Podcasts

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Steve Hershkowitz, the CRO of Virtana Corp., explores the key elements of a thriving company culture, including the importance of helping one another and building a sustainable business. Randy and Steve also delve into the significance of effective sales and business presentations, emphasizing the need for thorough research and understanding of the customer's business. Steve shares valuable insights on best practices, the role of presentations in establishing business fit, and the power of internal and external communication in preparing for successful presentations. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY Understanding the Customer's Business, Vendor Trap - Steve: “Customers are swarmed by salespeople who don't put in the time, energy or effort to really understand the business of the customer's business. And then when you don't understand the business of the customer's business, you get relegated to gatekeepers and to evaluators and to folks that want to sort…

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy Seidl interviews Steve Hershkowitz, the Chief Revenue Officer of Virtana Corp. Steve has over 30 years of experience in the tech industry, having worked for companies like HP, Pansando, and AMD. He is a customer-first, process-oriented, and results-driven sales executive who is passionate about sales and go-to-market strategy. Steve shares his insights on best practices for sales and business presentations. He talks about the importance of storytelling, preparation, and engagement in delivering effective presentations. He also highlights the role of technology in enhancing the presentation experience and the need for sales teams to adapt to virtual selling in the post-pandemic world. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY Navigating the Competitive Landscape: Achieving Gold Standard Status in Infrastructure Performance Monitoring - Steve: "We tend to see different types of competitors, Randy, depending upon which one of those platforms or products we'r…

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, host Randy is back with Steve Layne, the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of RedVector, a security company. Steve discusses various aspects of sales and demand generation. They emphasize the importance of keeping demand generation in-house to maintain a deep understanding of the market. Event-based marketing is highlighted as a critical strategy, as it allows for meaningful interactions with potential customers. LinkedIn is praised as an effective platform for engagement. The expert discusses their rev ops tech stack, including Salesforce as their system of record. Measuring and managing sales activities is crucial, and tools like ZoomInfo and HubSpot aid in this process. The challenges and rewards of scaling a company to $10 million AR are also explored. They conclude with insights on building relationships with influential figures and advice for personal growth and success. INSIGHT OF THE DAY STEVE: Navigating Adversity and Embracing Forward …

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, host Randy welcomes Steve Layne, the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of RedVector, a security company. The interview explores a company that offers an innovative solution for insider threats and risk analysis. Their approach involves being proactive and predictive rather than reactive, allowing organizations to mitigate problems before they escalate. Steve emphasizes the importance of partnerships and discusses the significance of their collaboration with Microsoft in the context of zero-trust architecture. INSIGHT OF THE DAY STEVE: Leveraging Predictive Analytics for Early Detection. “Just like the weather agencies build models, the North American model, the European model, what we do is bring in all of this data, allow analysts to build models like a sabotage model or a data exfiltration model, and then see the risk starting to increase over time. And as you see this, these indicators of risk are increasing. You try to get what they call th…

In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, host Randy welcomes Steve Layne, the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of RedVector, a security company. Randy mentions that Glen, a member of the team, is working hard in Manhattan while they discuss the topic of achieving $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in early markets. Randy and Steve discuss their backgrounds briefly, with Steve sharing his experience as a car salesman and a marketing analyst at Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi. They also touch on Steve's entrepreneurial journey, including his involvement in startups and his time at Lockheed Martin. The discussion leads to the formation of RedVector, which emerged from technology developed at Lockheed Martin for insider threat detection. Overall, the episode sets the stage for an insightful conversation about Steve's experiences and RedVector's journey in the security industry. It highlights the challenges of early markets and the importance of achieving significant ARR. The episod…

Sometimes technology can be invisible to the rep but it's actually embedded in the things they are using. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Bill Walsh, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Dell Technologies. Today, Bill talks about where he sees companies fail when implementing a PLG strategy. He also dives deep into the question of technology when it comes to rep productivity. How much does technology actually help and when are we using it "too much"?

