Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Ivan Gomez, Senior Director of Global Sales Development at Tenable Network Security. Ivan Gomez walks us through some of his major lessons learned from his 25-year experience in sales development and inside sales. He discusses what it’s like to establish, launch and grow a global organization using a very strong sales cycle process.
Episode Highlights
- Ivan talks about his past work experience prior to joining Tenable – he’s worked for startups and large companies.
- Tenable’s mission is to empower organizations to understand and reduce their cyber risk.
- Tenable provides solutions to small, medium, and larger organizations to help mitigate their cyber risk.
- The sales development team has a very clear mission on what their objectives are – to drive pipeline with qualified sales opportunities.
- In order to drive opportunities, the sales and marketing teams must be closely aligned.
- At Tenable, sales development reports to the sales team versus the marketing team…however, it’s important to recognize that they work closely with marketing.
- When a company grows, Ivan talks about the importance of having sales development report to sales versus marketing.
- Tenable has a strong focus on human capital development with the young professionals who are a part of the sales development team.
- Ivan talks about the importance of a “full funnel approach” with sales development and how it’s crucial for sales to have a complete understanding of the industry and specific pain points of customers.
- Ivan discusses the importance of understanding the entire buying committee – not just the CISO…but project managers, network security professionals and more.
- When launching campaigns at Tenable, Ivan discusses the approach of a “campaign in a box” and how the organization aligns marketing and sales together from the beginning.
- With outbound sales, you go after the prospects that you definitely want to work with versus those who engage with webinars or other inbound marketing efforts.
- Ivan discusses Tenable’s focus on its website and the resources available (i.e., podcast about cybersecurity).
Key Points
- When discussing outbound sales, Ivan mentioned “…when you go outbound, you get what you want. There are some individuals that despite our best marketing efforts, they just don’t raise their hands for a webinar. They don’t attend a particular trade show. They don’t download the information. These are individuals that are extremely busy. So consequently, we have to go in a very targeted approach and implement what we call our account based marketing strategies…”
- Ivan spoke a bit about intent data and how it’s important to combine intent data with a very specific ABM strategy to ensure sales is focused on the right accounts.
Resources
- Ivan Gomez: LinkedIn
- Tenable: Website
- Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies
