March 31 Show: Mike Schultz and Tony Panaccio

March 29th, 2011

Mike Schultz, Publisher

Host Will Crist wants to discuss Mike’s new book, Rainmaking Conversations. This is a landmark book that is getting a large launch, find out why.

Mike Schultz, Publisher of RainToday, is world-renowned as a consultant and expert in services marketing and rainmaking. Mike is also President of the RAIN Group, a sales training sales assessment, and sales performance improvement company that helps leading organizations improve sales results. His practice focuses on strategy for professional service and technology businesses in the areas of branding, marketing, lead generation, and sales performance.

Co-author of the booksProfessional Services Marketing (Wiley, July 2009) and Rainmaking Conversations(Wiley, March 2011), Mike is a well-known speaker in his areas of expertise, delivering keynotes and speeches for such organizations as MarketingSherpa. Over 80 publications and news outlets such as Business Week, Inc. Magazine, BNN, Boston Business Journal, and others have featured Mike's original articles and white papers, and frequently quote him as an expert. Mike is a lead author in many RainToday.com research reports.

Tony Panaccio, EMSI Public Relations

Public relations has really blossomed with the internet. Will Crist will discuss how PR is being used by B2B to inexpensively spread the gospel for a company’s products and services like never before.

Tony Panaccio is the Senior Campaign Strategist for EMSI Public Relations. With more than 28 years experience in news and media – split evenly between journalism and marketing -- Tony has an intrinsic understanding of what editors, producers and radio show hosts want and how to deliver it.

Tony started his career in the media as a newspaper journalist for The Clearwater Sun, The Tampa Tribune, The Hollywood Sun-Tattler and The Miami Herald’s Topic Magazine. In 1989, Tony moved on to public relations as a VP for Edelman PR Worldwide and the Weber Group, and as a Managing Director for Hill & Knowlton. During those years in the Big Three of PR agencies, he worked with client such as IBM, Sony, Warner Bros., Microsoft and others. He participated in the IBM Deep Blue computer chess match against Russian chess champ Gary Kasparov, and even wrote speeches for Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Continuing his growth, Tony soon was tapped to be a Senior VP at CrossGen Entertainment (later bought by Disney), where he managed the company’s communications with the media and worked with film producer Michael Uslan (of Batman, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Constantine, National Treasure fame) to license CrossGen’s properties into film and television.

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Posted in Public Relations, Current and Past Shows | Comments |

March 24 Show: SalesForce Apps that make salespeople better salespeople.

March 28th, 2011

Frank Verril, President of Advanced Image Direct and CLoud2You

Cloud2You is a better, faster, more economical way to compose, manufacture and mail personal letters or greeting cards in closed face envelopes, even brochures and postcard formats.Cloud2You is part of Advanced Image Direct.Cloud2You was conceived and developed by Advanced Image Direct (AID), one of the country’s largest and most secure direct mail manufacturers located in Fullerton, California. They are producing mail for Fortune 100 companies nationally on a wide range of production platforms from web & digital presses including state of the art personalization capabilities on through to intelligent inserting and mailing. They know mail and produce a lot of it!

Dave Stone, President of Red Sky Solutions.

Red Sky Solutions implements CRM solutions. As a premiere, certified partner, they combine Salesforce.com's award-winning CRM solutions with their business process and industry best-practices implementation expertise. This allows organizations to more effectively manage and share sales, marketing, and support information across the company - all without software - and in much shorter time.

Red Sky Solutions provides the right balance of hands-on implementation guidance and expertise to ensure the Salesforce.com solution is aligned with your business requirements - while still being sensitive to the bottom line investment.The company’s focus is on improving effectiveness in three main functional areas of a company - Sales, Marketing, and Services/Support.

Jim Banks, CEO of Shade Tree Technology – Incite2

Shade Tree Technologies improves Sales Performance Today with More Calls & Better conversationswith Incite2. Efficiency is about making more calls and having more conversations. Incite2 is the first purpose-built solution that equips sales professionals with everything they need to significantly increase performance and do the job better. The product goes way beyond native Salesforce.com capabilities to support the entire workflow of the calling process including: call preparation and research, prospect engagement, conversation and next step recording and team reporting.

Incite2 simplifies salesforce.com with a single screen interface that increases calling performance between 20% - 50%. Qualifying more leads & move deals through the pipeline faster is what Incite2 does.

It’s Dynamic Conversation Playbooks enable sales professionals to deliver the right information, to the right person at the right time... enabling sales professionals to put more deals into the pipeline. Playbooks enable reps to move beyond improvising each call... to utilizing a rich infrastructure of information that is uniquely targeted

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Posted in Inquiry Management, Marketing Automation | Comments |

March 17 Show: Kathy Greenler Sexton

March 15th, 2011

Kathy Greenler Sexton, VP of Marketing for Zoom Information

The SLMA will ask Kathy about her opinion of CRM and marketing automation systems. What can marketers do to better manage their sales lead and inquiries? How can sales managers get their salespeople to follow-up sales leads.

