Ampliz Podcast

The question that most content marketers and inbound marketers run into is how do you stand out. I think when we ask this question while thinking tactically, there's so much more to it than meets the eye. Ultimately we need to answer what is inbound? Because inbound is so much more than just creating concepts. It's actually about creating value through our content and creating experiences that are so memorable that people want to come back for more.   

Therefore, it starts with your goals because inbound is a top of funnel thing. You should not necessarily be trying to sell. When you're doing inbound, what you do need to be focusing on is traffic and subscriptions. These are things that are easy to measure, and then some softer skills awareness and engagement. You know you're nailing it if your traffic numbers are high. You are getting your topics right if your subscriptions are extraordinary. You know you're building fans once you see awareness, word-of-mouth, and that your reach is extending. You know you're standing out and if you see real conversations taking place both with you and about you. You know you're building the relationships that will ultimately drive results, but there's no one way to do this. 

There are a series of tasks that you need to be focusing on to make this happen.   So, it always needs to start with quality content. If you get that you're going to attract readers, they will subscribe. You're going to build engagement that will forge a relationship. It will ultimately even attract people who want to be part of your brand, write to you, and show up on your blog. Those are the tasks you need to be doing.   How you do it is going to help your audience, your brand, the product you offer? It's just that you almost need to be testing to figure out the hell now here's what is working for me. At Saleshacker, the thing that I focus on most is quality content, and to achieve that goal, I don't have a team of writers. What I do is I seek out experts who genuinely know their stuff. So we get precise solutions. We don't get general fluffy content and because we don't want to be part of the echo chamber.   

So, if we want genuinely original, precious content and to achieve that, we end up narrowing the focus going deep rather than broad now. It will create value for your audience, but you also need to be aware you have to provide value for your own business. You have to be driving growth. It's important not to get distracted by the bright shiny topics that you might want to cover to achieve results. You need to stay on brand. You need to know what your talking points are. You need to understand what actions you are trying to drive and create content around that.  Now that you've understood that you're providing value for your audience and your brand. How do you create quality? 

There are two ways to do that: 

1. You're going to do a ton of editing. All of your content needs to be easy to read and easy to provide very high value. 

2. Plan your content in four to six weeks in advance. Now that may sound like it's going to tie you down, but in reality, it frees you up.

How to make an opening call?

This COVID19 pandemic made a huge change in every business. When it comes to sales, the prospects hang up the calls when they hear from salespeople. Lauren has shared with us a few quick tips on how to make an opening call and engage a prospect. 

Swift Intro 

A great introduction is always short. Our introductions need to answer who we are, what do we want and why should they care? But right now selling during the pandemic, we have to add an important point. Why should they care right now? Why should they take your call right now? One of the biggest mistakes that we see in sales called introductions is that people immediately are leading with a pitch. The swift intro is all about adding value in those first couple seconds of the intro and we start with their names, then our name in an abbreviated version because we need to fit this in 10 seconds or less. 

Swift question 

 Three swift questions should be asked followed by swift intro. The questions should be connected to each other to engage prospects and to show real care toward them. In this pandemic, the question should be like is everybody's still working from home? How many folks in your team? How's that been going? 

Three Goals 

The next step is to concentrate on the third goal which is the sales pitch. 1st goal is to introduce yourself and 2nd goal is to establish a human connection by asking the follow-up questions. That is a tremendous opportunity. Finally, the third goal is to pitch based on the scenario. It slows down your sales cycle, but it will work better if we keep it focused on the goal of building a relationship. To build a good relationship, don’t go for formal talk, share something personal with your prospects and allow them to feel comfortable to be open up. But most of the salespeople don’t do that. That is why Lauren teaches how to reframe the pitch to create empathy in this situation. She conducts the team engagement and development program. 

Three punches of team engagement and development (Meeting, training, call coaching)

 She adopts three punches for this program. Generally, if a leader wants to re-strategize the outreach, it's going to start with a meeting. But Lauren gives less emphasis on this part. She emphasizes training than a meeting. Training takes three or four times longer than just a meeting. It allows people to dig in and share their experiences, get their hands dirty or roll up their sleeves with the content they might role-play. A meeting is one way. Training is always two way. Now the third step of the three punches is to do some focused call coaching on these messages for the period after the training. This is where they engage their managers to follow up, to listen to calls, to give feedback along the way.

