Do you focus on capturing product stories or customer-hero stories? The answer can make a huge difference in your sales and marketing results. Let me explain. Despite all the time, money, resources spent on improving sales productivity, just 13% of sales people produce 87% of revenue in a typical organization according to the Sales Benchmark Index. […]
The post How customer-hero stories help you connect better appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Are you connecting with and empowering your customer advocates? If not, you should. Here’s why. Customer advocacy marketing programs help you increase revenue by improving customer acquisition and retention (and they’re also your best source of leads). How? Because you’re helping to motivate happy customers to speak about you positively to others. And delighted customers […]
The post Why customer advocacy should be at the heart of your marketing appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Sales enablement is intended to help raise performance, but a lot of efforts have backfired due to departmental silos. And now there’s growing gap between what salespeople need and what they’re getting to improve performance. For example, Corporate Visions recently surveyed 500 B2B marketers and sales professionals that 20% of organization content creators “just do […]
The post Getting sales enablement right to increase results appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Do you feel excited about your 2018 plan? I hope so. If not, you’re not alone. Why? Because dealing with change, staying motivated, and building momentum is hard. That’s why business plans often change February 1st (just like personal goals). To help, I’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 most useful (and favorite) posts on […]
The post 10 Most Popular B2B Lead Generation Blog Posts of 2017 appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
CEOs and sales leaders have long wondered: how can we drive organic growth and increase sales from existing customers? But it’s elusive. In fact, the traditional approach is no longer working. According to CEB, now Gartner, “Only 28% of sales leaders report that account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth targets.” That’s […]
The post Gartner Research: Boost your growth from existing customers appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach? Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, “empathy” is the one word that matters most to sales [and marketing] success. It’s tough to buy. B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information, too many choices, trying to getting their colleagues to agree, not to […]
The post New research: Customer empathy and how to solve buying problems appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
To drive growth, the mandate for sales organizations is to make more calls, send more cold emails. Sales reps are hustling and using automated tools to move faster. But sales hustle and automation have a downside: they can hurt customer experience. Here’s what I mean: B2B companies are now hiring more people to do this. […]
The post How sales hustle and automation can hurt customer experience appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Find out about lead nurturing. Learn the 4 steps of walking through the buying journey with your customer to help them progress.
The post 4 Steps to do lead nurturing that helps more customers buy appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
At its core, ABM is about building relationships but there is one crucial thing often missing. I was reminded of this while talking with a VP of Marketing who stopped their account based marketing campaigns to “go deep” in a few segments. The reason? They wanted to focus on building stronger connections with customers on […]
The post Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Growth for B2B is hard. It used to be that you could accelerate growth with huge customer acquisition. Ramping up your sales and marketing is not enough to sustain growth. Today, the best companies are growing through customer success. That’s why I interviewed Kia Puhm (@kiapuhm), CEO at K!A CX Consulting to talk about customer success. […]
The post Transform Your Customer Journey and Accelerate Growth appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
We have more sales and marketing technology and channels to reach our customers, but they’re increasingly tuning us out. In short: we’re getting more disconnected from customers. Something is missing. Even though our tools have become smarter with AI and machine learning, connecting and building B2B relationships has never been harder. The question is: How […]
The post Building B2B relationships with trust and empathy appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
No one will ever say “we don’t focus on the customer.” But, most marketers are bad at empathizing with customers. Let me explain: Dr. Johannes Huttula did a study with 480 experienced marketing managers. They asked marketers to step into their customer’s shoes and predict what they would reply in a market test. BTW – […]
The post Why empathetic marketers fail at empathy and how to fix it appeared first on B2B Lead Blog.
Sales enablement is intended to help raise performance, but a lot of efforts have backfired due to departmental silos. And now there’s growing gap between what salespeople need and what they’re getting to improve performance.
For example, Corporate Visions recently surveyed 500 B2B marketers and sales professionals that 20% of organization content creators “just do what they think is best” with no overarching structure at all. And just 27% of organizations are content that focuses squarely on customers and rather than their own story.
And all the tools and technologies meant to help boost sales productivity are now are slowing things down.
What’s the bottom line?
Salespeople are getting overwhelmed and slowed down with increased complexity just like the customers they’re selling too.
That’s why I interviewed Dave Brock (@davidabrock), author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide, also CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave’s brilliance is his focus on practical simplification. And I’m excited to bring his thinking on sales enablement and what can be done to raise sales team performance.
Dave: Brian, thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to continue the conversation we started in Washington, and appreciate you inviting me to this.
By background, I actually started out as a physicist in my career, and ended up going to the dark side of selling, and sold mainframe computers for IBM a number of years. Went up the food chain to more senior management roles, then left to become EVP of sales for a technology company as part of a turnaround, later held VP of Sales or CEO roles in several technology companies.
And now run the consulting company – we help our clients actually solve some of the most challenging problems in sales and marketing, and dealing with the new buyers that there are. We have a highly collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people, solve really, really difficult problems.
Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of some things that we see in the marketplace. It’s the new buyer. Everybody’s changing the way they buy, and learning how we engage these new buyers, both through marketing, sales, and customer experience is critical.
At the same time, we see tremendous transformations in business and business models, whether it’s the digital transformation that virtually every company is undertaking, or just older business models being displaced with new business models.
We have some of the classics of Airbnb, turning the hotel and lodging market upside down or Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see that the new business models occurring are driving real stress on customers.
And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, just between the rate of change, the amount of information we’re deluged with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it impacting virtually everybody.
Brian: I can relate to those challenges. I think just in talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier and it’s just an overwhelming number of tools an average salesperson uses, or a marketer uses. It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration.
Dave: The easy answer is to break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done. The thing that we see is a lot of the issues we face, regarding internal complexity and internal collaboration, is just people being well-intended doing their jobs, but somehow their jobs aren’t aligned with each other, or there are things about their jobs that cause them to conflict with other people. Simple things like aligning roles and responsibilities, aligning metrics, some classic value stream types of analysis.
I just had a conversation earlier today with a marketing executive and his top management team. We were talking about what’s the value proposition they create for sales, and sales is the downstream customer of theirs.
I think, again, we have to rethink our working relationship, rethink the classic business process re-engineering of our workflows, our roles, and responsibilities. And really get some alignment in metrics, so that we realize we’re all on the same team, with the same end goal.
Brian: That’s helpful. And something that’s really come to age recently is sales enablement.
I think I’m on the wrong side of some debates on this. I look at sales enablement as more a set of processes in a set of activities than a separate function within the organization.
If you look at what sales enablement processes are supposed to do, they’re meant to be able to help maximize the salesperson’s ability to perform. And so, you look at that and say they are a whole collection of things that we can do to do that.
The first is the frontline sales manager and their role in coaching and developing everybody on their team to perform at maximum capability. But then these frontline sales managers need a lot of support in a lot of areas, whether it’s tools and technology, whether it’s new programs, whether it’s people selection and performance management, whether it’s training, whether it’s content and so on.
So, you start looking at seeing all these things contribute to enabling the salesperson to perform at the highest level as possible.
Now, who does that stuff? It could be all over the place. It could be marketing that’s doing some of this stuff. It could be HR that’s working on a lot of the talent management types of things. It could be sales operations, or it could be people in the sales function.
So, I think the discussion around sales enablement is more powerful when we look at: what are the things that we need to do, and then, look at who in the organization can do those most effectively and most efficiently.
Brian: I like how you talk about it because I often think when I speak of enablement, I often am looking at marketing and sales. But, as you’re talking, it’s bringing in the finance team, the human resources team, so it’s a collective effort, not just one single group or department. That’s the whole point you were saying earlier, about bringing down the silos. Do I understand that correctly?
Exactly. I got engaged in debate not long ago about how sales enablement earns a spot at the CEO’s table. To me, that was one of the most ridiculous discussions I’ve ever seen.
We now have sales enablement executives that not only want to have a spot at the Chief Sales Officer’s table but now they believe they should have a place at the CEO’s table. The CEO’s table’s getting pretty crowded.
I think it goes away from the point of what we’re trying to do. And, I believe that it actually starts building more barriers to collaboration and working. We’re building to the degree that we are creating another silo and another set of functions competing for attention and corporate resources.
Again, I tend to like to look at these as more processes and workflows, and what are the things that need to be done. And then we look at who can do those most effectively. And if it a sales enablement organization, well that’s really powerful, but we shouldn’t overlook the other parts of the organization.
Brian: We spent time talking about sales enablement. Marketing does have a significant role in helping raise the level of performance for the sales team. As you and I were in D.C., we talked about how often marketing is looked to as the “leads people.” We need to think beyond that, regarding how they can impact efficiency and effectiveness of each individual sales rep.
I believe that we must change our mindset from marketing being the “awareness people,” the “create interest people,” the “leads people,” the “demand gen people,” and so on and so forth, and look at the entire customer buying journey. Look at what that is and who can contribute to that.
We have the traditional feeling that marketing does demand gen, and lead gen, and tosses those over the wall to sales. And sales immediately reject all of them as being bad and tosses them back. But we separate these processes.
I think modern sales and modern marketing is very different. I like to look at modern marketing and sales as kind of like a basketball team. On a basketball team, every person has their defined roles. You have a couple of guards, you have a couple of forwards, you have a center, and you practice plays, and everybody tries and plays those roles. You get really expert at that. But then in the game, you’re very agile and nimble and adapt to what’s happening with competition and what’s going on with the game.
I think we need to look at marketing and sales more like a basketball team. What are our roles? What are our responsibilities? What are the plays that we execute? Who executes those?
But I think we have to be very agile in working with each other in saying, “Who’s the person that should be taking the shot right now? Who should be bringing the ball down the court?”
I look at marketing and sales, not as the sequential process where marketing gets the leads and gives them to sales, and sales takes care of everything throughout, but we work together in the demand gen process, and we cooperate in the buying process.
There’s a huge amount that marketing can bring to the party with qualified opportunities. Whether it’s case studies, whether it’s tools, whether it’s content relevant to where the person is towards the end of the buying journey, and those kinds of things. We really need to look at it as an interrelated, and integrated set of processes.
