Predictable Prospecting
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pisode Highlights:
pisode Highlights:
- What’s new in Predictable Prospecting?
- Creating meaningful conversations: Email and voicemail
- Assembling buckets and creating a value grid
- Top account-based marketing initiatives
- Defining the funnel and key metrics
- Fit sequence and nurture sequence
- The Five-Step System
- CRM recommendations
- Top coaching tips
- Book recommendations
- Sales enablement
- Favorite forms of social proof
Resources:
- Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler
- CRM Recommendations:
- Book and Author Recommendations:
- Drayton Bird
- Joseph Sugarman
- Denny Hatch
- David Ogilvy
- How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab
- Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
- Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
- Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
- Six Principles of Influence by Robert Cialdini
- Visit Marylou Tyler on her website, download a free chapter of her new book at Predictable Prospecting, or connect with her on Linkedin. You can also Tweet her @maryloutyler
Episode Transcript
Stephan: Hello, welcome to Marketing Speak. I’m your host Stephan Spencer and today we’ve got Marylou Tyler. She’s a renowned sales process improvement expert, author, speaker, and a CEO of Strategic Pipeline. She’s helped businesses like Apple, Bose, and UPS grow their revenue by increasing their sales pipelines. Marylou’s passion is helping B2B sales professionals go from cold conversations to qualified opportunities. You might be wondering why a sales conversation, a sales expert on a marketing podcast. Well, marketing includes sales or sales includes marketing depending on which side of the fence you’re on but either way, it’s a component and we need to look at strengthening your sales pipeline and getting better lead generation going as part of your marketing system. Marylou has a new book coming out which is called Predictable Prospecting and it’s one of the multiple books that she has—this is book number what, two or three? Marylou: Two. Stephan: Two, and you’re also working on a third one now, correct? Marylou: Yes, it has a working title called Compel with Content. Stephan: You’re busy writing amazing books. Your first book was Predictable Revenue and that was co-authored with Aaron Ross who I’ve had on the show and he was great so listeners be sure to check out Aaron’s episode. This book is a bit different from Predictable Revenue. What makes this book a must have in addition and this book is coming out this month, right? Marylou: It is. It’s a roving target but the hardcover version is available now on Amazon. Barnes and Nobles I believe it will be next week and the Kindle version so far is targeted for August 31, 2016. Stephan: Yay, that’s amazing. It’s like birthing a baby. Marylou: I know. It’s like three times birthing a baby. Stephan: Let’s talk about what’s different between these two books because I think our listeners want more predictable revenue in their business and that would resonate. Why they would want Predictable Prospecting and how is this new book different? What makes this book a must have as well? Marylou: The main thesis for this book really came from a formula that’s located on page 42 of Predictable Revenue and it talked about the predictable formula, the formula of predictability. I took that thesis and made that my thesis for this book Predictable Prospecting which included additional five years of field work with active clients. A lot of our clients from Predictable Revenue started off gung ho and we had an email engine, we leveraged the email engine into start conversations but they quickly got stuck in the pipeline and increasing the lag. To have a robust pipeline that’s predictable and consistent and that you can scale, you have to really get your arms around not only the high-targeted accounts but also reducing the lag in the pipeline itself. Predictable Prospecting really focused on what do we need to do once we get someone to raise his hand, what do we need to do to get somebody to raise his hand and then how do we help pull them through the pipeline so that we are sending them compelling sales conversations whether it’s email, voice, or other mediums like direct mail and we’re taking that and creating a holistic ecosystem around starting conversations and getting them through to qualification and at the same time reducing the lag. Stephan: What do you mean by a holistic ecosystem? Marylou: Essentially, in working with clients, it became very apparent that a five-step system that was described in Predictable Revenue didn’t fit a variety of client profiles. We really needed to look at the blending of other modalities like the phone or like email and creating different streams or channels in the marketing terms that we could blend into one system and utilize depending on the situation. We had multiple tools in our toolkit instead of the one tool of Predictable Revenue. Stephan: Okay, you also mentioned meaningful conversations. What’s about that? Does that presume that most conversations that companies have with prospects are not meaningful? Marylou: I think the term vanity metrics is something that is think the red circle with the line through it. What we really want people to think of in terms of meaningful conversations is very simple. If you’re going down the freeway and you’re at a mile marker, a meaningful conversation will move you a) to the next mile marker on the freeway or b) move you out of the exiting the freeway. If it’s not either forward movement or out, it’s not meaningful in nature because you didn’t learn something new. A lot of times, we get to see and hear people saying just checking in, want to know if you got my proposal or wanting to know if you got this white paper or this use case study. Those aren’t meaningful because you’re not learning anything new. What we try to focus on is actionable steps, actionable conversations, leveraging technology, people and process in order to be able to advance the sale to the next step, to the next step, to the next step. Doing it in a way that combines multiple modalities in a system as opposed to one stream which is what Predictable Revenue was. Stephan: Okay so I’m guilty of this kind of emailing. Hey, just checking in, make sure you got my