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Episode 33: Crafting Cold Emails to Engage Buyers – Bob Kelly

Predictable Prospecting
Crafting Cold Emails to Engage Buyers
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Plenty of companies struggle with crafting the perfect cold email. It’s either too long, too short, too impersonal, or it just doesn’t connect with your buyer. Identifying what’s missing and how to fix it can seem impossible, but our guest today has the process down to a science. We’re joined by Bob Kelly, my partner at Strategic Pipeline and contributor to my new book Predictable Prospecting. Bob is a leading chief strategist and sales expert, and an absolute genius at helping clients achieve maximum growth by writing the right messages to the right buyers. We discuss our work with Strategic Pipeline, current trends in account-based selling, and Bob’s best tips for crafting cold emails that engage your buyer.
 
bob-headshot-e1376782899912Episode Highlights:

  • Introducing Bob Kelly
  • Common marketplace trends: Products and ideal customers
  • Sales conversations and buyer personas
  • How to make the most of the current trends in account-based selling
  • Engaging with the ideal contacts in a company: hyper-personalized selling
  • Selling to multiple tiered accounts v.s. Selling to core accounts
  • Strategic pipeline method
  • The major faults of the CRM tool
  • Bob Kelly’s top content generation techniques
  • Upcoming challenges and predictions for the future

Resources: Predictable Prospecting: How To Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler Contact Bob Kelly by emailing him direct: bob.kelly@strategicpipeline.com or by visiting the Strategic Pipeline website

