Category: Most Inspiring CEO 2021 profile

Michael Whife: An Innovator and Leader

Meet Michael Whife, the Chief Executive Officer of Selling Simplified Group, Inc. Wife has exceptionally portrayed his unique ideologies and methodologies to lift him and his company to its current stature. As the leader of global B2B demand gen company, Whife has introduced various disruptive technologies to the industry that meet growing demand through an innovative, data-driven approach to business.

Tycoon Success admires leaders like Whife and takes pride in featuring him in this month’s special issue: “The 10 Most Inspiring CEO’s to Watch in 2021.”

Below are the highlights of the interview:

Innovative Services & Solutions

Selling Simplified Group, Inc. (SSG) takes a holistic, intent-driven approach to demand generation and martech solutions. Whife shared that the business was born from the idea that there are more opportunities to track engagement and garner insights from content consumption than traditional lead generation programs capture. The company offers two core solutions to helping marketers make more meaningful B2B connections:

Visionayr: This all-in-one marketing solution is designed to give B2B marketers a real-time view of organic demand and intent surrounding their products and customers. Operating atop SSG’s robust global database of 170M+ global B2B records, Visionayr offers a unique way to share content, track engagement, and drive high quality demand.

Integrated Programmatic: The SSG approach to programmatic display hinges on first-party data. While third-party data is costly and assumptions-based, first-party data ensures 100% targeting accuracy. Our programmatic offerings can be leveraged in any multichannel lead gen strategy, ensuring targeting efficiencies and reducing ad spend waste.

Customer-Centric

While Selling Simplified’s core mission has always revolved around helping its clients making more fruitful B2B connections, Whife and his team approached that mission in a few different ways before finally finding a path that set the company apart and enabled it to grow.

They developed the idea when they witnessed a need to capture intent. They realized that the company could provide more value for its clients by delivering digitally engaged sales leads. “To do this, we would need data,” he shared. As its proprietary database of B2B decision makers grew, the lead gen sphere became increasingly data-driven and started leveraging more digital methods. Whife’s team was able to grow over the past few years because they have built a vast global database and because their smart technology and global presence has positioned the company competitively in the market.

Selling Simplified primarily serves software and IT companies in the B2B space and has adopted a human-centered approach to demand gen, which can often be lost in the world of big data and marketing technology. Whife is committed to identifying and analyzing human behavior that’s useful to both its clients and their prospects. He stated that many SSG clients praise the company’s unique and out-of-the-box approach. Its core values center around customer service and localization, which the company believes go hand-in-hand. He and his team don’t believe in simply servicing clients from overseas; they strive to create jobs in the countries where the company does business. At the end of the day, Whife shared that the company’s technology is designed to help people. “This is core to what we do and the marketing message that we promote,” he said.

A Strong Team

The collective success of the company has contributed to the overall drive of Whife’s team. Thanks to an outstanding core leadership team, Selling Simplified has been able to create an environment that nurtures and cultivates its employees as professionals in the industry and allows them to grow within the organization.

Whife continues to emphasize the importance of corporate social responsibility and giving back to the community. “When we talk about Selling Simplified’s hyper-localized approach to doing business, one of the biggest elements is our model of hiring local to create fully operational regional office,” he said.

In the Digital Age, quality data plays a crucial role in understanding the market and empathizing with the buyer’s evolving needs. Data is an incredibly personal form of currency that, when mishandled, can have dangerous effects. Selling Simplified has always taken data security and privacy seriously, and Whife considers this a major responsibility of him and his company.

Whife also stated that some of the changes that the company made to its operating model over the years have been tumultuous for the company and were difficult to implement as a leader, but in hindsight he would now say that they were in the company’s best interest.

Lastly, Whife shared that Selling Simplified has nearly doubled the size of its team and continues to employ some of the most, talented, innovative, and seasoned individuals in the industry. This accomplishment is truly the result of all of its team’s tenacity, first-rate customer service, and knack for ingenuity. Whife expressed that he could not be prouder to work amongst such a fine group of global leaders in an innovative company such as theirs.

Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do -Warren G. Bennis

Future Endeavors

As the company continues to gain midsize status, Whife sees Selling Simplified becoming a truly viable competitor to top publisher and demand gen companies. While their presence in the Asia Pacific region continues to grow and further cement their status as APAC market leaders, Whife has expansion plans for Europe, North America, and Latin America.

“As we continue to expand throughout the globe, we pride ourselves on maintaining a data-driven, culturally sensitive presence,” said Whife. Around the world, Selling Simplified captures data in-language, and all their records come from a subscriber opt-in network that complies with global privacy & data regulations.  As they continue to open offices around the world and build a data capture system that mirrors the nuance of those regions, they are positioned to be the largest demand generation and data service provider in APAC and a competitive force in the world.

Selling Simplified also researches market trends to understand evolving needs and continues to set up global operations in an agile fashion. The company focuses on developing tools that improve their global database and add intelligence to the data. In the future,  Whife intends to adapt their products and hone their hyper-localized approach to demand gen, highlighting their opt-in framework that guarantees real-time, quality intent data for clients.

Awards and Achievements

2020 achievements:

  • 94 new employees are hired
  • 200+ new clients are added to the clientele list
  • 65% annualized growth was witnessed from 2019-20
  • 5 new offices are opened across the globe
  • The company achieved industry benchmark gross profit margin with 84% increase
  • Named on Inc. 5000’s list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America for fifth straight year

Parting Advice

Whife stated that growth and success are huge motivators for any team, which includes collective success and individual success. He advised that one must be patient and believe in one’s team and their ability to deliver. One must also empower others to do their best work and continue learning and expanding one’s skill set, even if it has nothing to do with the day job.

For companies seeking global expansion, Whife shared some tips:

  • Be patient with expansion and understand that it requires cultural adaptation
  • Ensure leadership has an authentic sensitivity to culture and empowers the team to deliver
  • Understand every market’s unique business challenges and business customs
  • Account for data capture and privacy policies, and capture data in-language
  • Strive to support local communities, hire locally, and contribute to the world

Ralf Parfuss: Transforming business with a Decisive Approach

Meet Ralf Parfuss, the Chief Executive Officer of Connect.it, whose unique ideologies and methodologies have led him and his company to its current successful stature. His decisive nature and driven by implementing innovation to transform the traditional custom ways. Through quoting, “It is not about being the best, but being better than you were yesterday,” he emphasizes over one’s ability to be persistent and march forward for the greater good. He suggests many a book by Daniel Kahneman titled “Think fast and slow”, which he believes is exceptionally brilliant to understand functioning of whole life.

Tycoon Success admire such leaders and appreciate Ralf’s contribution in the evolution of business. The magazine takes pride in featuring him in this special issue.

Below are the highlights of the interview:

Into the Shoes of Ralf

Ralf mentions, at the age of 45, he was already an exceptional manager specializing in IT and IoT projects and start-ups with their finger on the pulse. As a visionary, he follows his inner drive. He prefers and sees the big picture, can imagine what it is like when you change things and implement his visions and ideas in his company with persistence and a culture of innovation. As a free and lateral thinker, he succeeds in identifying and solving problems in an incredibly creative way and through various means and ways.

His will to personal commitment is unruly in the foreground. Driven by a thirst for knowledge, he is never satisfied with simple answers. His extensive network of contacts, which are mutually beneficial, proves his decisiveness also existing ideas of other people are taken up and improved. His vision is to forge new paths, to question previous “truths” and to confidently and independently commit to something. Ultimately, he often trusts his intuition and cannot always explain everything down to the last detail. He instinctively follows his nose and is mostly sure to be on the right track.