proposal. Can we have a call to discuss any questions you have. That’s apparently not a good email. Marylou: No. If you really thought long and hard about it. Are you adding value, Stephan? Is that email adding value to your reader? Stephan: Oh, shoot. Okay, no it’s not. Marylou: Okay. What we really do in the new book is we talk about what I call frameworks which are really methods and systems to be able to craft really good emails and really great voice mails that put the prospect first. You marketers out there who are listening, this is your life. you’re always thinking about the prospect, you’re always thinking about the buyer, and what it is you can say, do, or act in such a way that they’ll act, they’ll engage, they’ll want to move to that next step of conversation with you. We’ve essentially taken a lot of those marketing concepts but we have condensed them into a persuasive methodology of having that sales conversations so that every conversation is meaningful. Stephan: Okay. Let’s redo this email that is adding no value to my prospect. What would be a better version? Marylou: A better version than just checking in would be to elaborate on the previous correspondence that you sent. I’ve looked at your website, especially your podcast websites, you’re adding social proof, you’re adding value, you’re getting people feeling comfortable that you can solve their problems. You do the same thing in the body of the email. The difference is it’s billboard size now. You have to really think through how to wake up the chill of these people in a very short number of words but still get the point across. When I’m with clients, I teach them about, “Think billboard, you’re going down the freeway, 50 miles, 60 miles an hour and you see a billboard, it catches your attention. Something about it captured your attention or triggered you. That email has to have the same type of emotional pull. Stephan: Okay. Let’s say it’s an SEO proposal that I’m following up on. It’s been two weeks and they said that they would be following up in a week so I’m starting to wonder what’s going on. I want to touch the prospect, see what’s going on, I could call and I don’t know, something about picking up the phone, these days I just feel a bit nervous about doing it because it seems almost invasive nowadays. Maybe I should text first, “Are you available? Is now a good time or should we set up a time,” rather than just picking up the phone and calling at some unannounced time and probably getting their voicemail and leaving a voicemail. First of all, is that even, am I just making up stories in my mind, should I just not be afraid of this and just pick up the phone and leave a voicemail, is that more effective? Secondly, what would be an example of billboard size adding value in the case of an SEO proposal? Marylou: Yes is the answer to the voicemail but even that you have to use a cadence that’s comfortable. You’re not going to call a daily call, leave a daily voicemail. You have to use your judgment there. I’m not saying you shouldn’t dial that number every day but whether you choose to leave a voicemail or not really has to fit in your whole method of what is the next sales step that I’m trying to get these folks to? What is the purpose of this voicemail? Everything we do has a purpose, that’s the difference. You have to really think through like with your SEO proposal what is the purpose of them getting the proposal? What do you want them to do? What should they be seeing? What should get them excited to want to respond back to you? You have to prove with specificity around the proposal itself why they shouldn’t wait. Stephan: Okay. Could that be, “Hey, I found something on your site that you might want to know about,” but I don’t want to give them too much for free before they say that they’re going to work with me. Marylou: Exactly. You found something on their website, maybe it’s a conversation rate or some rate number and it just popped out at you. Why? Because the same thing happened to a previous client of yours and when they worked with you on this particular metric, they were able to increase the conversion rate by 80% by just doing one thing. That gets people like, “Well, what did they do?” Curious. “What did they do? Are they like me?” You’ve really got to build that sense of wonder into every email, into every voicemail, into every conversation that you have. It’s not easy but it’s something that you can learn, it’s teachable, and we just have to get our minds around not being sheepish. You sound very sheepish to me right now. I don’t want to text them, I don’t want to make sure. Stephan: I don’t want to bother them. Marylou: You know what? That’s telling me your product’s unreliable. Stephan: Okay. Marylou: Conviction, confidence that you have something that they can’t live without. Everybody has to have something that their prospects and buyers can’t live without. Otherwise, why be in business? Stephan: Yeah. Would it make sense maybe to get access to their analytics, to their Google search console for example as part of the pitch process? Because normally, I don’t get that until after they’ve signed and it makes it harder for me to add value before they’ve signed if I don’t have access to their data. Marylou: What you really need to do is think about where you think they are along the spectrum of awareness of the problem. There are five levels. That’s what we incorporate into our targeted streams. You have to understand there’s somewhere along that spectrum of either unaware or completely aware and suffering. You write and you talk with those levels in mind. Each level is designed to move them to a more awareness level. This is based on Eugene Schwartz 1960 advertising methodology. It’s called Breakthrough Advertising. They had to reach the minds of the buyer with disruptive products, with products that people knew they didn’t need and you’re in the same boat so you can talk generically and then get more specific. But if you’re wanting to create a system out of this, then stopping to do research on ever single account before you craft your email, voicemail, or you call them may not give you the system that you’re looking for. Stephan: Yeah, not scalable. Marylou: Right. It may be one arm. We have a lot of clients who have this cold engine as one stream and there are accounts that go in that bucket and then we have