Top Insights from the Best: Top Insights for CEOs, Sales & Marketing Leaders and Investors from the best experts in the world Zorian Rotenberg

Jen SpencerVice President, Sales and Marketing at SmartBug Media, Speaker, Sales Mentor


Jen Spencer is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for SmartBug Media, an Intelligent Inbound® marketing agency of experts in digital strategy, revenue operations, public relations, content marketing, and marketing automation. She's also a founding coach at SDR Nation and a past board member of the Phoenix chapter of Girls in Tech. 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.

Chris Lytle has conducted more than 2200 seminars throughout the English-speaking world. A gifted speaker and teacher, Chris inspired and educated countless radio advertising sales professionals for 44 years. He is famous for providing “more usable information-per-minute” than anyone else in the business.  Chris is the author of the business bestsellers, The Accidental Salesperson: How to Take Control of Your Sales Career and Earn the Respect and Income You Deserve and The Accidental Sales Manager: How to Take Control and Lead Your Sales Team to Record Profits. His company, Instant Sales Training, continues to deliver his sales training in easily digestible knowledge bites. This automatic sales improvement process revolutionizes the way sales managers develop the people who develop their profits.  Chris’ mission is making successful people and companies even more successful.
In this episode:
- About the "Forgotten Rookie" & Sales Management Trap
- Why there is so much risk when promoting an AE to a Sales Manager
- How a new Sales Manager mitigates the "Unknown Unknowns" in the role
- Why companies do sales training yet they don't do manager training
- Where to focus as a priority - why a Sales Manager is more important as a driver of results than sales reps
- Why companies promote their A-Players and top performers away from the role where they are highly successful into a role where they don't know anything about and don't always perform well as a manager
- How and why sales are won in the Discovery phase
- What makes someone a good sales rep & the value-add concept
- What is a Sales Pipeline Angioplasty and how to purge out unlikely Opps
- The difference between Prospects & Information Seekers and about engagement metrics and next steps in the sales process

Currently the VP of Inside Sales at PatientPop, Kevin has had an extensive sales career. He's been listed as an InsideSales Top 10 Sales Leader and Sales Development Exec of the Year, and his REVstar nomination called him "a true leader who can combine the vision it takes to plan ahead down to the day-to-day with the sales reps he's helping."
In this Episode:
- How do you use Analytics and tie it to humans (re data & Human element)?
- How do you drive behavior change?
- How KD scales sales faster - if the board asked to figure out a way to grow much faster in 2021, how he would approach it.
- Thoughts on Behaviors vs Processes vs Skills vs Metrics
- About managing Process vs developing People and skills
- Leadership style of Demanding vs. Commanding
- About "slowing down to speed up" and rebuilding and resetting to go faster
- What are the biggest mistakes KD made in his career (one relating to how to communicate to the Board of Directors about "risks")- Board Talk - on the balance of Risks vs. Upside when communicating messages to the Board
- What KD does when he is behind the goals in any Qtr  (and the How vs. What vs. Why of either missing or hitting your numbers)
- The key reason why, when the quota is missed, KD is still perfectly OK 
- And what is the reason that, when the team hits quota, KD is unhappy 
- About the concept of "Defend when Defendable" 
- What is "POE" and why it is the most important thing in sales
- On Specialization vs. the prospecting AEs and the insight of AE1 vs AE2
- Asking the question "Is it working?" first and foremost
- About developing a training Bootcamp for new AEs promoted from SDRs
- KD's insights on "earning promotion, not earning the role" 

Brent Gleeson is a Navy SEAL combat veteran with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Africa. Upon leaving SEAL Team 5, Brent turned his discipline and battlefield lessons to the world of business and has become an award-winning entrepreneur, bestselling author, and acclaimed speaker on topics ranging from resilience, mental toughness, leadership and building high-performance teams to culture, and organizational transformation. 
Brent is the Founder and CEO of TakingPoint Leadership, a progressive leadership and organizational development consulting firm with a focus on business transformation and building high-performance cultures. Brent was named a Top 10 CEO by Entrepreneur Magazine in 2013.
Brent holds degrees in finance and economics from Southern Methodist University, certificates in English and History from Oxford University in England and a graduate business degree from the University of San Diego. He is the bestselling author of TakingPoint: A Navy SEAL’s 10 Fail-Safe Principles for Leading Through Change, which was a #1 New Release on Amazon in Organizational Change and Business Structural Adjustment. Brent latest book, Embrace the Suck: The Navy SEAL Way to an Extraordinary Life, publishes on December 22, 2020.
In this episode:
- "The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday"  - how this Navy SEALS motto relates to business and sales management in SaaS
- How Navy SEALS become mentally tough and survive Hell Week - what SaaS CROs and sales leaders can do including engaging in health and wellness activities, taking short breaks, journaling and better sleep
- Hear a real life and death Navy SEALS "capture & kill" combat story from Baghdad   
- On grit, resilience, "emotional maturity", stress management and compartmentalization and learning what is in your control
- The Navy SEAL way of "leaning into adversity"
- About changing people on the team before changing the team
- On the upcoming book "Embrace the Suck: The Navy SEAL Way to an Extraordinary Life"
- Insights on "leading change"
- The rituals, beliefs and guiding principles
- Leadership - why great leaders have empathy
- The Navy SEALS and the "Rule of 7" & the "Rule of 40%" 
- Understanding people's behaviors and what motivates them and measuring team engagement at work
- How to get a team to click and enhancing the performance of your team
- Insights from Navy SEALS research/studies in the boat with good leaders vs. bad leaders (and what happens when you remove a good leader and bring in a bad leader to a well-functioning team)
- Z asks whether Brent knows other Navy SEALS like @Jocko Willink and @Leif Babin as well as @David Goggins
- How CEOs and CROs can hire Navy SEALs into SaaS sales roles with Elite Meet and the Honor Foundation

