Every technology salesperson will agree that there are innumerous sales strategies (and tools!) to enable every sales team’s efforts, but as Marianella says in this latest SalesTechStar interview, – everything boils down to attitude and behavior, especially given the current world situation and the effects of Covid19.
Catch the complete interview:
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Tell us a little about yourself Marianella, we’d love to get to know you! What has your professional journey been like so far (your biggest learnings from your journey so far)? What’s a typical day at work is like for you at Email Meter?
I have always been in love with learning and exposing myself to as many different avenues of knowledge as possible. This was reflected when I went off to college. I graduated from Ohio State University with three degrees in Business Administration, Human Ecology and International Studies. Later on, I received my Masters degree from SDA Bocconi in Milan, Italy.
I have worked for a number of different startups in the U.S., Italy and Spain and have always loved the startup atmosphere. As far as my hobbies go, I love traveling, experiencing new cultures, and cooking. My favorite hobby by far is spending time with my Doberman, Catania!
As far as my professional journey goes, I would have to say that I attribute my success to my father. He encouraged me to start working from a young age. I was able to get my first paying job at 14 working in the architecture department at OSU. I understand the meaning of hard work, perseverance, and making your own success. Since then I have worked in a number of different industries and have been exposed to a variety of positions. The one I seemed to take to like a fish in water was sales.
Jumping into my typical day, I have to say what I love is that every day is different! I am in a unique position as the CEO of the company, but I also run the sales and customer success departments. I spend a large majority of my time meeting with prospects and clients, presenting our solution and collecting feedback on how we can improve the platform.
The rest of my time is spent meeting with the amazing individuals on my team going over strategy, communication, company and individual development and growth. I really can’t express how blessed I am to have such a talented team working at Email Meter. What I love about my team is each person brings their own unique set of expertise to the table and supports one another like I have never seen or experienced before. Everyone truly cares about one another on our team. That isn’t easy to find in this day and age.
Given your experience in Sales/Revenue Generation- we’d love to know what some of your top must-haves are for a successful sales/revenue strategy?
There are many great strategies out there, but for me everything boils down to attitude and behavior! Being in sales can be very mentally challenging at times and you always have to keep in mind ebb and flow. When the economy is great, you are closing deals left and right. You have this amazing high, but then something like Covid-19 happens and BOOM! Everything starts to slip through your fingers and now you are at a painstaking low. The only thing you are able to control is how you react (your attitude) and the behaviors you set for yourself to keep chugging along in any type of situation.
What are some of the biggest challenges you see for sales teams today in terms of gauging rep productivity? What would you advise them to do, to overcome them?
This is a tough question to answer as each team is composed of a variety of different personality types. In terms of gauging rep productivity, one of the biggest challenges I have seen from different sales teams I have been a part of and interacted with is solely looking at the numbers.
At Email Meter, we believe that data helps you make better business decisions, increases your awareness and gives you insights into workload. But you also have to add the human aspect. Finding a balance between the data and the human aspect can be a tough thing to do, especially if you are part of a startup’s sales team. When individuals can’t seem to reach a set goal, there is some “headtrash” that can creep in and affect anyone’s productivity. Something that has helped me (and my teams) is to create goals as a guideline, but understand that the numbers aren’t the only thing that make up a person.
Customer Success initiatives are as crucial to an organization as a strong sales strategy, can you talk about some of your top customer success initiatives from your journey so far?
I totally agree! One initiative we have taken for our Enterprise contracts is what we call a Happiness Guarantee. We believe in our product and never want anyone to feel like they are trapped in a “bad relationship.” So with our Happiness Guarantee, we will refund our customers the remaining amount left on their contract if they are unhappy with the product or service. We have yet to have anyone use this, but every customer I have worked with has expressed how much they love this clause in our contract.
Switching to the current global situation, the Covid-19 crisis has given us the opportunity to really put increased emphasis on our customers and how we can help one another through this tough economic time. I am a strong believer in supporting companies through tough times. While we cannot give our product away for free, we have come up with several initiatives to offer a mutual exchange between parties so we both come out winning.
