This guide will serve as a resource to help direct your conversation about reviewing pitch materials. This guide is in place to provide structure and guidance only. There is no expectation for you to review everything on this list at any set time; please use at your convenience.
Conversation Topics
- Who is the decision maker for this vendor?
- For each of the major decision makers:
- Where are their organizations located?
- How technically adept or engaged are they?
- How did they rise to the seniority they’re at now?
- Where did they come from before {{Target_Company}}?
- Who are their counterparts in other orgs?
- Who do they work with regularly? Who do they like working with? Who do they not like working with?
- How are new ideas brought into the organization? How did the last big vendor get brought in?
- For each of the clients products, who are the major decision makers that would be involved in a purchase decision?
- What are their names or titles?
- Who do they report to?
- Who do they delegate tasks to?
- Who do they go to for advice?
- What are their main challenges?
- What is their personality like?
- Is their decision making driven more by quantitative or qualitative reasoning? Why?
- What are their budgets?
- What goals will be presented during the pitch?
- How will the client add value to the organization?
- How will this solution integrate with current technology / vendors?
- Which current customer should the client point to as an example?
- What kind of ROI would be most attractive to the target company?
- What kind of stories make the most impact in pitches or approaches at the target company?
- How do the following factors affect the impact of a case study: brand, size, innovativeness of program, industry, or size of customer?
- Are there any companies that should definitely NOT be included in a case study?
- Are there any current vendors at the target company that provide a part of the client’s product or similar products?
- What is the best way to present this information to the decision makers?
- What are pain points in the organization that could be addressed by the client’s product?
- Are there initiatives that the target company wants to undertake but can’t due to structural limitations?
- Are there areas where the company recognizes that they are behind the curve and want to improve?
- What business units should the client work with?
- How do the decision makers evaluate success?
- What are the main obstacle for expansion of a product?
- Who should the client direct their messaging to?
- Who should the client anticipate is going to be most and least receptive to the solution? Why?
- What level of involvement should the client expect from the decision maker(s)?
- Does the decision maker have a preference to certain solutions?
- What words / phrases should the client avoid using in messaging?
- Send deck and materials to advisor for feedback around messaging
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Tony Jaros
Chief Executive Officer
A product-focused, customer obsessed leader with a long track record of bringing new ideas to complex markets while building high performing and collaborative teams, Tony most recently served as CEO at Legacy Data Access, a healthcare software company. Other notable roles include CEO of CultureIQ, an employee engagement company sold to Perceptyx in 2021, and President and Chief Product Officer of SiriusDecisions, which he joined as a startup almost 20 years ago and helped build the organization into the worldwide leader in B2B sales, marketing and product management research, benchmarking and advisory services. Early in his career, Tony held product and consulting roles at Peppers & Rogers Group and Simba Information. He holds an MBA from New York University and a BSJ in Journalism from Northwestern University.
Erin Provey
VP Products
Erin has 20 years of experience in B2B product and service innovation and leadership roles, with a consistent focus on growth through customer-centricity. Most notably, Erin spent nearly a decade at SiriusDecisions (now part of Forrester Research) in a range of research and advisory product leadership roles, responsible for the entire innovation lifecycle: discovery, design, development, sales enablement, launch, implementation, and research/voice-of-the-customer-based iteration and enhancement. As part of this work, she was one of the most prolific commercially-viable content creators and public speakers, authoring and presenting hundreds of commercially-viable research briefs, models, frameworks, templates, tools, and one patented methodology – building world-class delivery teams and working closely with hundreds of the world’s leading B2B marketing leaders to operationalize these best practices in pursuit of revenue objectives.
Adam Rice
VP Engineering
Dynamic, results-driven agile technology leader with over 12 years of leadership experience and 10 years of hands-on software development experience. Adam has significant expertise in designing, building, and running highly available software as a service. He loves being part of a team where he can be instrumental in building and running a world-class team of software practitioners based on shared cultural values including collective ownership, pragmatic mastery, and continuous improvement.
Diana Kudajarova
VP of Operations
Diana has extensive experience in senior operational roles at technology startups. Before becoming VP of Operations, she was Emissary’s Chief of Staff and Head of Revenue Operations. Prior to joining Emissary, she was Director of Sales Operations for Burning Glass (a Boston-based job market analytics company). Diana has a PhD in History from Harvard University and was, in another life, a consultant for Monitor Consulting and professor of management at Moscow School of Management. Diana was also a co-founder and operator of four critically acclaimed restaurants in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts,
Morgan Costello
Director, Advisor Operations
Morgan oversees advisor operations at Emissary. Prior to joining Emissary, Morgan spent the last 9 years building and optimizing high performing operations teams from the ground up. Morgan previously ran operations at the home services network, Handy, scaling the professional platform by over 10x before being acquired by ANGI Homeservices. Having worked in professional services and consumer services, Morgan is an expert in how to scale and grow operations.
Seleste Lunsford
Chief Research and Strategy Officer
Seleste has been a leader and consultant in the sales effectiveness space for over 20 years, running professional services, product and marketing organizations. She is a regular contributor to industry publications, a conference speaker and has written two books and countless papers on B2B revenue strategies.
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