Brian: It makes a lot of sense, what you’re talking about. I think the challenge is that marketing and sales often are doing the same things. They might have different words for it.
For example, marketing may call it lead gen, lead generation, or inbound sales might call it prospecting, social selling, etc. They’re doing the same things. As I’ve talked to salespeople, they often are feeling they’re succeeding despite marketing, not because of it. I was talking to someone trying to build his own pipeline. He was getting leads from marketing, they weren’t helping. He was prospecting, trying to figure out how to cold-call, etc.
I do think we’re getting a lot wrong about prospecting. One is I don’t think enough salespeople are prospecting.
Most everybody I talk to is opportunity-starved, but we have a lot of these kinds of mindsets and mentalities that say, “Well, it’s marketing’s job to get those leads. And if they aren’t getting the leads, then you know, there’s nothing I can do. Or it’s the SDR’s role to take those leads and qualify them or do something with them. And then my job is just to take those great leads that the SDR gives to me.”
I think the first thing we do is we must change salespeople’s mentality and say, you know, marketing is going to do everything they can to get you the right kind of leads, and the right kinds of opportunities. SDR’s are going to do everything they can. But if the volume isn’t sufficient, you have to go out and start finding business yourself. You have to prospect. You have to generate new business.
You might go to marketing and ask them for help in doing that, maybe giving you a particular program that you can execute as well. The other thing too is I sometimes think we get our prospecting models, and particularly the SDR-driven type models a little bit backward.
I think we do a disservice to SDRs. Most organizations, the SDR is kind of an entry-level job to selling. They do something that most salespeople would refuse to do, which is to call people they’ve never spoken to before and prospect them. It’s a really tough job.
But one of the disconnects we have is these poor SDRs often calling on C-level people.
I get SDRs calling me every day. I feel really sorry for them because they’ll call me and say, “We believe we can help you improve your business.” And I say, “Cool. What am I doing wrong? How should I be developing my business?” and they’re floored. They don’t know how to carry on that conversation. They shouldn’t be expected to. If they’re brand new to selling, why are they calling me, a C-level executive, albeit of a small company, but a C-level executive? We’re matching the wrong people up with the target audience.
As a result, we’re creating terrible first impressions. If somebody calls me and they can’t have a powerful, engaging first conversation, I’m going to have a negative opinion both of that individual and of their company.
I think we’re missing huge amounts of opportunities by not having the right people. I wrote an article about a year ago saying, “Maybe we need to get some of our most talented senior-level salespeople being SDRs.” If they’re creating that first impression, and if our target persona is this C-level person, then those are the people that have the best capability of setting up a very, very positive first impression, and opening up far more opportunities than a brand new SDR without that experience base.
Brian: I love that suggestion. It reminds me before it was called an SDR, that’s what I started as at 23. I was on the phone. I was calling C-level people, 23 years old. There was very little training advice, coaching. It was on the job. Later, I started a company helping people do that. I worked for a company that, myself, I was CEO. I made calls with the team who was on the phone, and the whole point was to learn, to see what they were experiencing, to understand.
This is really a great transition into talking about this idea of empathy. That’s the hard part: how can somebody who doesn’t have experience connect with someone else and understand their perspective and feeling?
Dave: I think there are some things. First of all, empathy is about caring. You’ve got to care about your customers, whoever those customers are. If you’re only in business to say, “How can I get an order?” then you’re never going to be successful at all.
You’ve got to care about your customers. You’ve got to care about their success in achieving their goals. If you’re driven by that, it changes your whole orientation and your process for engaging the customer in the conversations you have.
That shouldn’t be a do-good or Pollyanna-ish kind of mentality. The only people I’m going to engage are people who I know have the problems that I can solve. I’m not wasting my time calling on people, and engaging them, and caring about them and their success if they don’t have the problems that I can help them solve. It is very focused on calling the right people that we can do some things with. And then it’s understanding who they are. It’s kind of sitting behind their desk or being able to walk in their shoes.
There are a whole number of ways you can do that. I used to sell to the large money center banks in New York City. To learn about banking, you hang out where the bankers hang out, and they hung out at Harry’s at Hanover Square. I’d learn a lot by just talking to them over a beer about what their businesses were, what their dreams were, where their problems were, which enabled me to connect much more effectively with those people in the business.
We’ve got to start hanging out where our customers hang out, whether it’s discussion groups, whether it’s trade shows. It’s really learning about where they live, and what they worry about every day. It’s asking questions, it’s getting engaged in those conversations. I think along with caring, is curiosity. If you have those two attributes, you’re going to figure out what the customer’s about. You’re going to know how to engage the customers. You’re going to understand how your products and solutions might serve the client and help them. Two fundamental attributes: caring and curiosity.
Brian: That is terrific. I really liked how you brought it together, regarding meeting those elements, then
immersing yourself in the world of your customer, going where they are.
It’s interesting, as I was listening to you, I don’t know that the marketers who are reaching out, or making that initial impression, have actually been able to get in the world of the people they’re hoping to influence and help to drive change, to work with them through their journey.
I would say that what you shared, what you did, as a salesperson, we need to do that in marketing too: get in the world of the customer and observe. From that, we’re going to have the empathy, or to put it another way, we’ll have the intuition.
Our empathy is our marketing and sales intuition; to know how to best move forward in what some of those opportunities are.
Dave: It’s really funny how some of these cycles go, but I remember maybe 10, 15 years ago, when there were a lot of initiatives around understanding the voice of the customer. When you looked at the way a lot of those initiatives were implemented, some of them literally would live for several weeks with the customers and sit and observe them in their jobs, etc.
Getting marketers out and treating the customers less as an intellectual exercise, or an analytic exercise, but actually visiting the customers. Spending a few days of watching them work, talking to them not about what we sell and whether they like these things that we sell, but talking to them about what they do, and what they feel, and how they think. And then bringing that back in and say, “Now we know the customer, and we’ve seen where they live. How do we take that information and best leverage it to engage them where they’re at?”
Brian: Fantastic.
Dave: I think it’s a little bit counterintuitive. It may sound simplistic, but we don’t do it. So many of our initiatives, so much of our thinking is driven inward-out, rather than outward-in.
We have our products, and we have our services. We think about what we want to do, and how we want to bring those to market, and so we develop all our launch programs, all our marketing programs, all our sales programs, from an internally-based orientation, about what’s most effective and what’s most efficient for us.
Usually, when we execute those, we find we’ve missed one thing: we’ve forgotten about the customer. What we do that may be most effective and efficient for us, but may not be effective or efficient for the customer.
So generally, I find the fastest way to the best and most effective solution is always to work your way back in from the customer.
Who are they?
Where are they?
How do they work?
What drives them?
What do they care about?
What are their dreams?
How do they buy?
How do they self-educate?
How do they learn about things?
Trace those things back into the design the process that meets them where they’re at, rather than trying to force them to find us and meet us where we’re at.
How to do lead management that improves conversion
How customer-hero stories help you connect better
Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities
The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue
Do you feel excited about your 2018 plan?
I hope so. If not, you’re not alone.
Why? Because dealing with change, staying motivated, and building momentum is hard. That’s why business plans often change February 1st (just like personal goals).
To help, I’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 most useful (and favorite) posts on the B2B Lead Blog.
This following list was compiled based on aggregate social shares across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and views. The list below starts at number 10 moving up.
Have you intentionally optimized your sales lead routing and assignment process? If not, you could be losing sales, and marketing ROI not see it.
For example, LeadData’s new report, The State of Lead Management, based on a survey of 527 B2B sellers and marketers found an average 25.5 % of marketing-generated leads get assigned to the wrong account owner.
Did you catch that? Over 25% of marketing-generated leads get assigned to the wrong person. In this post, you’ll get 7 tips to increase your lead generation ROI by improving how you route leads.
Read about How to Improve Lead Routing to Skyrocket Sales Results
Sales enablement is intended to help raise performance, but a lot of efforts have backfired due to departmental silos. And now there’s growing gap between what salespeople need and what they’re getting to improve performance.
So how do you get sales enablement right?
I interviewed Dave Brock (@davidabrock), author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide, also CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave’s brilliance is his focus on practical simplification.
Find out how to get sales enablement right to increase results
Have you looked at your lead management approach from the perspective of customer experience? If not, you may want to start now.
Here’s why: According to Forrester, top performers convert 1.54% of marketing qualified leads to revenue. This means almost 98% people who start the customer journey are lost.
Find out 5 areas you need to focus on to improve lead management and increase conversion.
Read more: How to do lead management that improves conversion
People aren’t looking for a reason to read your lead nurturing email messages, they’re looking for a reason to delete them. Think about it.
Marketers rely on email as the top lead nurturing tactic. And according to Econsultancy email is the best digital channel for ROI.
Read 7 Tips to Boost Lead Nurturing Email Results
How can marketers better connect with people we hope will become our customers?
Why? Because the trust gap between marketers and customers has never been more significant.
For example, a recent survey by Hubspot showed that only 3 percent of buyers surveyed consider marketers and salespeople trustworthy. Yikes.
It starts with the words we use which ultimately affects how we think and act towards others.
Read Stuck on words: how can marketing connect with customers better?
Just 13% of salespeople produce 87% of revenue in a typical organization according to the Sales Benchmark Index.
You may be wondering: what the 13% do differently?
They connect emotionally with their buyers.
I interviewed Mike Bosworth. If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the B2B sales/marketing space.
Read more: How customer-hero stories help you connect better
Getting the right content to the right people continues to be a challenge in B2B marketing and lead generation.
Salesforce analyzed more than 15 million data points, spanning a four-year period, from two of the most massive B2B databases: Data.com and LinkedIn.
The results will surprise you.
I interviewed Mathew Sweezey (@msweezey). Mathew works with Salesforce and is the Principal of Marketing Insights to talk about the report, B2B Personas: Targeting Audiences.
Check out the New B2B Persona Research from Salesforce and LinkedIn Study
Lead nurturing is one of those things that’s easy to talk about but hard to do.
Find out how to apply lead nurturing to help advance leads through three stages of your lead generation funnel to get more qualified opportunities.
Learn 5 tactics you can use immediately to improve lead-to-customer conversion.
Read more: Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities
Customer advocacy marketing programs help you increase revenue by improving customer acquisition and retention (and they’re also your best source of leads).
I interviewed Mark Organ (@markorgan). Mark is the Founder and CEO of Influitive, and he’s been a thought leader in the space of sales/marketing technology and customer advocacy.
Read about Why customer advocacy should be at the heart of your marketing
Who should own B2B lead generation: sales, marketing or both?
You might be thinking, “isn’t the answer obvious?” It’s not.
Let me explain.
Sales and marketing don’t do a great job of lead generation because they both believe it’s the others job.
I asked the 19,830 members the B2B Lead Roundtable LinkedIn Group about this topic. In this post, you’ll get a ton of actionable tips.
Read Who should own lead generation for a complex sale?
The single biggest issue for B2B revenue growth remains lead generation: increasing lead quality and quantity. This analysis into the most popular posts gives a glimpse into what subjects readers found most relevant.
Additionally, this list shows that increasing conversion, understanding customer motivation, managing and nurturing leads better, and improving sales performance are topics on the minds of readers. At the same time, connecting and building trust with buyers has never been harder.
That’s why we need to go beyond rational-logic based marketing to understand how our customers feel. Empathy is not just a “soft” skill, it’s an incredibly powerful tool to understand customer motivation and increase lead conversion. I’ll be sharing more about how we can connect with customers better using applied empathy.
2018 is quickly coming to an end and the holidays are a time for reflection and preparation.
To help you prepare and get some inspiration for 2019, I’ve compiled a list of the top ten most popular and shared posts on the B2B Lead Blog, chosen by readers just like you.
This following list was compiled based on aggregate Google analytics showing social shares and unique visitors generated from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and views. The list below starts at number 10 moving up.
No one will ever say “we don’t focus on the customer. But it’s a struggle for B2B Marketers. And according to Professor Huttula, marketers use their own biases (thinking it’s empathy).
Learn why (even empathetic) marketers fail at customer empathy and how you can fix it immediately.
Read Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix it
We can get so caught up in our Account-based Marketing (ABM) strategies, systems, tools, and investments that we lose sight of building deep empathy for the people in the accounts.
Ironically, marketers doing ABM are isolated from the people in the accounts they’re targeting. The reason? Marketers don’t talk directly with the very people they are reaching with B2B marketing campaigns.
Learn the steps you can take to improve your ABM results.
Read Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing
We have more sales and marketing technology and channels to reach our customers, but they’re increasingly tuning us out. In short: we’re getting more disconnected from customers. So, how can we connect better and build relationships with B2B customers?
To answer, I interviewed Steve Woods (@stevewoods), Founder & CTO at Nudge to learn how we can generate better results by building B2B relationships with trust and empathy in sales and ABM.
Listen or read: Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy
Growth for B2B is hard. It used to be that you could accelerate growth with huge customer acquisition. Today, the best companies are growing through customer success.
I interviewed Kia Puhm (@kiapuhm), CEO at K!A CX Consulting to talk about customer success. Kia’s got a fantastic perspective on “how do we accelerate and grow our existing customer relationships,” which is something that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough.
Read more: Transform Your Customer Journey and Accelerate Growth
The single biggest issue for B2B revenue growth remains lead generation: increasing lead quality and quantity. This analysis into the most popular posts gives a glimpse into what subjects readers found most relevant in 2017.
The post shows themes of increasing conversion, understanding customer motivation, managing and nurturing leads better, and improving sales performance were hot topics on the minds of readers.
Check out 10 Most Popular B2B Lead Generation Blog Posts of 2017
To drive growth, the mandate for sales organizations is to make more calls, send more cold emails. Sales reps are hustling and using automated tools to move faster. But sales hustle and automation have a downside: they can hurt customer experience.
Moreover, we need to humanize our approach and focus on building trust with remarkable interactions. Learn how.
Read How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience
Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach? Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, “empathy” is the one word that matters most to sales [and marketing] success.
Also, it’s hard for customers to buy today. B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information, too many choices, trying to getting their colleagues to agree, not to mention second-guessing.
That’s why I interviewed Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.
Read more: New Research: Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems
How often do you spend weeks or even months putting blood, sweat, and tears into a new marketing campaign, only to have it fall flat? You swear you did everything right, but when it comes time for the results to pour in, they never show.
The likely culprit? Bad buyer personas. In this post, you’ll learn five easy ways to improve your buyer personas.
Read Five Reasons Why Your Buyer Persona’s Aren’t Good Enough
CEOs and sales leaders have long wondered: how can we drive organic growth and increase sales from existing customers? But it’s elusive. In fact, the traditional approach is no longer working.
And according to Gartner, “Only 28% of sales leaders report that account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth targets.” That’s why I interviewed Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.
Read more: Gartner Research: Boost Your Growth From Existing Customers
Marketing can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that getting more leads are not better if you don’t know how to nurture.
In sum, I’ve seen companies spend too much time getting people to raise their hands (i.e., leads) but not enough towards progression. Not to mention, salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without marketing support.
According to Forrester, top performers convert just 1.54% of marketing qualified leads to revenue. That means 98% of marketing leads fail.Click To TweetRead: 4 Steps to Do Lead Nurturing That Helps More Customers Buy
This analysis into the most popular posts gives a glimpse into what subjects readers found most relevant. The single biggest issue for B2B revenue growth remains demand generation: increasing lead quality and quantity.
Additionally, this list shows that account-based marketing (ABM), growing revenue with existing customers, understanding customer motivation better, and improving sales performance are topics on the minds of readers. At the same time, connecting and building trust with buyers continues to be a growing challenge. Stay tuned as we dive deeper these topics and more in 2019 and thank you for reading!
B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.
Sales have always used an account-based approach. Now marketing is getting on board by with account-based marketing. But it’s not an easy road.
Here’s why:
In the B2B, you’re never selling to an individual. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. Moreover, the bigger the potential deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.
For this reason, many B2B marketers using a leads-based approach hit a wall with their account based marketing efforts.
ABM isn’t just about marketing. In fact, ABM works best in companies where all revenue-generating areas are closely aligned as one team.
So how can you improve your account based marketing results?
To help, I interviewed Jon Miller (@jonmiller), CEO and Co-Founder at Engagio. Jon and his team just released the Second Edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing. He brings a fantastic perspective on how you can complement a leads-based approach and adopt account-based marketing.
Jon: Great. I’m excited to be here and to have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.
So, my background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics, and when I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had [in order] to make decisions.
Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about really trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one to one interactions. You know, very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.
So, I worked at the company called Exchange and then I was an early employee at a company called Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-’90s.
After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo, along with Phil Fernandez. And I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology of the last ten years or so. Recently, it was sold to Adobe for just under 5 billion dollars.
I had this long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is marketing is changing all the time, and the underlying technologies are changing all the time.
I just felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to kind of keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.
And I was inspired to start a new company that would be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing product; that could really take advantage of all these new trends.
One of those significant trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. And so, that’s where I decided to start, to focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.
Brian: Well, there’s a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs, and they see account-based marketing as just good marketing.
But I’d love to ask you: you just had this new book come out, The Clear Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing and you’re on your second edition, so how would you define it?
Jon: Yeah. So, first of all, let me just say, really excited about the book. You know, it is a second edition; I wrote the first one about three years ago. I’ve learned a ton more about ABM in the last three years.
I’ll start with a colloquial definition of ABM then I’ll give you my formal one. I think the colloquial one I like to use is a comparison back to the kind of marketing that we did with Marketo. And that is the marketing that I like to describe as fishing with nets.
When you’re fishing with nets, you run your campaigns, and you don’t care which specific fish you catch. You just care– did I catch enough? That you can then do lead nurturing, and lead scoring to kind of run it through the system.
But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe because you’re going after your existing customers for expansion, or you’re in a narrow industry.
Any time you have a specific list of named accounts, you don’t want to wait around for those big fish to swim into your net. You’re going to find ways to reach out to them proactively. It’s much more like fishing with a spear. And so, to me that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.
The simple definition of account-based marketing: it's spearfishing as opposed to net fishing. - Jon MillerClick To TweetJon: My formal definition is that account-based marketing is a go-to-market strategy that will coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand at target accounts. Can I just explain what some of those words mean?
Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out that would be great.
Jon: First of all, I’m very precisely calling it a strategy. ABM is a way of running your go-to-market. And how your sales and marketing and customer success teams work. It’s not a campaign or a tactic. So, you really do need to kind of say, “We use ABM as our go-to-market strategy or at least one of our go-to-market strategies.”
Jon: Second, ABM is really all about being personalized. There’s so much noise in the market today; if you’re spearfishing and you’re trying to reach out to the right people at the right companies, somehow you’ve got to break through all that noise and the best way to do that is with relevance, resonance, and empathy, which I know we’ll talk about.
ABM is a misnomer because we’re saying it’s account-based marketing but right there, in my definition, I’m talking about marketing and sales. And let’s talk about that a little bit later.
Jon: ABM is about landing and expanding. I think that, especially today, so many companies earn their revenue through subscription models and recurring revenue models.
Just focusing on that new business, which is what the net fishing is all about, is a minimal myopic focus, and ABM expands, or changes, the marketer’s mindset to focus on the entire revenue journey:
ABM plays across all that. So, that’s why I chose that definition.
Source: The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing (p. 132)
Brian: Well, it makes sense, and I appreciate what you’re talking about, just the overarching trend.
CEOs focus on lifetime value (LTV) and CAC (customer acquisition cost). And so, ABM is providing answers to that.
There still is so much confusion out there, and you say, ABM isn’t just about marketing. How do you mean?
How is it different from demand generation? Because I still think people out there, even though we’ve just talked about the definitions, yet are getting confused.
Jon: Yeah. Well, so I always thought it was ironic that we called the category Marketo played in marketing automation. People think marketing automation means that you have fewer humans doing less work. The reality is the exact opposite.
