As the VP of Sales & Marketing for an IT security firm, I’ve had the opportunity to serve businesses in sales and marketing operational functions.
Marketing
My main tasks was with inbound marketing programs and projects, although outbound player it’s role. Not only were marketing campaigns created, implemented, and controlled, but their progress was frequently reviewed to see if they were aligned with building real business value and to measure results. Inbound marketing consisted of defining customer personas, created a marketing customer funnel, setting up a website that provided value above and beyond the company’s core product and service offerings, and creating brand loyal supporters after the sales process was finalized. To do this, content creation offerings were formulated. Content included white papers, blog articles, infographics, eBooks, videos, industry data, webinars, photos and much more. The content was created to provide actual value to the customer.
This value-added to our branding by establishing our company as a knowledge resource center in the industry. If people saw our content they knew they would benefit from us, and hence if they wanted to get some of our insights they would visit our site and search the various types of content for answers they had. Establishing yourself as an industry-leading knowledge resource center is of the utmost importance for inbound marketing to work strategically long-term. To support this content, and to enable relationship building, landing and thank you pages were created on the website. The landing pages offered content to the users for a small trade, starting with a simple email address form and a promise not to spam, all the way up to asking for more in-depth information including about a person’s work title, company name, phone #, etc… As users went to more landing pages, that meant they were building brand awareness and loyalty, and we knew we could acquire more customer information about them. The landing pages would lead to thank you pages which would deliver the valuable content, while also suggesting more relevant content to the users. Throughout the valuable content, subtle suggestions of how our SaaS would fix a pain point were interlaced. Inbound marketing tactics also included utilizing software the enabled us to see which companies were visiting our website and when.
Sales management
I’ve worked in sales management roles for multiple companies, including White Cloud Security and Radioshack. Sales included recruiting and hiring, compensation negotiations, sales training and coaching, and daily and/or weekly sales meetings. Included in my VP of Sales role included planning and implementing company sales strategy as well as setting objectives and tangible goals and measuring results. These were usually driven through key performance indicators (KPIs) which enabled everyone in the company, especially the sales team, to have a clear understanding of what was expected of them and what we wanted to see in the future. I’ve managed teams up to 40 people over 5 different locations and was in charge and responsible for their results. A big part of my sales role was researching competitors and how they were doing things to give ourselves some sort of benchmark.
I created onboarding materials for new sales employees and helped lead change initiatives for new company product rollouts and deployments. The sales management role had to align the sales team with the marketing campaigns, what is usually known as smarketing funnels. I was also tasked with planning and implementing the new Hubspot CRM tool that we adopted and ensuring that the sales team get into go CRM habits. A tool is only as good as the people using it including how they use it. While at Radioshack I finished 3rd place in total regional sales to earn the Bronze Cup award. I also took one of my stores to the #1 ranking in the world out of over 4,800 other competing stores! My bronze cup finish earned me hefty bonuses as well as a 5 day, 4-person cruise.