Ampliz Podcast

Leslie is the Vice President, Global Campaigns, and Field Marketing at Twilio Inc.  She has in-depth experience in Program Management/Management and proven success in planning and implementing worldwide channel partner programs and high-impact sales training programs to support strategic business initiatives. Leslie is also a great speaker, mentor, and trainer.

Ampliz invited her to the 4th edition of the B2B Binge event as one of the keynote speakers. She shares her journey from the beginning of 2020 in the campaign management and how the sudden changes like pandemic changed the way they functioned. Leslie also shares the critical learning she and her team acquired over the period.

Here are some of the lessons:

1.  Virtual reality is not a physical reality, so people may not understand your offering.

a.  Content is crucial. Keep it simple, compelling, and brief.

b.  Keep a check on your promotion strategy

c.  Keep your target audience engaged

2.   A virtual world is a self-service world, and engagement has to be reimagined.

a.  Manage the weird and have a strategy for engagement

b.  Deliver an experience on par with a physical event

c.  Get creative leverage your technology or product

3.  In a virtual world, be thoughtful, be inclusive, and be fun.

a.  Think beyond business goals to the time you are engaging your audience

b.  Hug the opportunity across geographies and time zones to reach new audiences

c.  Reach out, partner, share and learn.

Apart from these, she shares different learning about managing teams and works virtually.

JD GERSHBEIN has supported professionals and companies seeking a greater understanding of how LinkedIn works and how they can harness the site's full potential. He is a pioneer LinkedIn strategist, a widely-acknowledged thought leader, and a dedicated educator who acts as a facilitator of learning and brings the importance of personal branding to bear, especially in COVID-19 times. Drawing upon his background in marketing, psychology, neuroscience, broadcasting, and performance art, JD finds his passion for connecting people to new knowledge and new opportunities.

An early adopter of LinkedIn, JD has grown along with the medium, becoming one of its leading proponents. Transitioning from his traditional marketing practice, he rose to prominence as a LinkedIn profile writer and corporate trainer, before establishing himself as one of the most vivid and exciting personalities on the business speaking circuit. Through his events, writings, teachings, and broadcast media contributions, JD leads by example, inspiring people in all walks of firm striving to make their mark in the Digital Age.

At the B2B Binge event, he shares how one can leverage virtual networking to

1.  PIVOTING WITH PURPOSE: The coronavirus crisis has virtualized business, increased stress levels, and imposed new demands on our time and attention. LinkedIn, in combination with Zoom, has become our lifeline. JD is finely attuned to the pain felt by so many who, for whatever reason, cannot extract value from LinkedIn, are stuck on how to tell their story best, or cannot fathom the technology. He continues his commitment to minimizing this pain.

2.  LEVERAGING LINKEDIN TO RECLAIM BUSINESS MOMENTUM: Nothing like a global pandemic to derail the plans of businesspeople who had so much on the line and cloud the vision of a bright future. JD offers best-in-class LinkedIn training for companies struggling to execute their strategic plan and keep their teams engaged while working remotely.

3. DESIGNING THE LINKEDIN PROFILE THAT REFLECTS YOU IN THE NEW NOW: As one of the first independent LinkedIn consultants in the world, JD understands what it takes to communicate a value proposition through an online profile. He embraces a design thinking approach to LinkedIn profile writing, which positions his clients for the best possible impression and is engineered with their desired outcomes in mind.

Kate has more than 15 years of tech experience building strong businesses within different stages and industries. She believes deeply in bringing businesses to life in prospects and customers’ hearts and minds by creating compelling and consistent messaging throughout the customer life cycle. I have faith in its criticality for any business to bring the customer’s voice to every aspect of their business marketing, product, customer success, customer service, finance, and alignment with your customer. The customer experience doesn't begin when they make a purchase, sign the contract, or complete a transaction. It starts the first time they've heard your name.

At B2B Binge 4.0, she spoke elaborately on not only how to align different departments and speak the same language but also make it actionable. There is no point in aligning if you cannot take action around it.

To align all the departments to customers' needs, you have to listen to them ardently. When you listen to them carefully, the departments will understand what needs to be done. These actions will most likely be aligned to customer needs rather than personal goals. When you achieve customer goals and intend to provide delight to them, you will go beyond what is expected of you.

