In this re-released episode of Selling the Cloud, we revisit a valuable conversation with Ben Pastro, who dives into the power of partnerships in B2B tech.

Ben Pastro has a long history in professional services and systems integration in the B2B Tech industry, and has several insights and perspectives on the question of if and how to make partnerships successful for a modern B2B Tech company.

After investing 8 years at Oracle, a founding father of leveraging channel partnerships to accelerate revenue growth. Following Oracle, Ben joined Apps Associates which evolved from a traditional on-premise enterprise software systems integrator to a 100% Cloud based consulting firm focused on Oracle Cloud, AWS and Salesforce. Ultimately, Apps Associates was sold to Private Equity. Ben recently founded Anumetric to help founders and leadership teams at technology centric consulting firms looking to scale and operate more efficiently.

The value of a partnership needs to be viewed on both sides from the partners lens. In fact, having a shared focus on the customer’s business value is the best shared objective. In the world of annual subscription, recurring revenue, maintaining a focus on the on-going business value a customer is receiving is critical to the long term success of the partnership.

Traditionally, enterprise software companies would be more prone to “hand off the customer” relationship to the SI and implementation partner. Today, with the relationship being re-evaluated on an annual basis, the software vendor and the consulting partner are better served with sharing a long term orientation to the partnership and to the shared customer.

Partnerships should not emulate a relay race with a hand-off relationship, rather the partners should collaborate on the both selling process and the project implementation side. Specifically, the implementation partner should help to design the sales process when they will be involved in the customer implementation and ultimate success. The most successful partnerships for consulting firms start with an understanding and strong relationship with the software vendors sales resource(s).

If you are just beginning to evaluate a partnership program for your B2B SaaS or Cloud company, or are a B2B Tech implementation and integration services company, Ben is a great resource who has the experiences and insights to optimize partner programs for both B2B Cloud vendors and their consulting partners.

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Tune in as we revisit this episode, where Bob Scarperi reveals how proactive, data-driven strategies help sales teams target high-value prospects and enhance outbound success.

Data-Driven - a phrase we hear often in the B2B Cloud industry - but often as an output from sales activity versus as a primary input to outbound sales activity.

Bob Scarperi, has built a company that focuses on ensuring the right and complete account and contact data are in the sales resource hands before they being the outreach and lead generation process.

The amount of data available to revenue leaders is very deep and wide, however being able to figure out which data to acquire, deploy and use effectively has never been more complex and thus difficult.

40% of the time, the most junior sales resources, sales development resources are responsible for building and prioritizing the lists they use to conduct sales outreach. Often this results in low probability account being elevated in priority to those most likely to buy?

Why are we doing this to early-career sales professionals? Sources like ZoomInfo, D&B, Lattice Engines provide great data, but most organizations have not built a "playbook" on how sales development and account executives should use the data.

Often, the first step is at the corporate level, building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that defines the highest priority accounts to contact. Unfortunately, far too many companies have not defined the ICP(s) in enough detail that an xDR or AE is confident who they should be prioritizing in their outbound outreach and multi-channel cadences.

Procure a list source that allows sales resources to understand the firmographics of each account in their outreach list, which includes variables including revenue, number of employees, industry, and descriptive details about the company.

Once you have a conversation with the target account, seek to understand their buying mode, decision-making process, etc. Then, develop an "account score" that uses the firmographic and discovery information to highlight the priority of investing more time into that account.

Next, we discussed how intent data can add additional context to the account outreach prioritization process. First, use "technographic" information to see if their existing tech stack is favorable to your solution architecture. Intent data can often provide "false positives" if you do not compliment intent data with firmographic and buyer profile that aligns with your defined ICP and Buyer Persona(s).

Quality of account signal, complete account, and contact (buyer persona) data is the winning combo to optimize and maximize the return on investment for outbound activity.

When selling to larger enterprises, understanding the decision process and the roles of the multiple members on the buying committee, which on average exceeds 10 people. This makes the holy grail of understanding the buying process even more difficult, and yet today, even more critical to the probability of success.

CAUTION: data-driven can lead to data overload. Sales leadership needs to define the specific account information that is critical to make the initial outreach relevant. Identify and define the highest priority leading indicators, such as MQL to SQL conversion rate, SQL to Opportunity conversion, and Opportunity to Close rates. Having too many, or non causal metrics to the ultimate outcomes can lead to data saturation versus metrics-informed decisions.

Each company's environment is unique, so ensure your data driven culture is established, continously evaluated and then used to drive metrics informed decisions while eliminating the noise of too much or irrelevant data!

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Join us as we revisit this impactful episode with Joseph Fung and recognize how much has changed in B2B sales since its original airing – with the shifts introduced by COVID-19 still shaping the industry today.

Joseph is a multi-time founder of B2B SaaS companies, and his experience, frustration and challenge with scaling the sales organization was the catalyst to founding a company, Uvaro, purpose built to train the modern B2B sales professional.

As a trained engineer, Joseph wants to see the data that measures the variables that lead to the highest performing sales organization and sales professional. The patterns Joseph was able to identify within the top performing sales organizations, was easy to capture and the better news, not that hard to replicate.

One of the key challenges Joseph sees is that corporations cannot continuously train new sales hires. Thus the average ramp time can be 6, 8 even 12 months. The impact, quota delivery is dramatically decreased in the first year of employment. The resultant goal - how to train sales professionals not only continuously throughout the year, but even before they are hired in early career roles.

Uvaro teaches and trains students with little to no B2B tech sales experience. Uvaro's median student have a median income of $28,000 coming into training (21st percentile) and exit the training program with on target earnings of $70K and greater (46th quartile).

Less than 2% of colleges have a sales curriculum or a sales major. Joseph highlights "prestige" as a factor in the lack of adoption and introduction of sales majors in college. However, as the Cloud industry marches towards total revenue of $800B+, the industry will need 360,000 additional sales professionals to achieve that level.

CEOs, whose success depends on finding and hiring sales professionals, should be motivated to encourage their local colleges and alma maters to introduce sales curriculum, even a sales major to produce more early career sales professionals.

What are the skills required for the modern B2B sales professional of the future? One significant factor impacting these skills is the evolution of Product-Led Growth as a customer acquisition motion. Joseph views this as a re-allocation of investments from marketing to product, and will not materially affect the need for sales professionals, In fact, the average B2B SaaS companies has twice an many sales professionals as they do engineers, and this trend is not changing.

In a PLG company, sales professionals will need to become an expert in the industry and the business process of their customers, with an increased focus on the business value your product enables.

One additional aspect of the modern sales professional will be the ability to expand and retain existing customers in a recurring revenue model. The core skill required for this - the ability to build and maintain trust based relationships with their customers.

Lastly, Joseph shared that grit and understanding how to leverage a system to your advantage are two key reasons why even classically trained engineers and other technical roles can be leveraged to build a successful sales career.

Joseph is a great listen for anyone considering or just wants to learn about a career in B2B Technology sales.

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