How do you work efficiently form home being a salesperson?  

1. Prioritize your time and have a routine  Prioritization is very important because it helps to balance work and life. The work-life balance is a unicorn for everyone because it doesn’t exist. Hence, rather than trying to have a work-life balance where we trade one for the other, find a way that we can integrate these things. Now, there's another reason why that is important. When we have a process, when we have a routine, it reduces our anxiety and stress. And it also reduces the friction that we have to take those first steps toward something.  

2. Use a notebook instead of technology  To have a routine, she notes it down with the help of a pen and notebook. Because there is no need for technology, an app, and a fancy thing like that. Technology distracts you. The advantage of using a notebook and pen is you can work if you don’t have the Internet or power for the time being.   

3. Write your plan and break it down into different milestones  She writes her plan and she starts her yearly plan first. Then she breaks it down into quarterly milestones. Those quarterly milestones are then broken down into monthly milestones and priorities.    Making this plan takes about 15 minutes a day. It reduces your stress and anxiety. When you have reduced that stress and anxiety, it allows you to control your emotion, which is another thing that's important for all of us right now in these uncertain times and scary times. By doing that, you can be fully present at the moment with people, buyers, and the clients that you are working with. Because of that Carole’s sales increased by nearly 70 % which is a massive amount.  

4. Have 3 priorities in a week The weekly plan is something that needs to be noted down in the notebook. She starts with a little sticky note planning the week. Once she identifies what are the top three things that have priority for the particular week, she dumps it out from the brain to paper. She prepares schedules Monday through Friday. Each of those days is broken up into A.M. and p.m. She usually moves the presentation and workshops to A.M.  All these plans she does on Sunday night, and looks at her entire week and have a snapshot of where her priorities are going to be. It reduces her anxiety and stress of making things happen in this way.

How has B2B sales & marketing Evolved?  He has brilliantly split the B2B sales and marketing trends into three waves.  

The 1st Wave - Online  He segmented the 1st wave between mid-nineties to mid two thousand when people started visiting online and gathering tons of information. Companies went online, started their own websites, had a social presence, etc. All these increased in 10 years (the mid 90s to mid- 2000s). Customers had access to tons of content for the first time because no companies have websites.  The started reading different contents, started having a social presence, etc. This enabled a huge flurry of activity in the first wave, but this lead to deal distance got a little bit bigger. Big data companies started helping during this phase by having a lot of contact directories and company firmographics details online.  

The 2nd Wave – Inbound  2nd wave has been segmented between the mid-2000s to early 2010 that led us to an inbound way. This is the timeframe when the big events like HubSpot were started, the iPhone was launched, etc. So as a company you had an option to increase a lot of different content formats, video, audio, texts, and infographics.  There was a huge flurry of activity in automation. Emails, nurturing campaigns in social and other stuff started being automated. Customers had the option to change the whole process. They made it like a buyer-led journey. They wanted to be more informed, more educated and they wanted to learn at their own pace, not at the pace at which companies want. So this increased distance between the company and customers a little more. 

 The 3rd Wave - Noise  The 3rd wave that fell between 2011 to 2020 when we went from higher-end 50 companies in sales marketing technologies to 8,000 which was a huge jump. Right now we're in the middle of a crisis where we are rediscovering new roads as well. How is this affecting all of us in the B2B data segment? Because customers also going to leave a lot of digital footprint across different platforms  Though we didn’t have tech talk earlier, the footprint and the exhaust increased in this nice space, and this cemetery, the next pillar in the distance. It went from two blocks to five blocks and it kept increasing. Though B2B companies are trying to send you more data in different ways, the noise is not going away. We have lots of noise now. So what's next?  

What is the 4th Wave?  What's the fourth wave and the more important question is that why has this distance increased between the company and the customers?   Every small and big company wanted to have more and more data, more quantity and quality though they don’t know to measure it. Every small and big company is using tons of tools to automate the whole marketing process, bombard people, and the distance between a customer and the company has just increased nonstop.  So the 4th wave is you need to have a scale in a B2B data environment, you need to have personalization So you need data in the hundreds of millions at the same time. You need that personalization. Also, you also want the expert research. So your data partner should be both a combination of a platform, like a product or a data product like somebody who can tailor and give you intelligence more.

Here are some of my sort of rules for founder's, mainly for early-stage marketing teams.  

 1. You need to be obsessed with your buyer. So that means learning everything you possibly can about them, knowing what matters to them. The biggest thing is actually to stop making assumptions. At times when you are a founder, you're solving a problem that you had. You assume that you know everything there is to know about your buyer, and it turns out you don't.   Your buyers can be very different from you, and your ideal buyers are going to change as you grow. So make sure that you make research part of everything you do. Make sure you're not only talking to your buyers but also talking to the people who wind up not buying from you as well. It is the key, and I like to refer to this as relationship building at scale. So genuinely make build relationships with your ideal customers.  

2. You need to care about marketing often. You might if you're a founder. You might be a technical founder, and you might care a lot more about the product. You just don't think about marketing and sales. You hire someone else to do it. But culture is a top-down thing, and if you don't show your team from the beginning that you give a damn about marketing. That you're doing the work to learn what's going on and What you need, you are going to fall short through a whole thing. So you want to cultivate that marketing talent. If you have a marketing team of one hire a coach, they need help they need. They need assistance to hire a marketing coach that can support them.  

3. Don't compete for dominance when it comes to content. Don't do the same thing that everybody else is doing like fingers crossed that you're going to rise above it. Instead, find a niche of content that no one is covering. So look at what all of your competitors are doing, see what you both have in common. Then find the angle or the approach to content that no one else is covering. Dominate that, it's the thing that will set you apart, and it'll make your content journey a whole lot easier and a whole lot more successful. Find your niche and own it. 

 4. When it comes to marketing, especially early, you need to think 10x, not 10%. It can be hard for you perfectionists out there, so stop freaking out about every little typo. People don't care about it. Think about the big picture. Think about the things that are going to move the needle. Do big projects that have real potential. Don't worry about the small stuff because it's not going to get you to where you need to go. Focus on big things that have the potential to make a difference to your ledger that is your pipeline.   

5. Find your gang on the playground. What I mean is to find your strategic partners. Look at your industry and find the companies that are maybe solving a complementary problem to the one you are addressing. Perhaps you both can work together to kind of offer something that solves an even bigger problem together. Pull your resources if there is another startup that is going to team up with you so that you can maximize your assets and your reach. Invest in building Co-marketing and strategic partnership relationships. 

 6. Invest in your brand: With your brand, you can build a corporate brand far faster. Your brand can have a far greater reach than your company brand in the early days. People want to buy from people that they trust. If they see a founder who's the content they love, admire, and trust, they are a lot more likely to buy your product. Look at companies like DRIFT and GONG, and they have leadership teams that have been out there. They have built these powerful personal brands, and as a result, their growth has just been an absolute rocket ship.

• Evolution of sales 

If you look back 18 or 20 years back, there's always been this fundamental disconnect between marketing and sales and other parts of the organizations. Everything was much siloed. Everything was gold, very differently. Marketing was gold on brand, PR notices, and pipeline generation. When you look at sales and sales is gold on closed business, not necessarily conversion of leads but not in the way the marketing team was. 

 • The dichotomy in the organization 

This dichotomy has been continuing for decades and no questions were asked on this. This is because of the long journey of the customers or the life cycle of the customers. For example, a customer would buy software for a lifetime. Once they made the software purchase, they own those licenses, then every three, five, seven years, they would purchase maintenance renewals. They never had to repurchase the software unless it got an end of life or something of that nature. So by default, what you had was this lifetime customer value of five-plus years. So marketing was only focused on new logos. Now no one focused on this long term service because they were going to be around for five-plus years. So, it was way more expensive to try to switch any time after that first initial purchase than it ever was. Just to wait for the maintenance renewals to come and just renew the maintenance. So you think five, five-year lifetime customer value, at a minimum, you have this very sustainable business and very low term.

