Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 373 Q & A with Jen Allen-Knuth

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “Hard Truths and Lessons Learned for Sellers in 2025“ and my guest is Jen Allen-Knuth, Founder at DemandJen.

Tune in to Learn About:

• How SKOs can provide practical, actionable education.
• Examples of effective SKO practices that focus on real human connections.
• The importance of balancing technology with human interaction in sales.
• Jen Allen-Knuth’s advocacy for shelter dogs and how it intersects with her professional journey.

Whether you’re tuning in for sales insights or the heartwarming tale of rescued dogs, this episode promises valuable takeaways for everyone. Stay connected and make meaningful contributions to your field and community.

LISTEN NOW | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW:

Matt: All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I am your host, Matt Heinz

Welcome to Sales Pipeline Radio. So glad you all are here. If you’re joining us live in the middle of your work day and work week, thank you so much for making us part of your day.

If you are watching and listening on demand thank you for downloading, for listening, for subscribing. Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio past, present, and future always available at salespipelineradio.com. Very excited to have today Jen Allen-Knuth, the Founder of the CEO, the world traveler and home for a period of time in the midst of SKO season, but Jen, thanks for making a little time for us.

Jen: Thank you so much for having me.

Matt: I know you’re doing a ton of SKOs. I got to know you through Brent Adamson. I know you guys worked together at Challenger for quite a bit, but for those that don’t you know you, share a little bit about yourself.

Jen: Yeah. So I was a salesperson. I met brent very early on in my career, we both worked for a company called Corporate Executive Board, and it was basically a best practice research subscription that companies like CXOs would pay for annually. And I started that job in 2004. I was lucky enough to be able to learn from Brent and other brilliant people there about what sales leaders, what marketing leaders were up against, how the best companies in the world were overcoming it

and 18 years later, I found myself never wanting to go into management or leadership or any of that stuff. I was a lifer seller and I just always felt like there was so much for me to learn. I don’t think sales is one of those places you can ever truly become an expert. And so the last year I was at Challenger, which was a division that split off,

I created the role of Chief Evangelist Officer at the company and then spent a lot of time getting in front of sales organizations talking about the Challenger principles and things like that. And that’s where I realized, gosh, I love doing this. I love being out in the field. I love changing the way people think. What if I just made that my whole freakin’ job?

Matt: And that’s how DemandJen was born. I forgot that you go all the way back to early days of CEB. And the older I get and the more mistakes I make, the more I realize like there are special companies with special cultures. And I didn’t know a lot of CEB but got to know Brent, got to know Martha a little bit, Nick and Matt Dixon

and it just seemed like just good people doing really strong work. Work is hard, building something is super hard. Sometimes it feels like chewing glass. But if you’re going to go into that environment like do it with good people, right?

And it just seems like CEB was good people.

Jen: You’re so right about it. I keep finding myself writing the same thing in a lot of my SKO posts when I come back from working with a company, which is who you choose to work with matters more than anything. Like I think what a blessing to be able to work with all these brilliant minds who are also really fun, not pretentious, humble.

And I grew up in a sales environment where coaching was really critical. Everybody did it. You did not last if you didn’t coach your teams. And so I think in many ways, that’s what made me love this profession so much as I grew up around people that just did it so well. I had so many role models to learn from and it was a tough sale, but it was worth doing because I felt like intellectually stimulated by it

and I looked around and thought gosh, I want to be like all these people. So yeah, totally I think it’s the only reason I stayed in sales that long.

Matt: Yeah. I think back at some of the companies that were really highlights of my career. And at the time it’s hard sometimes to see it

for what it is, because you’re in the grind and things are hard. And sometimes you just and you experience other places. You’re like, wow, that was special. And I think a lot about that now. We’re very small consulting firm, but we’ve got people, we’ve got values, we’re like, how do we create something special even just for the people here?

And then how does that manifest for the people we get to work with outside the company to o. But you mentioned SKOs. I know we’re this is we’re deep into SKO season now recording this at the beginning of February. We did a webinar last week with The Bridge Group and the topic was SKOs and one of the things we address is are they still relevant? Should we be doing these? Someone asked the question, if we were to say show me the list of the 20 most important things we need to do to drive revenue this year, starting from scratch, would SKOs make the list given how much they cost and given everything else? I can argue either side. I know you have to be careful because you’re hired to come speak and run, workshops and such at SKOs.

What makes the most successful SKOs in 2025? What makes them worthwhile?

Jen: Yeah. And this is such a fun question because I do get to see so many different flavors of them. And there’s definitely things I love and things that I can’t stand. So first and foremost, I’ll speak from the perspective of a seller being a salesperson who sat through 18 SKOs.

There were some I loved and there were some that I’m like, what did we do? What happened? I don’t remember anything. The ones I loved were typically the ones where the goal wasn’t motivation, meaning I don’t need you to fly me to some weird hotel with no windows and put on a light show and flash all of our solutions on the screen and talk about how are the world’s leading whatever. I work here because I obviously believe in what we’re doing and that’s given as a by product of it.

So in most cases, not all, I never really wanted the rah because I thought like you pay me to do this job. Clearly, I’m motivated to do it. I don’t need a cheerleading session. What I loved is when I could learn something new that helped me with my job to be done. So one of the things I really appreciate about CEB and it’s core to how I think about SKOs today is every year there was something that changed with buyer behavior or something that changed with seller behavior.

And the SKOs that really stood out to me that were the ones that 1). Educated me on that so I could stay ahead of trends and then 2). Got really tactical on What do I do in the face of this change? Like How do I evolve the way that I sell to combat this? And so I was always craving give me really tactical, smart things that I can then go back and try tomorrow.

So I’m not trying last year stuff and it’s in a different environment. So that [00:06:00] was one. Two, I think the big thing now I actually think SKOs matter a little bit more now. And obviously I’m biased, but I think they matter a little bit more now just because of everyone’s craving to be connected.

There’s still plenty of organizations that are remote workforces. And there is something to be said about bringing people together, being like, Oh, you’re the dude on the CS team that has saved my butt a hundred times. It’s great to meet you and shake your hand and thank you for the work that you do.

So I think that part is more relevant perhaps now than it was pre 2020, because I do think people crave that connection. But three, the last one would be like my least favorite thing that I see at SKOs is it’s just a knowledge out. Like people sit in that dark room. They’re talked at. Why bring people together to do that?

You just put people on a webinar. So I think if you’re going to do an SKO and you’re just going to talk to your audience that to me seems pointless right now for the expense that it necessitates.

Matt: I think just like anything a company does, if you’ve always done it, it can be easy just to go through the motions and do it again, that way again.

But I think that’s a recipe for leaking value out of something that has enormous amount of potential. And you made the point about the connections we need to make with each other. Until robots sell the robots or robots do all the work and we’re on Jetson’s land doing whatever,

I think it’s important that we think about those things, big and small. And a lot of the time we spend is virtual. Some of us are on the road more than others, but a lot of people work from home. You’re home between SKOs, I’m in my basement on a snow day. Seattle does not handle snow well. If you’re in Chicago, if you’re Detroit, you’re used to this, like we get a little bit of snow every year, but the joke here is that we have one plow.

We share it with Portland and then I think the plow must be in Portland today because it’s a mess out there, but I digress. I

We talk all the time about how much we want to have like high leverage things that scale that are super efficient. I want that too, but the connection we have with each other one on one is so important.

Jen: It is. It’s I think about it from the perspective of LinkedIn. Often, like I could post and ghost, or I could start like engaging. It means something to me if someone takes the time to engage in one of my posts, I’m going to try to comment back. Doesn’t mean I do it a hundred percent of the time, but it would be so awkward to walk into a party,

someone’s Oh my gosh, that was such a great thing you just said and then just stone cold stare at them. But when it’s a faceless medium like LinkedIn or email, we do that stuff all the time. So I try to look at it as there’s truly a human on the other side of this.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Jen Allen-Knuth.

She is the Founder CEO of DemandJen. We’re catching her in the middle of the busy SKO season. So excited to get a few minutes with her here. As you talk to teams, as you talk to executives and the people on the ground, what’s their feel

for this year? Almost everyone’s going to come in with a level of optimism, blank slate, we’re going to do something. But what’s the reality of what people think they’re facing this year?

Jen: I do think that it is way more of an optimistic overall viewpoint than it was last year.

I think last year, people were like deer in headlights. The world is falling apart. The fact that there’s still so much uncertainty, but we’re familiar with uncertainty. So I do feel like there’s a higher level of [00:09:00] confidence. I think the thing that is freaking people out is just the uncertainty of what business will look like six months from now.

I’ve certainly been surprised at the rate of change with things like AIs. If you look at ChatGPT when it came out versus ChatGPT now, I think there’s a degree to which we’re all like are company’s gonna be able to do these things on their own?

Are we even going to need to have as many vendors as there are? So that I think is the sensitivity point. Things are moving so quickly and there’s a lower level of confidence of is my job security okay in a world where people are building agents? And what is truly human versus what can we outsource to that?

So I would say that’s probably the piece that I sense the most like uncertainty around.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. In every situation is different. You could say we went through cycles of this when the internet emerged and when mobile really became critical mass. I remember seeing like Mary Meeker, she would always do the internet trends thing.

I remember like years ago, she’s we’re going to get to a point where we’re mobile first, where people are doing their phones more than their desktops. I’m like, there’s no way that. My brain could not even conceive that. Now we’re all well past that.

The first job I had at a school, my first real job, I was an intern for a PR firm, and one of my jobs was to write briefing books for execs going on media tours. No one does that anymore. You just press a button and the internet does it for you. The agents do it for you. It doesn’t mean that PR firms are out of a job.

It just means that task no longer is needed to be done by a human, and that’s a good thing. But I think, the fear of the future, I don’t think that goes away. I read a book recently, Oliver Berkman, I think is his name. He wrote The 2000 Weeks, and his recent book was Meditation for Mortals, and it’s not as much about meditation.

It is just like living in this imperfect world. And he takes the concept of let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Don’t worry about the bridge. Who knows where it is? Who knows how to get there? Who knows what it’s going to be like when you get there? You control today. You can think about the future and I think it’s relevant.

I’m in a sales role in my organization as well. Like I can’t worry about Q3. I can control how many calls I make today. I can CMOs I connect with. And so that what we control versus what we don’t control, I think matters.

Jen: Oh, big time. I think it’s impossible to thrive in a sales job

if you worry about all that you, which you cannot control. And this is no different. And I think to me, even though there’s a lot of this is dead and that’s dead and SDRs are dead, whatever. I think there’s always going to be a place for people who are highly effective at having conversations with executives.

Like to me, that’s not going to go away anytime soon. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not a freaking futurist. I don’t know. But I think if anything now is the time to double down and become a great seller, regardless of the situation that you’re in. So I do find that I meet a lot of sellers who are like, yeah, maybe our job gets

taken away by AI, but for the next six months, I’m going to go kill it and try to prove the value of having a human in this role. So I’m with you. I think it’s not worth worrying about something that we don’t have any idea is going to happen or not, but there’s no better time in my opinion to show that you’re more than just like a, sequence sender.

Matt: Yeah, I would agree with you. I think a couple of data points I have on that one is I was told a year and a half ago [00:12:00] that in a year and a half that BDRs would be extinct. We wouldn’t need them anymore.

Jen: Are they gone?

Matt: No, crazy, right? In fact, I’ve talked to companies that for part of last year would just through attrition, reduced the size of their BDR team were adopting AI agents.

Many of them ramped their team back up. Cause the AI agents weren’t doing the same job. Now, maybe that changes as the technology improves, but you think about the jobs to be done. If I can have a robot help me schedule a meeting or help me qualify somewhere, help me know what to say next. Okay, great.

But again, until robots sell the robots, I don’t know that this changes a lot. The other piece I’ve seen for years, I used to do a lot of work with real estate technology companies, and you’d see these like ebb and flow, the real estate market, and when housing prices would go down, when the market would go down, you’d see a lot fewer realtors, but if you did the math, the realtors that were left, we’re actually doing more business.

They were the good ones who knew what they were doing, who were actually benefiting from a down market. So I’m not saying it’s good that like people lose their jobs or have to quit what they’re doing. I just think if you care about your profession, if you care about the art of what you do. You will find a place in this world.

Jen: Absolutely. And we talk to this all the time, we love to hit the easy button in sales. If there’s an easier way to do something, we’re like, how fast can I hit this thing? And I think as a result, there’s a lot of leaders I’ve talked to who are like, Oh my gosh, can I show you this

new tool that’s writing my emails for our team? And I look at it, I’m like, this is one of the worst emails I think I’ve ever read. Would you respond to this email? No, but it’s so fast and it’s okay, I think we’re missing the plot. And so I do think there’s a pendulum swing here too, where people are going to go lean all the way in because if it makes it easier, we say yes.

