Topic: Corporate Growth Secrets from a Silicon Valley Veteran

Speaker: Mr. Hilmon Sorey, author, entrepreneur, sales exec, company founder, coach, consultant

Presentation:
Companies in all industries, in all locations, and at all stages of growth face a whole host of challenges as they work their way through avoiding disaster and climbing up the ladder of success.  The challenges may be financial; they may be focused on marketing; the company could have tricky product design or manufacturing and supply chain challenges, or even human resource issues to challenge the most talented and creative human resource executive.... all, of course, with the help of you, their talented financial colleagues.

As talented financial colleagues, the CFO and senior financial staff maintain a broader perspective on all the above issues than the individuals in the C-level seats, who typically have to focus their attention and energies on their respective areas of responsibility.  That puts us in a unique position of being able to help clarify cross-functional issues, and to help facilitate their resolution.

Across the firmament of American companies, and indeed companies around the world, one interesting phenomenon occasionally pops into our consciousness, a phenom that has become a bit legendary over the past several decades, which is that that area known as Silicon Valley seems to have given rise to a disproportionate number of startups that became billion dollar companies.

There's no doubt that there are some unique things in the culture of Silicon Valley that have enabled the success of companies that may not have made it "big" elsewhere.  There have been books written on the subject by modern-day cultural anthropologists.  And there's no shortage of business execs who live there who will be happy to tell you, "OH, yeah... we've definitely got something special"...!

We're not going to try to figure that all out, or debate it, in the course of a one hour discussion.  But what we are going to do is benefit by hearing from one business exec who built his career in multiple Silicon Valley companies, and who, along the way, picked up some good lessons, some pearls of wisdom, some ways of thinking about issues that have something to offer all of us.  Some of them may seem like common sense; while some may seem like brilliant approaches, the stuff of which "why didn't I think of that" comments are made.

In this talk, Hilmon Sorey -- one of those successful, former denizens of Silicon Valley, with such companies as SalesForce.com, SurveyMonkey, Box, Bill.com -- is going to tell us about a number of business situations which he experienced over the years, and what lessons he learned from them.  In this talk, he will cover such things as:
- How to acquire and retain the talent necessary to win.
- Understanding your real markets.
-  Defining your target markets as narrowly as possible, to maximize messaging effectiveness.
-  Understanding direct versus indirect competition, and knowing which is more important.
-  Utilizing the Four Pillars of Sales Effectiveness.
-  Recognizing the "winning zone" and what it takes to get into it.
-  Recognizing the benefits of automated systems, but also realizing what situations are not right for automating.
-  Understanding the value of having the right people in the right seats.
-  Don't try to boil the ocean: the theory of marginal gains.

Sone of what Hilmon relates to us may be things you already know, but on which it's nice to get a reminder of how important they are... or maybe he'll take one of those things you know and give a slightly different perspective on it.  Some of the things may seem prosaically "inside the box", while others may show definitely "outside the box" thinking, while still others may give us ideas on how to turn the box itself inside out to build something creative and different.

Our speaker topic this month, as with most months, is a subject of interest to CFOs and other senior financial executives in any size and type of company, and for both US-only companies as well as companies in the global marketplace.  NOTE that if you wish to bring a corporate culture colleague or your CEO or other senior executive as your guest, please feel free to do so, and get them registered as soon as possible. 

Speaker's bio:

Our speaker of many talents, Hilmon Sorey, has been at various times an entrepreneur, company co-founder, angel and venture investor, sales executive, trainer, strategist, author, speaker and podcast host.  And as of this week, living as he does in southern Florida, he can add to that list "Survivor of Hurricane Ian", while helping others make it through the hurricane as well!

Hilmon is Co-Founder of CoachCRM, sales coaching software for managers, based in San Francisco, and Co-Founder and Managing Director of ClozeLoop, a sales strategy, training and enablement firm with offices in New York, Houston, Silicon Valley and Johannesburg.  In addition to his active work with those two firms, he is a partner in 2.12 Angels, a seed-stage venture capital firm, and author of eight top-selling books on sales, sales management and coaching.  He interviews thought leaders and innovators on The Winning Zone (TWZ), and shares his expertise for scaling companies on his Scale Academy podcasts. 

He has helped build teams in companies that range from early-stage startups to Salesforce, Box, SurveyMonkey and Bill.com, and some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, over the years totaling over $600 billion in market valuation.

He has developed intimate hands-on experience with what made those companies take off, and he fully brings that experience to bear in his coaching and training gigs. He is an award-winning trainer who has trained over 15,000 salespeople and over 5,000 executives.  He is a sought-after trainer and speaker around the globe.

In his spare time, Hilmon has served as the Board Chair of the Museum of Children's Art in San Francisco.  He is an active participant in the Forbes Business Council.  He is a frequent speaker around the world on the subjects of sales, sales management, entrepreneurship, effective company management and following your personal passions.

To Attend:
Meetings are for members, prospective members and invited guests only. For non-members, RSVP is required by writing to chapter chair, Dan Ruchman at [email protected]. Please include a one or two sentence description of who you are, and your interest in attending the meeting. Thank you.

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CPE Credits: Reminder for those members maintaining their professional certifications - we offer the documentation for Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits for our speaker presentations. For those members interested in this, you may complete the appropriate forms, which we'll have available at the meeting, for 1.0 hours of CPE credit

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