Bill Binch – Sales Success, Data-Driven Insights, and Ideal Customers

When the customer experience is poor, should the sales team take the blame for failing to consider the long-term health of customer relationships? Not so fast, says our guest Bill Binch, a sales leader at some of the tech industries fast-growing companies. It’s a bit more complicated than that, and if you’re a leader whose role include ensuring that customers either get value from your solution or deliver value to your bottom line, you’ll learn a lot from this episode.

Bill is an operating partner at Battery, an investment firm focused on tech companies, where he coaches and advises sales leadership in portfolio companies. Before that, he was chief revenue officer at Pendo, where he helped drive the annual recurring revenue to $100M in just three years. He spent nine years at Marketo, leading sales as the company grew from its infancy to its IPO, and beyond. And he held sales leadership roles at other heavy hitters like Oracle, PeopleSoft, and BEA.

So it was great to get Bill talking about how sales fits into the organization, its role in thinking about the ideal customer profile, and its use of metrics. A few of Bill’s points to listen for:

• Sales should be invested in renewals as well as new business, because that’s critical for company success, so it’s critical to align incentives and work hard to cross the internal gaps that can form in companies.
• Collaboration between sales and other departments -- like marketing, customer experience, or customer success -- rests on a shared understanding of the metrics and markers of progress, so clarity is key.
• As a sales leader and an executive, more is better when it comes to data about the customer experience, and the urgency around frequent updates only grows in an era of big data.

Find Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-binch-302a4a2/
Learn more about Bill’s role at Battery: https://www.battery.com/people/bill-binch/  

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Connect with Richard Owen on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richard-owen-98ba3