This week on Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall is once again flying solo while Corey Frank is out traveling the world. Chris’ guest today is Helen Fanucci, Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader at Microsoft — and Chris’ fiancée! The topic today veers away from competing with other companies for market domination, to competing with other companies for market talent. It’s just another result of our almost year and a half of working from home due to the pandemic: People now want flexibility in where they work and when they work.

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Helen explains that, because of this, managers have to manage and hire differently today, and provide the flexibility that workers might prefer. “We have to manage for outcome and results,” she says, “not just how long people are spending in the office.” Companies need to understand how to get the best out of their teams, building in that flexibility so that people want to continue to work. Another change is the necessity of asking how your team is doing on a personal level. Helen tells Chris, “If members of your team aren’t doing well, how can your company meet customers’ needs?” Employees exercise more power now with their decisions to stay at their current job or look elsewhere for a company that is willing to meet their needs, so it becomes imperative for managers and companies to be the kind of people that employees want to work for. Want to know more? Then listen to today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Will They Stay or Will They Go?”

 

About Our Guest

Helen Fanucci has been a valued employee at Microsoft for 13 years and is currently their Strategic Accounts Global Sales Leader, heading up an incredible global team of seasoned sales professionals who are working with some of Microsoft's most strategic accounts.

 

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Chris Beall (01:50):

Hey, everybody, welcome to an unusual episode of Market Dominance Guys. For one thing, we are missing my co-host, the estimable, maybe inestimable, I don't know how to estimate him, Corey Frank, who is off somewhere. I don't know if he went off on this cruise ship behind me or if he's doing something else, but he's not available today. And so we're going to have me play the host. And with me today is Helen Fanucci. And full disclosure, Helen Fanucci and I are engaged to marry each other. That's how it works is you marry each other. It's not a passive voice, like to be married, it's active voice because we're active people.

Chris Beall (02:30):

And Helen is working for Microsoft. She calls herself a sales manager. I think that's accurate. She is a sales manager, but she manages some really, really big strategic accounts at Microsoft. But Helen has a substantial career in sales and sales management, also in marketing and actually an MIT-trained engineer, mechanical engineer, which is pretty unusual in the world of sales. So Helen, welcome to Market Dominance Guys.

Helen Fanucci (03:01):

Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here and delighted to be here with you.

Chris Beall (03:05):

It's pretty cool. So Helen, we've been talking on Market Dominance Guys for 80-something episodes about one thing, which is dominating markets in terms of competing for customers and particularly competing for markets. So markets are all those collection of customers that are inter-referencing, so if you sell to one, your risk and the cost of selling to every other single one within the market.

Chris Beall (03:30):

You have been looking at the world of successful companies, being successful and being successful as a sales manager and being successful in all these ways, in a completely different way. Basically, turning the lens around almost exactly 180 degrees and talking about something that we have literally never mentioned on Market Dominance Guys, which is how the world is structured now, with regard to companies competing with each other.

Chris Beall (04:01):

And your thesis appears to be that companies are