'People think marketing automation means that you have fewer humans doing less work. The reality is the exact opposite.' - Jon MillerClick To TweetWhen you buy a tool like Marketo, or any marketing automation platform, it requires work. People have to do stuff.
So, in many ways marketing automation is a misnomer in the same way that ABM is a misnomer because ABM is not just about marketing.
If you’re focused on the entire revenue journey (creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, expanding and retaining relationships) that can’t just be marketing: it has to be an orchestrated business initiative between the different functions.
And frankly, if it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.
At Engagio, a lot of our customers have their strategies, and they’re not called ABM.
They call it something like account-based everything. Or the account first initiative, or something as simple as account-based sales and marketing.
I’ve seen all of those at play, and I think it really is the right way to think about it because otherwise, as I said, it’s just a campaign.
Brian: Well, I think that’s a vast distinction, especially as people are considering the future. I liked in your book, as I was reading it, you have a quote, “Salespeople never talk about how many leads they close, they talk about how many accounts they closed.”
Salespeople never talk about how many leads they close, they talk about how many accounts they closed.Click To TweetAnd do you find that marketers see this differently, and why?
Jon: Well, yeah. I mean this is my fault, and a little bit your fault.
Brian: Sure.
Jon: We taught marketers to talk about leads.
Brian: Right.
Jon: Literally, we called it lead nurturing, and so on. And the technologies that we use, like Marketo for example, they were built to be really lead-based systems.
You can’t even log in to Marketo and look at an account, for example. So, we created this world where marketers talked about leads, and salespeople talked about accounts.
Which, almost by definition, meant they were not on the same page. And that’s not the only reason marketing and sales have trouble getting along, but it certainly didn’t help.
I think a big part of ABM really put is merely just marketers, frankly, adopting the language the salespeople use. And just, again, being on the same page.
Brian: Yeah. I think salespeople have practiced, in some ways, the very things that you’re talking about in your book.
They may have called it strategic account selling, major account selling, and target account selling.
But they did focus on these accounts, and as you talked about, now marketers are coming alongside salespeople and working on these accounts together. So, we’re going to talk about some process steps, but I wanted to step back to something you said earlier.
We have more channels, content, and technology to reach customers than ever before, but connecting with customers has never been harder.
I am of course a big proponent and fan of customer empathy.
How do you see building empathy for our customers to bridge that gap of connection and trust and account-based marketing fitting together?
Jon: Yeah, in ABM, once you identified the accounts you want to go after, and the people at those accounts you want to reach, you’ve got to kind of find a way to reach out to them and engage them.
It’s such a crowded, noisy market and people love to ignore unwanted marketing and unwanted messaging. I think at the core if you want to cut through the noise you have to find a way to delight your prospects, educate them, add value to them.
I think empathy and relevance are just two sides of a coin. If you empathize with your prospects, the people you’re trying to reach, it means you understand their pains.
And if you understand their pains, you’re going to be in a much better position to teach them something about their business and create content for their specific economic motivators, their particular pains and that is how we stand out.
Jon: I think it’s just very much like The Challenger Sale, which is so popular on the sales side of the equation, that’s what the best salespeople do: they teach, and they tailor, and they do that by having empathy with their customer. So, very much these things go hand in hand. I’m sure you have additional thoughts on that because you’re the empathy expert.
Brian: Well, I certainly do, and for our listeners, we had Brent Adamson who is a co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, so we got Brent’s thoughts about this on empathy and sales, and I’ll share my perspective.
At a deeper level, neuroscientists have shown is that all our decisions are based on emotion. So, what we need to do is connect to, as you talked about Jon, the pains. But also what are the results people want?
Brian: And we have to think about when they’re making a purchase where it’s a complex sale and ABM is oriented to that what causes us to change is that we see something in it for us and what causes us to stay stuck–it’s like trying to climb a mountain.
Read more on this: Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing
If I want to climb and I’ve got to take other people with me, some of them don’t want to go.
Or I’m concerned about how do they feel about doing this?
How will my team see me?
Am I’m going to be concerned about–is this going to add ten extra hours to my week, and I’m already maxed out?
So, there’s this personal stuff that’s happening inside your customer because we’re all customers; we all make decisions emotionally.
We think B2B buying is less about emotion, but the stakes are higher, so it’s even more emotional. So, that’s the thing I find is that we’ve got to tune into every stage of the journey with what’s happening.
We often think B2B buying is less about emotion, but the stakes are higher, so it's even more emotional.Click To TweetJon: That’s a great point. The only thing I’d also add is I think the emotions in B2B tend to be more about avoiding negative emotions.
Whereas B2C might be about kind of seeking aspirational emotions. Because in B2B there’s such a disconnect between the–if you make a good purchase your company is a little bit better off. You make a bad purchase, you can lose your job.
Brian: Yeah, and often people start journeys by, “Hey I’m learning about…and I feel inspired and hopeful we could actually do something.”
And pretty quickly after that, it goes to despair. Like “Oh my gosh is this even worth it? I want to try to get this into our company; it’s so hard.”
For that person, they’re really saying, “Do I want to do this? Is it really going to be worth it?” And as you talked about the pain, just changing is painful and there’s so much there.
Brian: I loved that you laid out a process based on what you’ve seen that has been a proven approach–these seven ABM process steps.
We probably don’t have time to go through all of them, but I was just going to ask, where do you see marketers getting stuck, or need to put more attention in those seven ABM process steps?
Jon: Sure. So, just for the listeners, I’ll summarize the seven steps down and keep it simple, which is it’s only really about who, what and where and then measurement.
Who do you want to go after? Which accounts? Which people?
What are you going to say to those accounts that are actually going to be empathetic and relevant?
Where is how do you actually get that message in front of them?
What channels? And how do you orchestrate those interactions?
And then the last piece is the measurement of the whole thing.
Jon: So, regarding your question, where do people get stuck?
It’s really a maturity curve. Obviously, to start, you need to pick your accounts. That is a process that has to go hand in hand with sales.
The companies that are less mature can get wrapped up right around the axle right there. They just can’t find a good process for how do marketing and sales actually collaborate around an account selection process.
Once they’re past that stage, I guess the best way to describe it is sort of the next area I see people get stuck is; frankly, they pick too many accounts to really be able to deliver the level of personalization and relevance that’s indeed required to be successful with ABM.
I’ve seen people pick, they have 200 tier one accounts. And having 200 tier one accounts means that you are not creating a bespoke customized interaction with in-depth account-relevant research at every one of those 200 accounts.
So, there’s a set of interconnected challenges there. But it starts with recognizing that you’ve got to be able to break through the noise and stand out. That requires being more relevant, and you have to right-size the number of accounts you pick to your actual abilities to be able to be relevant.
Jon: And then the third challenge that the most mature companies run into is then scaling the whole thing.
So, great, you’ve identified some accounts, and you’ve identified things that you can do that are going to really help you stand out and it worked great in your pilot.
Now, how do you really start to automate some of those steps to bring it to the next level and make sure that any time a target account’s doing something interesting, your sales team knows about it, you’re following up appropriately? It’s really started to become a machine and not a whole series of one-act heroics.
I’d say those are probably the three if you look across the who, what, where, the three areas where people kind of get into trouble.
Source: The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing (P. 139)
Brian: That’s really good, Jon. do you have any tips or actionable advice that you would give to someone just, like, over coffee, and they said, “Hey, how do I do better?”
Jon: Yeah, a couple tips. I think the first is that I see a lot of companies start their ABM journey with display advertising.
And I think they do that because it’s really easy; it’s an easy button. You just have to spend some money, give them your account list, and hey, you get to say you’re doing ABM. But I’ve also seen that lead to disillusionment with ABM quite frequently because the reality is, I don’t care if you’re doing account targeting or not. Ads are ads.
I don’t click on ads. I don’t even notice ads, and I’m sure that’s probably true with a lot of other executives. So my first tip is don’t get seduced into thinking that you can really just start with ads. I think of advertisements as a nice thing you layer on top of an existing program. But, not your first step. That’s my first piece of advice.
Jon: I think my next piece of advice is that you really have to think about your technology infrastructure.
At Marketo, I started trying to do ABM with Marketo and Sales Force and the systems that I had, and it was hard. It was hard because those are lead-based systems. The data in those systems don’t roll up into your account. I made my market operation team crazy just trying to kind of set up the processes so I could even measure whether we’re also having an impact at the account level.
So, again, if you’re looking to start, I really think it’s worth considering what is your account foundation? And how do you look at data at an account-based level?
It’s kind of obvious when you say it that way.
You can't be account-based if you can't look at your accounts. But I see a lot of people missing that as a place to start. - Jon MillerClick To Tweet
Brian: That’s very good. As I was looking through the book, this is a 175-page book that you’re offering for free to people for providing information. You put a lot of effort and energy into it, it’s very well done. What’s your favorite chapter in your book and why?
Jon: I’m not going to pick one, I’m going to pick two here.
Brian: Okay, sounds good.
Jon: So, I think first, the whole part two of the guide, which is all about the different styles of ABM, and the concept of ABM Entitlements is entirely new in the second edition.
I think I like it a lot because when I go and talk to our customers about how they take their ABM program to the next level, this concept always comes up.
The different styles and the entitlements. And it’s related directly back to the problem I talked about earlier which is people tend to have picked too many accounts, and therefore aren’t really able to deliver enough wood behind the arrow. So, I think part two about the styles of ABM entitlements is one of my favorites.
Jon: And then probably the other one I like a lot is this whole section on ABM metrics and measurements, partly because I’m a quantitative measurement numbers guy. But it’s really struck me how different the metrics in ABM are from those in traditional demand generation.
In a nutshell, the metrics in traditional marketing primarily focus on quantity, and back to the net fishing, it’s all about how many leads did I generate? How many opportunities did I produce? How many people attended my webinar? How many people showed up at my event? And so on. It entirely misses out on the much more fundamental questions around quality.
First, are these the right people from the right accounts? It’s not about counting the people you reach; it’s about reaching the people that count. And so, are you measuring that?