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hey, everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Bob and I are partners in Strategic Pipeline and we have quite the past history of him mostly being my boss throughout my work history but we are working together now at the consultancy where we help clients, large and small, put in the strategic pipeline process, much of which is discussed in the new book Predictable Prospecting. If you worked with us, you’ll see some things in there that look very, very, familiar. I have a lot of respect for Bob since he’s been doing this for quite some time now in the sales area taking it all the way to close and he’s also run a ton of companies. Without further adieu, welcome Bob Kelly.Bob: Hi Marylou and thank you so much for the introduction. I appreciate that. I look forward to this discussion. Marylou: Yeah. What I wanted to share with our listeners today is the path that you and I have taken since the release of Predictable Revenue and actually since you and I joined forces going on now our fourth year. What have you seen in the marketplace, where do you see things going and what still remains the biggest challenge for our target audience out there in the field? Bob: That’s some interesting questions. Just to give the audience a little bit of context, Marylou and I worked with companies, business to business companies that typically range from early stage $3 million to $5 million in revenue although we’ve gone even lower than that when people were just getting started, up to more enterprise-level companies that have been up to $100 million in revenue with a variety of objectives, some are just trying to get off the ground and others changing their approach to their market or stratifying their sales approach from more of a general market approach to incorporating things such as targeted-account selling, or enterprise-level selling. Some of the things that we see, there’s some things that will vary by the size of the company, the history, and how much experience they’ve had in developing their organization, time and experience, and of course resources, to the type of market it is. Most of our clients have tended to be technology-oriented, quite a few are software companies, others services-oriented companies, people services, professional services. A combination of product and services approach in markets that they’re going after. One of the common things that has tended to exist in virtually every engagement that we get into is the initial understanding of do they know who they’re trying to sell to, first of all, who they are within those companies, and why they should care. Whether you’re a very small company or whether you’re a larger company, it really comes back to that basic understanding who your ideal customer is, who the buyers are within the customer, and then the characteristics of those buyers, and then the situations which they’re looking to buy or they will buy. What that comes down to to a great extent is the same product or service has one benefit to one particular buyer, and it may have completely different benefit to another buyer. For instance, I’ll give you an example. One of our recent clients with the exactly the same software as a service product was talking to the customer support executives, the customer experience executives, as well as e-commerce. In one case, the rationale was a support ticket deflection and another case it was trying to increase the customer experience, less of a cost reduction related benefit is important of retention of customers, attraction of customers. In the third case, it was really a revenue increase, trying to avoid cardigan in an e-commerce environment but the product was exactly the same in all three cases. Understanding those buyer scenarios as we call them and what’s going to motivate that particular buyer within a company to first of all become aware of your solution and then once they’re aware, see that it is going to provide them with a benefit so they become interested enough to move into a sales process. Marylou: Right, the actual conversation. I was just on a call prior to this call. We were talking about the buyer persona and the difference of those profiles that are built in marketing versus the profiles that you and I built for the sales teams. Your point well taken is that the sales conversation really has a number of different facets to it so we have to make sure that we really think through the buyer personas or prospect personas and define them in a way that allows us to have conversation where they’re at. I think one of the biggest things that we’ve encountered is that the personas are really the core of what we need to instill and actually assemble a really robust sales process. In addition to the ideal account profile, that’s another one that a lot of people, a lot of our clients, we try to get them to hone in from the plethora of accounts that they could sell to, which are the ones that we want to focus on in order to start conversations and actually build an active pipeline. Which brings the question to you Bob about account profiles, account-based selling, what trends are you seeing with respect to account-based selling and how do they impact the type of work that we do in creating and optimizing a top of funnel sales process? Bob: Certainly, this is an area that is getting a lot more attention today than it did a year ago or two years ago, or certainly three years ago. Although we’ve had clients over that three-year period and one which we’ve started almost two and a half years ago. That was moving immediately into that approach of account-based selling. In general, I think that that trend is being driven by the fact that people are becoming more aware of who their ideal account profile is, who the companies are that are within that. If you’re a smaller company, you don’t have a lot of resources to go after the entire market. Also, it’s kind of an interesting dichotomy like when you’re starting up a company and believe me, I’ve been there a couple of times, any prospect is a good prospect. But then you figure out that it takes just as long and just as much resource and it’s just as hard to close the ideal customer profile or customer prospect with, in some cases, a larger deal as it does to spend time on trying to close the smaller ones. Really getting your hands around who that ideal customer is is driving companies to say, “Okay, now these are my top tier,” whatever you call that top tier. Some people call it the core, some people call it the anchor accounts. There are number of different words for it, it doesn’t really matter but it’s that top tier of people, of companies that you want to go after, and that you can identify by name. That’s the key, if you can identify subset of your total available market, by companies by name, then you can have an account-based approach. What that means then is that your sales development reps are spending a lot more time working directly with and trying to engage with the contacts within those companies. Typically, this ends up being a larger and a larger enterprise-oriented approach because if you’ve got a product or service that addresses a fairly general market across a large range of company sizes, then it may be more efficient for you to address that entire market with a traditional predictable revenue or strategic pipeline, cold queue approach or new queue approach. But if you can identify these specific accounts by name so that you can then go and do the research to determine who the likely buyers are who have the roles, your buyer roles within that account that could be people in marketing or people in customer support, or people in finance or HR, whoever those roles are, they’re usually influence around those particular contacts that you can go after, it gives your sales development reps the opportunity to be much more personalized. Marylou uses the term hyper personalize which means you’re really understanding who these people are and based upon their backgrounds, their history, where they’ve worked before, who their interest networks are, their educational background, where that particular company is, their growth patterns whether they’re doing mergers, acquisitions, all the changes that go on. You can become very personalized, hyper personalized in your approach to those individuals. That is a trend that we’re seeing with clients who are able to identify that top tier of potential prospects in their ideal account profiles. Marylou: Sometimes though when you think about account-based selling, you’re almost thinking about, “Well, what about the other tiers of accounts?” Is it common for people, for teams, to want to focus just on those core accounts or do we have other ways to still hit the extended universe or a tier three, if you have multiple tiers, leveraging some of the processes and methods from strategic pipeline or predictable revenue or is it that you’re seeing teams are just focusing on those core accounts and that’s it? Bob: That’s a great question. On one side, it’s a matter of focus and if you decided to do account-based selling, you want to have a really strong focus on those top tier accounts. But at the same time, you have to recognize that there is the rest of the market, there are accounts that don’t necessarily play in that top tier, there may be a second tier, and there may be a third tier which is the rest of the market. The best approach to this and one that our clients have taken who have done this before with us is to have this focus in the top tier with their sales development reps and they may say, “Okay, my target is 80% of their time is focused on the top tier, the anchor accounts, the core accounts. 20% of their time is going to be dealt with leads that come in through marketing programs we call marketing qualified leads or through other cold approaches that come out of the predictable revenue strategic pipeline approach of having an automated engagement system where you’re sending out emails that are focused on pain points around the critical points by persona that may get somebody who wasn’t aware of you previously to become aware and have enough interest to look at the content that you’re including in these emails, to learn something about you. At some point, if they have that pain and they recognize that this might be a solution, raise their hand without having to have the sales development reps actually spend time trying to find these people. It’s a multi-tier approach and it incorporates your SDRs who are handling and targeting and focusing on that 70% or 80% of the time on the top tier, 20% or 30% of the time on marketing qualifying leads and people who respond. Then the third level is your marketing programs which are trying to go out the marketplace in general, and again targeted at your ideal account profile types of companies and the personas within that but your marketing programs that could include webinars, blog posts, trade shows, even advertising, depending on the market you’re in and how broad it is. Those are the programs that you’re trying to develop awareness, you’re trying to get people to know that you exist and that you have something that they might be interested in. In that middle level, what we’re really trying to do is to get the targeted buyer persona within that middle tier of accounts to become interested enough to raise their hand and respond and say, “Yes, I’d like to have a call or I’d like to attend this webinar, or I’d like to take an action that shows that they’ve developed a level of interest.” Marylou: Yeah. In the best of all worlds, and what we’ve instilled in our client base is to really focus on what matters most. It may be account-based selling if you have the actual ideal size of revenue per account to actually warrant an account-based approach and then leverage technology where we can to wake up the chill of those folks that are maybe lower tiered but still can bring in good revenue for the company, and then we wrap it all in technology to be able to track how they’re moving about into the active pipelines so that our email streams and our content assets, everything just gets smarter because we’re able to tell exactly the breadcrumbs they took to get to either a response as you said or they may click through or follow up on click throughs. Now, there’s ways to kind of have it all as long as we start with really identifying who these accounts are and organizing them instead of one big bucket, get a little smarter at segmenting where these accounts lie and then the people within those accounts. And then once we do that, and assemble all of that, then when we activate, we can fine tune with our optimization methodologies. Personally I think that that is a good way to activate a top of funnel prospecting pipeline when you have multiple tiers of accounts that you can go after. Bob: Definitely. I think as we engage with strategic pipeline, one of the things that we endeavor to do that most of our clients don’t have when we first become engaged with them is really the tracking of their activities. They don’t really know what’s going on in these business development activities. If they’ve got a marketing automation tool like a Marketo, they’ve got some scoring typically if they’re a larger company in place and so they have marketing qualified leads that have been defined at a certain level. When they bubble up to that level of qualification, they get passed into the business development or in some cases straight to a sales rep to an account executive. In most of our clients when they’re just starting up, they haven’t reached that level yet. When