another engine called account based marketing where we are going to spend the time and go into that account because the return on investment is so high for us. Stephan: Got it. Right. It’s kind of a fork in the road and you decide it’s an account that has enough value, enough revenue potential and so forth that it’s worth putting that effort into. Then, what was that other bucket called? Marylou: There’s a cold bucket which typically are targeted accounts that have a higher revenue potential and a higher likelihood of closing. And then there may be the supreme accounts which is account based marketing and those are the ones that you’re going to build relationship with, you’re going to spend money in trying to get them to be a client of yours. Like for me, when I was selling back in the dark ages, I had six accounts. They are all account based marketing because I only had six. I worked really hard on building relationships within the six accounts. My entire funnel was account based marketing but you may have some extended universe accounts that they’re great to have but you don’t want to spend the resources on them until they get to the point where the probability is high that they’ll close. Those are great accounts for this cold engine. Stephan: Got it, right. One thing that struck me as you’re describing this account based marketing which is pretty much what I do, I don’t do the other kind. One campaign that was really successful, this was back when I owned my agency, we would send out a pair of wool hunting socks in a FedEx tube to prospects. This would really surprise them. The connection there was well, we got Cabela’s, our client Cabela’s to rank number one for wool hunting socks and many, many, other keywords. That was just one example. This was a tangible representation of our results for our clients like Cabela’s and it definitely stood out and it got us a lot of calls back. That’s pretty cool. Marylou: There you go. I want to correct one thing you said. You said, there’s a fork in the road. Not really, what there is is a value grid that you’re developing before you build your buckets, before you assemble those buckets. In goes the accounts before you turn on the engine, whether it’s account based marketing engine, whether it’s a cold engine, whether it’s an inbound engine, whether it’s a direct mail engine, whatever it is. You’re deciding ahead of time based on your formula for predictability in my case, predictability is what I get out of bed in the morning for, it’s to build predictability for my clients. But you’re figuring out the universal potential clients where each of those fall based on value, value to you as a company. Then, they’re fed into the funnels, the different streams, and then they may cross over, they may move over depending on what happens in the sales conversation, and that gets fed back to marketing. Stephan: Okay. You’ve mentioned a value grid. What are the X and Y axis assuming if this is a grid, there’s an X axis and a Y axis? Marylou: Yes, I mean there are characteristics that are important to you as a company for clients. There can be the ideal account profile which we talked about, I think it was called ICP in Predictable Revenue. It’s called the IAP in Predictable Prospecting. There’s the personas, I would put those over the top, the kind of people that you’re trying to engage, capture their attention and then the characteristics of those people. And then somewhere kind of in the Z axis is the ideal asset size or revenue size of what these accounts will generate. Stephan: Okay. Now, you’ve got this grid and you’re going after the most valuable, I don’t know, aspect of this grid. High revenue potential or whatever and just in your sweet spot in terms of their persona and so forth. This would be the bucket that you would go after and do your account based marketing, you invest the time and energy into, you send them the FedEx tube and it really surprises them, and that sort of stuff. Marylou: You have the executive briefings, you invite them to breakfast in some major city that they spend half day with you going over how to improve their operations. It’s expensive but these clients are your cream of the crop. Stephan: Right. What would be some really remarkable examples of account based marketing initiatives, either that you’ve done or your clients have done, that are just like when you hear it, it’s like, “Wow, that’s genius.” Marylou: I think the direct mail is coming back, people. Stephan: Yeah. Marylou: Whether it’s a post card, whether it’s a FedEx tube, whether it’s lumpy mail. I was a direct mail person back in the day so those types of learnings from direct mail are definitely working today. If I was doing an account based marketing, I would definitely incorporate a direct mail, some type of package within the sequence and I would really think long and hard about where to cadence that direct mail package so that it lands instead of with a thud, it really lands and it is impactful which means again, we talk about these levels of awareness. I would make sure I’ve warmed up the chill to a point when they’re ready to receive something like that. Stephan: Right. Something that stands out presumably like a package or whatever or a lumpy envelope. Something that’s like, “What the heck is in there?” There’s something intriguing, or a really big postcard, something that stands out. Not like a normal sized postcard or even a big postcard but an insanely large postcard that doesn’t even fit in the mailbox or whatever sort of thing. Marylou: Or like the current fun, technical widget. I had one client, what are those things called when you’re tracking your walking? They spent– Stephan: A pedometer. Marylou: Yeah. I can’t think of the name. They sent those out, $99 a pop or $49 a pop or something like that but it was worth it because one conversation, one account raising the hand was a million plus dollar opportunity for them. Stephan: An actual Fitbit. Marylou: Fitbit, yes. Stephan: One of those legit ones, not like a $3 pedometer, that’s a piece of junk. Got it. Marylou: Going back to the value grid, a lot of thought was put into it ahead of time in planning who would be the best recipient of this item, of the personas that could engage a top of funnel, which ones are ones that would be so thrilled to get it that they would call us and say, “Yeah, come on down.” or “Yeah, let’s have a conversation.” Or, “Yeah, let’s do a demo.” Or whatever it is your next step in the sales process. That’s where you want to get with this. Stephan: Right, and presumably it wasn’t the couch potato persona that got the Fitbit. Marylou: Exactly, or the one that’s you know, the folks that come in, swoop in, and grab all your time researching and having you explain stuff and then disappear. We’ve all been there. Stephan: Right. Marylou: We get our little champion, we think it’s going to help us advance to the next sales stage and they end up being a dud. Stephan: The tire kickers. Marylou: Right. Stephan: One thing that I know you look for is when somebody says, “Hey, can I pick your brain for a moment?” That is my signal for turn and run. I don’t want any brain pickers or cherry pickers. “Can I buy you a coffee?” My time is a little bit more valuable than a cup of coffee which I don’t even drink. Marylou: See, we all have these inherent, our gut is telling us. We know what these are. The planning process gets it out into grid format that you can banter back and forth with your team and really scrutinize so that when you’re ready to press the activate button, you’re not just guessing and you’re not spraying stuff out thinking, “Let’s hope that it works.” There’s a lot of playing that goes into the networks and the systems that I help clients assemble. Stephan: Right. The opposite of that would be like you’re at a big trade show and you sponsor a party and anybody and his brother or sister can come to that party. Marylou: Correct. Stephan: That’s not targeted. It’s just kind of a mess versus you have let’s say an executive breakfast at that same conference and you hand pick the people that you want there and you got a guest speaker who’s got a lot of brand cache and name recognition to come and speak at that breakfast briefing and it’s a very select group. Marylou: Select group and you have a strong call to action of what do they do next because i’ve seen those as well where you just shake hands and goodbye. No, everything that we do has some type of action that we want them to take. Whether it’s a passive action or a true call to action. We don’t just shake hands and go, I’ve seen that a lot even in these executive briefings. Stephan: Right, okay. Let’s talk a bit about the funnel because there’s this idea of a funnel with a particular kind of set of steps that’s just like the internet marketing kind of funnel. The sales funnel, marketing funnel starts with the lead magnet and then goes to the trip wire. And then after the trip wires, the core product and then after that’s the profit maximizers but that doesn’t fit for everybody. Marylou: Correct. Stephan: Let’s say you’re in e-commerce, like an online catalogue site, you’re selling consumer goods, that’s not really a useful model. How would you define a funnel and what are the steps in a funnel from your standpoint? Marylou: Well, first of all, this funnel has been tested with business to business sales. I have worked with business to consumer clients, but again, we’re kind of bit expecting a multi-persona sales conversation so they’re highly targeted accounts with a high revenue potential and a higher likelihood of closing. Let’s start there. What we do is we first and foremost with all of the funnels that we work on, we put in the Predictable Revenue base line model to start because we don’t know if the audience personas are going to be receptive. Step one is that we’re looking for the right person. Now, you may say, “Well, gosh, with all the technology out there, you should know who the right person is.” No, because if you think about a large enterprise with 18 different marketing titles, how do you really know where to start the conversation in marketing for your particular product or service? You don’t necessarily know and they call themselves all different things. The first and foremost email engine that we use is really looking for the right person with whom to have a conversation and looking for that internal referral, it’s the same thing as Predictable Revenue. From there though, it just morphs into something a lot more impactful meaning that depending on the client, we can take them through an email only engine the way Predictable Revenue was and I call that the While You’re Sleeping engine because the only time sales gets involved is if there’s a response to the actual email and that’s it. Response is the first metric. Now, in a blended environment for sales conversations, we’re looking at responses, we’re also looking at click throughs so now we’re getting and borrowing marketing’s great content, flipping it sideways, and creating billboard-like attraction pieces that we can say, “Hey, go here and read a little bit about this.” Or, “Look at this one page use case.” Or, “He’s an executive summary with all of the return on investment numbers that we were able to generate with clients.” We watch to see whether they are clicking through and we have metrics that we get clients to a minimum level of because we know if they get to that level, that allows us to have enough meaningful conversations that can then turn into qualified opportunities. It’s all about finding the right guy, getting them through an are we a fit sequence or an are we a fit call just to make sure that they’ve got everything from our value grid that classifies this account as the right account for the stream, and then we take them through a disqualification process, finally onto opportunity. And then, it’s handed over, typically, to an outside field quota carrying sales representative that takes it from opportunity to close. That’s also Predictable Revenue which we call that the separation of sales roles. Stephan: Wow, sounds like I need to read the book. Marylou: Yeah, what I love about this process is that we have metrics that are actionable metrics and we have minimum metrics we know we need to meet. It takes all the emotion out of, “God, that’s a crappy email.” It’s just like, “No, we have to get 79% response rate for this sequence of which 1/3 of those have to be positive, are 1/3 usually neutral responses, and 1/3 may be negative.” That allows us to say, “We need to feed the bees with this many records in order to generate at the other end the qualified ops that you want. And if you want to scale it, then we can actually tell you right down to the record how