SalesTechStar Interview with George Kanuck, Chief Sales Officer at Monetate

George Kanuck, Chief Sales Officer at Monetate shares a few B2B sales best practices for modern sellers in this short Q&A catch-up:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat George, how has your B2B sales experience been so far, tell us about your new role at Monetate…

I have led B2B sales teams for over a decade and most recently joined Monetate at a very exciting growth inflection point in the business and a pivotal moment in the market.

As uncertainty around the economy starts to impact how we think about making purchases, the need for businesses to connect with us, their customers, and create a deep connection to their brand is amplified. My role as the Chief Sales Officer has two main facets: hire and build a knowledgeable, customer-focused sales organization that deeply understands the challenges facing our clients and enable all of our partners to be able to do the same on our behalf.

I have had the pleasure of representing leading software providers in various markets, and being at Monetate, a tenured marketing technology, is a highlight for me in my career.

Driving revenue growth is the base for any business: tell us about some of the core processes and strategies you usually rely on to drive this?

One of the first things I do when I enter a new business is look for ways to simplify the sales process, breaking it down into its core elements. This typically results in 5 or 6 clean stages, tied to a handful of key activities in each stage. I believe shifting the focus to engagement, empathy, and understanding over qualification and challenging, helps to connect early with customers and prospects.

One of our core values at Monetate is Customers for Life, one that I have had at several companies. If you go into the sale aiming to create that type of connection, and intend to do business for as long as possible together, you will end up with a much healthier pipeline, and ultimately, a higher lifetime value per customer. As a buyer of lots of software and solutions, I, too, prefer to interact with organizations that have my best interests at heart.

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In what ways can B2B sales and marketing teams use generative AI to further their growth efforts today?

On the marketing and content side, I have personally experimented heavily with various generative AI platforms, and my takeaway is that none of them are a replacement for connecting with and knowing your buyer. Reps using ChatGPT and the like to create an outbound cadence without doing the homework are simply being lazy, and your prospects and customers will see right through it.

The best use of AI and machine learning that I have seen is in the processing of large data sets to learn about emerging market trends, changes in sentiment and buying patterns that will require a retool of our sales approach.

Can you discuss some of the prominent ways in which leading B2B tech brands use salestech and AI to drive growth? We’d love to hear about the salestech and revtech you have relied on through your years in the industry to achieve goals.

Before the current hype around AI tools, I have leveraged tools like InsightSquared and Clari to take a large number of data points about my rep’s activity and pipeline behavior and create a visualization of our progress as a business. These platforms can capture the individual nuance of each team member, and normalize that with the historical performance of their peers. This allows for a more scientific approach to evaluating things like timing and staging of opportunities, and creates a more predictable forecast.

Of course, these tools do not eliminate the need for solid leadership and coaching, but they help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the pipeline. I also am finding that tools we share with marketing to model and predict intent, like 6sense and Demandbase, make great use of machine learning algorithms to help not only bring our two teams closer together, but to be more precise in our outreach to prospects.

If there are five things that you’d say every B2B seller should do on a daily basis, what would they be?

1) Focus on your strengths and leverage them before trying to fix your opportunity areas

2) Don’t ever start a meeting or a call without aligning on 3 key outcomes or steps with your customer or prospect, and always confirm your next steps

3) Ask for help early, losing by yourself is very lonely

4) Listen more than you talk

5) Get some sleep – you have a lot of work to do tomorrow

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