they’re doing proactive email engagement, they don’t really have the process in place to understand what to look at, what methods they should be striving for, how to set the goals for that optimization that you mentioned and being able to track the conversion rates within the business development pipeline. Almost every client and actually almost every sales organization that I’ve been ever involved with and know about has a very defined set of stages in their sales pipeline. That’s the first thing that a sales manager will do when they come into an organization is look at how to find that some cases the customer journey but how they define from qualified opportunity to close and the stages in there. Very few people have defined, in any way other than maybe some marketing score for inbound leads from that first engagement, the cold engagement through the business development process to a qualified opportunity, whatever you call that. Whether it’s a sales accepted lead or sales qualified lead or just a qualified opportunity, very few people are measuring the process in that part of the total pipeline. That’s a very important thing to do, you’re investing these business development resources, sales development people and time and process, and management, and content development etc. If you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know if you need more people, less people, how successful you are or whether your process is working at all. Marylou: Unfortunately, what you’re talking about Bob is some of the faults of the CRM tool because we have a situation where there is something called an opportunity record so we’re able to track from opportunity down to close. Top of funnel stages are not something that’s inherently built into the software application. You have to be pretty inventive as to how you’re going to track that information and build in the metrics because they’re not metrics that you can just select from the CRM itself. We’ve had our challenges there trying to get software to respond to process instead of the other way around which is define the process and have the software work within the process. We’ve had to fight our way through using the current tools set that’s out there which is unfortunate but we figured it out of how to do that. Once we do that, we’re able to then really know right down to the penny what our cost per sale, at least to get to opportunity are, the opportunity cost for resources, list, writing of emails, etc, etc, we have all that information that’s available to us and most importantly, we can track the progress of the buyer and how they’re engaging with our content, how they’re engaging with our sequences, our cadences, and then we’re keeping that information tracked so that the next time around, we get smarter and smarter which reduces the lag for us. It does take some planning and planning is a big part of what we do in order to help our clients become successful and create a predictable engine that if they want to scale, they can do so.   Bob: I think what you’ve just described earlier and what we’ve seen is that there is a real deviation between the marketing automation tools and the Sales Force automation tools. What we had to do consistently because the Sales Force automation tools don’t do all the things we need in the very front end of our business development pipeline and the marketing automation tools don’t carry into the sales prospect development pipeline, that we’ve had to bring together data from the clients, the combination of the clients to tools that marketing automation or campaign management tool and the Sales Force automation tools which is a little bit tricky. Luckily, Marylou is a great software engineer as well as being a real expert in this area so we’re able to move stuff from all these different systems and as frustrating as it is, sometimes you always come up with a solution. Marylou: Yes, aggregating data. Definitely. In the time remaining, I’d like you to share with the audience your experience with content and really what I’m looking forward for you to share is this email engine because you’ve been really very proactive in teaching our clients how to generate an email that resonates, that has a call to action. What I’m asking you to share is what kind of mistakes you see more often than not when the business development or sales development reps are responsible for crafting their own emails? Bob: This is a great one because we see this all the time and it’s an area that Marylou spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to structure content to get someone to move from unaware to aware to interest and therefore into the sales pipeline. We call it compel of content. The reason I bring this up at the beginning of this is because what we’re really trying to do is to get someone who may be totally unaware of this particular solution to, from an emotional perspective, be triggered to at least read into the body and hopefully into the content pieces that we’ve developed. In doing this, there are certain sets of components that need to be included in each of these and they should go in succession but they don’t necessarily have to always go in succession. You have to get an emotional trigger which moves the prospect from being in the status quo situation of this contact to thinking that there is a better place or having a fear that they’re missing something. To get them to move to that next stage, understand then what the obstacle is that they’re encountering and why they feel this pain. They may not even understand that they have this pain, they’re not comfortable, they didn’t know that there was a solution to it and contrast that with what could be, what is the potential better place that they could move to. Once they’ve gotten to that point, then they’re going to be moving from an emotional state to a logical state. Then, you need to be able to provide some proof, you need to use case studies or statistics, anything that you have that shows that this is the improvement, these are the benefits that have actually approved to other companies that have adopted the solution. And then a call to action. Again, that could be setting up a meeting, or it could be attending a webinar, whatever you’re trying to accomplish with this. What we find is when you have two types of people who are writing emails, you have a marketing person or you have a sales person. The marketing person is going to initially write a very long advertising piece which is going to have multiple paragraphs and will sound like marketing piece. Then basically what they’re going to do is use too many words for the format that the email is trying to communicate in. Nobody’s going to read the entire piece of this email. We’ve actually seen marketing and the marketing departments and some of our clients write a page and a half emails to be used in a cold campaign. Nobody’s going to read those. On the other hand, the sales person who writes the email is going to try to sell from the very first paragraph their solution without ever telling the contact why they should care. The way we think about it, in the pipeline is first of all why change, why should this contact care, why change, why now, what’s important? What is going to accrue to me, what am I going to miss if I don’t change now. And thirdly why the company, why my solution? By focusing on using few words, action learning words, making sure you have that emotional trigger at the very beginning of the email, keeping it short so that the person is going to read all the way through it and having very powerful. And in the emails that have content, have relevant pieces of content that really portray the benefit or the possibilities of what is your solution going to deliver for a client in typical situation and what kinds of benefits are going to accrue to them? That’s a real art. We’ve worked with marketing teams and had to go through making it much more crisp and more straight-forward. We’ve worked with sales team. The sales teams again, also in addition to trying to sell, the sales team and in many cases the marketing team will focus much more on I, we, us, the company’s name. We’re doing this, our product does this, so not really relating to contacts concerns and problems. It’s really an art to be able to write very compelling business development cold email streams that convey a story, convey a benefit, have that emotional trigger and will get people to follow them through and click through to the content and respond with interest to the emails. It’s a really interesting challenge but there’s definitely a methodology that we use with our clients that helps to move them from where they’re either coming from the marketing side or the sales side to get to this direct response type of environment. Marylou: Right. We feel so strongly about this and in the new book Predictable Prospecting. We’ve devoted at least two chapters that I know of, chapters four and five, to the process of crafting emails loaded with examples but we do follow a framework. Because we follow a framework for writing as Bob mentioned the rhythm in there of getting people kind of off filter a bit by triggering them, getting them to a low place, contrasting it to where they could be and then with specificity proving the opportunity and then of course the call to action. That’s the standard framework for any email whether it’s small, medium, or large in terms of length and we use them and populate and sprinkle them throughout the entire sales pipeline for business development at various stages. There’s a map in the book on page 83 that shows those different levels of awareness, how we use them, what content pieces we use, but the core of it all is it’s an iterative process, it’s something that we have expertise to assist clients in writing those emails, but the goal is always to then teach them how to fish as Bob says and make sure that they understand that the actual structure of the email and then we review with them over and over again because we’re always trying to improve conversion rates, we review those emails with the team. Bob in closing, what do you see coming in the near term as to the challenges that are going to be coming up? Essentially, where should teams should be focusing their time if they have this big pie of all these initiatives they have to do? Where would you as a sales manager, a director of sales and you have been in all those positions, where would you be focusing your efforts? Bob: I think the thing that you got to figure out first and foremost is this whole idea of why should they care. You can have the best process in the world but if you don’t know why the contact should care and you don’t know exactly how to explain that or demonstrate it, it’s not going to resonate. If I was going to say if there’s one place to start, it’s really to understand why your target market should care and what are the words, what are the support points that you have, what are the statistics that you have to build on that case for these content, these prospects. That is the biggest need I see in most companies that we deal with and companies that I’ve worked for before where we tend to be more focused, if you’re a technology company, on your product and its functions, its features, and all those kinds of things rather than understanding how they benefit the business of the client. And then what that means personally. We say in building our persona, our buyer personas, “How does this impact that particular contact from a financial perspective, a strategic perspective, and a personal perspective.” Financial, strategic, and personal perspective. Every person that you sell to, and sales is all about person to person. Every person you sell to who’s in an executive position has personal goals, they have company strategic goals, and they have financial goals both company and personal. If you don’t understand how your solution applies and benefits that particular role within your target customer, you’re not going to be able to put together compelling, resonating content that is going to get them to be interested to talk to you. Marylou: Or even have those initial conversations on the phone. If you don’t have your talking points aligned with the business reason for moving forward, you are going to get stalled and that’s when we’re called in, people are stalled in that first conversation or follow up conversation to get them moving further into the active pipeline. A lot of that we get back to basics as Bob said, “Why do you matter in the industry? What is it about you and what you have to offer that’s going to solve the client’s’ most pressing business issues and what’s specificity around your product or solution is differentiated out in the market so they understand why you’re different as well.” Bob, thank you so much for your time. If there’s people listening to this call who want to tap into your wisdom, how do they get a hold of you? Bob: bob.kelly@strategicpipeline.com Just go to our website, strategicpipeline.com and  there’s information what Marylou and I do and as well as our backgrounds and experiences on how we got here. There’s also a form in there that you can reach us so contact that way as well. Marylou: Very good. Well, I do appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with everybody. I’m sure the big take away here is really hone in why you matter and then work on the pieces that will allow you to communicate that in a variety of ways, whether it’s highly personalize or hyper personalize as we call it right down to an automated fashion. Thanks again Bob, really appreciate your time. Bob: Thank you Marylou. Take care.