many record you need to feed this thing with in order to generate more opportunities. Stephan: Cool. So you’ve got response rate as a key metric, click throughs would be another metric. Are there other metrics that are important to measure in prospecting? What are they? Marylou: Yes. In a blended environment, remember I talked about there’s the email only while you’re sleeping engine but if we have to use human resource to find the right person which is also called mapping through the organization, if we have to use the phone, then we track that as a metric because that tells us whether our technology, our email engine, is sputtering or if they can support the team versus the team having to, like you were telling me just a moment ago, cold calling in to find the right person. We try to limit that so that the team is only working on those people who have engaged whether through click through or whether through response through the email. That particular metric tell us voice versus email of how we got that first conversation started and that also tells us to turn on the stopwatch for the pipeline itself, ready to go, we’re starting now. The next metric we use is the are we a fit sequence which is the first level qualification. Not all clients have a first level and then discovery level, they may blend the two together. We’re looking to see of those people who responded, how many turned into fit conversations. And then from fit conversations, we go through qualification so we want to know, of the fit people, how many actually qualified to go to an opportunity and how many qualified out. The reason we want to know that is because that tells us a number of things, sales kills issues that the team is experiencing and it also tells us the quality of our list. Stephan: Okay so this are we a fit call is essentially like a triage call right? Marylou: Yeah. Stephan: Should I proceed with this person, are they going to be a good fit for me and I’m going to be a good fit for them? Or are they going to be too much work for me, I don’t want to—painful client. Or are they not going to get the value from me? I don’t have the expertise that they’re looking for or whatever. How long of a triage or are we a fit call is sufficient? Is this like a 10-minute call? Is it a 30-minute call? Marylou: It’s usually 10 to 15 minutes and I’ll add one more parameter and that’s time. Because remember, we are focused on lag. If the initiative that this problem will solve is nine months out, they may not be a fit now, they may be a fit someday so we’re going to probably put those folks in a nurture sequence through marketing to kind of bubble them up to the top when they’re ready. Again, the fit parameters are based on that value grid of what it is that you want as a client and we have to take into consideration the average deal size, the funnel itself and time. Stephan: Got it, okay. So this nurture sequence that you just mentioned, what does that look like? Marylou: It’s the traditional marketing nurture sequence that’s value loaded. The difference is that the signature line is of the sales person as opposed to generic marketing people sending out nurture. Stephan: Okay. These are what? Articles, case studies, videos, invitations to ten webinars, what sort of things will keep that lead warm without irritating them I guess? Marylou: Depending on where they exited out of the funnel, if we got them to an are we a fit sequence, then we know their pain point. Since we know their pain point, we’re going to feed them a funnel that really talks primarily or at least hits them up front with the pain points that mattered to them. It may be once a month, it may be once every two months, it depends on how this persona likes to consume content. Because remember, we’re very targeted. We’re thinking about people, we’re also thinking about what pains they actually engage with,. We’re also trying to figure out, they may have engaged with pain point number one but they ended up talking about pain point number three. The sales people have got to track that for marketing after they have a meaningful conversation to make sure we’re still on track with the pain points that resonated and whether they used language that was different than we’ve heard before, we need to feed that back to marketers so that they have this nurture content that’s spot on with their language, with what they’re concerned about, and how others like them have resolved these problems. Stephan: Right. We understand what their pain point is from this are we a fit call, that goes into the CRM or whatever sort of system is behind the scenes there. And then when you touch that prospect, keep the opportunity alive, you want to stretch the gap because where they are now versus where they would like to be in that particular area where they have that pain, you want to remind them how far they are from getting the problem solved and how painful it really is for them as well as give them something to chew on that will help them to at least look at this need or this particular problem that they have. Marylou: Right, and we basically break it down again by those levels of awareness because some of the content may resonate at a certain level and some may not. We want to sprinkle in. They won’t be unaware now because we’ve talked to them, hopefully, but they would be problem-aware perhaps. They still may not be solution-aware, they still may not be vendor-aware, and there certainly is no sense of urgency. Those three levels which are typically the levels that the content is written for inbound, those levels, although its specificity around the pain point and specificity around how this person consumes content would be added to this nurture sequence along with the signature of the sales reps so that if they reply, it would directly to the inbox of the rep. Stephan: Okay. Just for clarity purposes for our listeners who are not really clued into this whole sales world, there’s some terminology here that we’ve thrown around like inbound, there’s also some terminology that they may have heard of that we haven’t talked about yet like demand generation. Can you define these for us? Marylou: I think inbound and demand generation are very similar in nature. You’re trying to create demand in demand generation so that nurture sequence would probably be more like a demand generation. We’re focusing on three