely topic and provides a way to think about operationalizing love as a business process. Steve shares several stories that demonstrating how much a business can improve results using love as a discipline.  Learn more about Steve:  His Website: https://www.stevefarber.com The Book: https://w

Becky Flint, co-founder and CEO of Dragonboat.io, joins Nice Work to talk about how to bring strategy and execution together in the product development lifecycle using a process called Responsive Portfolio Program Management (Responsive PPM). Dragonboat has a tight integration with Jira, and if Jira represents the execution cycle, Dragonboat represents the strategic cycle. We dive deep into Responsive PPM and how it can help product teams deal with the onslaught of competing priorities that they deal with every day... and keep their sanity. Learn more about Becky and Dragonboat.io:  Dragonboat website: https://dragonboat.io/ Her presentation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CzE5pAjPnIz1WrNjk9uW06ufkcq4fc-PzZtcfHI2Oao/edit#slide=id.p On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beckyflint/   We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.  Thanks so much for listening! If

Product demos are broken. They are either a 60 minute feature dump or completely ignore the buyer's needs. We've all been on demos like that. Some of us might have even delivered demos like that. Well, not us. Other people. What makes all of this worse is that most companies hold their demos hostage behind a form, leaving potential buys to ask themselves, "Do I give them my email address and phone number so they can hound me for 2 months so I can see a 60 minute feature dump?" Customer wish they could just do a little self-demoing. They want to learn. And they want to learn on their own terms. Why don't we help them do that. Greg Dickinson, founder and CEO of Omedym, helps us understand how we can help our customers buy with self-demos. Free the demo and help your buyers at the same time.  Learn more about Greg: His company Omedym: https://www.omedym.com/ On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregdickinson/   We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn

Keith Mattes, senior program manager / Gainsight administrator at Pearson, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about how reduce support case resolution connecting Jira and Salesforce. Along the way, he also broke down silos by connecting development teams with customer support teams. He did this in the face of organizational resistance. As in most organizations, there are barriers to trying new things, especially connecting systems and integrating data across them. On the journey to overcome this resistance, Keith asked a lot of questions, questioned the status quo (politely, we might add), and got Jira and Salesforce connected. There is a lesson here in challenging the status quo with questions...it helped that Keith was new to the teach and could ask the "Huh" and "Why" questions that most people, who have been on a team a long time, can be afraid to ask. But this is how change is done.  Keith used ServiceRocket's Connector for Salesforce & Jira to do this, you can learn more about one the

Chad Sanderson has been leading sales and marketing teams to success for over 20 years through his proven and predictable ValueSelling Framework. Chad, who has been named a Top 5 Emerging Training Leader, has worked in sales, built teams, and achieved targets -- both within organizations and as a consultant. He cuts through the outdated, theory-based “fluff” so often attributed to sales training, and gets down to the nitty-gritty with a raw, no-BS perspective to look at what is working, what’s not working, and where there may be opportunities to drive predictable revenue growth through sales optimization.  Learn more about Chad:  Chad's Website, ValueSelling Associates: https://www.valueselling.com/ On Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chadsanderson Chad's podcast, The B2B Revenue Executive Experience: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-b2b-revenue-executive-experience/id1242104988   We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts a

The writer and customer success manager in me saw Torrey Podmajersky's (UX Writer at Google) new book, Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word, and said to myself, "OMG, let's talk about this." So we did and pressed record. You might ask yourself why this kind of writing matters. In Torrey's words, "we need to onboard people into our product experience" with the expressed purpose of "setting them up for success." Yes, the product design must be good. But if you are using the wrong words, you can very easily prevent a customer from achieving their goal. Bad customer success. It is not just about good writing. It is about the (this is gonna be tricky to say) right.....writing. Torrey talks about a virtuous cycle of transforming users. A UX writer does this by first considering the company goals, then the customer's goals...then figuring out what and how to write...so that both goals can be met. It all starts with goals.  Learn more about Torrey: Her

Change is great. You go first. That's the first thing I thought about when Todd said, "Everybody wants to grow, but no one wants to change." That quote came from Todd Hockenberry's book, Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company’s Future Using Inbound Principles. What does this have to do with helping sells? Everything. The entire philosophy of inbound marketing is based on the premise of being helpful...producing helpful and educational marketing that gives value first, educates people, and draws people in. But inbound is not just about marketing. Or even sales. As Todd talks about on the show, what if you marketing and sales teams are practicing educational and helpful inbound marketing and selling techniques, but then customers sign up and the rest of the organization (think customer success, legal, support teams) do not? Easy, you start to lose trust with customers and might even lose their business. The entire organization must learn to embrace inbound principles