To go beyond expectations it needs more action. Alignment with customers not only provides avenues to take action but also opportunities for taking meaningful action. The effort that aligns businesses and their customer not only externally but also internally. To internalize alignment, it starts with the 1st point of contact, i.e., social media, events, referral, and other channels to post-closure of deals like feedback, upsell and cross-sell systems, and customer re-engagement tactics.

2020 is a revenue era. All actions taken by various departments have to align with how they are aiding in generating revenue by providing delight, not just by cutting costs. Investment in customer delight digitally is crucial for success in 2020. The customer has to grow with you. Therefore, CLTV matters. The realtime conversations matter. It has to be personalized. Customers expect brands to understand them and ask you to deliver how you know them and understand their needs.

The experiences have to be unified and omnichannel. Anyone who delivers these will be a winner because it is a different level of customer experience. The customer experience should have synergy across all the departments. There should be a single source of truth that brings alignment across the organization.  The faster and smoother is the flow of leads to deals better it is. The conversions are only possible through conversations and mapping customer needs. This map has to be synced across the organization to have meaningful conversations.

Camila Kaul is a passionate thought leader focused on digital consulting through insights and storytelling to create breakthrough, innovative digital strategies for companies. She is the head of Strategy and Sales Development for Google. She is also the founder of Just as Squiggle.

As one of the keynote speakers at the B2B Binge event, she focused on how a problem-solving mindset can solve the organizations’ most significant problems more thoroughly. She goes on to say that 35% of the skills are obsolete. If people do not upgrade their skills and get creative, more are likely to lose jobs or modes of earning.

Creativity is the most critical skill that can hold on its own. Creative people can thrive and flourish under challenging conditions. Creative thinking comes from practicing small steps of creativity and being open to ideas.

Unlearning and relearning becomes a vital part of the creative process.  As people age, they lose the creative edge. The key reason behind it is acquiring a restrictive mindset and having conflicting thoughts before taking any action.  It makes them risk-averse and prevents them from taking up challenges.

How do you decide which challenge to take up or face?

Before facing or taking up any challenging task, we usually ask the following questions and don't take it up. They are:

1.  What if we do something weird?

2.  What if we exaggerate the rules?

3.  What is the opposite of the rule?

Harris is the founder of Harris Consulting Group. He is one of the top leaders in Inside sales. He is a keynote speaker and trainer. Harris trains salespeople on Full-Funnel Sales and provides Operational Guidance. He teaches from SDRs with no sales experience to AE's with years of experience under their hood and the Customer Success Reps on how to upsell and cross-sell.

Harris helps organizations in streamlining their Sales Operations and Sales Process. He creates, audits them with recommendations that will speak to the unique use case and provide the right feedback and guidance.

He was one of the key speakers invited to the US version of the 4th edition of the B2B Binge Event. He helped us, and the ones who attended the event, understand customers at a psychological level.  He unraveled the mystery of what goes in the customer’s head when they are looking to buy.

Richard sheds light on why buying is an emotional journey. He explains the three ego states of buying.

a.  The child ego state (The emotional state): I want it. It is this egotistical state where all the decision originates.

b.  The adult ego state (The rational you): Weighing the decisions to pros vs. cons.  It gives the customer a reason to go ahead and make a purchase or book a meeting.

c.  The Parent Ego State (The critical self): it aids in choosing something morally excellent vs. evil. It helps focus on what is ethically right vs. what is immoral.

When a salesperson understands these ego states, it becomes easier for the individual to act like a child, adult, or a parent to a customer based on the mutual understanding of the problem statement. And as the discussion moves ahead and the knowledge between the sales rep and the customer becomes better and better, the ego state also changes. Each of them holds a different role then. This evolution of function has to be very organic.

Most of the time, customer act like in a child ego state, but sales rep perceives it as parenting or the parent ego state. Salespeople have focus and listen very closely to understand the ego state your customer is in. Instead of rebelling or acting rebellious while understanding or negotiating a customer, try to understand each other and arrive at a better ego state to appeal to their Child ego state.

Andrea Waltz is the Co-Author of the bestselling book, "Go for No!" an eminent Speaker and a Virtual Trainer. She is the founder of Courage crafters Inc.

At the B2B Binge event, she explains why a no is an opportunity made than an opportunity lost. What do you think about failure? How can you change the outlook about the loss?