level of awareness and we’re adding specificity around pain and the persona. Whereas demand generation, I mean it’s getting better, but you’re pretty much casting a wide net out there and hoping to get minnows and whales. We’re working with the whales. Stephan: Got it, okay. We’ve talked a bit about some metrics that matter like response rate and clickthroughs and so forth. What about the vanity metrics that you mentioned, there are some earlier in the conversation but what are they? Marylou: Dials is one. Stephan: Okay, so what kind of dials are you referring to? Marylou: You pick up the phone and type in a number. Stephan: Okay, got it. I was thinking a dashboard like Dials. Marylou: No, this is actually picking up the phone to call somebody. Stephan: Okay. Number of calls made per day from your sales team is a really horrible metric. Marylou: In Marylou Tyler’s opinion, yes, because it says nothing to us. At the end of the day, we want to know how many meaningful conversations they are having and we want them to have five a day. We know that number. How many dials it takes is going to depend on, once again, the persona, it’s going to depend on the time of day they’re making these calls, and it’s a roving target. Stephan: Got it, okay. Any other metrics that are vanity metrics? Marylou: The deliverability rate is important but we’re making the assumption that our lists are good but it’s a metric that we want to look at but it doesn’t add into the conversation for, “Look at me, I’ve got a great funnel going.” It’s something that you keep on the radar but it doesn’t impact. It does in some sense but it doesn’t really add. When you’re working with your boss and you’re giving him an update on the project, it’s not going to go in there at all in the benchmarks, there really isn’t. That’s one. The same thing with how many emails we sent from a personal point of view because a lot of those are just checking in emails and so we want to reduce those to more impactful ones. The emails that are sent personally by the reps are not counted unless they result in a response of some sort. Stephan: Right, a meaningful conversation would be a great response or a great outcome from that. Marylou: Yes. At the top of funnel, I know marketers know this, if you look at the story arc for our emails, we’re trying to trigger them in some fashion, curiosity is a big one for a lot of my clients, fascination, there may be some prestige. Whatever the trigger is, we have to decide by persona what that is and then we take them down into life is not good and then we contrast it to saying, “But here’s how your outcome could be.” That’s the emotional side of things so it really tugs at people. Then, we overlay that for the second half of the email with specificity around here’s the opportunity, here’s the others that have come before you or if you’re a brand new company, you can state basically here’s the opportunity for you. If you’re an early adopter, this is like the best new shiny thing you can ever have and here’s why. Then, it closes with a call to action that’s actionable. Stephan: Very cool. You had mentioned that there’s a five-step system that was kind of laid out in Predictable Revenue. Marylou: Right. Stephan: Did you talk about that system yet? I don’t think you did, right? Marylou: No, not in this episode. The Predictable Revenue model, people are still just getting the book and it was published in 2011. For the newbies out there, it’s a good book for people to sort of gather their arms around what the stream is all about but it really talks about the fact that you’re going to build, you’re going to assemble a predictable engine using the five steps for Predictable Revenue which is all about essentially finding your ideal customer profile, figuring out the size of your list, having these conversations, we call it Sell The Dream, and then basically the baton over. The steps are, in order, your ideal customer profile is one, you build your list from that. You can see right now there’s nothing in the book talking about personas so that’s a big portion of the new book. Then, you run email campaigns, that’s also different now because we have three different flavors of campaigns we run. And then, you sell the dream which is the combination of the AWAF call, the are we a fit call, and the discovery call and you pass the baton which is the hand off to the sales folks in the field. We’ve expanded on the Sell The Dream section, we’ve expanded on the persona development for sales. A big kind of push back that sales always gives me is the persona development for sales, that they have to build a persona for their sales conversations top of funnel. Stephan: Okay. You had mentioned that it’s important for sales to feedback to marketing and basically for marketing and sales to talk to each other. What are some of the ways that that’s done most effectively? Marylou: If you have a tracking system like a customer relationship management or you said CRM or database, we teach the reps to do something we call Wrap Up. That’s kind of left over from the call center days. Every time we hang up the phone, we have to wrap up the call, why? Because the systems needed to know where to file that call next. It had to have a place to go. You had to disposition the call and you had to tell it why you’re dispositioning it in that fashion. It was very efficient, it was very effective, and it made lots of people lots of money because we were effectively filing things so that we knew when to recycle. We implemented a very simple, similar process in the CRM called Wrap Up that the reps need to wrap up the call. I give them three or four different things and depending on where we are in this kind of crawl, walk, run cycle of assembling this actual system, we add in the pain point, we add in any language that they heard that sounded different so that marketing sort of gets a heads up as to hey, they’re calling this, that. Like you’re asking me, inbound versus demand generation, we’re looking for words like that on the call. And then the next step, they have to say what they did for that call so that we know from a coaching standpoint where that record should be filed. Stephan: That makes a lot of sense. Are there any particular CRMs that you would recommend for folks? I use Capsule CRM for example, I used to use salesforce.com when I had my agency NetConcepts, that