Episode 32: Closing the Gap between Marketing and Sales – Max Traylor

Predictable Prospecting
Closing the Gap between Marketing and Sales
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 Recent studies have shown sales people fail to make quotas when they don’t have the knowledge of their product to have a value-adding conversation with their clients. Where does this gap come from, and how can we close it to connect with our prospects? Today’s guest is Max Traylor, a marketing consultant who specializes in sales enablement. We discuss how to best close the gap between marketing and sales, why millennials don’t trust the internet, and how to best personalize your sales content to target the prospects who matter the most.
 
mark-traylorEpisode Highlights:
  • Introducing Max Traylor
  • What are the biggest obstacles for sales professionals to overcome?
  • The gap between marketing and sales
  • Why millennials prefer speaking to sales reps over researching on the Internet
  • The technology gap in sales
  • Knowledge is power: Learning to close the gaps
  • Defining and tweaking the buyer persona
  • Personalizing sales content on a small and large scale
  • Targeting at the top of the pipeline
  • What’s next for Max Traylor?
  • Working on three tiers of accounts

Resources: CSO Insights’ 2015 Sales Management Optimization Study Accenture: Selling in the Age of Distraction Visit Max Traylor’s website for blog posts, coaching and advising information, and video content Email him at max@maxtraylor.com, connect with him on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hi there, it’s Marylou Tyler and I have a very special guest today. His name is Max Traylor. He’s an independent consultant specializing in marketing and sales enablement. As we all know, sales enablement for our tribe here is a term that is becoming more and more important to us especially as we’re trying to figure out how to start conversations with people we don’t know and also to take the great leads that are coming in from marketing and creating those follow on conversations. Max is really well-versed in what it takes to align that content to the sales process so that we have another almost an army of sales reps in our arsenal that we can use to get these people marching from the cold status down to qualified op.Welcome, Max. It’s very nice to have you. Max: I can’t tell you how excited I am to be here Marylou. Thank you so much for the invite. Marylou: My pleasure. Tell us, in your experience, as we go into now 2017, what are you seeing as some of the biggest obstacles sales professionals will need to overcome under the umbrella of sales enablement? Max: Well, I’ve seen it but CSO Insight did the study on this and they asked a ton of sales executive what is the major reason your salespeople are not making quota and that was because the salespeople do not have the knowledge to have a value add conversation with their buyers. If you think about that problem, they can’t add value during a conversation, part of the trend in the industry that have caused that have to do with marketing. Over the past five, six, seven years, we’ve all witnessed the explosion of inbound marketing and content marketing and all these initiatives where marketing teams are creating educational content for buyers. They’re really educating the buyers and they’re arming those buyers with content that they can use to gain internal approval and that sort of thing. But then when they talk to the salesperson, the salesperson is less knowledgeable about the challenges and solutions than the buyer. How are they going to have a value add conversation? How is that buyer going to look at their relationship with the salesperson and go, “Yeah, this person can actually help me.” That knowledge gap that’s been created by marketing is really something that we’re seeing per sales team and I think that’s why sales enablement is becoming more important in organizations and that we recognize the need to educate the sales team but also arm them with content to help facilitate those value added conversations. Marylou: You know, sometimes when faced with a situation, the common response back is, “Well, marketing creates our content.” How is there a gap if marketing’s creating the content? Are sales people not reading it? Is it not geared towards sales? Is it not enough? What is that gap, Max? Max: First, it’s not being created for sales. Marketing up until now in almost every organization I speak with, marketing number one consumer of the content they’re creating is the buyer when in fact there are two really important audiences for that content, the buyers and the salespeople. The format and the actual information that’s being  presented for those two different audiences differ a lot. That’s one problem is that marketing and the organization itself is not creating content that is meant for the sales team to either learn from that content or help facilitate value adding conversations or send to buyers to help move them through a sales pipeline. Marylou: Or a process, or a cadence, so that they a progression, kind of an awareness progression. That’s one of the things that I see a lot that is disheartening in a way because we’re working on starting initial conversations with people we don’t know, typically, or we’re trying to get follow on conversations. A lot of the times, the content assets that we have starts with a level of interest that’s three levels too high. It’s usually coming from people on the website who decide they want to view some information, there’s an interest there, or they’re ready to evaluate. They’re looking around researching different vendors that are available to solve the problems that they have. But what we need to do also is think of those people who are unaware of us and what we have to offer, people who are not yet convinced, they may want to have a conversation but they need more information. A lot of the times, we don’t have that collateral in sales in order to be able to help push those people or gently pull them through the pipeline. I see that also as an issue besides the fact that marketing is perhaps not looking through the lens of–they have two clients, one is the buyer and the other is the sales team. Max: Exactly. Another trend that’s really making that an even bigger problem, I’m talking about the problem of salespeople not having content or not really understanding their role as the buyers in that research teams. The beginning stages of the buying process when they’re out there researching, there’s some studies being done on millennials. The importance of this is that millennials are now taking over. They now represent a majority of the B2B researchers. Maybe not the people who are making the final decisions, but the people that are being tasked with going through the internet, researching problems and potential solutions. When they survey these millennials on how they prefer to get their information, very surprising to me, their number one source of trusted information is from sales reps. That’s really interesting. Me, being a millennial myself, it makes a lot of sense. We don’t trust the internet. We’re the first generation that grew up with this and we know that marketing teams are sitting in a dark box somewhere creating content that the buyer wants to hear. Instead of saying, “Yeah, we trust everything on the internet,” we want to get on the phone with somebody, we want to hear their voice, maybe we want to see them on a video call, we want to know that that’s a real person that actually understands my problems and I prefer to get information from that person speaking in general–as the studies go for millennials. Marylou: Wow. That’s a game changer right there because we’re kind of brainwashed to think that content is king but what you’re telling me is conversation is becoming king. Max: Conversation and arguing over semantics–content can be additive to that conversation but yeah, they want to speak with somebody, they want to hear it from someone’s mouth, they don’t want to read a piece of content on the internet that they have really no way of judging if that information is credible or not. Before they take it to their boss and look silly, they want to get on the phone with somebody and make sure that there’s an actual person somewhere that can help answer their question. Marylou: Wow, okay. You mentioned that content and marketing isn’t preparing necessarily or there isn’t enough information for the sales executive to be armed with the conversation pieces that matter to the buyer. What else are you seeing besides the content itself that is rewarding the efforts of a sales executive in the sales process? Max: Well, I guess we can turn our conversations towards the technology gap. CRMs have been in a state of kind of Sales Force is winning, they’ve got by far the highest install rate. When you look at marketing automation software, you’ll say, “Wow, that’s really exploded in the past decade.” What happens is marketing automation software and marketing technology in general is generating a lot of data about buyers, what they like, what they interact with, that sort of thing. I am not seeing almost any of the organizations that i speak with, their sales teams are not leveraging that information. They’re just missing the opportunity to take those marketing investments and actually get the most out of them by crafting more contextual conversations using the information that’s available to them. I also don’t see the technology as being integrated in a way where sales can leverage either marketing content or whatever content they happen to have available to them that’s usually on this brick system and because there’s no connection on the software, people are often in a state where they purchase marketing automation, they have a CRM, they also have document management tools, none of them talk to each other and they actually have created a much more complex situation which takes time away from sales reps rather than enabling them to have better conversations. Marylou: Wow. How do fix all these? What is a logical step if people are listening to this conversation and shaking their heads say, “Max is describing me to a tee. He’s describing my organization. This is what we are faced with but we don’t where to begin.” What do we look at first in your opinion? Max: I wouldn’t claim to have the final answer to that question but I’d attack in a number of ways. Number one is knowledge. I want to make sure that my efforts in educating my buyers, which is happening on the marketing side, your competitors are also contributing to that, I want to balance the amount of education I am getting to my sales team with the amount of the education that’s available to buyers. That maybe like a monumental path but it involves educating the sales team on the challenges of the particular industries that they’re pursuing, individual personas, the challenges that they have within those different industries, how their products or services line up with those industry challenges and that’s just educating the sales team on the buyer, let alone the technologies that they have available to them, the content that they have available to them that they can leverage during conversations. We need to look at educating the sales team in learning initiatives. Then, there is sort of your line of work, the planning and the activation of that learning. What technologies are in place, what process are we going to use, how are we going to document our process for new incoming sales development reps and closers. Really getting our team a process that handles a technology question. What are you specifically going to use the technology for so we can make sure that you’re not wasting time, you’re actually saving time and adding value to the people you’re speaking with by leveraging technology. Marylou: I know one of the areas that I’m very adamant that sales teams review is the buyer persona. In fact, we call them in the book prospect personas instead of buyer personas. The main reason is because the term buyer persona is associated with marketing. What I am working with sales teams who are responsible for starting conversation, the sales conversation, and moving that prospect through the pipeline, we need to define who those personas are so we start with the buyer persona profiles that are available through marketing and we tweak them so that they are sales specific. When I first bring up this type of exercise to the directors in sales and executives, the first thing is to kind of–not roll the eyes but pretty darn close because they say marketing has already done this but I’ve given an example of when I was in product development. I was actually developing a software and we had our own personas because we wanted to know how people used the system, not how they bought the system. This is the same way with sales is that we want to understand what are the problems and challenges that these folks have, where’s that gap so our conversation can be steered towards the gap because we’re trying to build a sense of urgency as well as getting them educated into how our product or service can solve those big problems that they have. Not only do we have