Jenn McAuliffe, Senior Vice President Global Enterprise Sales at SmartBear chats about the latest B2B sales and salestech trends impacting the SaaS marketplace:
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Welcome to this SalesTech Series chat, Jenn, take us through your Sales journey over the years and what you’re most looking forward to as Senior Vice President Global Enterprise Sales at SmartBear? We’d also love to know: what inspires you most about being in B2B sales!
It is great to talk with you today. I’ve been fortunate over my career to have worked in so many great sales organizations and been able to contribute and excel at both the revenue execution and the sales operation sides of the business. Throughout my journey, I have been mostly focused on serving enterprise class customers across a wide range of problems with technology solutions in both emerging and high growth areas. As the Senior Vice President of Global Enterprise Sales, I will be able to take my learnings and expertise and apply them as SmartBear leans in to meet diverse customer needs by intelligently powering three integrated hubs for the industry’s most comprehensive API development, testing, and production readiness with insights that power great user experiences across the entire software development lifecycle. This is the great thing about Enterprise Sales, and what keeps me energized – there is always more to learn and there are always new and exciting ways to help customers solve problems. SmartBear is going to be a great place to continue to do that.
Take us through some of your core sales strategies you’ve relied on over the years as well as the salestech that has helped drive those goals and plans?
One of the main core strategies I have relied on, and has always been tested and true, is that our job is to guide our customers. Sales is about helping people realize their potential while helping them to solve their problems or concerns. It sounds basic, but if you can focus on the problem at hand and the value that you/your company/your solution bring to solving that problem, most of the other pieces take care of themselves. To do this, you need a really good CRM (like Salesforce) to manage all customer and process data so you can consistently inspect for your support of the customer journey. You need a great review tool (like Gong) so you can ensure the quality of that support across your organization, and you need great collaboration tools (like Trello) so you can ensure the speed and agility of that support. That said, the technology available to us keeps getting better and can make us more efficient, but nothing substitutes a great sales team of talented people who can execute the strategy.
What are some of the biggest flaws in modern B2B selling that you feel more sales leaders need to address?
Sometimes I think we have become too automated and relied on technology to do the job for us. While in some circumstances, and with some sales process, it can make us more efficient and help offload some of the more repetitive work.
Sales is still about people. As leaders we need to ensure that we are not completely substituting the personal element that our sales organizations bring to the table, and that customers still expect during their journey with us.
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Can you talk about the impact of AI overall on modern B2B sales and how it’s changing the game for sellers today?
AI is everywhere, and it is changing the sales game quickly. The opportunity with AI to make us more personally productive to do our jobs, and the benefits it can deliver to speed up analysis and help us understand our markets and buyers more is great. Everyone should take advantage of those elements of AI for sure. Our customers are also using AI at an increased pace, and the more we can understand how it is impacting them and their use and expectation of its value, the more in tune we can be to their needs and challenges.
What are some of the top trends that will drive the B2B tech and SaaS market in 2024 according to you?
Customer Experience versus just Customer Success will be the driving force behind many decisions. We will find new ways to communicate and collaborate with our customers and partners as remote work evolves. This will also drive more security priorities. AI will continue to uncover new opportunities to be more efficient and knowledgeable, and we will continue to see how the cloud offers more flexibility, automation, and scale to grow our businesses and our customer relationships.
If you had to share a few AI trends that will lead the salestech-martech space in 2024 and beyond, what would you highlight here for our readers?
Analytics and Sentiment analysis come to mind immediately. AI can help provide a tremendous amount of insight both historically and predicatively to drive our internal and customer interactions. Sentiment analysis will continue to get smarter and more efficient to guide our efforts and priorities. These two alone can make us more efficient on how we run our businesses and where we apply our resources.
Anything else we should ask that we haven’t?
I love to talk about having a customer-centric approach. Customer-centric is not just a buzzword; it’s a strategic imperative. By prioritizing the needs of the customer, building trust and credibility, creating value, driving loyalty and retention, and adapting to market dynamics, we position our customers for long-term success and growth in increasingly competitive and changing industries.
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SmartBear provides a portfolio of trusted capabilities that give software development teams around the world visibility into end-to-end quality through test management and automation, API development lifecycle, and application stability, ensuring each software release is better than the last. Our award-winning products include SwaggerHub, TestComplete, BugSnag, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, PactFlow, and Stoplight, among others. SmartBear is trusted by over 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers at 32,000+ organizations – including innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. With an active peer-to-peer community, we meet customers where they are to help make our technology-driven world a better place.
Jenn McAuliffe is Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales at SmartBear. She served in high level sales positions at Tamr and at Datawatch Corporation (now Altair) where she was named to CRN®’s prestigious Women of the Channel list for her outstanding leadership and vision in driving growth and innovation. She was Vice President, Sales at Sonian (now Barracuda Networks) and Director, Cloud Consulting Sales at IBM/Platform Computing. Prior to SmartBear, she was Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Emporia Holdings.
