vanillasoft

SPAM EMAILS ARE VERY ANNOYING, PERIOD.

Ollie Whitfield’s sales story is unlike any other. He used to hate the sales profession because of spam emails and pushy engagements. From being someone who said he will never be a salesperson, Ollie transformed and is now the Head of Growth Marketing at VanillaSoft. He discusses the need for sellers to cease utilizing spam-based marketing strategies and why being intentional is key when it comes to cold outbound email outreach. It’s an interesting story that you will only hear in this latest episode of Love Selling Hate Sales.

HIGHLIGHTS:

OLLIE: GET DOWN TO BEING CREATIVE

“People's attention are at a premium and it's our job as sellers to get creative, really do your research, understand the person, connect with them at the human level, and really start to break through that way, as opposed to these spam-based approaches”

OLLIE: YOU HAVE TO DO THE WORK

“You have to build relationships with people, you have to do the hard stuff, you have to be productive, you gotta organize your calendar, you've got targets, you know revenue, all of that stuff. If you're good at sales, you could probably be, in most cases, or at least close to being a pretty decent founder.”

Learn more about Ollie and his work in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olliewhitfield/
• Website: https://vanillasoft.com/

About Josh Wagner: 

Josh is a growth advisor and the host of the Love Selling Hate Sales podcast. He specializes in helping executives understand modern marketing and sales to drive growth in a scalable way. 

To learn more about Josh and his work, follow the links below:

• Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshwagneraz/
• Josh’s Website: https://joshuadwagner.com/
• Love Selling Hate Sales: https://www.lovesellinghatesales.com/

This episode of Sales Career Podcast with Kevin Hopp features Ollie Whitfield, Growth Marketer at VanillaSoft and host of The 0 To 5 Million Podcast. There is a systematic way to prospect on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Ollie shares how some creativity and a lot of tenacity helped him excel in his sales jobs, as well as his almost obsessive way of seeking out people for specific career advice.  He also talks about how essential having a better work-life balance is in sales.

HIGHLIGHTS

• An apprenticeship in Facebook marketing led to sales
• Learning to snipe prospects on social media
• Strategies learned working for Tony Robbins
• Create better work-life balance and leading others

QUOTES

Ollie on getting creative on social media prospecting: "He only went to this one chat and it was like 9 PM at night on Wednesdays to meet once a week. So I went to that knowing he'd be there because he's never anywhere else this guy. And we started talking. I engaged with him... a few times, with everybody else too, in the DM we got the appointment. It taught me things like that."

Ollie's exercise to reach the next level in your career: "I researched everything he did and all of his jobs, all of the content he did, speaking engagements, everything. Podcasts, you name it. I had a very specific question for him that only he could answer, no one else, and I would get him on the phone about that for half an hour. Next night, someone else."

Ollie on a future leadership role: "I really, badly, want to be at some point in my career a team leader. I don't care what the title is like CMO or VP, whatever that is, I don't care. But it's the coaching aspect that I've been there and I can offer you a perspective, a guidance, a way of doing it which you might not have thought about. I can stop you from failing because I've seen myself do that."

Find out more about Ollie in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olliewhitfield/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OllieWhitfield
• Podcast: https://anchor.fm/0-to-5-million-podcast

You can find and connect with Kevin in the links below:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khopp/

Website: https://www.hoppconsultinggroup.com/

Darryl shares some of his must-do strategies to build better alignment between sales and marketing to create the revenue engine. 

He believes firmly in SLA, sales lead agreements to keep both teams focused on revenue and maintain transparency between marketing and sales goals.  

We discuss marketing attribution to sales pipelines and what metrics are important to a CRO. 

Darryl shares some lessons learned on the people process of managing a revenue team and how to avoid misunderstanding and negative outcomes with your sales teams. 

He explains the criticalness of breaking down silos between marketing and sales, both in process, people and to build a culture of revenue team first, department or divisions second approach. 

We discuss some of the mar-tech that he deploys at VanillaSoft to rev up his demand-gen engine and how reverse engineering revenue goals to SQLs is key to putting a strategic demand gen plan for successful revenue attainment. 

As always, Darry doesn't hold back, he injects a bit of his humor but is all business about the practical and pragmatic approaches to build a world-class revenue team at VanillaSoft. 

He also gives us some of his favorite marketing/sales book recommendations such as Blue Ocean and some insights on what advice he would have given a younger Darryl Praill.