And then find that middle ground where they’re like maybe we do need the human in the loop here and we can find other ways to use it. So I think we’re still early in that, right? We’re going to get really optimistic and then reality sets in, to your point about some of the agents.

Matt: And this isn’t just us as sellers, many of us are sellers and buyers.

So as recipients of this marketing and recipients of these messages, we get to decide which [00:14:00] ones we care about and want to respond to as well. So this isn’t completely out of our hands in any way on either side. All right. We’re starting to run out of time. And so we need to talk about dogs.

And so I’ve really enjoyed your content during the week. And then on Saturday you post pictures of dogs. As a dog lover, why is it important to you? And why did you decide to do that on Saturdays?

Jen: First of all, thank you for engaging it.

Appreciate it. Calling it out. I think one of the things I became very aware of is my audience size on LinkedIn grew. Like it just crossed to, I think 80,000. I was like, gosh, what a waste if I just sit here and talk about sales tips all day long. Like I’m still going to do it. But I want to do something that feels like more meaningful.

And so for those of you that don’t know, you can see one there. I’ve got three others around, we’ve got four dogs, they’re all rescue. And I think to me, there’s still a lot of false perceptions in this world about rescuing a dog or adopting a dog from a shelter somehow means that dog is less than.

And so my husband, Nick, he takes photographs for the shelter organization that we adopted three of our dogs from. And so the reason he does that is he’s a great photographer. And if a dog has a great picture on the, the feeder websites that they’re on, they have a much higher likelihood of getting adopted.

And so he does that. And so every Saturday I take one of his photos and I put it out there so people can see shelter dogs are not broken dogs. They’re not, secondhand, bad hand me downs. They’re beautiful dogs who, in many cases, have no behavioral issues. They’ve just found themselves in really unfortunate situations.

That’s something that’s deeply personal to me. It’s deeply meaningful to me. If I can make a dent in that world and have someone think differently about how they view shelters and shelter dogs, I’d feel really good about myself. So if anything, it was more out of a byproduct of saying I want to do something a little bit more meaningful than just talk about sales all the time.

Matt: I love a lot of parts of that. We have a 13 or 14 year old. We’re not sure he’s getting a little old. He’s a rescue dog and has just been the most perfect dog just in every way. He was a street dog. He was shot and we found him at a n adoption fair.

And he’s just been amazing. But I also I want to point out just how important it is when you reach a level of success that I can tell you’re a humble person, but also you’ve been very successful. When you think of that as that’s great for me and great for my family but this is also a platform.

Success is a place to start doing things that matter, right? To take that platform and to take that influence and do something. And I think it’s not always money, right? Sometimes it’s just ideas. Sometimes it’s just putting a spark into the universe that someone else may pick up on.

And I, again, the older I live and the more mistakes I make, the more I think that spark doesn’t have to change everyone on the planet. If you can impact a couple people around you, like that’s meaningful. So I think it’s well worth it.

Jen: Thank you. It’s really important to me. So the fact that you wanted to spend air time on this means so much to me.

Thank you.

Matt: Oh, of course. So as we so as we wrap up a little bit here I know people can find you on LinkedIn where else can people check out some of your content?

Jen: I finally updated my crappy website that I DIY’d, which was like literally embarrassing. So DemandJen.Com is my new website and now you can actually understand what I do and who I do it for and all that stuff.

And I have a lot of videos there too if you haven’t heard of me before.

Matt: Jen, when I quit my job 16 and a half years ago, my wife was pregnant with our first child. Who needs healthcare at that point? Honestly. My first website was a GoDaddy website.

It had a flash intro, Jen. You couldn’t get to the content until you watched the flash intro. And I was so impressed that I had a flash intro on my website. There’s probably a screenshot of that somewhere.

Jen: I’m going to go hunting for it.

Matt: Jen, thank you. You’re amazing.

Thank you so much for your time, your insights. Thank you for evangelizing rescue dogs all this super important stuff. Thanks for being here.

Jen: Thank you. I loved this.

Matt: Thank you everyone for joining us.

Appreciate y’all. We’ll be back next week with more content until then. My name is Matt Heinz. We’ll see you next week– another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Take care.

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Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to [email protected].

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