Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP of Marketing, Exinda (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: So, when a partner channel is selling to an account, they don’t have visibility into what has been going on in that account prior to their involvement?

KS: They get a record export of prior activity from the channel manager, and once we hand it over they are the sales manager of record. We continue to update based upon our field sales team and channels sales team interaction with that partner or internal records to track what is going on in the account, but the channel is using its own internal CRM systems as opposed to ours.

SM: Then the question is, once you have handed the account to a channel partner, what is the channel partner doing? The records of their CRM system are not integrated with your CRM systems, so you don’t have visibility into their system.

KS: We have not yet implemented the Force to Force integration for partners who use Salesforce, for example; that is one of the programs that I’m looking at for implementation in 2012.

SM: Interesting. Which other processes or strategic elements of your sales marketing organization are worth discussing?

KS: We have also started to leverage a tool called HubSpot [see the Sales 2.0 with Mark Roberge, HubSpot VP of sales.].

KS: HubSpot is a fully integrated package inside Salesforce, so it gives us a Web contact to lead to opportunity development to close tracking so that we can start to assess the performance of the complete factory of Web visits through to revenue, and we are sure that we are getting a better view of that. The second part that we have seen from the HubSpot tool is much stronger search engine optimization capability. It’s stronger because it integrates a number of tools in the background that significantly improve things like traffic rank. I would say that since October, when we implemented HubSpot, we have improved our rank more than 500,000 positions, we have seen our SEO rank improve two spots, and we have a higher number of key words we’re targeting enter the top 100 keyword list. HubSpot is having a definite impact; part of that is through the integrated blogging engine, part of that is through enforcing the discipline of having proper SEO terms all over the pages, all text things of that nature so that we get better and higher relevance among the various search tools.

SM: Is HubSpot determining which SEO terms to go for in terms of optimization, or is that something your SEO people need to determine?

KS: That is a combination of . . .  we created the baseline list, which was done by an SEO consultancy that we worked with originally. We maintained that list by evaluating terms that were in use by key competitors, and the HubSpot tool also suggests potential keywords that maybe useful to start to integrate into pages and page sidewalls.

SM: So HubSpot doesn’t recommend such terms to you? That is something you have to have additional consulting or internal organization for to do the actual search engine optimization?

KS: It makes recommendations based upon competitors you enter, and of terms competitors use that you may not currently have in your list. But you feed that with a baseline list yourself, and you feed it with a list of competitors

SM: Fair enough. And the blogging that you are talking about, what is the strategy for that? Who blogs? And what do you blog about?

KS: Our entire senior leadership team blogs, and our strategy is not to have a sales and marketing blog per se, but, because we have a technical buying in the community, it is more of a technical blogging strategy to ensure that we are talking about topics that come up in day-to-day sales and marketing efforts. If we see common questions that come up through our support organization, if we see common questions when we are out visiting customers, those will spin off a blog topic. For example, I just spent two weeks in Europe, and that gave me about five to six different blog topics based upon common questions I heard from customers when I went to meet them face to face.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP of Marketing, Exinda
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