She says, "Embrace the connection between the Yes and No." Yes, maybe the destination, it is 'No' that takes you there. A 'No' is a chance to improve and develop. Be authentic, and take feedback. When you take the input, you are going to hear a lot of NOs, but you will start building genuine relationships. In a business or career, authentic connections will take you farther in your career than anything.

Change the way you respond to rejection. Please take it as a possibility.  No means not now. Seek feedback and the answer to why it was a no. Seek the chances of improvement.  Rejection is not black and white. It is grey most of the time. Based on how you react to no, it can become an opportunity.

It is pretty obvious sales and marketing teams of any company just need growth and growth just comes from more revenue and more customers.

There are different stages in the funnel, at the top, you have the lead generation and you want to put as many leads as possible. Then you nurture it through your inbound marketing and other teams and then you want to close the deal. To make it even more obvious, you should have lead volume, so the more number of leads you put into the funnel, your funnel can get bigger. You can close more deals or you can increase the velocity which means the pace in which the lead moves through the funnel has to be expedited. So those are two ways in which you can make your funnel work better for you increase the size of the funnel or make it shorter and quicker.

There’s a slight problem as lead generation becomes a marketing responsibility. With the funnel that we have, we have a problem. Our customers are kind of leftover at the end, and we’re not thinking of them the way we should be. They have the power to be our most influential marketers or most helpful salespeople, and our most beneficial customer success people because they’re, you know, on the ground using your product, telling other people about it, thinking about when you buy something online these days, rarely do you not look at the reviews about it.

And those reviews are customers advocating for them. The product is not advocating for the product. And it’s a potent thing to activate your customers into being advocates for you. So we dropped the funnel a few years ago, and we said, you know, modern businesses, particularly in a product-led growth world, they use this flywheel approach.

Passion economy is not hating your stupid boss and then becoming one. Many people think that, okay, I don’t like my boss. Let me just do a passion economy. Let me just jump into entrepreneurship. It is not that case.

You are going to work with someone even tougher. You will be the boss. You are not becoming a businessman. You are a businessman. So it’s different if your reason for quitting a nine to six job and then starting a passion economy is just because your boss or your work is getting a little boring, tired of all the office politics, maybe not the best, option according to me.

Maybe you can pick something else and think about what comes naturally. Well, so in that case, Am I asking you to quit your nine to six job and then jump into passion economy. Maybe not some for someone who is from India for whom the whole template is all generalized.

The sales interview processes, in general, is never complete without touching this topic and then the capacity planning in general. So let’s get to the first one.

How do you attract the right talent? Now, there could be three different sales models in any organization. You know, when a company is pretty small, you’re thinking of a founder-led sales model with one or two salespeople. You want to make sure that you’re able to attract the right people.

Now is not the time to go on job boards. So as an organization, then you want to try your network. You want to make sure that you’re reaching out to your connections. You’re talking to your previous employers and seeing what sorts of people are there whom you could offer.

You talk to your investor network, LinkedIn groups, and communities, but don’t go to the job portal yet because, at an early stage, you need people who actually can hustle their way through, not so much a specialist in the initial stages.

When you grow the team slowly, with the sales model, it is just beginning with your two to five people. You need to have some predictability into what’s going to work for you. Rely on references from your employees heavily. That’s very important. They know what works at this organization, and they can help you find relevant people in no time.

Again, your network is the most important, keep on building and nurturing your connections. Business and startup communities are other ones. And if you look at the third one, which is when you have a well-defined sales process in place, then it’s where everything that you can think of comes in place, where all the sources, the job boards, the recruiters, the agencies, the LinkedIn and all of that comes in.

Now, you got to remember for startup founders, and it is imperative that you’ve got to build some thought leadership with time, as well as your company is growing. It’s equally essential to sort of attracting candidates mainly for this specific reason.

If you look at the tip, the top 1% of salespeople in any company are never looking out for jobs. I mean, these are the highest-paid employees. They probably, in some cases, earn more than the CEO. So they’re not looking out for jobs. They’re just doing very well. Their ex-bosses are calling them, and they always have a position available.

So unless there is something that attracts them with some thought leadership of some kind, it’s going to be hard for you to go back and look at what are the parameters to consider when hiring again to the new company.

When you start hiring, you can divide it by a variety of parameters, depending on