SalesTechStar Interview with Marco Pasqualina, VP of Sales at Feedback Loop

In sales and marketing, there’s always room to implement newer and effective technologies and proven practices to drive better outcomes, Marco Pasqualina, VP of Sales at Feedback Loop shares some thoughts:

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Hi Marco, we’d love to hear about your journey in sales through the years…what are you looking forward to in your new role as VP, Sales at Feedback Loop?

I have over two decades of sales experience and majority of my experience has been with consumer insights. Prior to joining Feedback Loop I was Head of Sales at Toluna and I’ve also held senior sales positions at MarketTools/MetrixLab and Nielsen.

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As the VP of Sales at Feedback Loop my focus is on building upon our existing work with Fortune 500 companies, to further accelerate our growth in the consumer healthcare, consumer finance, consumer insurance, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and consumer hard goods (CHG) industries. I’m looking forward to scaling the business in these five key industries and building a sales team to support the company’s next stage of growth.

Feedback Loop’s agile research platform automates critical research processes for enterprises, such as generating surveys, sourcing consumers, and analyzing and surfacing insights. It also introduces guardrails to eliminate human error while giving non-researchers direct access to consumer insights in as few as two days, rather than in months. I’m eager to further define Feedback Loop’s role in the emerging ResTech space.

Take us through some of your biggest sales learnings from your time in tech: a few biggest moments that drove key sales learnings during the pandemic as well?

Majority of my experience has been with data-driven, technology (SaaS) and insights-driven organizations and one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that the consumer landscape is constantly evolving. Companies need to be in tune with this constant evolution to be successful and fully understand how consumer behaviors and preferences are shifting. This means updating products, messaging and approaches to meet consumers where they are.

Throughout my experience I’ve also learned that no matter how great of a sales experience you provide or how great of a year you’ve had — there’s always room for improvement.

A learning that came specifically from the pandemic was the importance of listening. Businesses were severely impacted by the pandemic and had to make changes we had never seen before. It was a challenge for our team to understand the unique customer obstacles and develop a point of view on how we could help. The best thing we could do was to listen intently to the customers to understand their challenges and deliver solutions accordingly.

How do you feel today’s sales leaders need to revisit their sales processes and choice of salestech to empower their teams more while being remote?

There are so many great salestech tools out there, but my belief has always been to find one thing that works and remove three things that don’t. You want your team to be focused on understanding the customer’s business problem – not which process to follow.

Any solution that enables you to listen to customers and capture their feedback is critical to any business, especially to sales teams. There’s a lot of pressure on teams to know “what’s next” and a significant amount of focus for me has been on the ability to build expertise across the team in both the industry verticals we support and how our technology helps our customers.

Can you talk about some of the top sales solutions over the years (sales technologies) that have helped you drive better business outcomes?

Call capture technology has been a key technology on all the sales teams I’ve led. Another type of solution that continues to drive better business outcomes is technology that can bring a defined process to collecting customer feedback.

Additionally, pipeline management and revenue operation (RevOps) solutions have given me the complete accounts, opportunities and contacts across the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition to advocacy. This allows our team to identify deals at risk, bring in support resources and be more confident in our forecast and projections.

How according to you will the future of customer engagement and sales engagement in a digital buying world start evolving…to change the face of customer engagements as we see it today?

A lot depends on the customer — the industry they are in, the competitive landscape, the pace of change and the level of growth they are looking to achieve. Sales teams have suffered some setbacks in training and development because they haven’t been together in the office and or had some of the interpersonal learning opportunities they normally would. Teams have also struggled with building relationships with customers due to the lack of face-to-face contact. With remote and hybrid teams becoming the norm, teams are going to have to think more creatively about how to engage with customers on Zoom and other channels.

Additionally, as customers become more focused on digital transformation, speed becomes a critical factor in the ability to develop products, reducing friction and time to market. Customer engagements need to be clear in the problem they solve and integrate with other solutions in the customers tech stack. At Feedback Loop we focus on enabling our customers to bring consumer feedback earlier in the decision-making process. Foresight, not hindsight, is critical to any business success.

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s sales leaders need to do to motivate, train and uplift their teams to optimize business and sales performance, and the sales technologies you feel sales teams should have more of.

I learned through in-person training and it was very important to my career to role-play. It provides a lot of comradery to be able to make mistakes and learn in a safe space. We don’t have that opportunity as much today in this new digital world, so we rely more on call capture technology and data in the CRM to help coach and mentor the team.

The challenge is to use the data to enable, but not to become solely reliant on it. It’s still a relationship business and we need a real understanding of what customer business problems are so that we can listen, be consultative and provide solutions. It’s important not to lose sight of the main goal which is helping businesses make better decisions.

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