Bite-Sized Conversations With Seasoned Customer Experience and Sales Acceleration Experts
Welcome to Sales Chat! Where resident experts answer rapid-fire questions on the most pressing issues facing our clients—revenue leaders representing B2B and B2C brands of all sizes.
Lauren Robinson shares wisdom from her seat as Client Services Director, leading front-line sales acceleration and support teams for many years.
Transcript
Lauren Robinson Sales Chat Transcript
Introduction
Bite-size conversations with MarketSource sales acceleration experts.
My name is Lauren Robinson.
I lead a team of account executives, design engineers and managers responsible for selling voice and contact center solutions on behalf of our clients to their customers.
Topic 1: How Do You Assure Better Outcomes for Clients?
Our team is very seasoned and very professional, and we let them run their territories like they’re their own business.
The goal of the managers and I is to give them the support and the infrastructure that they need to do that successfully.
They know what will work best. They know what’s needed most. They know how to best attain the outcome for the client that they’re looking for.
We’re just there to give them whatever resources and support they need to be successful.
Because we take this approach, it gives them more autonomy and instant buy-in to the success of the program and ensures that they are going to go above and beyond to deliver the result for the client.
One of our core values at MarketSource is serving others, and in serving our clients we are aiming not to just deliver a good outcome, but to deliver the best outcome possible.
Topic 2: How Do You Pivot for Clients When Things Beyond Our Control Change?
When things arise that are out of our control, we really try to go back to the basics and focus on the fundamentals.
We make sure that we keep the main thing the main thing, which is delivering results for the client, and ensure that we double down on looking for the short-term successes and maybe even redefining what success looks like in that time of change or uncertainty.
That keeps everybody focused on moving forward and not worrying about the things that are outside our control.
In a time of change, our client had to make some difficult decisions and some very important technical resources within their organization were impacted.
We were able to step in and provide similar or actually better resources in some cases than the ones they had in place to continue supporting the business.
In that very critical role, we were able to do this because we have such a depth of knowledge about their business and what it takes, as well as a strong understanding of the type of talent that they would need.
We’ve worked with our client a very long time and have seen their business go through a number of very large changes.
One of those changes was when they were acquired by another company and had to go from supporting a small regional portion of the United States to the entire country in a very short amount of time.
At the time, our team was primarily inside sales only with a handful of field salespeople covering a nine-state region.
When this acquisition happened, we had to act quickly on the client’s behalf and put together a model that allowed us to provide field sales resources as well as additional inside sales resources to cover the entire country.
Topic 3: What Are the Most Important Qualities You Look for When Hiring?
The first things we’re looking for are the things that you can’t teach.
We want people with strong work ethic, people who have a natural curiosity, who want to learn and will push themselves to learn new things.
Someone who understands and has a genuine interest in the industry that our client is in, who has a positive attitude and is coachable.
Because we want to be able to take that person, teach them, and watch them grow.
Past that, we’re looking for great sales acumen, business acumen, and strategic thinking the things that we know will help us deliver above and beyond for the client.
This starts before the person even walks in the door.
As leaders, we partner closely with our recruiting team at MarketSource to be sure we have a great candidate profile that helps them go out and find people with the skillset we know will allow them to deliver results to the client.
Topic 4: What Makes a True Strategic Partner?
Being a true strategic partner to our customers means fitting seamlessly into their teams in a way that makes us look and feel like actual team members, not just a vendor with whom they partner.
We do that by demonstrating business acumen and an understanding of the industry they are in.
Because we’re able to do that, it creates trust with the client, and that trust allows us to then perform to the best of our ability with fewer constraints and with better outcomes for the client.
Aaron Williams brings expertise from a vantage point of nearly 30 years leading MarketSource B2B sales acceleration teams.
Transcript
Aaron Williams Sales Chat Transcript
Introduction
Bite-size conversations with MarketSource’s customer experience and sales acceleration experts.
Hi, I’m Aaron Williams and I am a director of client services.
I’m responsible for many of our programs, predominantly in the telecom and manufacturing verticals.
Topic 1: How Do You Assure Better Outcomes for Clients?
Well, I like to build teams kind of custom for my clients based on exactly what it is that we’re trying to sell.
So I’m looking for a specific type of individual.
We like to hire strong people, not necessarily people with proven experience, but there are attributes that we’ll look for.
I like to take those ideal candidates, those strong people, and wrap them with our process and our technology and our great tech stack.
And enable, empower these people, these sellers, to sell more of that product and more of that service than our clients can do themselves.
These individual contributors become program managers.
I’ve built a team of managers that every one of them have been in the seat selling before with me, and it’s typically the best of the best.
