With everyone today pretty much competing on the same digital platforms, marketing and sales teams have to be a lot smarter about the technologies they deploy to support creative positioning while enhancing their overall product and sales pitches. Ralph Natter Berg, VP of Sales at Ardoq shares a few pertinent thoughts:

____

Hi Ralph, welcome to SalesTechStar! We’d love to hear about your journey in tech and your role at Ardoq! What’s a typical day at work like and how has that changed for the team in the light of the new normal?

My career in tech started at Meltwater, where I led the CS team in London and established new business for Meltwater in Dublin, Ireland. When I joined Ardoq in October 2017, I was the first person dedicated to sales in the company. At the time, Ardoq was more or less an engineering company, so introducing sales was challenging and fun. Since then, we’ve grown into a 90-person company, with sales offices in NYC, the UK and Copenhagen, in addition to our HQ in Norway. Back then, we only had customers in Norway, and now we have customers across the globe.

My workday has changed drastically in 2020. The pandemic not only changed the way I work, but where I work, too. After coming back from a three-month paternity leave with my daughter in July, I moved across the Atlantic to NYC to run our global sales team from Manhattan. Now, a typical day starts with a bike ride down Broadway via Central Park to Midtown which is an exciting change.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Allyson Huiskamp, Vice President of Sales at Flashtalking, Inc.

Meeting my colleagues a few times a week also gives me so much energy and really makes a difference. I start early in the morning, working with the European team, then shift to a US focus when the day kicks off here. A lot of my time is going into hiring, onboarding and training new employees. We’re really focused on growth within our sales team right now, and have hired for seven positions in the NY office. All days are different, which I really enjoy.

For Ardoq, the change to fully remote work didn’t disrupt the business. We already had a good work-from-home setup, and a good rhythm of business that supports the workstyle that we’ve had to embrace. Every Monday and Friday we gather the whole company on Zoom; Mondays for a weekly kick off to talk about our priorities, and every Friday to share our weekly learnings and wins. These rituals have kept us connected as a team during the period we have been through.

All of this has allowed us to build upon Ardoq’s strong company culture. Maintaining this culture, while onboarding a lot of new hires across the world, is probably the biggest challenge for us right now—but it’s an exciting one to have.

How have you used your salestech stack (or improved it!) during this time, to enable better results? What core changes to strategies helped drive goals during this time that you’d advise other sales and marketing teams to consider?

We’ve focused a lot of attention on creating a better overview of our marketing and sales metrics so we have better insight into the journey from traffic on our website to leads, on through the sales funnel, and then to wins. We are pulling data from HubSpot and the Ardoq app to better understand customer engagement. The goal is to fully understand the journey and be able to upsell and drive new sales through this insight.

I’d recommend that sales teams take a closer look at their sales pipelines. The way we sell has changed, but there is a lot of valuable information that can be gained from the data teams already possess from existing sales processes.

For Field sales professionals who are now forced to transition to a more inbound role because of the pandemic, what are the top thoughts you’d share with them?

We have increased the marketing spend to be able to bring in more leads, and are learning a lot from what the different channels can do for us, what content works and doesn’t work, and having more sophisticated conversations based on the lead sources. Working in a more inbound role is a different ballgame, but optimizing the processes for both inbound and outbound can help make the transition much easier.

We are looking forward to getting out and meeting our customers again when the time is right, but until then, we are happy to serve our customers online. This isn’t new to us, but we have seen that relationship building is becoming more challenging. Often, companies decide to make technology choices based on their hands-on experience with vendor representatives, and this is made much harder without on-site visits and in-person demos. At Ardoq, we are encouraging our employees to be personable and open in their prospect and customer communications. We’re all still adjusting to the new normal, but keeping communications personal helps make the best of the current environment.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Chad Pearce, Vice President Marketing – APAC at Zendesk

What are some of the top go-to market and growth strategies that you feel B2B sales and marketing teams need to now focus more on to ensure business success despite the global slowdown?

Everyone is now competing on the digital playground. This makes it harder to stand out and makes marketing more expensive. Being creative around how we do outreach is more important than ever, so at Ardoq we are spending a lot of time trying to get that human interaction via Zoom, phone and personal email – as those are arenas where we can stand out and create more meaningful relationships with our prospects and customers.

Take this time to focus on creating normalcy amid the abnormal. Develop a strategy for sales processes and find out what works for your teams and products. Read through your tools and connect the sales journey; understating what you have to work with will inform how you ultimately decide to work.

How according to you will sales and marketing teams need to upskill and reskill (including those at leadership levels) in the new normal; to meet changing business needs? What are some of the biggest areas you see teams still struggle with today during this downtime?

Through digital sales and marketing channels, we get access to more data than ever before and now need to relate to data in new ways. In order to convert that data into knowledge so it actually generates value, we all need to upskill on how we can interpret and use data.

Written communication has also become more important for everyone, and it’s expected that your digital channels reflect your overarching brand messaging. Your personal digital brand can make a big difference, too. When I moved from Norway to the US, I posted an update about the move and our growth plans for Ardoq on LinkedIn. The post has been viewed by more than 30,000 people, which is a lot higher than previous posts I have published, showing the impact of a personal touch.

Can you talk about some innovative ways in which tech sales and marketing teams in B2B have gone against the tide during this downtime, to build brand presence and growth?

For us, this downturn constitutes an opportunity. While others have had less to do, we have increased our activity level. We are working harder to meet new people and optimizing our resources to be more innovative in how we can stand out.

In marketing, we are focusing on the concept of selling our people and our product. We use our employees in our marketing materials like ads, videos, quotes and on our website. This way, when you go through the sales process you are seeing familiar faces. At Ardoq, our product and our people make up our brand so it’s important that prospects are exposed to both from the beginning.

In sales, we are seeing efficiency go up while effectiveness has gone down. By eliminating commutes and on-site meetings, we have more time to focus on work and researching prospects, but we are also losing the valuable in-person connections that are so key to our businesses. It’s important that those in sales remember that people buy from people. Don’t let the digital channels we communicate through jeopardize our personal connections.

A few top tips you’d share with new sales reps and sales executives moving up the ladder in the midst of a pandemic and uncertain work environment?

My recommendation would be to focus on the smallest details, like how you dress, smile, the background in your Zoom calls and giving people on a conference call your complete attention. This really matters for customers, colleagues and partners. Calls can become laborious if they are treated just like every other conversation. I encourage everyone to use their cameras to try and mimic the face-to-face interaction we’re used to, since the reliance on digital communication can become very cold.

Ardoq has a lot of young and extremely competent and driven employees. Moving up the ladder, I have really seen how emotional maturity and seeking out feedback and advice separates those who succeed from those who don’t. Now, more than ever, keeping an open mind and being responsible about your communication with others is so important. Always ask questions and don’t be afraid to check in – even if it’s more difficult with teams that are remote.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Jason Rushforth, GM and SVP, Americas at SugarCRM

A parting thought on your biggest leadership goof-up and the learning that came from it!

I am Norwegian and English is my second language. While I was working in London, I was speaking with an executive at a large investment bank and we had a great conversation. We decided to set up a meeting, so he shared the address of the office with me. Realizing it was right near the hotel I was staying at I told him, “you’re so close I could throw rocks at you,” thinking I was saying something along the lines of “you’re a stone’s throw away.” Needless to say, I now pay extra close attention to the rhetoric I use when discussing business in English – don’t want to make that mistake again!