Welcome to Mavens of Modern Sales, where we take a deep dive with the sales leaders pulling sales teams in the 21st century to get their insights on leadership, strategy, industry trends, and more.
This week we talked to Eric Steele, Chief Revenue Officer at SIB Fixed Cost Reduction.
With your extensive experience in aligning sales, marketing, and client success, what strategies have you found most effective in breaking down silos and fostering a unified revenue approach in challenging economic times?
When it comes to breaking down silos and unifying a revenue approach, it starts with a clear mission and values, with the client at the center of everything we do. At SIB, our mission is simple: ensure our clients never overpay. When clients avoid overspending, it unlocks possibilities—promotions, hiring, investments in R&D, acquisitions, increased profitability, and even new schools and roads. Our rallying cry is to “row together” in support of our clients and their pursuit of these outcomes.
This unifying mission is critical because SIB is comprised of multiple brands, each serving different client segments—like Shipware and Getida for eCommerce and retail, and Procure America for the public sector. Focusing on our clients’ success forces us to think from the outside in, aligning sales, marketing, and client success around a shared purpose. This clarity of mission and values was the first step in breaking down silos.
Next, alignment and communication are crucial. There is no separation between our BDRs, sales reps, marketing team, channel sales and partnerships, client success, and delivery teams. We operate as a single revenue organization with shared goals and metrics. We meet weekly, monthly, and quarterly, and we prioritize consistent communication and collaboration daily.
In a time when employee engagement and retention are critical, how do you ensure that your leadership approach continues to empower the voice of the employee, while also delivering on aggressive growth targets?
It always comes down to people. It was the people and the culture that attracted me to SIB and it is my most important job to preserve that culture as we grow. To achieve this, we focus on two key strategies that empower our employees while ensuring we meet our ambitious goals:
1) Upward Feedback: We believe in the power of continuous, open communication. As leaders, we proactively seek upward feedback by asking our team, “What obstacles can we remove for you? How can we help you succeed?” Additionally, we conduct quarterly anonymous surveys that solicit feedback on leadership performance, areas for improvement, and suggestions to enhance employee effectiveness (we ask, “what do you need today to be 25% more effective in your role?”) This feedback not only guides our leadership approach but also taps into the innovative ideas of our employees, ensuring that we leverage the collective intelligence of our entire team—much like Jack Welch’s philosophy of getting ‘every brain in the game.’
2) Revenue Advisory Council: To further elevate employee voices, we establish a Revenue Advisory Council each year. This council, composed of nominated members from across the company, serves a one-year term with the mission to foster an environment where every voice is heard, innovation flourishes, and continuous improvement is embraced. The council is a crucial platform that helps align our team, ensuring we grow and move forward together as one cohesive and integrated company.
What’s your secret to getting sales, marketing, and client success to actually work together, especially when the pressure is on in a tough market?
There is no secret – just the hard work of rowing together. We focus on celebrating success, maintaining daily communication, and actively breaking down any silos that arise. Our unifying mission is clear: ensuring our clients never overpay. Each department plays a crucial role in this mission. In marketing, we ask ourselves if we’re effectively communicating this message in the channels where our ideal clients are listening. In sales, it’s about building trust and genuinely uncovering ways to help clients avoid overspending. In client success, it’s all about aligning with the client’s north star—their desired outcome—and striving to achieve it together. When we align around the client’s needs, great things happen.
With all the changes in technology and data, how do you stay ahead of the curve while making sure your team isn’t just chasing the latest trend but actually driving revenue?
This is where one of our core company values comes into play—making decisions with data. When working with clients, we rely on over 500,000 pricing benchmarks to ensure they never overpay, and we apply that same data-driven approach to our internal decisions about technology and tools. The tools and technologies we adopt must help us serve our clients better. Whether it’s revenue intelligence tools that guide our reps in enhancing their meetings, intent and signal tools that identify clients who may need our help, productivity tools that make us more efficient, or advanced analytics that enable better negotiations for our clients, our focus is on embracing tools that help us achieve our mission of ensuring clients never overpay.
For example, on the revenue intelligence side, we use a best-in-class tool that provides visibility into our conversations, opportunities, and client interactions. The data from this tool gives us a clear understanding of what our clients want: they want us to involve multiple stakeholders, minimize their involvement due to limited time and resources, give them a clear picture of their indirect spend compared to peers and industry benchmarks, and achieve savings without disrupting their operations. Armed with this knowledge, our sales and client success processes can be client-driven. These tools have allowed us to double our win rate and significantly increase our average deal sizes. The best part is, when we win, our clients win too.
Eric Steele is an accomplished B2B revenue leader, currently serving as the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of SIB, the leading cost reduction and contract compliance services firm across major spend categories serving as a trusted partner to business leaders in mid-market, enterprise, government, and private equity organizations. Prior to joining SIB, Eric served as CRO at Source Advisors and held various roles during a 15-year career with Forrester, a leading global marketing and technology research and advisory firm. His commitment to excellence at Forrester was recognized with the “Benjamin Villien Award,” a tribute to integrity, client-centric focus, passion, and exemplary people leadership.
Eric’s academic credentials include an MBA with distinction from the Jack Welch Management Institute and an undergraduate degree from the University of Oklahoma.
A Dallas, TX resident, Eric cherishes family life with his wife and their two sons and is actively involved in coaching his sons’ sports teams and believes his primary job is to be a good Dad. As an active member of the CRO Collective, Eric continues to influence the realm of revenue leadership, sharing his insights and experiences to inspire others in the field.
If anyone is reading this and their company is facing economic challenges right now – or they just want to become more profitable – SIB is built to help you. We exist to ensure that our clients never overpay. We reduce our clients’ costs by 11-35% in over 15 spend categories, typically without changing vendors or service levels. Please reach out to me directly and I’ll make sure you are taken care of.
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