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Christopher is responsible for all global marketing, business development, and go-to-market strategies at Qvidian. As an accomplished global marketing executive with deep domain expertise in the technology sector, Christopher has a proven track record with high growth companies. Most recently he was with SumTotal Systems (acquired by Vista Equity), where he led integration and transformation across four successful M&A transactions, while delivering dynamic marketing initiatives resulting in significant pipeline growth. Christopher was chief marketing officer at Softscape, where he grew the company to be a category leader and successfully exited with the sale of the company to SumTotal Systems. Prior to that Christopher was the EVP of global marketing at WBT Systems in Dublin, Ireland (acquired by AVNET Group), and the founder of several other venture-backed software companies leading innovative marketing execution and product strategies.

Christopher Faust

The results from Qvidian’s second annual Sales Execution Trends Survey reveal the top objectives and challenges facing sales leaders in 2015.

You Think You Know Sales Trends—But Here’s Data to Validate Your Assumptions

Shift the Performance Curve: Make Your Middle Sales Performers Incrementally Better

Qvidian recently surveyed sales and marketing executives from companies around the globe to better understand their outlook for 2015. Please join Qvidian’s Chief Marketing Officer Christopher Faust and Marketing Director Amanda Wilson for a live webinar as they review the results of the annual State of Sales Execution Survey, which include key objectives for sales organizations in 2015, the challenges and obstacles they expect to face, and the investment areas needed to improve sales execution.
Attendees will receive valuable insight into this year’s sales trends:

Executive management priorities imply that most organizations will continue to be in growth mode for 2015.
Slow sales rep ramp-up continues to be the hurdle for organizations achieving quotas.
Efficiency remains a priority for organizations with increasing upsell and cross-sell efforts, and they are streamlining sales processes to meet this objective.
 


2015 Sales Execution Trends Research Results

Every sales organization can be categorized into top, middle, and bottom performers. Top performing sales reps can be counted on for hitting quota and making those deals happen that didn't look possible. Most reps, however, fall into that middle category. Consider that a simple 5 percent gain in the middle 60 percent of your sales performers can deliver more than 91 percent greater sales than a 5 percent shift in your top performers.
What if you could bump up your middle performers by just 5 percent?
Join our webinar to better understand:

the art and science of understanding your middle performers
practical tips to help motivate those sales reps
the full financial impact of motivating your middle performers.
 


Moving the Middle: Motivating Existing Sales Teams to Perform Better

Martin Luther King Jr. was many things, but few would see him as a great model for business leaders.King exemplifies two types of organizational leadership vital to today’s business environment, according to Christopher Neck, associate professor of management at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, and his colleague Jeffrey Godwin of Saint Vincent College. They argue that King was a transformational and servant leader, and enterprises today would benefit greatly from adopting his techniques.When Neck and Godwin started using King as an example of leadership in class, their categorizations differed—Neck saw him as a servant leader, and Godwin saw him as a transformational leader.Transformational leaders articulate a vision, while servant leaders believe in empowering and developing people on an individual level. Both types of leaders aim to empower employees and improve performance, but the transformational leader focuses more on the organization as a whole, while the servant leader focuses more on individuals. Both paths lead to the same goal, and in the end, the two types have more commonalities than differences, Neck says. “If you care about employees first, they will work harder, and their performance will improve. At the end of the day, it’s all about the organization.”In his research on King, Neck found examples of both types of leadership. King had a vision and set a model for followers to emulate. His expectations were high, and he challenged people about their assumptions. But he was also patient, advocating nonviolence and cooperation. He promoted equality and fairness and helped individuals believe in themselves, realizing that personal motivation was the key to social change.In research published in the Journal of Leadership and Management, Neck and Godwin examined a particular phase of King’s career: the “Chicago Campaign” of 1966. To end housing discrimination in the area, King moved into an apartment in the city’s west-side slums and began working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO).In August 1966, King led about 700 people in a protest march through all-white neighborhoods in Chicago. Angry residents gathered, but King was not deterred. Working with the SCLC and the CCCO, he planned another march, this time in the white, middle-class suburb of Cicero. Worried town leaders met with King and other civil rights leaders to discuss the march. The civil rights groups agreed to cancel the march, and in exchange, the city promised to guarantee accessible housing to African Americans.City leaders, for the most part, failed to follow through on the pact. King, though bitterly disappointed and angry, was not a short-term thinker.“It was one cog in his strategy to bring attention to his vision,” Neck says. “Even if the organizational outcome failed, he didn’t fail from a servant leader perspective. He helped people believe in themselves. He brought people together and brought attention to achieving equal education and facilities.”Though the business world has changed tremendously since King’s day, his leadership style is more relevant than ever.In the past, workers often stayed with a company for 20 or 30 years, and authoritarian leadership was the norm. In today’s fast-paced business environment, “it would be hard for an autocratic, top-down leader to survive,” Neck says. The pension carrot is gone. Frequent job change is the norm, and employers have a tough time finding and retaining skilled workers. Routine tasks are automated, and high-performance expectations are the norm. Employees accept the pressure, but only if they feel their work is valued and has meaning.A transformational leader provides a vision that inspires workers to come together and rise to challenges. A servant leader empowers them to use their best skills and make independent decisions that ultimately benefit the entire company.

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