The average sales rep spends about half of their time selling and the other half of the time doing other stuff. If we can get their selling to at least 60 or 70%, that can be a huge difference. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Bill Walsh, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Dell Technologies. Today, Bill talks about how they view value selling and how to tackle in from the productivity side. He also discusses whether ops, enablement, or someone else should own account planning. Bill also shares some trends that some go-to-market leaders aren't thinking about yet.

How do you grow a consistent go-to-market motion? First, you have to think about organizing countries and segments because, in some places, these are king. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Bill Walsh, Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Dell Technologies. Today, Bill talks about some factors that made him successful in his ops activity, how to figure out rep territories effectively, and how they zone in on minimizing churn as much as possible when Dell and EMC came together.

One weakness to culture is that it makes people think they need to act a certain way. For today's episode of Tech Sales Insights, we have our last conversation with Tom Mendoza, Member of the Board of Directors in companies such as VAST Data, Varonis, and more. Tom highlights the importance of authenticity and bringing out one's uniqueness. While having a healthy culture at work is important you should not forget that you are your own unique self.

More than just performance and the usual accountability, leadership, and understanding aspects of growth, culture can be a prime factor in long-term success. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy continues the conversation with Tom Mendoza, Member of the Board of Directors in companies such as VAST Data, Varonis, and more. Tom talks about going through major challenges like the internet bubble and the financial services meltdown and gives advice on how one can lead effectively in times of adversity and self-doubt. He also shares some of the notable individuals he's worked with and learned from over the years

More than just performance and the usual accountability, leadership, and understanding aspects of growth, culture can be a prime factor in long-term success. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Tom Mendoza, Member of the Board of Directors in companies such as VAST Data, Varonis, and more. Today, Tom talks about leadership and building a culture of transparency, unity, consistency, and more. He highlights the idea of leadership from a personal point of view and actually getting to know your people for who they are and not just focusing on their numbers. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY TOM ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LEADERSHIP PRESENCE “Obviously management is important but leadership is a different skill. I always say about leadership, people don't care what you know unless they know that you care. Show them you care and when you ask back, they will show you they care." Find out more about Tom Mendoza in the link below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommendoza/ This epis…

A CRO needs to invest ahead of time on when you're going to start getting predictable revenue. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, we have the last part of our conversation with Mark Stephenson, Go-To-Market Advisor for multiple tech companies. Mark talks about the best way to identify ICP in situations when ownership is sporadic. He also shares his insights on the PLG motion and how AI might affect the work of inside sellers in the near future. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY MARK: It's like playing chess once you see repeatability “If it's a repeatable sales motion, okay good I'm interested as a channel partner, but what's the return on invested capital? Is it predictable margins? Is the street price consistent? Am I going to get twenty-plus gross margin on resale? That calculus has got to work otherwise you're going to get a head fake. The channel partner might say they'll sell it but they won't dedicate resources to it." Don’t miss out on our previous episodes and watch out for the n…

What we've known before as the legacy VP of sales has now morphed into roles that cover other aspects that may or may not involve marketing. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy continues the conversation with Mark Stephenson, Go-To-Market Advisor for multiple tech companies. This time, Mark discusses the role of CRO and where he thinks marketing should actually report to. He also talks about the best ways to find talent during the hiring process and his advice for those that were affected by the recent tech layoffs. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY MARK: You become a better leader after experiencing the role yourself “I do think a systematic leader can become a really good CRO and business partner to the CEO by having the full go-to-market function of marketing, sales, customer success, RevOps altogether so that you can tune it to the business." Don’t miss out on our previous episode and watch out for the next ones! E125 Part 1 - MAPPING THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY: Customer Success Through …

Focus your entire go-to-market around the adoption of high users that will expand with you and you can eventually build a great business around it. In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Mark Stephenson, Go-To-Market Advisor for multiple tech companies. Today, Mark talks about go-to-market alignment and how to approach it for increased efficiency and leverage. He dives into the importance of a great GTM engine and how the concept of product-market fit comes into play. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY MARK: Make sure customer paths are well-defined “If you define that process, you'll find bottlenecks, you'll find inefficiencies and that's the best place to add technology, by the way, is once you really understand the process. Otherwise, you're just going to use technology to speed up a bad process and do the wrong things quicker." Find out more about Mark Stephenson in the link below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-s-2b28054/ This episode of Tech Sales Insights is b…

