Q&A with Craig Rosenberg on the TOPO Summit
As the event season swings into high gear, we caught up Craig Rosenberg, Co-Founder and Chief Analyst at TOPO, author of the Funnelholic, a must-read blog for any B2B marketer and producer of the newest event, the TOPO Sales Summit.
Q: Tell us three things about Craig Rosenberg.
A: 1. Husband and father of three
2. Student of B2B sales and marketing
3. Teacher of B2Bsales and marketing
Q: You have been involved in some exciting ventures…TOPO now has its own event – a sales-focused event. Why a sales-focused conference…aren’t you a marketer?
A: Why a sales conference? The modern sales machine is innovating at hyper-speed. The organizations are scalable, efficient, predictable organizations. They deserve a conference that focuses on these innovations and how organizations are executing these approaches. For example, one of the Summit speakers is Ryan Azus from RingCentral where they have built one of the most data-driven sales organizations on earth. It’s a predictable, systematic sales organization that is scaling at an extraordinary rate. The RingCentral story is one you won’t find elsewhere. People will love to hear this RingCentral story and there are many more like those.
Aren’t I marketer? I still am. I just believe strongly that organizations that want to grow fast should be looking at the entire revenue process through first touch (marketing) through upsell (sales). I love marketers and work with marketing all the time, but understanding the entire story is the key to success. For example, the new rage is Account-Based Marketing. But, you can’t just change marketing to be effective, you need Account-Based sales development and sales – it’s not just ABM, its “Account-Based Everything”.
To achieve the bigger goal, you have to adjust for a wider lens. As a matter of fact, we have a lot of marketers signed up for the event.
Q: The TOPO conference is covering everything from sales leadership to sales development. What makes this event unique?
A: The Summit is for sales and marketing professionals who are interested in high growth including sales leaders, sales development managers, sales operations, marketing leaders, and individual contributors. So far, the Summit attendees have been a “who’s who” in high growth organizations. It’s very exciting.
We believe there are four major reasons our event is unique:
- The best sales leaders in the world will be speaking and attending. You will literally be able to learn from and network with the world’s best sales leaders.
- Specificity wins at this event. No high-level bullet presentations. We ask all of our speakers to provide specific details on how to operationalize their recommendations. The result is valuable content that attendees can go execute on right away.
- Topics that matter. In order to deliver on that specificity, we built an agenda of topics that you can’t find anywhere else. Here are some examples: “Growing and Managing a Global Sales Development Organization” or “The Account-Based Sales Technology Stack”. These topics can help you change your business, delivered with depth and specificity.
- And it will be fun as hell! Great conferences offer actionable content and fun, memorable networking and frankly, parties. As we planned the event, we made sure that it was fun. And it will be.
Q: Can you share some sage advice that might help marketers looking to make an impact in their organization?
A: Headline: Give the (sales) people what they want. It sounds obvious, but it’s not. Before the digital demand generation movement, marketing was basically ineffectual in demand generation. With the digital demand generation movement, marketing created demand generation machines – driving large quantities of leads. But alignment between sales and marketing remained elusive. Marketers would say, “I am driving all these leads and sales is still complaining.”
That’s because the wide net of these industrial strength demand generation programs fueled SMB and mid-market sales, but often failed to drive enough demand against the target accounts most coveted (often enterprise). It’s one of the reasons the “Account-Based Everything” movement is happening and that’s good. It’s perfect alignment.
Get your tickets to the The TOPO Sales Summit before it sells out.
Author: Erika Goldwater CIPP/US @erikawg Vice President, Marketing, ANNUITAS
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