BC Startup Sales Podcast – Sales Repositioning with Brian Malkerson (Attentive)

We had our friend Brian Malkerson in the studio this week to talk about sales repositioning and how to think about repackaging of your product, materials, and selling model as you scale and grow your software company. This sales repositioning concept relates to a lot of components as you start and grow. The general marketing materials, the ideal customer profile mapping, your organizational design as you move up or down market, and finally the sales process map will need to mold and change. Brian is currently the VP of Sales at Attentive and done a lot of work thinking hard about sales repositioning in the context of his company but also during his prior roles at TapCommerce and Twitter.

Brian is currently the VP of Sales at Attentive. Over several years of working with 500+ leading brands, Attentive has built a powerful suite of mobile messaging solutions designed to meet the needs of large customers. Prior to Attentive, Brian was the VP of Business Development for TapCommerce, acquired by Twitter in 2014. While at Twitter, he helped run sales of the mobile practice for the east coast. Before getting into sales, he worked in venture capital at firms like NYC Seed, AOL Ventures, and InSITE and before that was a management consultant at Mercer and J.H. Whitney. He has an MBA from NYU Stern school of Business, and a BA from Northwestern.

First we talked a bit about the broad concept of sales repositioning and how to think about it relative to overall markets. As you bring a product to market and either create a new market or reshape one how do you think about sales repositioning? Brian specifically walked through some of his learnings in the SMS, Voice, and Chatbots spaces and gave some examples on how to think about sales repositioning. We then dug in on specifics around what he has done at Attentive and some of his considerations around marketing of the product, outreach to prospects, and ROI statements that work. We covered team design and how that might change over time and also some really narrow elements like pricing, delivery, and customer success. Finally, we went back to the broad concepts and lessons learned.

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