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Gary Young
Head of External Sales Business Unit Automation at VITRONIC Machine Vision
about
Gary Young
Gary Young is currently the Head of External Sales Business Unit Automation at VITRONIC Machine Vision, a position he has held since January 2021. In this role, he leads the external sales business unit for automation, covering sectors including intralogistics, healthcare, and automotive. Gary brings over 25 years of experience in the B2B technology sector, with a focus for the last 11 years on global sales and business development leadership. His expertise spans the intralogistics market, particularly in CEP and postal sectors, as well as machine vision technology.
How would you characterise your organisation's approach to revenue generation, and what factors influence this?
Our approach is a blend of both sales-led and marketing-led strategies. Taking a holistic view, I'd say it's more marketing-led because we collaborate with marketing to identify our target accounts and devise our overall strategy and plan. We're very focused on thought leadership, promoting white papers, and speaking at summits – essentially educating the market.
That said, we're also heavily driven by outbound activity. We track key performance indicators that give us insights into the balance between marketing and sales efforts. We know our customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, which serve as good indicators of this balance.
How has the increasing complexity of B2B buying groups affected your sales process, and what do you need from marketing to better engage these diverse stakeholders?
The landscape has changed dramatically, especially since COVID-19. We're now operating in a more hybrid environment, with a mix of online and in-person interactions. This shift has made it challenging to engage with all stakeholders in the decision-making unit, as it's harder to get everyone together for remote meetings.
From a marketing perspective, we need to know who is trying to engage with us remotely. Tools like 6sense have shown us that interactions often come from unexpected departments and geographical locations. It's quite eye-opening to see the global nature of these interactions after we've engaged with a customer.
What types of buyer intent signals or data do you need from marketing to help you identify and engage prospects earlier in their buying journey?
We need to know when potential customers are active in their buying journey. Given that only about 10% of our market is active at any given point, identifying who they are and where they're located is crucial. Ideally, we'd like to know their job descriptions, what they're looking at on our digital properties, and how long they're engaging with our content.
In addition, we need algorithms that can help us determine their level of intent. Are they simply curious, or are they actively looking to buy? This information allows us to personalise our outbound marketing efforts and engage directly when appropriate.
As a global company working with global accounts, we're often looking for a needle in a haystack. The world has changed, and decisions are now being made across the globe rather than locally. We need to understand these global dynamics to be effective.
How do you envision the ideal sales and marketing collaboration, and what specific support from marketing would have the biggest impact on your sales success?
I believe we have a good relationship between sales and marketing, but there's always room for improvement. Ideally, there should be no clear lines between the two functions – it should be a blurred, integrated approach where sales and marketing are part of the same team, sharing communication channels and understanding common goals.
One area where we can improve is integrating marketing more deeply into the customer journey. Currently, they're primarily focused on inbound activity, but I think they need to be involved throughout the entire customer journey. When a customer shows intent to buy, marketing should be ready to help personalise our message and engagement strategy.
The biggest shift I've seen in recent years is the need for marketing to be involved at an individual account level, not just at a broad market level. This personalised approach is crucial for success in today's complex B2B landscape.
What capabilities do you wish your marketing team could provide in terms of understanding buyer behaviour and engaging accounts? How would these capabilities change your approach to selling?
The 'dark funnel' is a significant topic for us. If we could better understand and illuminate this dark funnel, especially on a global basis, it would help us engage our group companies much quicker and more effectively.
We're all navigating a situation where budgets are tighter and sales cycles are reduced. This means we need to engage much faster when a customer shows readiness. It's not always about being proactive; sometimes, we need to be reactive because 60-80% of the engagement happens behind the scenes, in the dark.
This shift requires a different type of salesperson – one who can adapt quickly and engage effectively when the customer is ready, understanding that the sales process has already moved through certain stages by that point. It's a fundamental change in how we approach sales, and marketing plays a crucial role in providing the insights and support needed for this new approach.
about
VITRONIC Machine Vision
VITRONIC Machine Vision, founded in 1984 and based in Wiesbaden, Germany, is a global leader in industrial machine vision technology. The company specialises in developing and manufacturing advanced vision systems and software for industries such as logistics, automotive, healthcare, and traffic technology. VITRONIC's products are used for quality control, measurement, identification, and traffic monitoring, leveraging cutting-edge image processing and automation solutions.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.