 • Alignment in the organization 

These days, customers have lots of options. They are now paying monthly or annually. So switching the vendor is pretty easy. If customers are not satisfied with the service, the move to another vendor. That is when you see marketing and sales have to react to this. They no longer are fractured as last time.  So these teams suddenly had to work much more closely together. But the reality is we now need customers to adopt the solution. We had to take really good care of them. And not only did we now need to be focused on new logo acquisition, but we needed to also understand how we could maximize the existing revenue and every single account that we encountered.

Scott Douglas Clary is the SVP Marketing & Sales at ExciteM and Strategy and Growth at Grass Valley. He hosts the Success Story Podcast. Scott is Professor at AmityBS. He is also part of the Forbes Council & Revenue Collective. Scott has contributed significantly to Forbes, WSJ, Hackernoon, DJ, The Startup as an author, and other published work.  

10X, by definition, is to increase your business by a factor of 10, increase your revenue by a factor of 10, whatever that KPI is. And obviously, not many companies can do that easily. And the playbook for that depends on the company's context, industry, the environment, what you're selling to your customers, and various other factors. 

Irrespective of any industry, the concept stems from how you sell to customers. So when you want to 10X growth in your business, you want to increase your business by a factor of 10. Every company has its sales and marketing strategy. Then there are all these different types of branded sales strategies.  You have challenger, SPIN, and the list is of endless sales strategies. And that's really like your sales playbook. You understand your customers, their pain points, you solve your customer's pain points at whatever solution you are selling. That's sort of how sales work.

That's not going to have 10x business. What do we have to do more than just a regular sales strategy? If you think about how we solve customer's pain points when we deliver our sales campaign to a customer, we focus on our marketing, our branding, our narrative, our messaging, our inbound or outbound, our operations, our tech stack, or our sales enablement to help our sales reps, and spend more time selling and whatnot.  

When you realize how many things are involved in selling to a customer, it's much more than just one conversation. You have to understand the behaviors, all these different parts of commercial business units. You have to focus on and what you have to align your messaging across. What I mean by that is a great sales leader, a great marketing leader, a great revenue leader.

They're going to build out an end to end process that leaves no point of interaction with the customer up to the imagination. Traditionally, when you look at a sales organization, and a marketing organization in many circumstances, those business units are usually siloed.

So let's walk through the traditional sales process. A customer hears about your product. Perhaps they go to a landing page, submit their email address on a form that becomes a marketing qualified lead that gets passed over to sales.  An SDR/BDR calls out to that customer. And, and then, they book a demo, and he follows up, and account executive follows up. And that's sort of like the traditional linear sales process.

If you realize and take that mindset as to how you sell to a customer, after they become a marketing qualified lead (MQL), they get passed over to sales. And it's almost like you're after marketing, selling with them now. It's the onus on sales to close that deal, and that's how many businesses work.  To have 10X growth of your business, you have to understand that customers don't buy that way. So why are you selling to them like that? According to research, between 50-70% of the customer journey is completed while finding the product information.

They need to buy a product before they even speak to somebody from your organization. Because they're going to your website, your social, and any sort of peer review website, they're getting all of these stats, speaking to their peers, and they're looking at references before they engage with you. Then they go to your website, they put in a request for a sales demo, and now your sales rep speaks to them.

Vinaya Prakhala is the Founder & President of Sales Enablement Society, India Chapter. He is also the VP of Deskerra, which is a suite of various business enablement solutions. He comes with over two decades of experience in sales across the globe. He is a great speaker and mentor.

Here, he shares a glimpse of what got him going in his 25 years of a long career. Through his experiences, he shares why individual startups fail to perform in sales and why certain startups perform exceptionally well in sales.

He shares his six steps to building a sales strategy for any organization, either struggling with or trying to improve their sales. They are:

1. What is the product or service?

Be clear, complete, concrete, concise, and correct.