KATHY GREENLER SEXTON is vice president of marketing for Zoom Information, Inc., located at www.Zoominfo.com, the world's most comprehensive directory of business information on people and companies. She is responsible for leading the strategy, development and execution of market initiatives that directly impact Zoom Information's revenue, profit, market share and growth. Kathy brings more than 20 years of content and online information experience to her role as vice president. After working in broadcast television and international marketing roles, she was a founding member, lead marketer and publisher for the web-based search engine pioneer AltaVista. She has also general-managed or marketed industry-leading online companies focused on news, small business information and general research including: Individual.com, Office.com and HighBeam Research. Most recently she worked to lead the transformation of BLR (Business & Legal Resources) from traditional publisher to online media company.

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Posted in CRM and Related, Marketing Automation, Sales Strategist, Sales Skills Training | Comments |

March 10 Show: Srihari Kumar and Jeff Molander

March 8th, 2011

Srihari Kumar – Chief Executive Officer LeadFormix

Questions: What makes LeadFormix different? How can marketers use the LeadFormix information to support salespeople? What does LeadFormix do that other products don’t do? Cost? Commitment?

Srihari has been a co-founder or early employee of a string of successful Silicon Valley startups, including VXtreme (acquired by Microsoft), Yodlee (acquired in part by Warburg Pincus), InMage Systems (the largest independent Continuous Data Protection provider), and RingCube (winner of the 2009 Product of the Year for Desktop Virtualization). Srihari was a key member of the team that built the first version of Windows Media Server and Windows Media Player at Microsoft, and invented the concept of hypervideo for which he holds the patent. Srihari also worked as a Computer Science Researcher for SRI (Stanford) International, Philips Research, and the UCSD Computer Science Department. Srihari earned a BS from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, an MS in Computer Science from Washington University, and an MBA with honors from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.

About LeadFormix LeadFormix is a leader in next-generation marketing automation software, known as Marketing Automation 2.0. LeadFormix delivers a game-changing real-time marketing automation solution for enterprises that converts anonymous online visits into qualified sales leads, determines website visitor interest and intent, and enables sales teams to reach decision-makers more effectively and close deals faster using patented business intelligence and data mining technology.

The company was founded in early 2008 by experienced software executives from Microsoft, Yodlee, Autonomy (Optimost / Interwoven), and Healtheon.

Jeff Molander is adjunct professor of digital marketing at Loyola University's business school.

Our questions for Jeff ask him to explain and backup his assertion that social media sells! What does he mean when he says there is no such thing as social media? What’s this story about Moosejaw?

Jeff is the former co-founder of the Google Affiliate Network and the authority on making social media marketing produce leads and sales. He's author of the forthcoming book, Off the Hook Marketing: How to make social media sell. Since 1997, Jeff's been helping business owners and senior executives align digital marketing with customer acquisition and retention. He's a professional speaker who's known for delivering practical ways to make tools like Twitter and Facebook produce leads and sales. http://www.jeffmolander.com/blog

This show is sponsored by:

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Posted in Marketing Automation, SEO and Social Media, Current and Past Shows | Comments |

March 3 Show: Matthew Schwartz and Michael Ward

March 2nd, 2011

Matthew Schwartz , Editor of Follow The Lead

SLMA Radio host Will Crist will ask Matthew about trends he sees in the sales lead management industry. He will ask about what’s working and what’s not working! Matthew Schwartz , has been editor of Follow the Lead since its 2009 launch. He is also a contributing reporter for Crain’s BtoB and BtoB’s Media Business magazines, where he covers business media, marketing/advertising and, naturally, social media. Earlier in his career he was Editor of PR News, where he got an education in corporate communications, and a writer/producer for Fox News Channel and CNN, where he learned to pray at the altar of the deadline. If you have any news, tips and information that you think would be suitable for sales and marketing executives, please give him a holler at matthew.schwartz38@yahoo.com.

Michael Ward | CEO / Founder Net-Results

Will Crist the host will ask how Net-Results tracks individual visitors to a website and “listens” to their needs. He will dig into the value-add for salespeople that are the beneficiary of Net-Results users. He will ask questions about users can be using Net-Results in just 5 minutes.

Net-Results was founded in 2003 as a web development and marketing firm. They transitioned to a software company after experiencing success with a web monitoring product we released in 2006. Our marketing automation software evolved from that product through innovation and customer suggestion to become the best software available to manage revenue generation from lead to close.

This show is sponsored by: