Top Insights From the Best: Paul Melchiorre & Mark Petruzzi

Paul Melchiorre is an Operating Partner at Stripes focusing on SaaS portfolio companies, specifically assessing and advising on go-to-market strategies. Currently, Mr. Melchiorre is an independent director at R3, an enterprise blockchain technology company, and was previously an independent director at Scout RFP, a sourcing and procurement software company that was acquired by Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY). He also sits on the board of nonprofit Spark.Org. Previously, Paul also served as Global Customer Officer and Chief Revenue Officer at Anaplan, a leading SaaS platform to facilitate financial planning and management, where he contributed to a successful IPO in 2018 and saw the company grow from $80 million to $300+ million in Annual Recurring Revenue and to over a $7 billion market cap. 

Mark Petruzzi has worked in the enterprise software and cloud software ecosystem for 25 years. Today he is an industry leader with a distinct focus on channel and alliance program development and execution. Mark started his career at The MAC Group, a Harvard-based strategy consulting firm, and has held senior leadership positions at Deloitte, Oracle, Ultimate Software and HCL, driving exceptional growth and consistently delivering over-target revenue performance. In addition to his operating success, Mark is an author, speaker and an adjunct faculty educator at Duke CE, Trusted Advisor Associates and The R Group.  He specializes in Cloud Software Sales, Trust-based selling and Cognitive and Behavioral-based Sales Team Development.  

In this episode:

- Insights from the new book "Selling the Cloud:  A Playbook For Success In Cloud Software And Enterprise Sales"  {@Lisa: please hyperlink it to Amazon}

- How enterprise software selling has changed over time and the acceleration of those changes with the current environment around the work from home efforts

- What is the future profile of the top enterprise sellers and how to identify them and compete for the scarce talent

- Why Empathy and Authenticity are key when recruiting your most successful sales professionals

- How has the role of Customer Success evolved and where do you see its role in the future of the high growth SaaS companies

- Why growing revenue from existing customers is 3x-5x easier than finding new customers

- How the acceleration of sales transformation is happening in 3 months that otherwise would take 3 years

- What is the CRO role (Chief Revenue Officer), why it is more than just a VP of Sales and how will it evolve in the future