was over kill for me, now I’m still offering consulting services but it’s at a smaller scale. Capsule CRM does a good job. I also have Infusionsoft which I’m not really using so much as a CRM as more—I’m using it for emailing, I’ll be using it as a shopping cart and I guess I’ll use that as a CRM once I have my first information product out there and launched. What are some of your favorite CRMs that you’d recommend? Marylou: Since I work with upmarket client, there’s a sampling of top. Sales Force is by far the one used most, Microsoft Dynamics is used, NetSuite is used, these are big systems. I’ve had clients that used excel. Anything that you can track and create a report off of, any database is going to do the trick. Look to see where your records are housed and then look to see if you can add a field to disposition what happened during that call, logging the call, see if there’s a feature that will allow you to log the results of a call. Then, what I do with people is I just use short codes that you can parse meaning you can take a report and say if it contains MKT:: then that is a directive to marketing to look at these words. If it’s PN?, then that’s the pain point. It’s very simple to just add a couple codes in that the reps are trained on that you can run weekly reports on to see the movement and also see what transpired during that call. Instead of waiting to the very end to pivot, meaning oops, our marketing didn’t hit the mark, you’ll know on a weekly basis where you are relative to go. Stephan: Okay. One of the features that I use in my CRM is the pipeline reposts so I can see where things are kind of falling off, just where I’m dropping the ball or where they’re just not responding and also give me a sense for likelihood foreclosing. If it’s at proposal stage, that’s whatever percent, 50%, 60%, whatever. If it’s a statement of work stage, if it’s just the meaningful conversation stage. These all have percentages assigned to them. How important is that kind of feature or functionality? Marylou: We love to have that because again, the formula of predictable revenue is the lag time, the ideal customer asset size or the revenue you’re generating from the deal and the funnel itself. If we know in trust stage conversion rates and if we know interstage conversion rates, that gives us the ability to predict how long something’s going to take from that first conversation through to close won or close lost. The more that we can look at pipeline movement, the better we’re going to be able to help our reps with their sales skills issues and also to coach them through how to get from initial conversation through to close faster. Stephan: What would be some examples of kind of coaching tidbits that you would give somebody? Let’s say that the data shows they’re really falling short in their cold calling, what sort of tips would you give somebody like a sales person who’s kind of falling short on their cold calling? Marylou: I am a big fan of roleplaying all different types of calls. What I would do with this person is before he did what we call block time which is setting aside time where you are making phone calls and you’re not multitasking on anything else. You’re not texting, you’re not emailing, you’re not looking something up, you’re not researching. You’re on the phone. We take 15 minutes of that block and we roleplay with them on the areas that they’re struggling. Stephan: Okay, and let’s say that the struggle is with getting the person to agree with the next stop. Marylou: We try if we can to take some of these calls and then what we do is give them tips on what they should be saying in the form of us building an objection tree for example where we have the objection and all the ways to kind of move through that that they can practice. We listen to see how natural they are in progressing that person from that objection state all the way through the next sales step. Stephan: I love that, that’s great. I haven’t even heard of that term before, objection tree. I like it. Marylou: That’s–again, the new framework, I don’t want to make this daunting for people but the five-step framework has evolved into 28 steps. They’re broken down into assemble, activate and optimize. These trees and matrixes are in the assemble and activate stages and we’re constantly tweaking them and iterating and making them better because we’re getting smarter as we learn more on the sales conversations themselves. There’s no more blackhole with this process. It’s all built on feedback loops because we can’t generate Predictable Revenue without it. Stephan: With objections, this is something that’s a real challenge for a lot of people. How do I overcome the objections of the prospect. One thing I learned which I think is brilliant is to pre-empt objections with your testimonials. If you have a video testimonial, before you get the person to record the video, ask them to recall what were the objections that they had prior to signing and to reiterate those on the video so that, “I thought Stephen was a little expensive.” “Well, actually it’s a lot expensive. But you know what, it was actually worth every dollar I spent, the ROI was incredible and blah, blah, blah.” By incorporating that little bit about the objection, that allows you to pre-empt the objection that the person hasn’t even articulated yet. That’s super powerful and a lot of people don’t do that in their testimonials whether they’re video or written testimonials. Any other tips for objection handling or pre-empting objections? Marylou: We put that directly in the cold email streams. Those streams that we’re generating, those emails, we do eight emails that we’re sending out, we put objections in three through seven to sort of get that person uncomfortable with that, “How did they know I was thinking of that?” We are constantly, patiently persistent as opposed to confrontational but we definitely address everything head on because we don’t want to waste their time and we certainly don’t want to waste our time. Stephan: Do you incorporate some testimonials into the email stream? Marylou: Yes, but they’re bite size chunks. We are trying to figure out where these folks are in their state of awareness so they are short and sweet and they’re to the point, they’re called persuasive emails. It’s a style of copywriting that a lot of companies don’t necessarily have