In the year 2019, he was honored as one of the 10 best CEO’s. As IoT enthusiast he founded 2014 among others the company t-matix with the first programming free IoT platform worldwide, already before the IoT market was born. In order to make his start-up a success, he was convinced that it was necessary to bring in the know-how and clout of an international player and sold t-matix to this company. Due to his experience, technical competence, creativity and implementation skills, he has a good eye for markets and technology and is someone who recognizes at an early stage needs and potential and brings an idea to implementation. Countless contacts to major players and experience in the field of financing and M&A take all projects to a great success. Driven by a thirst for knowledge, Ralf Parfuss is never satisfied with simple answers. How can you do something better? Why does something not work, or: If A works, B should work too – such questions and considerations are typical for him. His main principle is to have fun at work. This is the only way to successfully implement products and projects. Right from the start, the focus is always on the conclusive definition of goals and well-structured business plans in order to be able to measure progress afterwards.

Products to Rely On

Ralf states that with connect.it he and his team are specialized in business development of digital products in software, telematics and IoT. Whilst, these technical skills combined with its ERP and process knowledge cover all necessary and mandatory things to be successful. A wide range of small companies but also big international players trust in its developing small to huge products and projects, which are predominantly of a technical nature. In the past few years, company have implemented more than 100 IT projects. Currently it has successfully supported the establishment of a large cell phone operator and a company with toll and traffic management, but also implemented telematics products for OEMs and large construction companies, and not at least, it has created and developed the world’s first independent and programming-free IoT platform within t-matix. Moreover he states that the company is planning and executing the visionary orientation of several start-ups, mainly supporting and connecting their products with revolutionary IoT processes., most exciting is the realization of an unprecedented invention.

The company works for small startups up to large international companies. He states that the overriding principle is to gain trust in its work with openness, honesty and handshake quality. “Even if things don’t go well, you have to address things openly and solve them together,” he adds. The company focuses on the goal and the solution, technology is always challenging and has no place for a culture of claiming.  Connect.it counts on its team with extensive know-how and a lot of experience as well as all the necessary resources for successful implementation, which are:- Visionary orientation and creativity combined with technical know-how- Financing and operational processing including controlling- Marketing and Design- Software and hardware development- Project implementation- Operations and support- High M&A experience

Well-led Team Ralf states that to be based on an equal footing and appreciation always have top priority, and thus the focus must be on people. He and his always try to promote the strengths of every employee and at this point it is important to understand that not everyone can do everything, but that strengths have to be evaluated first. Further he states, the team with the right skills and responsibilities needs to be aligned. He and his team achieve fairness by working out and setting goals with every employee from individual employees to top management. “Only under this circumstances an employee has the chance to reach a successful day-to-day work,” says Ralf.

Overcoming the Challenges

 “Growth is the primary challenge,” quotes Ralf. It sounds very simple, but the challenges are that every employee has the right work orders on the table every morning, that the goal is clearly defined and that everybody has the chance to go home after a successful day with the feeling that he or she has brought the company a step forward again. He states that in particular, leading across multiple levels is extremely difficult for managers. As defining goals and good communication is the key to success yet, this is often underestimated and creates a lot of problems for employees. He also emphasizes that the key to success is to focus on the goal and get everyone on board with power and enthusiasm. “But above all the right team and people around you who can be relied on are crucial. And even when things don’t go well you have to learn to hand over responsibility,” he states.

The company has won many awards and attained many achievements, are mention below:

  • 2017 Telematik Award Gold
  • 2018 DIGITAL Impuls Award
  • 2019 Telematik Award Gold
  • 2020 Top Smart Cities Provider in Europe
  • 2021 Top List in Telematics

Advice worth Appreciating

Ralf advices that one must take time for his/her team and management to develop a clear strategy. One must also define targets and milestones with KPI’s that can be measured. “In the next step synch and communicate with your team and review the progress at least monthly,” says Ralf. Further he states that excellent co-operations with good partnerships are the key, especially in the complex tech area one need to scale. “You can reach this goal with great partnerships and the right planning,” he adds.

Exit mobile version