So it’s all about providing the right people.
So if we’ve done our job right, we’ve found the people with the right skills and given them the tools to be successful, wrapped them with the process, wrapped them with the technology they need to be successful.
It’s all about continuous education and training.
Sometimes that’s education on the products and processes from our clients, but just as much it’s about how to sell.
So soft skills training—we’re in the results business.
Our clients hire us to not just meet expectations, but to exceed those expectations.
From my perspective, it’s all about exceeding those expectations, delivering on those results that will drive their results so that they see true ROI and will want to come back for more.
Topic 2: How Do You Pivot for Clients When Things Beyond Our Control Change?
I think the best way to approach is first of all, recognize it. You’re not hiding from it or running from it—you’re running at it.
One thing I really like that we do at MarketSource is the alignment of our leadership.
We align at every level.
It’s important that it’s not just that I am aligned with my peer on the client side and we’re approaching this, but the program manager has to be aligned appropriately, and we are all hand in hand addressing types of things of this nature and how we collaborate with them from a strategic perspective to then recalibrate, adjust, pivot where necessary, and move forward.
It’s really worked well for us through the years.
A partnership that I have with one of our clients in the manufacturing and distribution space. It started out as a pilot, and we proved ourselves right off the bat.
Recently, in the last year, they came to us and said, “Hey, we’ve got a unique ask.”
Over a six-month period, we ramped up a team focused on something that was really bailing them out of a problem because they were undergoing a huge migration in terms of data upgrades and rebuilding their entire tech stack and everything that they use from an enablement perspective.
They were worried about the disruption that would cause for their customers.
So they asked us to step in and be an insurance policy for them and staff up a team that would take on some of the burden on a temporary basis.
We stepped in, performed well, and they kept that team in place—and it’s still in place 18 months later.
And that’s what excites me about coming to work every day and being able to provide results like that for something that’s supposed to be more short term.
Topic 3: What Are the Most Important Qualities You Look for When Hiring?
Well, my response may surprise some, because I tell my clients this:
I’m not necessarily looking for experience.
What I’m looking for is the person.
I’m looking for someone who can demonstrate an aptitude to learn.
I’m looking for someone who has a great ability to communicate.
I want my teams to have extraordinary work ethic.
Because if they’ve got those traits, we can teach them the rest.
You arm them and you let them go.
And it’s proven me wildly successful through the years, and my clients have been more than impressed.
Topic 4: What Makes a True Strategic Partner?
For me to be a strategic partner to our clients, it’s all about truly understanding their goals, exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, and then working with them in a collaborative fashion to achieve those results.
I’m really fortunate because I’ve got several partnerships that I would consider highly strategic in the telecom space.
I’ve got a couple of partnerships that are more than 25 years old.
I consider them strategic because they depend on us and have depended on us for decades to deliver results, and we always do.
We continue to build on that year after year.
The value they’re receiving from us, allows us to continue to provide for them on new scopes of work on an annual basis year after year.
Ben Simms, through his lens of helping our clients consistently exceed their revenue goals, guides us through today’s AI-influenced sales terrain.
Transcript
Ben Simms Sales Chat Transcript
Introduction
Bite-sized conversations with MarketSource customer experience and sales acceleration experts.
Ben Simms with MarketSource. I oversee the delivery of many of our B2B programs as the Executive Director of Client Services.
Topic 1: How Do You Pivot Alongside Clients as Their Needs Evolve?
One of the benefits of working with MarketSource is that we can pivot on a dime and we can do it much faster, in most cases, than our customers would be able to do it themselves.
Along the way, our clients have been with us for many years, they ask us to pivot yet again.
There’s another opportunity either for growth or some risk that they’ve identified that they know we can help eliminate.
Topic 2: Can You Share an Example of How We Adapted for a Client During Change?
We had a client that was installing an entire new technology ecosystem from their CRM and order entry and this had been taking years for them to deploy.
They knew when they deployed it, it was going to be lumpy and bumpy. There was going to be a lot of learning.
So they came to us with an idea and said, “For the next year or so, we really need to staff up our customer service to avoid the bottlenecks that the new technology is going to initially have. Could you help us, MarketSource?”
They knew we could, and we did.
We stepped up for them. We were able to hire several resources throughout the country—east to west, north to south—and put them in the strategic locations that this client needed and quickly train them on the new technology.
We hired these resources in less than 60 days. We trained them on the new technology.
They were able to quickly enter orders from their customers so that no orders were missed or slowed down.
Topic 3: What Makes a True Strategic Partner?
It’s not just doing the work and generating sales or revenue.
It’s also collecting valuable data that we’re able to give back to the client.
We’re able to show them intelligence about their own market, about growth, trends, things that they are not able to see with their own data structure, technology, and sales team.
When you hire MarketSource, the teams that we deploy are trained to collect data and enter it on every conversation.
With the data that we’ve generated and insights from working in dozens of industries, we’re able to glean insights for them to use in their strategic decisions, as well as offer our thoughts on what a future state for optimal revenue growth could look like.
That is a true value-add that many of our clients don’t realize they’re getting when they hire us until we start having business reviews with them.
Then they appreciate that extra data collection and the reporting that we give that they’ve never seen before.
Topic 4: How Do We Support Clients During Times of Change?
When our clients are experiencing headwinds and challenges due to economic changes, environmental changes, or changes with their customers, that’s when we rally the troops.
There is a whole army of people behind the scenes that are supporting the sales team within MarketSource that supports our client.
A lot of times, our clients only see the resources that are doing the day-to-day work. They don’t realize that behind the curtain, there’s a lot of support.
Business process engineers, practice leads, sales operations people, project managers—they are all there to support our client and the team that works for our client.
0:16 – Adapting as clients’ needs evolve
0:44 – An example of how we pivot for clients when things beyond our control (client-level changes, economy/market fluctuations) change
1:46 – The marks of a true strategic partnership
2:53 – Supporting clients during times of change
Colleen Bonney brings expertise from a vantage point of nearly 30 years leading MarketSource B2B sales acceleration teams.
Transcript
Colleen Bonney Sales Chat Transcript
Introduction
Bite-size conversations with MarketSource’s customer experience and sales acceleration experts featuring Director of Client Services, Colleen Bonney.
Topic 1: What Makes a True Strategic Partner?
We invest in our clients’ success every day.
We act like owners, and that’s how invested we are in the business.
Really what we’re doing is a strategic deployment of people that live and breathe and fight for the brand day in and day out inside of national retailers.
We listen to the front line and we get some of our best ideas from listening to the front line.
No company spends as much time in the field as the MarketSource leadership, working side by side hearing the truth, because we have a saying: the truth is not at headquarters. The truth is in the field.
We spend a lot of time out in the field talking to our frontline reps so that we are ensuring we’re focused, strategic, and our tactics are in line with the game plan that we’ve set forth.
Topic 2: What Difference Do We Make for Our Clients and Their Customers?
The difference we make to our clients and our clients’ customers is we’re not just providing staffing or people.
We are scaling their business at the end of the day.
We pride ourselves in knowing the minutiae about our client’s customer so that we understand how to operate, how to be good guests in their home, and how to drive their goals when all three goals are aligned.
Magic happens at the end of the day, and that’s why I think we deliver so well on the promises we make back to our clients.
Topic 3: What Does MarketSource Offer That Our Clients Can’t Achieve on Their Own?
What we offer at MarketSource is acceleration that they wouldn’t have without us.
We offer that because of our expertise.
We’ve got decades of experience operating inside of national retail.
We’re a people company. We know how to hire the right people for the right client in the right stores.
We help our clients cut through the noise and go in and win inside of national retail to levels that I don’t believe they would achieve on their own.
Topic 4: Why Do You Love Working at MarketSource?
I love coming to a place that appreciates bringing innovation and thought leadership.
Here you can be restless in your career in a good way and pursue doing things better today than you did yesterday and better tomorrow than you do today.
That gets me out of bed every morning.
I get to build people up along the way and I get the development I need at the end of the day to be a top performer.
That’s what we offer at MarketSource day in and day out.
Topic 5: How Do You Empower Your Teams to Perform at a High Level?
I think staying out of the way is part of it, and letting them perform.
But the most empowering thing that I do is bring clarity—whether that’s to their role or the strategy.
It’s unique for every client, so we have to make sure that we are clear in our ability to explain the objective: see the hill, take the hill, and here’s what that looks like.
We don’t like to micromanage.
We like people to have the creativity to self-solve, and we train for that creativity and those problem-solving capabilities.
I’m in the field 30 weeks a year. I don’t have to be—I want to be, because the truth is not at headquarters. The truth is out in the field.
I think I’m a better leader because I spend time with our frontline employees, and they teach me as much as I probably teach them.
Topic 6: What Drives Our Team’s Passion for the Clients They Support?
Honestly, I think we represent great brands and our people believe in the brands they represent.
It could be saving families meaningful dollars on their wireless bill every month or supporting a software company that helps people manage their digital lives and protect their identities.
That makes our jobs meaningful, and that makes them show up for work day in and day out.
It’s a great relationship. They love their brands, almost as much as they love working for MarketSource.