figured out or wired. But if you’re a student like I am of all the advertising greats in the 60s or 70s, their style of writing the direct mail teasers is the style that we use for writing the emails for the cold engine. Stephan: Who are some of your favorite of these legends, of these greats from the past. Marylou: Well, Eugene Schwartz, I love him. He’s my favorite guy. Drayton Bird, Joe Sugarman, Denny Hatch, gosh, Bob Lye, Victor Schwab. I think I have everybody’s book and it’s on my desk where it’s readily reachable, all those guys. They’re all ancient, they’re old but what they said and how they said it and how they teach is exactly the way we need to write these emails, and exactly the way we need to leave these voice mails, and exactly the way we need to have these conversations. Stephan: I agree. There’s a really great book from I think it’s the 1930s or 40s or something, it’s, I don’t know what’s the name of it… Marylou: It’s going to nag you now. Stephan: Yeah, Scientific Advertising is one of the books, it’s of the greats by Claude Hopkins. Tested Advertising Methods. Marylou: Yeah, I’m looking at it right now. It’s a red book. Stephan: By John Caples. Marylou: Yes, it’s another one. David Ogilvy’s books is another one. There’s a couple of Madison Avenue Ad Executives that if you look on YouTube, you can see their interviews. They’re just fabulous. Stephan: I’ll put these names and book titles into the show notes so listeners if you’re interested in learning more, definitely check out the Marketing Speak website and the show notes will guide you to these different authors and book titles. We only have a few more minutes so I want to kind of get to a few things before we finish. One of those would be sales enablement, can you kind of describe what that means? That is not a term that I hear really at all. Maybe I’m not in the same world as you but that’s just not a term I ever hear and it’s an important, a new buzz word so could you talk about that? Marylou: It’s essentially the repurposing of the importance of involving marketing into the sales process. Enablement is basically enabling the reps with all the tools, leveraging as I said before that people, process, and technology, leveraging all of those things so they have a really robust toolkit that they can pull from depending on the circumstance they find themselves in in the sales conversation. It’s enabling them to be champions of the process by giving them the tools that they can use as baseline but allow them to personalize for the intended target or buyer as they march through the pipeline. Stephan: An example might be a set of templates, email templates that they could choose from and then personalize. Marylou: Right because as we talked before, the cold engine, it’s a while you’re sleeping engine so it’s going to rely on data to personalize, not humans. Once they move into this working status and we’re trying to get them into an are we a fit sequence, we rely very heavily on highly personalized emails but we want to make sure that the sales message, the essence of why they should talk to us is still embedded in the email because otherwise, left to his own device is a sales rep who’s going to say like you, “Just checking in. I’m wondering how my proposal went.” We give them a robust and rich email that they can personalize, but it’s still getting the why change, why now, and why us inside the body of the message. Stephan: I love that. I’m going to change my emails now. Alright. One more question, social proof, what would be some of your favorite forms of social proof? I know we talked about testimonials already but there are other ways to provide social proof that convinces people, “Hey, this is a train I should jump on to.” Marylou: Yeah, I think I’m still a fan of Cialdini, influence book of his, Six Principles Of Influence and how those are activated and accentuated. I think testimonials, endorsements, use cases, case studies. There’s a plethora of documentation depending on again the buyer that you can put to your arsenal. The other thing that’s becoming really fun, and you mentioned this already, is video and the GIF files are getting attention in corporate, they’re fun, they’re light but they still get the message across. Using those different modalities in media to build on those three things I mentioned before of why change, why now, why us is going to give you what you need in order to create impactful social proof. Stephan: Use cases, case studies, endorsements, testimonials are all examples that you can learn more about in Cialdini’s book Influence. Marylou: Right. Stephan: Is that something that you also cover in your new book? Marylou: Not really because we are at the point where we’re leveraging existing content from marketing. What we teach them to do is turn the lengthier marketing pieces sideways and pull out the relevant information and maybe add an infographic or something that we can do easily so it doesn’t go into the depth of what the content is to create. Now the next book, I definitely go into the types of content that work at those five levels of behavior or awareness and how long they should be in terms of consuming that content. Stephan: Awesome. Listeners, definitely check out Marylou’s new book which is called Predictable Prospecting. The website for Predictable Prospecting is where? Marylou: predictableprospecting.com Stephan: Yup, and you have a podcast as well. What’s the website for that? Marylou: It’s maryloutyler.com/predictableprospecting Stephan: Awesome. If somebody wanted to work with you, hire you as a consultant, how would they get in touch? Marylou: If you go to my website, maryloutyler.com, there’s a contact area that you can leave particulars about what you’re looking for and I will get back to you. I like to do phone calls but I also like you to work a little bit for it so I have a survey that I ask you to fill out so I get an understanding of where you are on that pain level and also the awareness level. Stephan: Yes, and hopefully you’re in a lot of pain. Marylou: Yeah. Stephan: Alright, thank you, Marylou, this was awesome. Again, listeners check out the Marketing Speak website for the show notes, transcript, and we’ll create a checklist of actions to take from the content of this episode. Thanks listeners, this is Stephan Spencer signing off and we’ll catch you on the next episode.