2. Where is it being sold, and to whom is it being sold? Understand your target audience and define the target market, Outline your total addressable market (TAM), Potential addressable market (PAM), Serviceable addressable market (SAM), and Serviceable obtainable market (SOM). What is it? I wish to get out of the market? Set goals for the market. These goals help you define your SOM and find the right direction to approach that market.

3. How is it being sold? Find your GTM strategy, ideal customer vertical, and an ideal buyer persona. List all the individuals you are going to pitch (create an emotional story, not a product feature list). At this stage, you decide if you will base your marketing strategy on inbound or outbound, after which set up your sales process to reach your customers effectively. Based on the outcome of the tasks performed till now, decide if you would go the ABM way right out of the bat.

4. When are you going to sell the product? Timing is everything in sales. Define your call timing (When you will you call the customer), social selling (put the right message and content across in the right time), ABM timing (Time when you will upsell, cross-sell, down sell to specific account so that they keep buying from you), and Budget (Define what is the maximum time and resources you are going to spend after a lead till you choose to give up on pursuing the lead)

5. Why will anyone buy it? Find your niche and answer what differentiates you from your competitors. List down everything that separates you from logo and messaging to every inch of your product and brand. Don't hard sell; be kind to your customers. These customers will be your product evangelists.

The other critical strategies for building your sales structure for a startup are:

He later lays down the guide to increase your sales exponentially, the Dos and Don'ts of sales for startups, build a sales team, and various other vital questions.

Sue Barrett, the founder of Barrett Consulting Group, is a well-known name in the sales circle for creating sustainable sales systems. She is an educator and a leading strategist. She is here to shed light on the selling systems that create lasting success. Sue reveals below how to remove chaos and build processes for sales that can be repeated and brings sustainable success to the business.

According to her, most sales processes are random in nature. Some ways allow you to model sales success. If you can shape sales success, you can repeat it with minor tweaks. It will make success repeatable.

What is a sales system?

A sales system is an open system that lives and breathes inside the organization and interacts with markets, clients, workers, and society. Marketing is the interface between customers and sales. A sales system is a well-coordinated super highway driven by:

It flows effortlessly between the customer and the organization.

Types of sales systems today in business

All the organization has some form of sales system. Some are well-polished engines, and some are not. Invariably there are two kinds of methods:

Why do you create sales systems?

Either a business establishes the sales system by design or default. The question you need asking is, how operational is your sales system and is it working for you? Most execs try to reply to this question by lead to a deal conversion rate or the number of leads in the system.

Even though the numbers may look good, it fails to answer if the system will sustain itself if no leads are generated through external interference (new leads through cold calling, social media, and any other similar sources). Can it be sustained through an existing group of customers? The answer is no in most cases.

How do you turn it around? How do you convert the answer to yes?

The answer is creating sales systems.

Before creating a system, develop an understanding of your customer, have a feedback loop system in place that can help you align your sales activities, and prevent you from losing focus. The execs are mostly fixated on the number to find what they can control and what they cannot, and make the forecast more predictable.

The input and output measures that most execs focus on are:

It makes it quite evident that somewhere down the line, sales get misaligned with business goals while focusing prudently on the number game.

Ljubica is the marketing director of the APAC region at Hexagon PPM. She is a strategic marketing leader with a focus on increasing revenue generation, creating customer journey, building brand, and great go-to-market strategies.

Here she sheds light on one of the most discussed topics of the late and one of the teething issues businesses are facing. That is having a sales-focused marketing team that can increase the bottom-line of the company. She explains how an organization can develop a robust revenue-focused marketing engine. She also speaks about what COVID19 changed for the marketing and sales department.

The organizations have to understand the value and the experience they are willing to deliver at the various stages of the customer lifecycle. Now due to the pandemic, most of the interactions have turned towards virtual systems. Marketing and sales teams dependent on the legacy systems will need to upskill themselves and move towards technologies like VR and video streaming.

What affects a revenue Engine?

Before jumping into the models, tips and others understand that 10 factors affect any organization in their revenue generation engine. They are: