Scott Santucci

Scott Santucci

Forrester Research
As a principal analyst at Forrester Research, Scott Santucci has deep knowledge and hands-on experience working cross-functionally with product, marketing, and sales teams to develop innovative and effective integrated programs designed to improve the entire revenue cycle.
  • 0 comments 484 reads
    Posted on 2011-08-16

    During the first week of June, we had one of our quarterly Sales Enablement Leadership Council meetings in Barcelona, Spain. (A leadership council is comprised of executives from leading companies who work with us to set the direction for the near-term and long-term role of sales enablement.) For an entire day, we discussed the application of Forrester’s SIMPLE framework, which is a model designed to help combat the random acts of sales support that persist within most B2B companies, to common sales enablement leadership challenges.

    The sheer volume of insight, ideas, new research topics, and techniques shared during that session was tremendous – far too much to share in one blog post. So, I am going to pick two issues that came up.

    First off, Tamara, I hear you. I was told point blank that I need to participate in the social community more. I’m going to make a more dedicated effort to do this moving forward, but I need your help. Please tell me what you’d like me to...

  • 0 comments 723 reads
    Posted on 2011-06-24

    During the first week of June, we had one of our quarterly Sales Enablement Leadership Council meetings in Barcelona, Spain. (A leadership council is comprised of executives from leading companies who work with us to set the direction for the near-term and long-term role of sales enablement.) For an entire day, we discussed the application of Forrester’s SIMPLE framework, which is a model designed to help combat the random acts of sales support that persist within most B2B companies, to common sales enablement leadership challenges.

    The sheer volume of insight, ideas, new research topics, and techniques shared during that session was tremendous – far too much to share in one blog post. So, I am going to pick two issues that came up.

    First off, Tamara, I hear you. I was told point blank that I need to participate in the social community more. I’m going to make a more dedicated effort to do this moving forward, but I need your help. Please tell me what you’d like me to...

  • 0 comments 1,183 reads
    Posted on 2010-10-04

    Ah, that pesky sales force.  Why don’t they:

    • Follow the selling methodology you’ve developed with much expense, and rolled out with great sweat.
    • Call on more senior level buyer, for goodness sake – don’t they realize those are the people with adult money and fat wallets?
    • Just use the tools you’ve developed for them -  all they need to know has already been figured out.
    • Sell more stuff to their existing customers – with so many things to sell, how can they NOT be successful?
    • Stay on your brand message?  It’s like each rep has created their own version of the truth.

    Do any of these thoughts sound familiar to you?

    No matter where you sit inside your organization (executive leadership, department head, marketing, etc) you cannot help but bring a strong bias that drives your perception of the sales force.  But, is that...

  • 1 comments 3,538 reads
    Posted on 2008-09-16

    On August 27th, Forrester hosted the first Sales Enablement roundtable in the industry focused on addressing challenges related to profitable growth objectices for large enterprise technology companies.

    Assembling a balanced group of sales and marketing executives, through one lens the session could have been viewed as an economic summit. Added together, the total revues of the participants exceeded $350 Billion. To put that into perspective, that would make our panel the 27th largest economy in the world right behind Greece, but ahead of Denmark. In attendance were representatives from the following global organizations: Accenture, Allen Systems Group, BearingPoint, BMC Software, CA, CSC, Dimension Data, Dun & Bradstreet, IBM, Kronos, Orange Business Services, Siemens, SunGard, Unisys, and Xerox.

    During our session we talked about best practices, a cross functional framework to help galvanize product, marketing, and sales teams around customers, and how to...

  • 0 comments 2,876 reads
    Posted on 2008-06-27


    Technology companies are under pressure to accelerate growth and improve margins. However, the enterprise accounts these vendors sell into are increasingly viewing their offerings as commodities.

    Most enterprise technology vendors are feeling these pressures and in a response to the colliding tectonic forces of accelerating growth, improving margins, and differentiating in increasingly competitive markets, one common strategic imperative employed by most firms is to retool their sales organizations.

    In most cases, management wants their sales people to become “trusted advisors” to c-level executives. Sales people are brought in and through a “corporate car wash” trained in a day or two how to gain access and influence major executives.

    Does this...

  • 7 comments 4,742 reads
    Posted on 2008-01-25

    The industrial revolution happened over a period of about 200 years starting in the mid-1700’s and lasting to the mid-1900’s. The core pattern of this period was the application of mechanical methods to meet the needs of the many in a more scalable, cost-effective way. For example, the first industry to kick off the industrial revolution was textiles. In the early 1700’s all garments were made by hand. The wealthy could afford extremely high quality, comfortable, tailored, and expensive handmade garments. However, most people could not afford these clothes and had to make their own. The idea was to apply machines and water (later steam) power to produce many garments at much higher quality than home-made ones with an extremely high degree of consistency, but less quality than those created by the high-end, skilled tailors of the time. The result was a complete transformation of business and society.

    Today’s Problem – Providing Your Customers with Valuable...

  • 2 comments 5,951 reads
    Posted on 2008-01-14

    Knowing they need their front line sales force to develop relationships with executives to gain access to bigger budgets and differentiate themselves from the 5 other players who can do similar things, many B2B companies are retooling their sales and marketing organizations to be more consultative in their selling approach. This is generally accompanied by another major objective to round out the product portfolio to offer more valuable stuff to these executives they want to build relationships with.

    So, how are companies doing with this?

    Not so well.

    The Sales Leadership Council (a Corporate Executive Board service) in 2006 found that most consultative selling efforts were increasing the cost of sale at a greater rate than sales were growing. In fact, more than 20% of their clients were actually losing money due to their consultative sales effort - so much for expanding margins.

    To me, this really comes into view when I speak with executives who...

  • 3 comments 3,878 reads
    Posted on 2008-01-11

    When your CEO asks, "Why haven't we realized the sales performance boosts we expected when we (insert investment of your choice)

    ...implemented our SFA system?
    ...trained our sales organization?
    ...launched our sales portal?"

    How will you respond?

    If you (and the CEO) thought that investment was "the answer" to improving sales performance, we have some bad news. There is no such thing as a sales effectiveness silver bullet.

    While, there are many different types of organizations that claim they can help you improve your sales productivity, few of these solutions can offer measurable gains in productivity on their own. For example:

    • CRM vendors argue that implementing their software will help you drive more business by providing better structure to the sales process and improving the accuracy of your forecasting.
    • Sales training firms suggest that you can improve your sales fundamentals by teaching a common sales...
  • 0 comments 3,909 reads
    Posted on 2008-01-02

    General George Patton’s unparalleled ability to execute in WWII sometimes gets overshadowed by his colorful (and stupid) public relations. Because of his quick strike abilities, the Axis leaders feared him more than any other Allied general. What made him truly unique, and someone still studied in military academies throughout the world today, was his formula for success. Patton had a voracious appetite for history and believed that humanity already had a master inventory of all of the strategies and tactics for winning a battle. All one had to do was apply that knowledge to a given situation. His success can be summed up by his ability to model, map, and match.

    He was able to model the various elements of a particular battle (from tactics, troop movements, level of aggression of his opponent, terrain, initiative, strengths, weather patterns, etc.) to recognize patterns from an engagement of antiquity. Having identified patterns, he was able to associate (or map) the...

  • 1 comments 4,957 reads
    Posted on 2007-12-21

    You've heard it before — the seemingly endless "he said, she said" debate between sales and marketing. Many CEOs feel like they are counselors and could write John Gray's next relationship advice book: "Sales is from Mars, marketing is from Venus."

    Clearly, the counseling approach isn't working; as the "divorce rate" between companies and their marketing leadership is extremely high — 75% of enterprise technology firms replaced their VPs of marketing between 2002 and 2003. Chief marketing officer (CMO) tenures, already on average much shorter than those of other CxOs, has dropped from 23.6 months to 23.2 months according to an article in Brandweek (“Length of CMO Tenure Continues to Decline”. http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10030...

    By comparison:
    [...