Sales and Marketing that’s Scalable, with Peter Fillmore
Episode 231
It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks.
When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don’t have to raise N very much to see it balloon in size. Each increment it jumps by represents its value going up by a factor of ten.
The question of how we reach scale then isn’t how to change financial numbers by a basic percentage; it’s how do we grow them by a factor of N?
Our guest knows how sales and marketing can scale their organization without snapping them. He knows how to leverage concepts like batch mode, local vs global maximums, and WIP bottlenecks for growth.
He graduated from the University of New Brunswick with an engineering degree and then went into technically heavy roles, working in IBM’s semiconductor division. He pivoted into leading sales and marketing teams for tech organizations until the late 2000s, when he founded a product startup with an app that helped salespeople gain visibility into their funnel activity. He also teaches sales practices and scaling up in the engineering faculty at the University of Ottawa.
Join me now as I sit down in person with the head of Ottawa’s Scaling Up initiative, Peter Fillmore.
Chapters/Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:10 My guest Peter Fillmore
03:27 What Changes When You Scale
05:37 Making the Funnel Visible
08:58 Sales Fundamentals and Urgency
09:55 PSA
12:03 Saying No and Off Ramps
13:26 Marketing Segments and Messaging
15:31 Discipline Metrics and Cadence
22:53 Connect with Peter & Ottawa Scaling Up Initiative
People, Products mentioned in the show
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith