Leveraging Internal Champions with Mark Birch (Stack Overflow)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Mark Birch, an Enterprise Sales Executive at Stack Overflow, to discuss "Leveraging Internal Champions." Stack Overflow is the world's largest and most trusted community for software developers. A question and answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers, Stack Overflow caters to developers and provides a forum for learning, knowledge sharing, and career advancement. The Company also provides enterprise customers with a powerful database to reach out to a targeted talent pool as well as package reports for corporate customers. Mark joined us in the studio to discuss ways of leveraging internal champions during the enterprise sales cycle. He reflects upon his experiences at Stack Overflow, as well as his background as the Founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum, a 10,000 person global B2B sales community of enterprise sales professions. As a part of our discussion of leveraging internal champions, Mark discusses the process of identifying, coaching, and providing digestible information to internal champions. He also provides insights into the ways that champions can assist with mapping a purchasing path within organization and providing insight into the segments within the business where gaps may emerge. We conclude the discussion identifying best practices and identifying scenarios in which you build credibility and avoid the painful "stall, evade, quiet" cycle of losing a champion.