And even furthermore, it’s about understanding the depth and the quality of the relationship. How engaged are these people with you?
Most salespeople would rather have meaningful engagement from a decision maker at a target account than a hundred random leads and ABM metrics really kind of embraced that concept.
Most salespeople would rather have meaningful engagement from a decision maker at a target account than a hundred random leads - Jon MillerClick To TweetGrowing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy
Why Customer Advocacy Should Be The Heart of Your Marketing
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5 Ways to Immediately Boost Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with the way modern B2B buyers purchase goods and services.
Meetings, phone calls, and email are still important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations?
Conversational Marketing is about having direct one-to-one conversations to connect with customers and offer help.
By using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website), you can connect with people in real-time, and convert leads faster.
That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG.
DG: So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing; been here for three-ish years right since the beginning of the company.
The way that I talk about Drift is that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.
Which is a significant change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda built for later? Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.
But you know, there’s just been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.
I think about walking outside this building: if I called Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s what we expect from everything. Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.
Brian: Right.
DG: So, our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.
Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually. –
DG: You got a copy! Wait, old that up again. I gotta take a screenshot.
Brian: Do a screenshot right here.
DG: You got one of the contrabands. Love it.
Brian: Yeah, we do! I have highlighted all over this book, and so I wanted to talk about it.
This new book’s coming out. When’s the release date? I know it’s soon. And what motivated you to write the book? Why now?
DG: Release date’s January 30th. Pre-order it everywhere until then, but it’ll be in stores on the 30th. And the reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, we felt it firsthand.
We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest growing companies of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.
And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”
We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say and enough case studies and examples and methodologies and playbooks and blueprints, and all that stuff.
And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”
Brian: Well, it’s really well done.
DG: Because content’s a commodity, right?
Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody’s into videos. Everybody’s on social media.
Content five, ten years ago you could be like, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people are like, “Blogging? No way!”
Today, all that stuff is a commodity, and nobody’s going to be on their commute home tonight being like, “You know what I wish I had more of?
I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. Like, I need another B2B podcast. That’s what I need.” Right? And so, there’s got to be some other way to compete.
You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” Because we’re all kind of starting to ignore that, right?
I try to avoid filling out forms if I can.
I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t usually call me. I never reply to cold emails. And so, something had to give. And that’s really the shift that we’ve seen in the market.
And something that David (who I wrote this book with; he’s the founder and CEO of Drift) the thing he talks about is, he calls it the shift from supply to demand. Right?
Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power, and so if you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person that sold iced coffee.
And you could say, “You know what, Brian? You’re going to have to go through my process, and you want one of my iced coffees? Great! Come back at 5 o’clock tonight. Call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”
Where now, customers have all the power, right?
By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I’ve already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason.
And so, it's all about adapting to the way that people behave and want to interact online.Click To TweetReally, the concept that information is free now, it’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.
Brian: I was just thinking you sell to marketers, right? And so, naturally, we’re kind of a snarky bunch. We know how things are played, and so it’s about building trust with people as well. I just wanted to hear the story; I was reading the book, but also, I first heard about it, I think it was a year ago. This whole idea of the #noforms movement.
DG: What do I mean by “no forms”?
That’s a loaded question. So “no forms” is pretty, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not a rhetorical question, but you know what I’m trying to say, right?
Brian: Right. Right.
DG: You need no forms because of the whole process that I think marketers got into this world of just abusing forms, right? And I’m not preaching to anybody;
I did this too, right?
I remember one of the first things I did at Drift.
I wanted to write an article about the Growth Marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. And so, I made a Twitter list, I put it in a Google sheet, and I put a form behind it.
And I said, “Hey! You want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.” Like, that person’s not a lead. Right?
There’s no intent there. I’m just gating this thing that is a commodity, and so we kind of started this whole “no forms” movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.
It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work and he’s like, “Hey! You got a second?” And I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.
So, when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.” It was actually worse than getting fired.
He was like, “Hey! I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.” And I was like, “Okay. And do what?” Like, I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away?
So, what are you going to measure me on? And he’s like, “No, idiot.” He didn’t say that.
But he’s like, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way, and we need to remove all of our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”
And so, it was really like a pivotal moment for us, because it’s like, “Alright. If we’re going to build this thing, we’ve got to live it firsthand.”
And it was amazing because it wasn’t just a marketing lesson, right?
I remember sitting next to two of our engineers, we shared a little table together and they’re like, “Okay. You’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?” And they’re like, “We’re building this thing as we go on the spot.” It was super transformational for our business because we were able to see how it worked firsthand.
But then we got to go and educate the world, right? Because you say “no forms” to marketers, people are going to jump off the side of the boat.
But for us, we were like, “Hold on. Let me show you how you would do a webinar registration without a form. Let me show you how you would do this on your pricing page without a form.”
And so, it gave us an opportunity to really go out there and educate the market. And the results since then have been amazing.
Brian: You know it still stings and feels a bit like heresy, this idea of “no forms.” because every marketing automation provider has been built in forms. We have tons of popups. I have popups on my blog and on my website, and the question is if I get rid of forms, then how do I engage people
DG: So, the short answer to that is to have a conversation, right? And that’s really why Drift exists because the way you’re going to capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody.
I’ll give you an example. Forms work. And in reality, the best advice I could give you is, don’t replace your forms.
That’s what you’re going to do eventually after you’re very successful with conversational marketing. But I want you to use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start, right?
And you’re going to create a second net that’s going to create this fast lane for the best people because if somebody has very high intent and they land on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form.
They want to get an answer now. And so, Drift is going to create a fast lane for those best people.
So, part one is, use Drift or conversation marketing in addition to what you’re already doing with forms. The other part of that is something we see all the time, right?
How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t.
You either fill it out or you don’t, right? We see this happen all the time.
Somebody will come in on our website and our sales reps, when a named account comes to the website, they get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey! The VP of Marketing at DropBox is on the website right now.”
We had a real example like this, and I’ll just make up the companies.
The CMO at Starbucks, she comes to the website, and she says, “Oh, I was interested-” and the bot says, “Hey! What brought you to Drift?” And she says, “Well, I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack and so we’re actually not a good fit.”
At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa! Hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.” And she’s like, “Oh, interesting.”
Long story short, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.
How does that happen in the world of a form? It doesn’t. Because the only opportunity is you either fill out the form or you don’t, right? There is no conversation, and that’s the heart of conversational marketing.
Now, the next question people ask is, “Okay. So, does that mean that I have to have my team sit there on chat waiting for new messages 24/7?” No. That’s where we use bots and AI.
We don’t use bots to replace a human, and we don’t want to put anybody out of a job, right? But we use bots to do that stuff, so people can go on with their day, right?
We want bots to handle the digital paperwork; the stuff that was normally used for a form, right?
A bot can ask the same questions that a form can ask in two seconds versus having to add the friction of somebody filling out a form.
That way, as a marketer, I can do what I’m good at, which is getting people to talk about Drift and coming to our website. And a salesperson, all they have to do is take calls all day, right?
That’s the kind of relationship that conversational marketing can help.
Brian: What I think as I’m listening to you, I think of two ways of building a relationship.
And one, which you’ve touched on, is if you get rid of forms, you’re making things available to people, and you’re helping them. And so, it’s like reciprocal altruism. You’re giving something of value.
And two, it’s through conversation. That’s how we build relationships.
DG: I mean, there’s so many. I don’t have one specific brand example, because there are so many different ones. I’ve seen some creative ways people have used conversational marketing.
We have a customer who uses it not to book sales meetings, but to sell tickets to their event. So they have this high-end event, and it’s in March.
Every person that lands on that website get a, “Hey, Brian. Nice to see you here. Did you know that right now we’re running two for one ticket? Do you want to get one? Click yes.” Okay. Have a conversation to do event tickets.
We have customers who use conversational marketing instead of forms to do webinar registration, and it makes webinar registration one click. So, basically, it can double the number of conversions by simplifying the webinar registration.
A lot of people actually use conversational marketing with content, which is, “Hey! You just finished reading this article about thing X. I bet you’d also like part two, which is about thing Y. Do you want to go check that out?” And the bot basically leads them to another piece of content
It would be annoying if every time you visited our blog, a bot said, “Hey! Do you want a demo of Drift?” You think, “No. I just want to read this article.”
But what if on the fifth time you come to our blog, we then ask you for the demo? And the message is like, “Hey! Alright, let’s be honest. You kind of come here a lot, right? Can I show you what the Drift product is all about?” Right?
That’s such a different ask, and it’s just about being a little bit more patient and doing it when the time is right.
We think about this a lot. If you had a brick and mortar store and to every person that walked in you say, “Hey! Do you wanna buy something? Do you wanna buy something? Do you wanna buy something now? Can I show you where to buy something?”
You would scare them away. But that’s how most B2B companies operate, and that’s how they do business on their website.
Brian:
Yeah. And we know how that feels in the retail setting. We don’t want to be there. We don’t want to have that experience.
As I was listening to you share the experience of what it’s like to be in a store, for example, and how that would feel, it leads me to think about empathy and how we think about the experience of the customer.
DG: Totally. So, I think of it as, not to simplify this, most B2B marketers, we treat the people on our website like they’re dumb, right?
Like they did no research, they just happened to stumble upon your website in the middle of the desert and go, “Huh…what does this cybersecurity company do?” Right? It doesn’t happen that way.
Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You’re not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company’s websites. So, step one is, understand that the people who are there are there for a reason.
Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You're not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company's websites. So, step one is, understand that the people who are there are there for a reason.Click To TweetThey probably listen to your podcasts, they watch your videos, they read your blog, they got on your email list, a friend told them.
And so, even if they kinda stumble upon your website, like I said earlier, information is free now, right?
If somebody comes to the Drift website and they don’t find what they want, guess what they’re going to do?
They’re going to go over to Google, and they’re going to type “Drift alternative,” and they’re going to find one of our competitors and they’re going to use their product. And so, I think it is all about empathy.
