As we revisit this episode, Doug Landis' insights on storytelling in B2B sales are more important than ever. Learn how compelling stories can help differentiate and elevate your message in a crowded market.

Doug Landis, Growth Partner at Emergence Capital was formerly the Chief Storyteller at Box. Before being the Chief Storyteller at Box, Doug was an executive in the Sales Productivity group at Salesforce.

In this episode of Selling the Cloud, we dive deep into how storytelling has become a critical skill for enterprise-class, B2B sales professionals.

One of Doug's early learnings came directly from paying his dues initially as a quota-carrying sales professional at Oracle. Over those early years, Doug discovered his passion for helping others and sharing the secrets that made him successful as an individual sales contributor with his colleagues, thus the move to sales enablement/productivity at Salesforce.

The journey to becoming the "Chief Storyteller" at Box started with the hiring of a new SVP Sales. As the new executive interviewed sales reps across the company, he quickly identified that Box did not have one common message that they were communicating to the market.

This inconsistently led to the new SVP Sales challenging Doug with the task to replicate and scale his ability to communicate consistently through storytelling to the entire sales organization. One of the key areas Doug first identified was that most customer stories were very "rote", and needed to become more interesting to the target buyer(s).

First, Doug engaged Customer Success to capture the Voice of the Customer, and start the journey to train the sales force how to storytelling by focusing on the customer and their experiences and stories. Secondly, the story could not be the same story that the founder and CEO of Box told, because that was his own story and did not easily translate to being told by Account Executives.

Storytelling is not just for natural storytellers, it can be learned by listening to your environment. But it does take thoughtful practice and needs to be tailored to a relevant story, that resonates with the individual buyer(s) needs.

Improv was highlighted as an interesting format to learn how to put yourself in the persona of the person you are speaking with and make your storytelling more impactful.

Storytelling helps one to learn how to transition from one part of the story to the next. This skill is highly relevant to how a B2B Sales professional can learn to enhance the transition from one slide to the next in their sales presentation or demo.

The discussion evolved into "Getting to WOW" and why storytelling is so relevant to founders and CEOs pitching to investors. A common theme for B2B Sales professionals and founders pitching to investors is about getting to the "why" you or your company are uniquely positioned to help the recipient of the story.

Finally, we discussed the benefit of establishing a "Story Library" by stage, by buyer persona, and even the creation of a "storytelling" coach role in the sales enablement function.

Stories should focus on telling stories that relate to individuals by telling the story about how your solution impacted people (buyer personas) not companies.

In today's extremely noisy and saturated B2B SaaS and Cloud market, making your solution and value stand above all others is critical. Storytelling may just be the best way to differentiate yourself and your solution.

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We are excited to revisit this episode of Selling the Cloud. featuring Paul Melchiorre, a legendary Silicon Valley Chief Revenue Officer at leading Saas companies like Ariba and AnaPlan. Paul's unique perspectives on scaling high-growth companies, the role of a CRO, and the impact ofProduct Led Growth remains just as relevant today.

Over thirty years, Paul has had the change to be a part of industry leading, high growth companies beginning with SAP where Paul was an early executive for their entry into the North American market.

Paul then in 1998 joined Ariba, an early market entrant and ultimately the acknowledged leader in indirect procurement automation. Paul experienced a unique journey in early stage, venture backed companies by staying at Ariba for over 15 years, including being the Global Sales, Services and Partner top executive for the majority of that time.

Paul shared why, in the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) role that being responsible for marketing, sales and customer success is a critical element for success. Several reasons that this is so important is that the customer lifecycle has been changed by the SaaS industry, including the growing importance of existing customer expansion revenue in the evolving "Land and Expand" customer acquisition model.

The growing trend of Product Led Growth (PLG) as a customer acquisition motion will continue to increase the importance of an integrated approach to customer acquisition, retention and expansion. This need for an integrated approach to the customer lifecycle is further highlighted when up to 50% of revenue growth is generated by existing customers.

Paul also shares how investing in himself, including earning his MBA in Finance in the middle of his career journey was critical to being a well rounded, CRO that could build credibility with the CFO.

Paul further explored how PLG also impacts the need for product management to become a more integrated part of the revenue generation team.

Another variable discussed is how the stage of the company impacts both the CRO role and the profile of the CRO. Being able to identify CRO's that have hands-on experience in both early stage, Product Market Fit (PMF) to Minimum Viable Repeatability (MVR) and then from MVR to Minimum Viable Traction (MVT) to true scale is a hard find, but more CRO's like that exist in 2021 than every before.

If you have just become a Chief Revenue Officer or have the aspiration to become a CRO in a SaaS or Cloud company, this is a great listen.

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As the landscape of B2B marketing and sales continues to grow, it's the perfect time to revisit this insightful conversation and Michael Pollack’s perspectives on optimizing your data strategy for more effective customer acquisition.

Moving from data driven to metrics informed decisions and what does this mean for customer acquisition professionals?

This was a primary topic of conversation on the latest Selling the Cloud podcast with Michael Pollack, Intricately CEO

Data is like water - it's really important if you don't have any but what if you have TOO MUCH? Water's value increases exponentially when you process or distill it into higher value outcomes (coffee vs water). This applies to B2B Marketing and Sales by evolving your data strategy from "contacts to context" - creating marketing & sales intelligence

CRM, Martech and Salestech platforms contain and create a lot of content (data) - but not enough context such as:

- What to say and/or what content to share

- When do you share it and how

- How do you say it or how do you message the content

Marketing can add more value to revenue growth by REDUCING the number of leads and moving to a "disqualification" versus "qualification" orientation. Disqualifying low fit leads, contacts, and prospects increases time invested on high quality leads & opportunities

We all know the buying journey has changed - but why are we still using techniques from 10 years ago?

Mike has some interesting insights and ideas that he shares in this episode.

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