SalesTechStar Interview with Olivier Metier, Senior Vice President Of Global Sales at Zeotap

Maintaining a direct relationship with the client is crucial for sales feels Olivier Metier, Senior Vice President Of Global Sales at Zeotap; in this chat he talks about a few proven sales alignment practices and sales optimization tips:

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Hi Olivier, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about a day at work as SVP of Global Sales at Zeotap?

I joined Zeotap five months ago, after spending the last ten years with Salesforce. In my role as SVP of Global Sales, I work on both operational and strategic initiatives – everything from restructuring the sales organization to bringing in new clients and reviewing Zeotap’s marketing messaging.

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Zeotap launched its Customer Intelligence Platform – the next-generation of Customer Data Platforms – just over a year ago, and has raised over $60 million in funding to support its growth. For the Sales team, this means that we’re rapidly growing and scaling our efforts in order to meet demand – it’s a busy, but exciting time.

What are some of the core sales processes and sales technologies that you’ve often used across your years in sales management and even now at Zeotap to drive better sales value and ROI?

In my previous role at Salesforce, we only used Salesforce (naturally). At Zeotap, we also rely on Salesforce for its automation, ticketing and customer capabilities, but we have additional platforms that allow us to streamline our efforts and make them as efficient and effective as possible.

One of those platforms is Outreach.io, which we use to maximize the impact of our customer outreach and improve engagement. Leadfeeder is another tool we use to support our outbound engagement , and Loopio enables us to quickly and effectively respond to RFPs. At the moment, I’m looking to implement additional tools, including a content management system that will enable the sales team to work more efficiently.

What according to you should senior sales leaders be doing to ensure better alignment and use of salestech among their global teams? A few best practices you’d like to share when it comes to ensuring best data practices for sales teams with their sales automation?

The first thing that senior sales leaders should be doing is making sure they maintain a direct relationship with customers. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to leave Salesforce was because of the number of layers that interfered with my ability to maintain a direct relationship with the client. The customer is always right, so being able to hear feedback directly from them is the best way to tell whether or not you’re doing a good job.

Secondly, leaders shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes. Instead, think of them as learning opportunities that lead to progress in the long run. I often see people in senior management who are paralysed by the fear of making a mistake – which isn’t good for them or the organization.

The last element of ensuring better alignment among global teams is hiring well – and hiring fast. Especially in the startup world, where things move quickly, it’s important to build up a good team of qualified professionals to ensure that all the work that needs to be done can get done, and be done well.

We’d love to know more about your thoughts on the future of sales tech and how you feel this market will shape up? Can you talk about a few top global providers that you’ve been following as well?

There are a lot of really good platforms available on the market already. For instance, Salesforce is definitely a clear leader and a market standard, which is useful from a hiring perspective as most people we bring in already have familiarity with the product.

One of the key issues for any sales organization is being able to efficiently leverage the right resource at the right time – so any tool that enables us to do this will have value in the long term. What I would therefore like to see in the future is an AI-powered sales system that is capable of identifying, qualifying and evaluating leads at scale so that sales teams know which ones to prioritize. This would help separate the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise’ and enable our teams to focus better on the best-fit opportunities.

What are some of the must-have / basic sales automation and sales technologies that you feel sales teams shouldn’t be doing without today?

When I started at Zeotap, I quickly realized the importance of customer engagement platforms, especially for organizations who have small sales teams but big areas to cover (we’re currently present across six markets in Europe and India). When you have one or two account executives responsible for a fairly large country, you need tools that enable them to focus and decide where they should (and shouldn’t) be spending their time.

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s sales and marketing leaders need to do differently (and suggestions on martech / salestech) to help them stand out from the crowd!

Over the past year, so many companies have had to fundamentally change the way they do business. They’ve had to be creative, and find innovative ways of getting input from stakeholders and every team member in the organization. The hierarchy in the sales and marketing organization has been transformed: it’s no longer just a question of someone discussing an idea with their manager, and the manager bringing it to their manager, and so on – that takes far too much time. We need to start thinking about how to lead teams remotely and how to motivate them to be creative and do their best work. Speed is of the essence.

One other change that came about in response to the pandemic – and will likely remain in the future – is the reduction in the number of physical meetings with our clients. This has forced us to reevaluate the way we approach sales and outreach, and change the game on our side in order to be more successful.

The one other thing to add here is something that we talk about day-in-and-day-out at Zeotap: how customer data gets used. Since GDPR came into force three years ago, sales and marketing organizations have had to be much more conscious of how they capture, store and use customer data …but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. With the deprecation of third-party cookies at the end of this year, there should be a renewed drive to make sure that customer data is being used not just correctly, but effectively.

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