Once a certain level of adoption has been driven and customers see that "first value" moment, you can then find numerous opportunities for cross-selling, expansion, and more. Today's episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of Randy's conversation with Jeff Depa, Chief Revenue Officer at Gainsight. Jeff discusses the framework they adopt when it comes to driving value and outcomes consistently with numerous different clients and customers. He also shares a few examples of sales leaders that he follows and respects and how he's applied his learnings. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY JEFF: Sales processes can start with a value hypothesis “Value is really built on a number of different things. It's what do I think that outcome is? How do I measure it? What's a rational metric for that? What's an appropriate timeline? Putting all of that together, reps build that value hypothesis and that hypothesis turns into a success plan.” Don’t miss out on our previous episode and watch out for the …

While your CS team has visibility into what's happening in your customer base, how do you leverage this across all departments? In today's episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy continues his conversation with Jeff Depa, Chief Revenue Officer at Gainsight. Jeff talks about focusing on alignment and how each team can support the other. He also shares about Gainsight's mission statement of "human first" and how this translates not only in running business processes but also in the product itself. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY JEFF: Bringing digital customer success to market “Providing customer success at scale requires you to do it through your product. It requires you to be able to leverage the intelligence and visibility that a customer success platform like Gainsight can give you, especially through analytics. But it also requires you to do things like self-service, and leveraging community advocates.” Don’t miss out on our previous episode and watch out for the next ones! E124 Part 1 - …

Years ago, customer success was only something you'd think about when you start to "lose" customers but now you definitely have to be more proactive. In today's episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Jeff Depa, Chief Revenue Officer at Gainsight. Jeff shares his insights on helping businesses across different industries achieve durable growth through technology, partnerships, and value creation overall. He talks about Gainsight's current ICP and how they even manage to work with some companies outside of their ICP and drive growth there. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY JEFF: There are a lot of great ways to leverage AI “Think about your customer house score. How do I actually optimize the house score and understand where I have the opportunity for either expansion or risk of potential churn? And so we have AI tools that allow you to go optimize that house score, backflow test it, and determine if I tweak the score this way, all the higher confidence in terms of what my outcomes are act…

Today's episode covers the last part of Randy's conversation with Kimberly Dieter, VP of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn where they talk about how she comes up with frameworks that lead to efficiency, productivity, and attainment. Kimberly also shares the advice she typically gives to those facing layoffs in the tech sales field and the increasing need to think about goals and expectations more clearly. Learn about all this and more in this latest episode of Tech Sales Insights. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY KIMBERLY: THE IMPORTANCE OF ATTITUDE, ACTIVITY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY “If you come in and you're only focused on attainment and you're not doing the necessary activities, you're not accountable for what happens, and you're showing up with a bad attitude, chances are you're going to fail on your role. For me, if someone can demonstrate, even if they're new in a role and need a minute to ramp, maybe they're not crushing attainment out the gates but they're doing those first three things righ…

Today's episode of Tech Sales Insights is the second part of Randy’s conversation with Kimberly Dieter, VP of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn. Relationships matter but how you use your tools and implement the right behaviors are what help you build that lasting relationship with customers. Kimberly talks about the "tool fatigue" companies have experienced where they use too many tools without really understanding how to use them effectively. She also dives deep into the importance of being aware of how top performers stay productive so that their process can be applied as well. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY KIMBERLY: HAVE A MORE HOLISTIC APPROACH WITH CUSTOMERS “Relationships really do matter and your best customer is someone else's best prospect. If you're not investing in that relationship, not just with that individual but with the entire company, you're going to miss the opportunity to maintain that customer in your book of business. Don’t miss out on our previous episode and watch out for t…