to make them aware of the big problems but also show them how deep the abyss is of where they are now to where they want to be. Buyer personas turn into prospect personas is a big area for me to go in with sales teams. Do you see sales embracing the development of their own prospect personas? Max: I actually don’t. I see it being seriously adopted on the marketing side but again, I think that’s contributing to the gap if you’ve got marketing that’s ahead of sales in the research that they’re doing and the documentation that they’re providing to the organization on buyers but people are just starting to and you’re sort of leading this in the industry people are just starting to think about prospect personas for the sales team. Marylou: The other thing that we use prospect personas for is what I call the bull’s eye and that is we have our targeted persona, our prospect, but there are also people in and around the bull’s eye who directly influence or indirectly influence that particular persona. Just by virtue of doing that exercise have extended the persona profiles for additional contact points because we’re trying to get a little tow on the door to start conversations. We may not start with the intended target, we may go in and around the bull’s eye especially in account-based selling, we’re going to be mapping through the organization to find someone either to refer us in or to give us more information and ammunition as to what’s actually happening within that account as it relates to what are product and service can solve. I’m really hopeful that people listening to this call will understand the value of taking that profile and reworking it so that we can slant it towards sales which will also open up that other can of worms you talked about which is the content assets that we need in sales in order to continue those conversations with the prospect. Can you tell us a little bit about the content pieces and what you are seeing evolving not just for the education of salespeople but for salespeople to use as content as they’re working through the pipeline? Max: The first thing that comes to mind when I talk about the whole thing we had talked about when I go to my clients and I start talking about sales content, they look at sales content as proposal contracts. Everyone seems to have a very end of process view of what that sales content is. We need to give somebody a proposal, we need to capture their challenges, show them a solution and have them sign on the dotted line but they don’t put enough effort into thinking about what content is actually going to be used by the sales team during prospecting, the early stages of sales pipeline. When you do get somebody on the phone that’s qualified who want to have follow up conversation, how are you going to construct a piece of collateral that’s probably going to present how are you going to construct that so the the buyer feels that that sales reps took a good amount of time to customize that presentation for the means and the solutions that are specific to their situation rather than just feeling like they’re in a line of a hundred people that are getting the same exact thing and they’re not being provided with that value. I like to focus on the latter which is what content is actually going to be available to the sales team during the evaluation process that the buyer goes through. I kind of look at your book and say, “Wow, you nailed it Marylou. You’ve got a few presentations that happen in critical moments and those presentations, that content is basically there to help facilitate a qualifying call. It’s used to educate buyers but it’s also used to piece out key information that’s going to be used by the buyer to construct that next presentation and ultimately construct a proposal that is in direct alignment with your primary challenge. Marylou: Right. The other thing about having a content further up in the funnel allows you to hyper personalize it, and that’s a big term to that’s in the book, towards the buyer because as you sad before, we expect as buyers and prospects that you have now a lot of resources at your disposal to learn more about us. We don’t want to see a can presentation, we don’t see a generic features and benefit sheet. We want to see something specific to us directly relating to our culture, our company, our pain points, whether they’re financial, strategic or personal, we want to see that in a document. But at the same time as sales team, we can’t be doing these one off presentations. Salespeople will need some type of templated base line document that they can hyper personalize. I think that’s what I’m seeing as people who are really getting into sales enablement are starting to provide those tools and those documents for their sales reps but way up into the funnel, from cold conversation through qualified opportunity. Not from opportunity to close, it’s not just for those steps. It’s for the pre-steps. Do you agree with that? Max: I do. It becomes easier to do that when you’ve got a focused effort on identifying who those most valuable accounts are going to be and who the personas are in those accounts. Marylou: Right. Max: People are in a state of like, “Uh-oh. We don’t know what contents to create at top of funnel because we’re opportunistically going after every opportunity that comes our way. If we first slow down and say wait a minute, we have a choice to who we sell to,” and we should put the work in to figure out who’s going to be most profitable and who’s going to be most aligned in our solution. If you do that, you can start to create an environment where you have those templates available, you have different modules where you can personalize those pieces of sales content, but it starts with that decision that, “Hey, we are consciously going to go after a very specific type of person and we can predict what those challenges are going to be and thus arm the sales team with content that will help them add value into their conversations.” Marylou: And then because a lot of these intelligent systems now track the usage and actual path of content usage, we can then take that, feed it back into the system, and start developing the shortest path if you will. Reduction of lag is what I call it where we’re actually anticipating that the prospects will go down a certain path in their decision process, in their buyer thought process. Now that we have tools that can actually help us with the order in which they consume content in many cases, since we’ve defined our personas, we’ve targeted our accounts, we looked at the roles and we say these people act like this most of the time based on our data, we’re now really going to affect how long it takes to get to close. By starting at the top of funnel, we should be able also to anticipate and predict how long it’s going to take to get the opportunity. Max: That’s right. All of that benefit disappears if you don’t have that intentional effort at identifying those people and going after them. That problem of opportunistic selling, we have to hit our numbers so we’re going to after everybody. Then people just got stuck on the hamster wheel. Marylou: It is that. It’s funny because the book Predictable Revenue which is the first book that Aaron and I wrote that came out in 2011, between 2011 and 2016 which is now, most of the people I talk to get stuck in that phase where they can’t figure out how to get someone who’s responded or raised his hand into an active conversation. A lot of that is because we don’t have a clear vision and a clear path of what conversations to start, with whom, at what time and under what topic. I think a lot of what we’re talking about today is going to get that right time, right person, right topic, and right in front of the rep now so that they have a better chance of getting to a qualified opportunity faster. It does start with really thinking through who you are targeting, what they look like, what the ideal size of the account is and stop going after this minnows and going after the whales. Max: Exactly. Marylou: Yeah. What’s on the horizon for you, Max, going into next year? What are some of your initiatives that you’re hoping clients will open up their eyes and get that Aha moment? Max: As if I plan for 2017. I knew that in 2016 video is going to be big as just a form of communication and I think that sales teams are just scratching the surface of video. I think you’re going to see more videos being created just in time by salespeople to reach those “unreachable executives.” I’ve been doing that a lot in my sales process working with a single person that’s a researcher, or an evangelist inside the organization, but knowing that I have to create something that is as compelling and as trust building for other people in the organization. I think videos are going to be big. The research says that predictive analytics is big on the horizon. I got kind of into that a lot in 2015. You’re seeing a lot more technology that is aimed at gathering data about buyers to help have better conversations, also to score leads better so that the salesperson isn’t looking at a list of a thousand leads. They predictably created an equation that tells the salesperson, “Hey, this is the person that is most likely to buy.” I see an explosion of technology. I see people adopting more technology and as they do that, they run the risk of creating a more complex environment. It all comes back to people need to research their buyers, they need to create a process and before they go adopting new technologies, they should create the process and then look for a technology that will help enable that process versus the other way around which is what 90% of companies are going to do. Marylou: Right. That’s a very great advice. I think if people would just slow down a bit and think through, heaven forbid, the SWOT 6 which is the first chapter in the book which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats overlaid with six other types of technologies and mapping so that you’re really going to understand who you serve, why you matter, why they should change, why now and why with you. You’ve got to get to that real core of why you matter and then the next step is to look at the companies with whom you can serve and target those companies. I think that’s sort of like the old fashioned way, the way we used to do it, but now you have technology that is going to help you get there a lot faster and figure out who those companies are. Rather than casting a wide net and getting a bunch of different fish, you’re going to go after the ones that matter and then leverage technology to reach that extended universe using automation. That’s what I recommend for clients is almost like three tiers of accounts. The first tier are your core accounts that people you would really like to have as clients, the next tier out are perhaps extended universe accounts that almost a targeted account but not quite, and then the third level is everybody else that could be a client but you don’t want to spend a lot of time on because from a resource perspective, you’re wasting your time. We have those types of methods that are available. It really takes someone to sit down and figure out who are in those tiers and as you said Max, then you apply the process and then you apply the technology to the process. Max: The biggest challenge people are going to run into is balancing that strategic work with making their number. Marylou: Yeah. Max: You have to convince somebody that it’s valuable enough to step off of the hamster wheel and go. Marylou: Right. It’s funny, I have a client right that they’re suffering through the vanity metrics. Vanity metrics look so great but they’re not closing deals so we have to create actionable metrics instead and it’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re used to seeing a lot of activity and then have it go down to virtually an eighth of what they were doing but it’s all quality now. You have to give it that time so that you can let those incubate and grow and then use technology that service the rest of the troops with good content. As we work through these content assets for sales, we can automate a lot of that conversation to get people kind of warmed up, what I call warm up the chill, get them ready to go so that when they are at a point, when they scored enough, then you can start having those conversations and hyper personalize that interaction. Max, thank you so much for your time. This has been a great conversation. I’m sure people are trying to figure out how to get a hold of you so would you like to leave us a little information of how to reach you? Max: maxtraylor.com or max@maxtraylor.com. My trusted email address. Marylou: Okay. I know you’re LinkedIn, I’m sure, in Twitter and all those great places. Max: Yes, I do. I do do the social media. LinkedIn is the preferred method of contact, obviously. Marylou: Alright, very good. Thank you again for your time. I appreciate you taking time to spend with us on this very important topic. Max: I really appreciate it and I still have your book on my desk and I don’t think it’s going anywhere soon. Marylou: Well, thank you for that. Talk soon, Max. Thank you. Max: Thanks Marylou.

