In this episode, Michael Herren, Director, Global Customer Engagement Program at Illumina, shares strategies to deepen partnerships with sales teams and create strong evangelists. He advises to understand sales structures, motivations and pain points, then prioritize the desired outcomes of the partnership. Whether it’s the guidance you provide, tools you offer or ‘rules-of-engagement’ you define, make working with your team as frictionless as possible. Sales engagement must be earned!

Highlights

• Embrace Challenges to Achieve Measurable Successes
• Define Clear Sales Engagement Outcomes
• Understand Sales Structure, Motivations and Pain Points
• 7 Key Sales Engagement Strategies
• Share Key Tools and Collateral
• Develop an Effective Communication Plan
• Define Clear Rules of Engagement

Resources

• 7 Engagement Strategies & Rules of Engagement
• “The Power of Moments” by Chip & Dan Heath
• “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker
• A Bit of Optimism - Simon Sinek
• A Good Hang - Amy Poehler

Guest Thought Leader

Michael Herren, Director, Global Customer Engagement Program, Illumina

Michael leads a world-class team dedicated to delivering strategic, story-driven experiences that strengthen partnerships and drive business growth. With over 18 years of experience in the biotechnology, life science, and diagnostics industries, Michael brings a unique combination of technical expertise, operational excellence, and customer engagement strategy to his leadership role.

In our latest episode, Emre Ozbek, Executive Managing Director at BICEP Solutions, shares how customer-facing programs can build repeatable, intelligent systems that free up their best talent to focus on what truly matters: creativity, strategy, and connection. He digs deeper into his ‘touch it once philosophy’ and the ‘lazy approach’, a principle of profound efficiency rooted in automation. Emre advises teams to avoid ‘managing what you measure’, and instead ask ‘why’ to ‘eliminate’ unnecessary metrics and ‘illuminate’ your data. He also suggests how to change our mindset related to AI including the practical step of selecting one small process, then ask ‘why’, and either eliminate or automate. An important takeaway for listeners is the realization that the process of leveraging business intelligence is more accessible than we may have imagined.

Highlights

• The ‘touch it once philosophy' and the ‘lazy approach’
  • A long term strategy, take time to ‘sharpen the saw’
• Auditors review past data, strategists use the data to look to the future
• ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ - understand the data before you automate
  • Leading vs lagging indicators
• Avoid ‘Manage What You Measure’ - ‘vanity vs actionable’ metrics
• Ask ‘WHY’ and ‘ELIMINATE’ unnecessary metrics
• Utilize data across customer facing programs: Executive Sponsorship, briefings, meetings at events, CABs, etc.
• Build in processes to keep systems up to date and reliable (i.e. integrate HR employee database into scheduling and CRM tools)
• Automate to spend time for relationship building, critical thinking and creativity
• AI: how to shift from a ‘Fear mindset' to a ‘Partner mindset'
• Start small, start now - strive for clarity over quantity

Resources

• Book: Measure What Matters by John Doerr
• TED Talk: The Beauty of Data Visualization by David McCandless
• HBR Article: Ensure High-Quality Data Powers Your AI by Thomas C. Redman

Guest Thought Leader

Emre Ozbek, Executive Managing Director, BICEP Solutions

Emre is a business and data strategist with a simple but powerful philosophy: if you have to do something more than once, it should be automated. He calls it his "lazy" approach, but it's a principle of profound efficiency that has guided his 30-year, multi-national career helping some of the world's top companies solve their most complex operational challenges.

His journey has taken him through enterprise architecture, business consulting, and innovation leadership across a range of industries. This unique cross-sectional view revealed a universal truth: most businesses are stuck solving the same problems over and over, wasting valuable time and frustrating both employees and customers.

Today, Emre channels this passion through his new company, BICEP Solutions, providing Business Intelligence for Customer Engagement Programs. He now helps program leaders apply the lessons learned from running a world-class customer engagement program, complete with briefing centers, innovation labs, and executive sponsorship, to their own organizations.

In our latest episode, Bryan Hobbs, Executive Briefing Manager at Zoom, provides lessons learned from his years of designing and implementing technical demonstrations for industry leading companies like Cisco, Symantec, Google Cloud and Microsoft. From identifying viable spaces and deciding who to partner with, to confirming what products/services to showcase, it is important to build for the short term and plan for the long term. Bryan also shares best practices for overcoming the unique challenges faced when installing in regional locations.

Highlights

• Visioning, the Art of the Possible
• Designing technical demo spaces for a variety of visitors
• Demo elements: wow factors, humor, addressing challenges
• Build in flexibility, see products/services working, leads to faster decision making
• Consult with Internal and External teams including industry partners
• Elements to consider: budget, size of space, content, exec involvement, roadmap
• Define scope and work with partners for alternatives (budget)
• Lessons learned for regional demos

Resources

• ‘Career Mapping: Charting Your Course in the New World of Work’ by Ginny Clarke
• ‘REVOLOGY’ by Todd N Williams about Tom Scapello
• ‘From Good to Great’ by Jim Collins

Guest Thought Leader

Bryan Hobbs, Executive Briefing Manager, Zoom

Bryan is a dynamic leader with over 25 years of experience at the intersection of technology, people management, and business processes. Bryan consults with businesses to refine their processes and harness the power of strategic partnerships. His career began at Cisco where his love for technology and customer engagement was established. Fostering strong partnerships has been key to his repeated successes during his leadership at Symantec’s Experience Center and to building groundbreaking hybrid experiences at Google Cloud’s Executive Briefing Center. Recently, as Director of Immersive Experiences at Microsoft, Bryan led teams in creating interactive, immersive customer experiences while mentoring high-performing individuals.