Peter Gillett, CEO of Zuant where he drives product development initiatives for the company’s award-winning mobile lead capture app joins us in this SalesTechStar interview to talks about his biggest game changing experiences as an entrepreneur and to share his tips and insights on Sales and SalesTech:
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Tell us about yourself Peter, including your Hobbies!
Where do I start? In the early days I studied mechanical engineering and business to support a motorsports career with a journalist role in the automotive sector as part of the mix. I have always loved innovation, good design and marketing and still enjoy competing in motorsports. I am also passionate about photography and skiing when the opportunity arises!
Can you tell us a little about Marketpoint and Zuant? How did the inspiration behind these entities come about?
Marketpoint originated as a lead tracking service for marketing/sales executives who needed analysis of lead sources and top performing sales reps. This soon developed into receiving all types of leads from direct mail, advertising and essentially any form of promotion. Our customers attend many tradeshows and we started to see hand-written lead forms come in as a primary source of leads – Soon this triggered a better way of doing things and Zuant, a mobile-first lead retrieval system for marketing and sales pros, was born!
Can you share some tips on how Sales teams can ensure better optimization of their tech stacks, including use of CDPs and Data to help achieve their revenue goals?
Data planning and visualization of the sales territory is the optimum starting point. Is the data clean, de-duped and up to date? Has a market penetration study been carried out so focus can been on the best new and existing opportunities?
What are some of the challenges that you often see Tech marketing and sales struggle with when they adopt new tools / new data or mobile data inputs and insights into their existing stack?
We see these three consistently:
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Integration – Our customers invest in software to cover specific functions, such as CRM, marketing automation, social media and service support. It is important that these unique systems are all linked together and feed the same information to each user, for an accurate and total view of each customer and prospect.
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Process flow mapping – We rarely see process flow mapping used, despite today’s integration challenges, which is unfortunate. With such powerful software available these days, mapping out each step of the data journey on each system drives the overall performance optimization of the customer’s total technology investments.
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‘Single source of the truth’ CRM data – At the center has to be the CRM data file, which hosts all aspects of a customer/prospect profile, communications history pulled in from each integrated system, individual sales leads and related sales pipeline reports.
What’s your smartest Product Development or Sales Hack that you’d like to share with the audience?
It’s simple, but rarely done! We integrate our Zuant tradeshow system with our Marketpoint CRM so individual sales executives receive emailed links to their sales leads for follow-up. Their feedback is a simple click, which drives ROI reporting by event and sales channel.
Your biggest learning so far in Sales/Product Development/Data Capture and Management?
Don’t overlook the role of inside sales, particularly when it comes to B2B marketing. This is often an ignored aspect where there is such a flurry of activity to close an initial deal, but if the buy cycle timing isn’t absolutely correct it may take a year or two to close. Therefore, having a CRM database that allows sales leads to toggle effectively between the direct sales team and the inside sales team. This capability provides the ideal follow-up leveraging the entire sales team, including warm-up artists and big closers, at the perfect time!
Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!
Ian Gotts of Elements.cloud who will have a fully analytical view of the same questions!, I believe!
Tell us about some of the sales/salestech/or other industry events that you’ll be participating in as a speaker or audience, in 2020!
Web Summit is the top show for us. For the Zuant team, we’re one of the myriad of partners at the event, and in a unique position as exclusive suppliers of the show’s entire lead retrieval system for all exhibitors.
Words cannot begin to describe the sheer excitement that surrounds Web Summit! Being on site a couple of hours before the doors officially open, when it’s completely silent, is a crazy juxtaposition to what happens next – like the calm before the storm, suddenly the doors fling open, like air rushing into a vacuum, and the onslaught of over 70,000 visitors from 160 countries rush in from the main hallway all the way to the main stage.
Can you share a few of your biggest tech entrepreneurial learnings before we wrap up?
Speed to market is vital to success. Find the tech capacity (technology, process and skills) required to go to market as soon as possible, even if that means outsourcing or using remote tech staff.
Any parting thoughts? Perhaps on work-life balance, Product Development, etc?
Obviously we travel a lot to attend different events around the world – One of our rules for any member of our team is to always ‘take the extra day’ to soak in the location – you might never be there again in your life. Memories are made of so much more than a conference venue and hotel. We want our people to get out there and experience it all!