How have you seen the role of the typical B2B/tech salesperson evolve over the years? What are some of the key traits you feel more of today’s sales teams should imbibe given market dynamics and the changing salestech landscape?
I would have to say that I have seen the role change in a couple of different ways. I feel that the typical B2B sales role has become more of a collaborative role, meaning that there isn’t just the one person doing the research, reaching out, setting up meetings, etc. You have a team of people helping and supporting sales reps. I also feel platforms like LinkedIn have become increasingly more powerful for prospecting and finding your ideal point of contact. The way people communicate in sales is becoming more virtual. With more and more SaaS companies coming into the B2B landscape, I have noticed a decrease in face to face meetings and calls and an increase in communication via email, text and social media platforms.
We’d love to know some of the innovative ways in which you align use of your salestech / other tech stack to achieve team/revenue goals.
I feel extremely fortunate that we have such an innovative group of engineers on the Email Meter team. They have created a few “homegrown” products to help our team achieve our revenue goals. Last year they created an internal product with a neat UI where agents could check if a domain or a prospect was already a part of the Email Meter family. We use this tool a great deal for prospecting and understanding team dynamics within different companies.
Another innovative solution the team is currently creating is our UUDBS (Unified User Database Service), which is built using Firebase and Cloud Functions. The problem we had was that our data was not shared between our backend and sales/marketing tools. Once UUDBS is complete, it will integrate the data with the tools API’s being our single source of truth. It will also be synced at all times for all of our information regarding our three different products: Basic, Premium and Enterprise. This will help us not only with prospecting, but also with upsells and better customer service. All of our information will be shared across all the platforms that we use allowing us to fill the holes of data we once had.
When it comes to enterprise sales: what are some of the best practices you follow to build better customer relations?
Something that has really helped me and the team is spending time on the psychological part of understanding people to build better customer relations. A big part of that is trying to understand their DISC profile (Dominant, Inspiring, Supportive, Cautious) to alter our communication style and make it more comfortable for the other party to engage with us. In addition, our complete honesty and transparency has served us well. I have also found a great deal of value in posing many questions to prospects and clients to reach a point where I truly understand what their needs are. Oftentimes I feel in sales we can get so caught up in how we are going to help people with our product that we don’t take a step back to ask ourselves, what is it that they are really struggling with and why? The better you can communicate and the quieter you are, the more you hear and understand.
Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!
Steve Wozniak
Your favorite Sales/SalesTech quote
“Selling is a Broadway show played by a psychiatrist” – David Sandler
Tell us about some of the top sales/salestech other events that you’ll be participating in (as a speaker or guest!) in 2020!
With everything going on with Covid-19, it’s hard to say what I will be able to participate in this year. One of the events I was planning to go to is the “Women in IT Summit” in London this summer, but I am not sure if I will be able to or not. Time will tell!
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview With Tom Addis, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) At Kinetica
Email Meter is the leading email analytics solution. Leveraging a state-of-the-art analytics engine, Email Meter provides critical business metrics and email statistics, including workload and response times, to help business leaders make better informed, data-driven decisions. Purpose-built for the enterprise, Email Meter can analyze thousands of emails in real time and compile detailed reports on employee performance and productivity. Today, over 40,000 people across hundreds of leading global enterprises including Roche, Netflix, Uber, Decathlon use Email Meter as their email analytics platform of choice.
Marianella Mace is the Chief Executive Officer of Email Meter, the leading email analytics platform. Mace is an experienced revenue operations professional with a demonstrated history of exceeding yearly sales plan and personal goals in a variety of different industries and quickly adapting to new cultural environments. She is highly skilled in Domestic and International Sales, People Management, Team Management and Conflict Resolution.
Mace graduated from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance, a Bachelor of Science degree in Human Ecology with a focus on Product Development, and a Bachelor of Art degree in International Studies with a concentration in Latin American Development.
