SalesTech Interview with Don Matejko, Chief Revenue Officer at Showpad

Sales Tech Journey

Tell us about your journey into Marketing and Sales Technology. How did you arrive at Showpad?

Prior to my current role at Showpad, I served as Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Field Operations at SAP Hybris.

During my time there, my mission was to scale and transform SAP Hybris into a billion dollar line of business, leading the business into a period of hyper-growth. Prior to SAP Hybris, I helped Adobe transform their Digital Marketing business across the Americas, bringing their business to the cloud.

I sold and managed many types of software and technology, and sales and marketing became a fascination that turned into my full profession. I joined Showpad in April 2018 as the Chief Revenue Officer, where I’m currently responsible for scaling Showpad’s revenue while continuously improving the customer experience.

What is Showpad and how do you differentiate it from other Sales Enablement platforms?

Showpad is a holistic sales enablement platform that empowers modern sellers to provide the best buyer experience to customers. While other platforms focus on content alone, Showpad unifies sales content with training and coaching into a single, powerful platform, combining interactive selling experiences with industry-leading habits and recommendations. Through this combination, we empower sellers to engage with buyers as trusted advisors who can communicate the right message at the right time.

We’re focused on enablement, engagement, and impact. Sales Enablement drives buyer engagement which drives business impact. Simple as that.

How different is your role at Showpad compared to the ones you had at SAP, Adobe and Oracle?

There are two notable differences between Showpad and my previous roles at Adobe and SAP. Both companies are fantastic software machines with tremendous market share and brand recognition. And when you work at such companies, you have massive resources to help execute.

Showpad, on the other hand, is a mid-stage, fast-growing rocketship. We’re creating a category and, as a result, our strategy, execution, and brand are always evolving.

Here at Showpad, the interactions we’re having with our customers are influencing our decisions every single day and helping us grow. We’re able to move fast to meet the needs of our customers. Consistent innovation actually happens as engineering is intimately tied to sales. If you think of Showpad, we act as the epicenter tying content, CRM data and marketing systems together. We are providing the glue for all of these operational solutions to work better together.

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Customer Success

What are the core strategies you focus at Showpad for Global business development? How does it impact your revenue channels?

As Chief Revenue Officer, the core charter for me is to grow our revenues across each channel. To do that, we focus on three core phases of the buying cycle. First is the pre-acquisition phase, where we have to understand who our customers are and what channels and ICPs we need to address. Next comes the acquisition phase.

How do get our customers to invest in our services?

And lastly – which is by far the most important – is the post-sales phase. This is the trickiest and most complex phase as we’re monitoring why the client bought our services, making sure they are successfully deployed and driving ongoing support and innovation so they keep investing in our services. This is the revenue circle of life. I always tell my customers that earning your business is the easier part of the job. The hardest part is keeping you as a customer. Because of our critical focus on research and development and post sales experience, we are able to keep growing and expanding our brand by providing new value that keeps our customers happy.

How different is Customer Success for marketing and sales technology products compared to other technologies, for instance, IT SaaS and Cloud?

Showpad focuses on driving marketing and sales success. There really is no big difference in Customer Success in our industry versus others – or I should say, there shouldn’t be a big difference. The bottom line is that you need to focus on what your client deems as “success” and deliver. It’s that simple. For us, this is a HUGE focus and a core reason why we retain our clients.

If we’re not servicing our customers better than our competitors, there’s no reason for them to stay with us. Because of this, we strive to be the best in the industry. At the end of the day, people are buying an experience, not the product.

How do you differentiate—Customer Success vs. Customer Service at Showpad?

Customer success should be a programmatic plan, where teams focus on maintaining the highest service levels possible. If you don’t have a plan in place, you can’t deliver on the service. At Showpad, we accomplish both, and that’s a utopia. If your product works really well and your customer success teams work really well, your companies scale up quickly.

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Sales Vision

What is the sales culture that you represent? Why is it important to build a sales-focused culture for any business?

At Showpad, we’re 100 percent focused on the customer. Without the focus on the customer, we die. With every single candidate we interview, we determine whether they place that same emphasis on the customer because we always want to ensure that our culture and values align.

Secondly, we invest in our people. I always make sure to spend adequate time and energy with my employees in order to create a clear path that’s driven by success and focused on the customer journey. At the end of the day, if we hire great people but they eventually leave the company, that’s a huge problem that won’t help the brand grow.

I have always had the philosophy that I hire people much smarter than me so I am pushed to my limits daily. Surrounding yourself with diversity and talent is a recipe for success. Giving your team the power to drive change is paramount. When I make a decision, I want a team to support or alter the decision so we are always moving forward. It’s a simple concept of creating a “learning organization.”

And this is incredibly important, as I’ve discovered in my career that happy employees make happy customers.

Tell us how you achieve marketing-sales alignment. How does it impact your targets?

I will start with a basic concept. If a buyer calls to inquire about Showpad services, they are already 70 percent into their buyer journey, and we only have a tiny amount of time to sell to them and navigate that remaining journey. To make this happen, content needs to be relevant right away, and if marketing and sales aren’t aligned in real-time, that can be an issue.

In order to stay aligned, marketing has to provide content at the right time, at the right place, allowing our sales team to stay updated and capable of closing deals. We communicate consistently across both teams, and despite our rapid growth, we’ve been able to stay successfully aligned. I meet with our Chief Marketing Officer, Theresa O’Neil on a regular basis.

If our departments didn’t have a close relationship, we would fail to hold onto our existing customer base, and it would be tremendously difficult to convert new prospects.

Expertise with Automation and AI

How do you leverage AI and automation for sales performance at Showpad?*

It’s interesting to hear how people are leery of AI, but in reality, it makes the job easier. As this traditionally analog field becomes more digital, AI can leverage the data we’re creating, or that which already exists within operational systems like CRM and Marketing Automation – to drive better outcomes.

AI compliments a seller’s intuition, so they can make decisions based on data – not just a hunch or a previous experience. At Showpad, we’re using AI to analyze the use of content and training to equip sellers with the right material and learnings at the right time. For us, AI drives faster conversions and enables us to close business faster by helping us improve our buyer experience.

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My Sales Magnifier

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Sales Technology leader?

As a sales leader, you can’t fear innovation. If you do, you’re in the wrong business.

It’s different for every individual, but we embrace AI to stay relevant, and it’s a critical solution to stay ahead of the competition. For Showpad, AI streamlines supply chains and communication routes, making it easier to accelerate info between sellers and buyers. In two to three years, AI will be even more advanced, and its applications will become even more advantageous to the selling industry.

Your advice to other CMOs and Sales professionals in the sales and marketing technology space?

Break down the walls between your departments. Parts of a business should never be competing with each other because that distracts from the shared goal of buyer acquisition. We now have so many tech advancements which give us the ability to truly understand our buyers, so why not embrace those? Most importantly, sales and marketing MUST be aligned or failure is a very possible result.

Thank You, Donald, for answering all our questions. We hope to see you again, soon.