BC Startup Sales Podcast – Leveraging Internal Champions with Mark Birch (Stack Overflow)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Mark Birch, an Enterprise Sales Executive at Stack Overflow, to discuss “Leveraging Internal Champions.” Stack Overflow is the world’s largest and most trusted community for software developers. A question and answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers, Stack Overflow caters to developers and provides a forum for learning, knowledge sharing, and career advancement. The Company also provides enterprise customers with a powerful database to reach out to a targeted talent pool as well as package reports for corporate customers.

Mark is an enterprise software tech entrepreneur, sales executive, and startup investor based in NYC. He currently leads enterprise sales for Stack Overflow, providing a Q&A community platform for developers in enterprises to easily share and find knowledge. He also is the founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum, a community for B2B sales professionals and leaders to share ideas, network with peers, and learn innovations in the field of sales. The group comprises 21 global chapters and over 10,000 members. Previously he worked at a diverse group of leading technology companies including Oracle, E.piphany and Siebel in sales roles at both the individual contributor and executive levels. He got his start in technology by complete accident as a programmer without any programming experience and then becoming a sales person by accident.

Mark joined us in the studio to discuss ways of leveraging internal champions during the enterprise sales cycle. He reflects upon his experiences at Stack Overflow, as well as his background as the Founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum, a 10,000 person global B2B sales community of enterprise sales professions. As a part of our discussion of leveraging internal champions, Mark discusses the process of identifying, coaching, and providing digestible information to internal champions. He also provides insights into the ways that champions can assist with mapping a purchasing path within organization and providing insight into the segments within the business where gaps may emerge. We conclude the discussion identifying best practices and identifying scenarios in which you build credibility and avoid the painful “stall, evade, quiet” cycle of losing a champion.

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