It’s understanding who somebody is, why they are on your website. There’s a good chance they don’t have all the answers, and they’re here for a reason.
My wife and I bought a new car about a month ago, and it was amazing. We walked into the dealership, and we already had basically everything narrowed down. We just wanted to go for a test drive.
And you’re nodding, and everybody that you say this to is nodding because that’s how we all behave like people. As humans. That’s how we all buy.
But then something happens in our brains when we go to our jobs in sales and marketing.
We’re like, “Alright. I’ve got to make sure we don’t tell them anything about this unless they talk to us.” Where the old sales rep tactic of, “Oh, you want to know the price? Yeah, let’s get on a call.”
No! Just tell me the freakin’ price over email.
That’s not what the decision-maker is going to be, and so it all starts with empathy and understanding that the goal should be to have a conversation with somebody who is in your store.
If you change your mindset to that, then your “store” as a B2B company is your website. If I’m a B2B company, I want to have conversations with the people who are in my store, which is my website.
If I had a store, I’d have somebody in front and somebody on the aisles being like, “Hey! I’m here if you need anything. Let me know if you have any questions.” Right? That’s how we think about conversational marketing as a layer for all this.
Brian: And as you bring it up, I mean we’re all customers, and yet at the same time when you’re a marketer you’re not your customer.
So, you need to think about that experience, as you just talked about, and from that place, how can you help them?
Otherwise, we just have this bias. We love our product. We love our website so much, and we really need to put the customer first is what I hear you say.
DG: Totally. The customer has to be first, and I think here’s the easiest way to be empathetic about it. Think about what type of marketing you react to, right?
We don’t ever think like this. We think of, “Oh, I’m just going to send this email for the fourth time in three days.”
Hold on. We’re all the same, right? There’s no more like I’m not “B2B Dave” and then I go home and I’m like “Dave the dad,” and “B2C Dave.” No. I am just the same person in all walks of life now.
That’s because of our experience as consumers, we live in a world where I can order a Starbucks on my phone. I can order a car on my phone. I can order four boxes of diapers and have them sent to my house tomorrow and spend $300 in two minutes on my phone.
And then when you go to a B2B website, we want things to work the same, but they don’t.
To really break into empathy, you actually don’t have to think about what somebody else feels.
DG: Think about how you buy and think about the last thing you bought and start thinking about how you can reverse engineer your buying process to match what you would like.
Brian: Yeah. I would probably also add, if I think of that and then also at the same time realize if I now start believing I understand what a customer’s thinking, then I have a bias. You know?
So, I’ve really got to understand them too and what they want. You need to spend time with the customer to understand what it’s like, what their experience is too.
Brian: There’s so much I wanted to ask you about, but one thing is that in the book you talked about the power of plain text emails and I wanted to ask you about it because, why plain text emails? Can you share more on that?
DG: Yes! So, plain text emails. This is something that we first started doing about three years ago, and we did plain text emails because I think people just started to get “banner blindness” in the email.
When I saw a highly designed HTML big banner type of email, I was like, “Oh, this is a promotion from a company.” We wanted all of our emails to look and feel like they were being sent from a friend.
So, our whole email marketing strategy was like, “Alright. I’m going to a wedding with my family in New York. How would I email? I’m meeting my mom and dad at the train tomorrow. How would I email my mom to make sure we’re going to be there on time?”
Subject line would be like, “Tomorrow?” “Hey, mom! I’m just making sure we’re still on for tomorrow. We’ll be there at 1 o’clock. Do you need anything from me?” Why do our marketing emails have to be different than that? That’s how we talk.
That’s how we would communicate. And so, we started thinking about what if we just ditched the banners, ditched the design and we started sending plain text emails that were always written like they were from a friend?
Brian: Yeah. It was written as if it came from a real person because it did, is what I’m hearing.
DG: Yeah! The thing that was so frustrating for me was that I got a bunch of responses from people like, “Ugh. You’re trying to be too sneaky. I don’t like this. It felt like a real person.”
And I’m thinking, wait a second, doesn’t that just reveal the state of the industry that we’re in?
So, B2B marketing is not supposed to sound like a real person. And I was like, “No, that’s exactly why we’re doing it.” I want it to sound like a real person.
And we even had an email that when you would subscribe to our blog, you would get an email from me and it would say, “Hey!” You know like the welcome email you get after you sign up for something, right?
And it would say,
“Hey! I just want to get this out of the way. My name is DG, and I’m VP of marketing at Drift. Even though this is an automated email, I just wanted to let you know that I’m a real person and I’m really here, and I actually really did write this. And if you ever get spammed or if you ever feel like your inbox is being disrespected, just email me directly.”
Source: Drift.com
And that one email just disarms so many people, because it’s like look, I’m a real person. I had a video of me saying that. Nobody’s trying to get you upset. Nobody’s trying to spam you. We’re real. We’re human.
This is what we’re doing. That little piece of humanity in that email was such a disarming thing, and it helped us really build a relationship with those early subscribers that we had.
Brian: Well, it seems like as you read in the book the way I would describe it is, you’re treating people as people, not as leads. Not as objects to convert.
You’re just relating to them as other people, and you’re a person.
Brian: When I first started 20 years ago, before it was called business development reps, my VP of sales said to me, “Just be people with people.”
And you know, I was 23. I was an intern, and I was trying to sound important because I was calling executives.
And I think when I embraced the fact that I was 23 and didn’t have a lot of experience and just was who I was, there’s that authenticity and it just is.
DG: I love that, because of look, and this is not to be disrespectful. I don’t have the most experience in the world, but I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing now for like the last eight, ten years.
No 23-year-old BDR is going to know more about marketing than me, right?
Brian: Yeah.
DG: And that’s not a knock. You had just graduated college and are in an entry level sales job so if you tried to reach out or call or LinkedIn or whatever, and tried to tell me that I could triple my conversion…whatever, right?
I mean, there’s no way.
So, I think, how can you be human? How can you show who you really are? “Hey! Look, I’m at this company. I’m not a marketing person, but man, we have this product that has seen crazy results for so many customers just like you. Can I show you how it works?”
Right? That little change makes such a difference.
Brian: I love the section you actually wrote about BDRs and personally, I get questions about BDR reps.
For example, how do we help them do better? You talk about the problem is the process, not the people. How do you mean?
DG: Yeah, it’s probably not a people problem.
I think the process is more like, most BDRs, most any sales, marketing, whoever, the reason they do bad things is that they’re not incentivized to do the right things.
Which is, “Hey! 23-year-old Brian, you’re a BDR. Look, you’ve got to make 200 calls today. That’s all I care about. Make 200 calls.” Of course! What are you going to do? You’re going to make 200 calls.
Or, “You’ve got to send 300 emails today.” Then you’re going to send a bunch of automated, terrible emails and you’re going to be like, “Alright. It’s 2 o’clock. I’m going to go home.” So, I think if you have people who are incentivizing behavior like that, then, of course, that’s going to be the result, right?
Whereas if you said, “Look, you need to get two meetings a day. I don’t care about how many activities, inputs, outputs, whatever. Two meetings a day.”
There are two ways to go about getting two meetings a day.
You could send 300 emails and hope you get two emails, and how are you going to send 300 emails in eight hours? Well, either you’ve got to blast people, or you could reach out to six of the perfect, dream customers, right?
And you’re going to book two meetings from it. And so, that means you’re going to spend half your day doing research. Is it the George Washington or Abe Lincoln quote that talks about chopping down a tree?
Brian: Yeah. If I had an hour to chop down a tree, I’d spend 50 minutes to sharpen my ax. Or something like that. (here’s the quote)
DG: That’s exactly right. So, it’s the same process for sales and marketing that I think we’ve got to help bring back to the world.
Brian: That makes sense. We have time probably for one more question, but I’d love to ask you a lot more. If we have a coffee together and I said, “DG, how do I get into conversational marketing? Where can I start?” What tips would you recommend for me to get started today?
DG: Number one is to go and buy the book. Pre-order it. Because we’ve taken everything we’ve learned over the last two and a half, three years and put it into this book to help you get started. And obviously, we have a ton of great content at Drift designed to help you do that.
But let’s assume that you’ve signed up and you’re going to use conversational marketing.
For me, it would be, pick one to two things, one to two places that you can be successful right away. The biggest mistake I think people make is, “Alright. I bought Drift. It’s everywhere. Let’s see what happens.” We’re like, “No. What is your plan?” They’re like, “Oh, well…”
So, here’s a better example. Most websites have a “contact us” button, or “request a demo,” And that pops out a 13, 15 field, 20-field form, whatever. You fill it out. I’d be like, “Oh, that’s easy. We could replace that easily.”
So, start with that one page. Have a contained experiment on that one page. Prove out success and then start to expand. Then put it on the pricing page. Then put it on the homepage. Then put it on the blog. You’ve got to have a motion that you’re going to try to improve.
Well, we think we could double the conversion rate on our homepage by doing this, right? So, that’s where I would start is pick one or two familiar patterns, whether it’s your blog, whether it’s your “request a demo” button, and start there. And really learn.
You’re going to learn a lot more than you thought you would. I think a lot of people say, “I only want to book sales demos.” And then they start using Drift, and they’re like, “I haven’t booked a demo yet, but I’ve had five conversations this morning that blew my mind and, oh my God, I need to change my homepage.”
That’s the stuff that you can’t quantify until you actually get out there and have real conversations with people.
You can listen/subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast via iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or Google You can leave a review of the podcast here
Also, connect with Brian and Dave (DG) on Twitter @brianjcarroll @davegerhardt
Conversational Marketing Drift.com/book
Drift.com: Get the first chapter of Conversational Marketing for free
How Customer-Hero Stories Help You Connect Better
Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy
New Research: Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems
What’s the quickest, cheapest way to implement lead nurturing?
I get that question frequently when I talk to marketers about lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is pretty easy to understand, but hard to execute when you have little time or budget.
I thought I’d share my barest-bones lead nurturing strategy to help you get started fast. I’ll do my best to resist the urge to elaborate. Volumes could be written about each bullet point. In fact, they have been.