Episode 30: Intersection of Sales and Marketing – Stephan Spencer

Predictable Prospecting
 
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On this episode, I’m interviewed by Stephan Spencer of Marketing Speak podcast. We discussed the intersection of sales and marketing, the steps to building a successful pipeline, and my favorite marketing initiatives and social proofs. I also gave Stephan Spencer tips on how to improve his conversations with prospects, my best book recommendations, and a few of my top coaching practices.
 
Estephanspencer_1335637109_56pisode 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:

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.

Episode 29: The Intense Planning and Logistics behind Expanding a Business – Hans Peter Bech

Predictable Prospecting
The Intense Planning and Logistics behind Expanding a Business
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Our world today feels smaller than ever, largely due to advancements in communication and technology, making plenty of business owners wonder: Should I expand my services abroad? My guest today is Hans Peter Bech, author of the bestselling book Building Successful Partner Channels and managing partner of TBK Consult, a company that helps IT groups break into foreign markets.We discuss the intense planning and logistics behind expanding a business, how culture impacts sales, and Hans Peter Bech’s suggestions for anyone considering making the jump into a foreign market.
 
hans-peter-bechEpisode Highlights:

  • Who is Hans Peter Bech?
  • Why you should take your company global
  • Partner channels and foreign markets
  • Challenges to expansion for IT companies
  • How doing business differs from country to country
  • Why planning is essential to expanding your business
  • Hans Peter Bech’s top tips for going global

Resources:

Episode 28: The ‘Why’ behind Predictable Prospecting – Jeremey Donovan

Predictable Prospecting
The 'Why' behind Predictable Prospecting
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My new book Predictable Prospecting is set to inspire sales teams all over the world to reformat and build their B2B sales pipelines. Curious to know more about the writing process behind the book? This episode features a conversation with Jeremey Donovan, my co-author on Predictable Prospecting, as we discuss our reasoning behind writing the book and what we think sales representatives can get out of our methodology. Jeremey Donovan is the Head of Sales Strategy at Gerson Lehrman Group. When he isn’t at his day job, you can find Jeremey serving as an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Professional Studies or writing and speaking about Public Speaking – his book How To Deliver a TED Talk topped the bestseller list both domestically and internationally.
 
jeremey-donovanEpisode Highlights:

  • Background : The “Why” behind Predictable Prospecting
  • The effect of automation on sales
  • Roleplay as a training tool
  • Timeblocking in the workday
  • The “Keep or Kill” technique

Resources: Pre-order my new book Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline , out on August 19th 2016! Check out Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, the book Marylou and Jeremey agree was fundamental to beginning their sales careers! Connect with Jeremey Donovan on LinkedIn or through his website, Speaking Sherpa.