Curate your network by identifying what your objective is and design that community to help you drive the outcomes you need. In today's episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy welcomes Kimberly Dieter, VP of Sales solutions at LinkedIn. Kimberly talks about creating content on LinkedIn to build a strong network and have more meaningful relationships in the long run. She also discusses the use of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and how impactful this can be for top performers. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY KIMBERLY: DEFINING THE "GOLD STANDARD" OF CONTENT “I don't know that I would ever have the goal of something going viral. I would want the content I'm creating to impact the ecosystem that I'm trying to engage with. I don't necessarily need a hundred thousand people to see something, I would like fifty-two customers that I currently have on my book of business to have some level of engagement with them so I can improve my relationships in that environment.” Find out more about Kimberly Dieter in the…

Today's episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of Randy's conversation with Gabe on sales compensation from the CEO's perspective and hiring the right people to take your business to the next level. Gabe touches on their philosophy when it comes to compensation and fostering high producers by also providing more incentives overall. He also shares why they have a strong inbound lead engine and the few ways in which they can keep it up consistently. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY GABE: CHOOSING A MORE AGGRESSIVE COMPENSATION MODEL “What we decided to do is say we want only AEs who are bringing in a ton. We don't want a ton of AEs bringing a little, we'd rather have less bringing in a lot more because it works out economically better for the company and we're willing to pay them more than we would otherwise in a linear compensation model.” Don’t miss out on our previous episodes and watch out for the next ones! E122 Part 1 - EFFICIENCY IN IT: Guaranteed Value with the Right Software wit…

For today's episode, Randy is back with Gabe to continue the conversation on sales compensation from the CEO's perspective in the field service software space. Gabe expands on how they balance inbound calls with how much their reps still need for quota. He also talks about hiring for a sales team in a remote environment and why he likes referrals when it comes to hiring. There's all this and even more in the latest episode of Tech Sales Insights. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY GABE: MONITORING THE BALANCE OF INBOUND CALLS FOR QUOTA “We don't want to all of a sudden flip the switch and say everyone has to cover 50% outbound. Because then we're going to set our team for failure and we don't want to do that. At the end of the day, we want people who blow it out, we want them to make a lot of money and it ultimately makes recruiting a lot easier.” Don’t miss out on our previous episode and watch out for the next ones! E122 Part 1 - EFFICIENCY IN IT: Guaranteed Value with the Right Software with G…

Welcome to another amazing episode of Tech Sales Insights. Today, Randy welcomes Gabe Pinchev, Founder and CEO of FieldPulse, an all-in-one software for running field service businesses. Gabe dives deep into the field service software business, the pricing of software, and the overall potential within the space. He talks about the impact of having software for less IT-focused fields and the many opportunities this presents. There's definitely a lot to learn so check out this latest episode of Tech Sales Insights. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY GABE: THE PRICE NARRATIVE NEEDS TO BE CRAFTED ACCORDINGLY “Pricing is an interesting and sensitive topic ultimately because I think the value is tremendous but at the end of the day it comes down to willingness to pay. Sometimes you have cheaper alternatives that they compare you to. We have such a broad spectrum of price in the market because you might get one customer comparing us to that bigger guy and saying 'Wow, you guys are cheap.'” Find out more…

In today's episode of Tech Sales Insights, we have our last conversation with Pat on applying the 7 habits of success to get successful sales. This time, he discusses using resources properly and continuing to be a student at what you do. Pat shares advice for people wanting to break into tech sales and similarly for those being affected by recent layoffs in the tech sales space. He talks about understanding how high stakes can be in tech sales because rewards are also much higher. This is why we should place importance on continuously improving. INSIGHTS OF THE DAY PAT: ADAPT THE PUSH-UPS ANALOGY “No one can do your push-ups for you, you have to do them yourself. I had an old high school coach who said that to me one time, it seems like a lifetime ago but I still remember it. As much as you want to help someone, ultimately, you have to teach them how to fish and then they have to go fish themselves.” Don’t miss out on our previous episodes and watch out for the next ones! E121 Par…