Include all of the people you could potentially sell to, such as people you’ve met at trade shows, who have spoken with your sales team and who have responded to your website.
What do you know about the people in it? What industry are they in? What are their titles? Where did you get their names?
Not everyone is the same. Make sure you understand what each persona looks like, their needs and goals, what information they’re looking for and how they prefer to receive their information.
Begin by asking your sales team, “What questions do our customers ask most often? What do they care about? What issues are they facing?”
Find content – articles, blogs, white papers and the like – that addresses these issues. Pass this content by your sales team. Ask them whether their customers would value it. As much as you can, repurpose content. For instance, white papers can be transformed to articles and articles to blog posts.
These should be simple emails that are written as if you are speaking to them directly. Be genuinely helpful.
Provide your sales team with email templates so that they can follow up and engage in their own conversations.
Make a personal connection and follow up emails with phone calls to directly gauge prospects’ interest. Never rely on email alone.
Lead nurturing can be executed without expensive marketing automation tools; there are plenty of simple, low-cost platforms to start off with.
You can create databases in Excel and run mail merges from Microsoft Outlook.
I hope this is helpful as you implement lead nurturing for your organization. I’d love to hear your tips on what you found helpful to get started with lead nurturing? What else have you learned to implement lead nurturing programs in your company?
If you want to dig deeper here’s some lead nurturing bonus material:
When you’re designing a lead nurturing program, ask yourself the following:
Thoughts on lead nurturing channels and timing
Lead nurturing is not a single marketing campaign. Instead, it’s better to think of it as a conversation.
Lead nurturing takes on the form of a series of steps and communication tactics with defined objectives and strategies that are tailored to developing and building a relationship with the potential customer – out of which will come conversations that convert to sales.
The channels you’ll use and the frequency of touches will depend on the product or service being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect. A general rule is to bring salespeople into the process about six months before the targeted purchase time.
A simple lead nurturing path might look like this for your personas:
The mix and selection of lead nurturing channels and content should be based on what is being sold and how the specific market and prospect have been shown to prefer acquiring information.
I just covered using the phone and email, but you can use several channels, as evidenced by this mindmap of lead nurturing channels and content:
Stop Cold Calling and Start Lead Nurturing [More from the blogs]
B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified [MarketingSherpa how-to]
Marketing Research Chart: The ROI of lead nurturing [MarketingSherpa chart]
Want to connect better with people on the phone or in person and build rapport today?
Over the past few days, I’ve had two readers reach for advice on how to do better outreach.
One reader wrote, “never had a role like this before and I’m desperate to succeed and be the best I can be for myself and the company.”
Another one writes, “thankful for any help I may get because I am a millennial x 3, so this is not natural.”
So I’m sharing two tips you can apply now.
My best advice came over 20 years ago when I was a 22-year-old business development rep (BDR). I was calling to setup up appointments for a small sales training company.
In my first two weeks, I had zero meetings booked.
I felt dejected and worried about paying rent. I was trying to sound experienced and professional calling people who had way more knowledge about sales than me.
My Sales manager Julie said to me, “just be people with people.” I was 22 after all. Just own it and be me.
Here’s what I did:
I started talking about how it was my first sales job, and how excited I was and how much I knew had to learn.
More importantly, I was interested in learning about them and if this training might help their team. The result?
I scheduled three appointments that day. My vulnerability became my strength to connect. It wasn’t about my experience; it was just about being myself and doing the work.
Often, I could hear smiles from the managers I called. Some shared how my story brought them back to being in their first sales job too.
Just be people with people.
Are you listening (like many people) to confirm what you already know? Alternatively, are you looking deeper to learn something new? The difference is huge.
Here are some quick things you can do right now:
Listening with empathy goes beyond active listening because you’re tuning in to process two levels, what’s said and also trying to understand why.
If you listen with the intent of figuring out what you’re going to say, then you aren’t hearing them. They will feel it.
Here’s a quick test: After they finished talking, can you repeat back at least the last three words of what they just said back to them?
By doing this you’re going to tune in to listen, and by being present (i.e., being fully engaged), you’re, going connect more effectively.
In sum, be people with people and listen with empathy and you’ll connect immediately.
How Customer-Hero Stories Help You Connect Better
Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing
Do routinely look for ways to drive innovation with your demand generation approach? Or do you feel behind the curve?
According to research by Circle Research, marketers are split. Half of the marketers say they’re “old school” while the other half believe their approach is innovative.
Circle Research found that most of the marketers (93%) who describe themselves as innovative say that it has made their marketing more effective. However, 83% of marketers who are lagging plan to bring innovation into their approach this year.
That’s why I interviewed Jeanne Hopkins (@jeannehopkins), CMO at Lola.com on how marketers can bring more innovation to demand generation.
Jeanne: Thanks, Brian. My undergraduate degree is in Accounting.
Believe it or not, the accounting office where I started told me in my annual review that I probably didn’t have a future in accounting because I was too loud for the office. Yes, everything balanced, everything was good, but I was too noisy for a nice, cut and dry accounting office.
So, that’s when I moved into toys, and I worked for Milton Bradley Company in their in-house advertising agency. Then I moved to LEGO and then moved into other consulting companies.
From there, I got into software which was an internally funded company called Datum E-business Solutions which delivered a trusted time application.
A long time ago, way back in the year 2000, it used to be that you’d send an email. Maybe somebody would send it again, but it would be like three hours later or three hours before and that’s because networks were not on the same timing device.
So, the whole concept of having timing and having to be secure became something that became critically important to all networks. From there, selling into IT, B2B technology companies, that sort of thing. So that’s my gig.
Jeanne: Lola.com is a corporate travel management solution that allows finance people, office managers and business travelers themselves to be able to see their full travel details and integrate with an expense platform. I know, Brian, you’ve probably done some expenses before-
Brian: Yeah.
Jeanne: You take a picture of the expense, you watch it go into the cloud, you fill out the form, and it takes a half an hour or hour and, I bet you avoid it, right? It’s like one those things-
Brian: It’s something you wait until the last minute to do, and if the reports are due on Monday, you’re doing it Sunday night.
Jeanne: Of course, taking away from family time.
Brian: Right.
Jeanne: We integrate with Expensify, Concur, a whole bunch of different finance applications as well as travel. You can book all your travel with us.
We have a complete support network that helps you get checked in and makes sure that when disruptions come up (reroute people, get people back sooner or back later) and any other hiccups that business travelers endure and we’re trying to mitigate that for them.
Brian: I wanted to highlight you because you’ve done so much, you know, since you and I met, and we could date ourselves a bit here but-
Jeanne: That’s okay.
Brian: Way back, as we spoke, I think, at a MarketingSherpa Conference.
Jeanne: 2006, yeah.
Brian: Yeah! I was impressed by you and just how you were bringing innovation and creativity and out of the box thinking. Also, you’ve continued to do that throughout your career.
I feel and have always felt, that my job is to generate revenue - Jeanne HopkinsClick To Tweet
How did you start thinking differently to drive innovation with demand generation?
Jeanne: Well, I can’t claim the credit myself, so I’d say that there would be a couple of different influences. I would say both of my parents are artists of a kind. My dad paints, he plays music, he writes. My mom sings, plays music, and paints.
So, when I was in high school, I majored in Art. We had to submit a portfolio, and I enjoy thinking from an artistic view of the world. That’s the left-handed component of me.
However, then, when I graduated from high school, I went to college for Accounting because I’m ultimately practical, right? I said I could always get a job adding things up.
I read constantly. I’m trying to always look for something that’s a little bit different, a little bit ahead of the curve.
I don’t want to be an early adopter, but I want to be on the forefront before the competition, catches up with us. So, I’m lucky by having kind of a creative outlook, and I think.
My dad was a newspaperman. He was a managing editor of the newspaper in western Massachusetts, in Springfield and I can look at things and look at story ideas. This a story, like just us having a conversation right here, Brian.
Jeanne: So, we each have a story, we have a back story that goes back some 13 years now-
We know each other. We worked together, you know, you have a family, you know my family, and that’s a story.
So, I sent a note to my internal content team, and I said, “Hey, I’m doing this podcast. When it gets published, I think we should do a press release and post it on the blog and backlink to Brian’s blog because that’s where he’s going to be posting it,” but, that’s not creative.
Don’t you think that’s where people kind of drop the ball?
'I think that one of the challenges that many marketers have is that they don't look at the whole business.' - Jeanne HopkinsClick To TweetBrian: I do. I think it’s like bringing the two pieces together and what I’ve respected about you is that you were always willing to try something new, you know? And you would see it through and wouldn’t let it drop.
Jeanne: Are you saying I’m a nag?!
Brian: Well, I think a little bit. You want things done well and you own it. Being creative is great, but being creative or innovative isn’t going to matter much unless you can get it done.
Jeanne: A place that I worked at a few companies ago, one of the salespeople contacted me and said, “Oh, they’re completely rebranding. They’re doing all this kind of stuff.”
I feel like marketers that go the rebranding route, the new logo route, they’re arts and crafts marketers because while that’s important and a brand is essential, but it’s not as important as generating revenue.
Brian: Yeah.
Jeanne: But almost a thousand of them were untouched by sales because we don’t have enough sales people so working with an organization to be able to make sure if people are downloading content, you want them to get touched.
They may not be ready to buy, but you want to be able to make sure they’re touched. So, I’m trying to come up with a solution to that internally. To go figure out what can I do to help the sales organization be able to achieve the revenue targets that we have as an organization?
Jeanne: I think that one of the challenges that many marketers have is that they don’t look at the whole business.
Because our job is not just as marketers. And this concept of arts and crafts marketer and saying, “Okay, I’m going to change this logo from orange to pink,” and therefore all these people are going to come to us and say, “Oh, I love your new logo and can I buy from you?” That’s not going to happen.
You haven’t given anybody anything of value. I feel and have always felt, that my job is to generate revenue.
And that becomes challenging for many marketers. If I looked at what this brand person is doing, you’re going to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars with an agency, you’re going to go through this whole process.
