Interview with Daniel Zamudio, Founder and CEO, Playboox

Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to conceive a Sales Enablement platform?

As the founder of Playboox, we saw an unmet need in the market to enable sales organizations to more effectively and consistently execute their sales process.

To achieve sustainable, scalable and repeatable sales success, it’s essential that sales organizations excel at sales process execution. We define this as the ability to define, execute, reinforce, monitor and continually evolve a repeatable sales process based on what top performers say, ask, do and use at each stage of the sales process.

Research shows sales organizations that excel at this outperform those that don’t across key performance metrics like win rates and quota attainment. The problem is the tools at the disposal of the Head of Sales are ill-suited to the task, namely, conventional Sales Training and CRM.

Sales Methodology training is a common way to try to get everyone in the sales organization on the same page. Unfortunately, without proper reinforcement, its effects are short-lived. And CRM systems are not designed to drive consistent application of your sales process and best practices. Our application coupled with the MindTickle platform uniquely addresses this need.

How do playbooks fit into a CMOs tech stack? Do they impact the performance of a Sales CRM?

The objective of a playbook is to capture and codify what top performers say, ask, do and use at each stage of the sales process. Done right, a sales playbook can help middle-of-the-pack reps replicate a top performer’s best practices and enable new-hires to come up to speed more quickly.

To maximize their utility, it’s essential that the playbook is technology-enabled,  so salespeople can easily access them and apply them to assess and advance specific leads and deals. The other benefit of technology-enabling the playbook is that the playbook authors have a way to continually evolve the playbook and easily build multiple playbooks for different vertical markets, as an example.

In 2018, how would CMOs benefit from leveraging smarter personalized content for playbooks in B2B campaigns?

Heads of Marketing care about enabling consistent and personalized messaging across the sales organization. A common complaint from Heads of Marketing and Sales is lack of consistency in messaging. Providing the playbook stakeholder, both sales, and marketing leadership, with a mechanism to ensure the salespersons have access to use case or buyer persona specific conversations and discovery talks tracks are essential.

What are the key business metrics that modern Content Marketers should have at their fingertips?

Modern Content Marketers should care about the same metrics Heads of Sales care about, namely, measures like win rates, average deal size, sales cycle duration and percentage of reps at plan.

Without Sales Enablement tools, what are the major challenges that martech customers would face in 2018?

The major challenge is messaging scalability. By this, I mean the ability to quickly and effectively execute and iterate sales messaging that drive compelling executive-level buyer conversations, especially early in the sales process. In the absence of an effective Sales Enablement system, it’s difficult to ensure the field is adopting and utilizing the most recent and proven best messaging.

Which startups in the martech industry are you watching/keen on right now?

Our primary focus is the Sales Enablement space, so we like to track what other vendors in the space are doing. Gong.io and Conversica provide innovative solutions that we see as being complementary to our own. MindTickle, our partner, is someone whose vision and values we deeply believe in. We believe that the combination of our and MindTickle’s offerings are the best way for reps and managers to quickly learn, master and consistently apply their sales organization’s best practices and tools.

Which tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

We are big fans of Yesware for personalized email prospecting. We also used SalesLoft and ConnectAndSell to drive a cadenced approach to prospecting.

Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign at Playboox? 

Our target audience are the Heads of Sales, Sales Enablement, and Sales Operations. We use a cadenced approach consisting of calling, emailing, and social. Our key metric is the number of meetings per week with a target buyer that meets our ideal prospect profile.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader? How do you leverage AI capabilities at Playboox?

Because we are a native-Salesforce application, we will explore how to leverage Einstein, Salesforce’s AI engine.

One word that best describes how you work.

Checklists.

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Playboox Playmaker! Evernote, Google Docs.

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

I only review email 3x per day at specific times.

What are you currently reading? 

Radical Candor

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

My dad taught me to always give more than expected

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Mohit Garg Co-Founder MindTickle

Thank you Daniel! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.