Episode Transcript

Marylou:       Hello everyone! I’m here with co-author for Predictable Prospecting, Jeremey Donovan. I asked him to have a call with me because I wanted you guys to get a feel for the why behind this wonderful book. I’ve asked Jeremey to join us. I have a starter question I guess Jeremey for you and that is if you go back in time and think about what trigger would have event that prompted you to pursue not only the topic further but to pursue writing this book with me, can you take us back to what your thought process was and what that event was that caused you to say this is really a great topic that should be in a book? Jeremey:       Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I think also this will be fun actually to recollect and reminisce about all of that I’ve noted. I think if I run the clock back even further which is why do I write books to begin with especially since I have a day job that I quite enjoy. The reason I write fundamentally is about learning. I write to learn although I read tons and tons and tons of books in a given space whenever I’m transitioning into a new role at work or taking on some kind of new project that’s foreign to me. I’l tend to read eight to ten books on a subject until things start to get repetitious for me.                        There are certain things were I feel like there’s something that wasn’t said or I don’t understand it well enough so then I get motivated to write. The motivation here was throughout the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to keep reinventing myself. Some people like to do one thing for a very, very long time. I would take my father in law as a great example, for 40 years he designed cooling systems for a variety of different types of power plants. He is probably one of the best people in the world who were doing that. That’s not how I’m wired. I’m wired to want to switch radically every couple of years and do lots of evolution. I wouldn’t say making huge leaps. There is a path to it but making some kind of evolution. For me I began to evolve originally from an engineer to an industry analyst, to a product development and management person then to a marketing person and then ultimately to a sales operation and strategy professional. In each of those major transitions, I mean really to learn a new domain. In this particular case, I knew enough to know that I didn’t know as much about sales as I wish I did, in particular B2B sales. I read every book under the sun. There are some amazing books that have been out forever like Spin Selling is definitely well regarded as a classic in the area. I think it’s still every bit as valid today as it was when it was written 20 or 30 years ago. There’s lots and lots of new books like Trish Bertuzzi’s book, the Sales Development Playbook, the Cracking the Sales Management Code. There are all kinds of new books that are constantly being created. When I read through the stuff that was out there, I landed on the book that you wrote with Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue. Like many people who happen upon that book, I felt, wow. This is something that’s actually really, really different than what’s out there. What I liked about it, it really fits with my style of writing, but what I liked about it was, it was really practical. It wasn’t theoretical. It was clear that both you and Aaron kind of had boots on the ground and were not only helping salespeople sell but you are also selling to build your own businesses, that you both were experienced sales professionals. That was an important piece for me. Sometimes people get so bogged down in sort of the consulting world that they forget a little bit of what it’s like to be boots on the ground. I felt like, “Wow,” what I’m reading in that book really resonated with what I was experiencing in the organization I was working at when I read that particular book. I’ll pause there for a second that I would assume that would kind of resonate with what’s in your head. I know from talking to you, I guess we’ll get deeper into the story but you also kind of had a I want to write a book one day interest in you. Marylou:       Yes. I was actually asked by a number of people who I had the good fortune of servicing after we wrote Predictable Revenue. They saw the differences in what they read in the book to what I was teaching to assemble, activate, and then optimize their top of funnel frameworks. There’s always this hint of it’s been nice if you can get this down in some type of coursework, some type of manuscript, or how to guide because what we read in this book is a foundation of what you’re teaching us. It wasn’t unusual, I had heard it, but as you know writing books can be a  daunting process. There’s always this fear that you forgot something majorly important because you would pertain in some critical key element that they need. Gone are the days of when you pretty much got to get it out there. Now, we can add supplements to it and that’s what we’re doing with this piece is giving our viewers, our readers, our fans an inside kind of look us to how we came together to do this and the why behind it. I do agree with you by the way that Spin Selling for me was the book that I used, because I’m also an engineer. I had this feeling that I wasn’t really a salesperson per se, I was more of a consultant or consultative type of person trying to solve problems. Spin Selling was just a godsend to me to be able to formulate my process, ideas, and my systems know how into conversation that lead people down the path where they were excited about doing business with us. Jeremey:       Yeah. I mean it was Spin Selling by the way. I will say that there’s almost nothing in any book that’s come in the years subsequent that isn’t covered at least in some level in depth by Spin Selling. It’s all sort of in there. People might brand things around but there are maybe rebrand things that are in there and variations on the theme. There’s additive stuff and we definitely try to be additive with our book but at the end of the day, falls is a pretty fundamental during that—all of the techniques change, the ultimate purpose which is providing supplying an individual or accompany with the product or service that they find value and that they get a return on investment in. That fundamental thing doesn’t change. Therefore, and some human beings don’t change that much. Human psychology doesn’t change that much. There should be a similar foundation, I’m not surprised by that. Getting back to our story, my recollection was I was on a new role and I can’t join an organization that really needed to enhance its sales culture. After reading Predictable Revenue, I think I called or emailed or LinkedIn connected, I can’t even remember, both of you and Aaron to see if one or the both of you actually did training and consulting work. You reply quickly, I vetted you by I’m sure the way I vet all partners which is to have a phone call, understand what your methodology is, what your approach is, to see if I would judge you to be a good facilitator for a training session. I think that’s when I hired you and we met up in Boston I believe. Marylou:       Yeah, we did. That’s what I call an immersion program which is when we sit down together for hours on end and work through step by step the blocks and the new framework that the book is written against. Jeremey:       Yeah. What you may not know, I can’t remember if I told you this or not, but we actually hired a second person. We booked this one hotel conference room. I can’t remember if you were first or you were second but we did like two or three days with you, then we did another two days with or vice versa we do these two days with the other person. At the end of the session that you read, I was just totally blown away. Especially the other person was good but not to make you blush too much but you were great. At the end of the session, I thought there’s definitely stuff that you know that is not in any book I’ve read and wasn’t even in Predictable Revenue. I think I walked up to you and I said, “Hey, you should really write a book.” Even though I had anything to do with it or not, I just taught you got something special here that I haven’t read before. I do that a lot by the way when I’m really impressed with people so I think that’s probably what I said to