Mike Volpe is the CEO at Lola.com, Spend Management & Travel Management Software
Previously, he has joined HubSpot as the fifth employee and as CMO helped the company grow from about a dozen beta customers to over 15,000 customers, 1,000 employees, $150m in revenue, and an IPO leading to a $1.7B market cap.  He has also made more than 25 angel investments with 4 exits so far (HubSpot, Locately, GroSocial, ThriveHive).
Mike serves as an advisor to a number of companies and is on the board of directors of Repsly, a mobile CRM company and was on the board of Attend until they were acquired by Event Farm. He has worked in marketing at a number of different startups in Boston and San Francisco and loves talking about marketing and growth with other marketers and entrepreneurs.
In this episode:
- As one of the original founding team members of Hubspot and someone who co-invented Inbound Marketing, Mike shares top insights on how Inbound changed over time and the future of Inbound going forward
- On why so many companies still erroneously don't believe in or don't do Inbound Marketing despite the fact that it works better than any other type of marketing
- How Content Marketing is not the same as Inbound Marketing
- Discussion about PLG (Product Led Growth) as Mike was one of the originals in the PLG game with WebsiteGrader.com which generated millions of leads
- How Mike went from a world-class SaaS CMO to a CEO
- What are some of Mike's favorite Marketing Campaigns that you can learn from
- Why "Made to Stick" is one Mike's favorite books for marketers
- And some of Mike's favorite Marketing executives

Kyle Porter is the founder and CEO of SalesLoft, the provider of the #1 sales engagement platform. SalesLoft helps more than 2,000 companies provide better selling experiences to their customers and was named the 7th Fastest-Growing Technology Company in North America by Deloitte. Recognized as the #1 best place to work in Atlanta for the second year in a row, SalesLoft has more than 400 employees in its offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, London, and Guadalajara, Mexico. Kyle is a fervent champion of organizational health and is focused on creating an environment where people can learn more, do more and become more. 
In this episode:
- Why every great CEO prioritizes "Organizational Health" and culture over everything
- Why great leaders set Vision, Mission and Values
- On using Core Values to gauge who you let into your company and how they guide the behaviors you celebrate vs those you tolerate 
- The story that inspired Kyle from Patrick Lencioni's "The Advantage" and Southwest Airlines & how "it's below me" is the reason most CEOs don't pay attention to Organizational Health
- Why the Sunday Night "Weekend Update" email is so important
- Cultural rhythms like the "All Hands" meeting every friday 
- About team members who get an applause 3 times
- Managing remote teams with 2 types of Fridays - the "Rest Days" and the "Focus Days"
- Why Kyle developed his own internal "Leadership Program"
- On why Kyle had strategies to be: "Best Place to Work" and "Best Place to be a Customer"
- How to do exceptional Marketing in SaaS - on not talking about yourself, ranking the problems you will solve, finding influencers and repackaging their messages
- Stories of how Kyle used "risky marketing" which led him to meet @Marc Benioff
- About the KPIs/metrics and how the goals for Meetings Scheduled by Outbound SDRs are 70 / quarter while Inbound SDRs is 100 / quarter  
- Learning from Kyle's leadership style about empowering his lieutenants and being a Leader who is "biased to approve his executive's decisions"
- The way to fill gaps with Trust
- Why leaders say "I intend" and how to learn Intent-Based Leadership Philosophy from "Turn the Ship Around" by @David Marquet
- Great leadership and expecting the best - giving lieutenants big goals outside of their experience or comfort zone and say "I expect from you" while also saying "I will help you and support you"
- What it means to be a "Level 5 Leader" based on John Maxwell's leadership methodology
- The importance of being exceptional at attracting great talent and the difference between "Recruiting" vs. "Hiring"
- Using a "Role Clarity" spreadsheet
- Profound insight: how Kyle learned to scale his own knowledge faster to scale as his SaaS company grew from zero to $80+ Million in $ARR and Kyle's point: "I intend to learn faster than the rate of my experience"
- Why the ultimate compliment to someone is to "take advice and do it" then come back and tell them you did it
- What is "#SalesLove", why it's an internal culture plus what the reps give to clients and about the mural behind Kyle in the video
- Why it's critical to read your Customer NPS Reviews and G2 Crowd Reviews while listening to your rep's calls
- Why Kyle loved the "Above the Line" concept from reading the "15 Commitments to Conscious Leadership"