My understanding is this individual has been there for eight months, and the sales team hasn’t seen a single lead. I would stick a fork in my eye if that were the case. My job is to generate leads.
I want to have an excellent relationship with sales.
I want to make sure that the sales leader that I’m working with is somebody that I like, and respect and we’re joined at the hip so that we can, together, grow the business.
It's not marketing; it's not sales, it's us together. - Jeanne HopkinsClick To TweetBrian: I want to call attention to something you’ve said that it’s so important that you go beyond the lead. You’re looking at the whole business and focused on revenue, I think it’s just part of being a good marketer is looking at, execution.
How do we take this person we built a relationship with or start a conversation with and carry it through to helping them become a customer?
Jeanne: Yes. Also, stay a customer.
Jeanne: Because when you think about it, I feel like there’s like four circles if you will.
The center ring is employees and if employees don’t have a sense of what’s going on and they’re not being communicated with, like here are the events that are coming up, here are the PR things that are coming up.
What’s the full transparency so that the employees know what’s going on with the product, with marketing, with sales, with the team, with everything?
The next one is customers and, unfortunately, customer marketing as a concept is not something marketers dig. But they don’t think about them until they’re gone.
Then the next level is prospects. Many marketers focus just on prospects. Then, what’s the conversion rate, visit-to-lead, visits-to-CTA, CTA-to-opportunity, the opportunity-to-customer?
Oh, that’s all great, but you also have a community, and when I worked at HubSpot as an example, we had a million people that were part of the community. They were not going to become customers, but you know what they did? They amplified content, so we had a new E-book on something, sent it out, the community would leverage it, and that’s what you want.
But if you don’t start with employees and customers, the rest of it is all for naught and prospects look at reviews and what other people are buying. You must have a solid core of employees and customers, and that’s the holistic view in my mind.
Brian: Well, as I talk with CEO’s, I hear the metrics they care a lot about are looking at customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV) because they tie back to the diagram you just shared.
How much effort and money do we need to spend to acquire a customer? And how well are we keeping them?
Jeanne: I think it’s the immediacy of things. I think we are all suffering; I mean, you’ve read the attention span of a goldfish and all that kind of stuff.
We use Drift on our website because people want to get information right away. At my previous company Ipswitch, we implemented Drift.
As a global company, we expanded the hours for the third party company that was monitoring all of our Drift interactions.
They acted as kind of a tier zero to be able to funnel people to the community, be able to answer in Spanish, to do different things with our Drift implementation.
Over this course of eight months, we generated $3.6 million worth of pipeline because people got answers right away. They will set up a demo and make sure you get to the right sales person. I think that there’s such a flood of information, people want answers right away.
So, the great thing about Drift and this implementation that we leveraged is that it is a personal one. It’s not a robot if you want some help, let’s schedule this, let’s do this.
Point them in the right direction to be able to get people the answers they want when they want it.
I’m sure you’ve had these instances where you send a note, and this has been happening to me increasingly, you send a note to the contact desk email thing, you fill out the form and you never hear back.
It’s just a black hole. You wonder as a marketer, have you ever filled out one of those forms on your company? Do you know if anybody’s ever going to get back to you? So what a wasted opportunity.
Brian: It’s such a great tip. Be a secret shopper of your own web experience and your 800 experience, and your Drift experience. Ask yourself, how does it feel?
Jeanne: Right.
Brian: And seeing things from the customer’s point of view, you spend time talking about connecting with salespeople.
Jeanne: I think most marketing people would benefit from some sales experience.
I’m lucky enough to have, in the course of my career, worked in sales. I carried a bag, carried a quota. I like marketing people to feel that they’re tied to sales and their ability to hit their numbers.
It’s not just, “here, I generated a thousand leads and throw them over the fence; you deal with them.” But, have you ever called any of those leads?
Have you ever touched any of those leads when people are saying, “I don’t know who you are? I never downloaded this. I never do that,” and that happens all the time.
Jeanne: And if salespeople, out of every ten leads they get eight of those, “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re calling me. I don’t know this.” They’re going to start to avoid the leads that you’re sending them.
Even though you tell salespeople you’re going to have a hundred “nos” before you get a yes. Selling is hard. It’s very, very difficult.
So, it’s our job as marketers to scrub the leads, that’s what I’m trying to do here is before I throw them over the fence, I want to scrub them.
We’ve taken out international, we’ve pushed to nurture anything that’s a public email address. They want company email addresses, and we’re trying to narrow this down as far as our service level agreement is with them.
But my advice would be walking a mile in their (sales) shoes, and you’ll build some empathy for how hard it is.
'But my advice would be walking a mile in their (sales) shoes, and you'll build some empathy for how hard it is.' - Jeanne HopkinsClick To TweetJeanne: I think empathy’s a tough thing, Brian, right? You talk about the emotional quotient like such as intellectual quotient like, that your EQ.
I’m lucky enough in my career, I’ve always had a good relationship with finance people because if I want more money, for whatever reason, I want to be able to say, “give me 100 thousand dollars and I’ll get you 500 thousand, and this is how I’m going to do it.”
I’ve done it before. That sort of thing because most marketers with finance people are over budget and don’t understand how to talk to a finance person.
So, finance people, let’s talk about them in travel. Finance people are the bad guys. They are always the bad guys. They’re the ones that kick back your expense reports. And they say “this isn’t going to get covered or they may say “you need to get your invoices in the next five days,” or your expense reports or whatever.
It’s always the bad cop, bad cop, bad cop and you know, these people don’t travel so what do you think their viewpoint is of a salesperson that is travels or maybe overspending? How do you think they feel?
Brian: Well, they feel they are probably irresponsible, or not looking out on the best interest of the company or, you know, feel like their entitled and want the white table cloth treatment.
Jeanne: Yes. You know, they want to be business class. So, we’ve been doing this series of webinars on implementing a travel policy like, “how to sell your travel policy within an organization,” “How to take the pain out of creating a travel policy” because, in our consult, we can put parameters like nobody takes a first-class trip.
They can bypass it, but if you have set up a travel policy and somebody books first-class to go to Austin or something, it gets triggered and then they know that when they were doing it like this, it’s out of policy and that’s very intentional.
It’s like video cameras at Wal-Mart or something, you’re looking at it is going, “oh well, okay,” you’re being watched a little bit.
So that provides a level of transparency and clarity to the employee where most employers have policies that are “use your best judgment” so what is your best judgment?
Your best judgment. I need to stay at the Intercontinental for $400.00 a night, and you’re like “oh, no! The La Quinta’s perfectly fine for 99 bucks a night.”
So, what’s reasonable? Is La Quinta 20 miles away from your meeting and you must rent a car for $150.00 to go back? It’s trying to rationalize what works and what doesn’t work for an organization and also taking the emotion out of it.
Brian: Well it’s interesting because you’re thinking of the experience of what it’s like to be in finance and you’re trying to help solve the problem they’re dealing with which is we’re human.
We don’t want to feel like the bad guys all the time, even people in finance or HR or whomever it may be. They serve a considerable value to the organization in driving profitability and ensuring people have payroll met and all these essential things.
Jeanne: Absolutely.
Brian: So, it just sounds like you were trying to see from their experience how do you make it better, and then you focus on helping them solve it, is that what I’m hearing?
Jeanne: Well, and another example is another persona that is a user is, say the office manager or whoever’s responsible in the office for booking.
You’re responsible for booking people to go from office A to office B regularly. If you could see this all in one place rather than worrying about this person’s travel itinerary and that person’s travel itinerary-
Jeanne: What we figured out from an ROI calculator that I worked on is that the average business trip takes 60 minutes to book. You go to four to five sites.
You could go to Marriott; or JetBlue, or Delta. You’re trying to map out your itinerary.
You’re trying to get it for a reasonable price, but also on your schedule because you want to be home on Friday night, you want to be home at Friday night no later than 5:00 so that you can have supper with your family and watch a movie, right?
However, if you had a choice, this becomes problematic for people and then you, as an individual, are talking to Donna at the front desk. You’re going back and forth, back and forth, the flight is gone, this is that and if you could manage it all and you could save time, and you could save productivity, that’s good for the company.
It’s good for you as the traveler and that poor office manager that’s like rock hard wall.
Jeanne: That’s having the degree of empathy for the user, the customer and as a business traveler, too, that we want to help them be able to get home.
The busiest travel times that we see, people start booking Sunday night, and they’re booking Monday’s and Tuesdays for travel and it might be traveling out two weeks or something, but they’re thinking about their schedule.
Also, another thing that happens is people don’t think about the changes. Think about the business trips you’ve been on, and I’m pretty sure that one out three of your business trips changes. You book it out two weeks in advance and then suddenly, somebody wants to meet you here.
They can’t meet you at this time; they’re gone. So, you end up trying to travel, change your travel and your flights are not refundable, and your hotel is a pre-paid. What do you do? Those are some costs because you can’t get your money back.
Jeanne: So we’re trying to deal with refundable and trying to say don’t always go non-refundable because you got a one out of three chance that it’s going just to go away so you might as well spend the extra 50 bucks to make it refundable and not worry about it.
Brian: You’re looking from the experience of the customer, seeing it, and you said earlier for the sales team, walking in their shoes. Going from frustration, annoyance, anger to feel calm.
Jeanne: I would say the most important thing that they need to learn is how to speak. They need to know how to talk in front of a group without using all those crutch words.
If we’re talking on this podcast and every other word I said was “um, you know, like,” those are all crutch words that we don’t feel comfortable hearing.
Jeanne: And I would suggest that people that want to be able to move forward in their careers join a group like Toastmasters, Or Start a group like Toastmasters so you have the practice of being able to do this so you can have conversations on webinars, on podcasts, and be able to present in front of your company.
I think, as you know, speaking in front of people is hugely intimidating. How do you get over that hump where the people in the audience are feeling just as scared, if you will, and you can be able to present your company, offer your point of view.
If you get called into a board meeting (and every CMO is in the board meeting every single board meeting) you must be able to present your information in a way that makes sense to the board and build that level of internal confidence. So, that would be the advice that I would share.
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