you. Marylou:       It was very much along those lines. When I laid out the framework on the board and we worked through the critical path elements, I remember you shaking your head towards the end saying, “I have never learned like this before in this manner,” then you said, “You really ought to be putting this into your book.” It’s more of being my mentor saying, “Okay the next step now Marylou is to take this and to put it into a book so that you can share with the world.” Jeremey:       Yeah, yeah. I’m glad eventually we sort of connected to do it together because, selfishly, writing the book in a way was a half a year of free consulting, of picking your brain so I can get smarter. I think what was great about the partnership was you had ideas, more ideas than me. I had some ideas, then I was able to actually take those and put them into practice in an operating environment in real time. As we are writing the book, I could say that, “Hey you know what, that didn’t really work,” or, “That really did work.” Here’s an example. I know Aaron and you really talked about this which is, back when Predictable Revenue was written the sort of mass customize, or it’s not even customize, mass personalized email like, “Hi Marylou. Blah blah blah blah insert company name, insert dynamic field X.” Those fully template emails which were talked about a little bit and were adopted widely by a lot of Tech Companies, particularly fast cloud based software companies. That worked a long time ago but it is just stopped working.                     I’m a buyer and as a buyer whenever I say an email like that I just press delete. What we started testing out was we started testing out okay what happens if you really slowdown? Don’t send 100 or 150 emails a day. Slow down send 40 to 60 maybe a day and for every one of those 40 to 60, spend five minutes or some or so ten minutes or whatever it happens to be. We really take the time to personalize the email. Read that person’s LinkedIn profile, get some preferably professional but maybe personal tidbit out of it that you can reference or go through the company’s 10K, 10Q in yesterday presentations, whatever it happens to be so that your email is contextually spot on. That might just be the subject line and maybe the first sentence and a very, very much often in last sentence. I’ll tell you, when we switched over from generic templates to a degree of personalization, we’re still using a template, we customize the subject line, we customize the birth line. That switch over had a dramatic impact on our ability to convert in the meetings. I’ll add one more thing, I’ll pick a pause which is the other thing is just a concept that you really opened my eyes to which is so many people just think that they can do it all via email. You really opened my eyes to the necessity of doing a multichannel approach. We modify, we ultimately settled on doing just three email touches. If you hit someone with email more than three times, you’re going to drive them bonkers. We do one on the beginning, one on the middle and one on the end. The beginning is a typical intro email. The middle one is sort of a follow up, did you get the chance to check it out? The third one is a little bit more in the break up email which has been successful but eventually people are really getting wise to that one too. We’ll have to changes as things change. We call at least five times with the premise that you have about 20% chance of connecting on any given call. If you want to get a call, you got to call five times. That actually also was really a breakthrough to move from email only to that sort of mixed phone and emails at a regular cadence. The combination of those two things I think is a massive business accelerator. Marylou:       I think it’s really funny that you say that about hundreds of emails with automation, scaling it down to something more meaningful and that you can really take time. The original book, Predictable Revenue, when it was published recommended somewhere between 25 and 50 emails per STR to be sent out but it was pre all this automation that allowed you to just mass send. If we’re going back to that gentler, kinder, being more respectful, more authentic, researching upfront like you said one to five minutes somewhere in that timeframe. Then, provide the STR with the template that covers the sales conversation because a lot of times if you asked an STR or a sales representative to do a one off email, they may forget or may not understand the components of what goes into an email to make it impactful so that people will act. What we do is we write that hard part so to speak where we’re triggering an event, we’re looking at an obstacle. We’re getting it to a potential outcome or result that the client can get. We provide specificity and proof and then we share the opportunity that’s ahead of them if they take this action. Those components are pre written in template format but we tie it all together with personalization. That’s what you’re doing at your company now. Jeremey:       Yeah, exactly. It really has been so effective. I have the luxury of being able to listen to the calls that going are on, I have the luxury of being able to audit emails that get sent out. Definitely, our most successful STR’s are the ones that are taking the time to do that pre-call research, are taking the time to truly personalize the emails. You’re communicating with a human being. I also add that personalization is so critical because in the company I work for currently, we target generally quite large enterprises. Fortune 1000, Global 2000 kinds of companies and large financial services companies. There, if you burn a senior level contact with a crappy outreach, you’re dead. This is the point you made to me which is you vary the degree of personalization based on how critical any email is to you. If you’re Yelp and you’re targeting Mom and Pop small businesses, then you probably can’t afford to take the time to do that kind of pre-call research. You just got to be smiling and dialing. I will say taking the time to do less dials per day potentially with or without automation, we use a decent amount of automation as well also has a positive impact on the longevity and quality, and productivity of the people that you hire. These STR’s are human beings just like everybody else and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. If you try to get them to do over 100 calls a day, you’re just burning this person out. One thing I’m proud of in having our folks do less calls is it gives us a lot of time to spend to train them. I’ve been told that our training program is pretty unique. I know from the people we’ve hired who went through STR programs else where, they just got handed a computer and a headset and told to start smiling and dialing with limited training. We actually, with our STR’s, we role play every single day which I think is the best way to train people to be successful and listen to calls every single day. Marylou:       That’s a key takeaway I think that we really focused on in our book was this concept of role playing and like you said roleplaying every day. The way that I’ve seen it done where it’s just a natural part of the rhythm is that we advocate block time or people call it time blocking, there’s different terms for it, uninterrupted telephone time, because data has shown that the more we’re on the phone contiguously throughout time, the better we get in our conversation. If we warm up those conversations by role playing, by the time we actually hit the phones and get ready to start conversing with people, we’re ready to go. We’re warmed up, we pick the topic. It may be objection handling one day and maybe how to speak with the gatekeeper the next day. Whatever the topic is, the STRs can raise topics that they want to drill down on. The point is it takes 15 to 20 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, somewhere in that range everyday to role play. If I were to shake somebody at 3:00 in the morning and say some objection, it will be natural to them to come back with not only an answer to the objection but a follow on question. That’s where the Spin Selling comes in. A follow on question that will allow the client to start thing, “Wow, I never thought of that, that way,” or, “Gee, okay let’s talk about that.”                     Role playing is a big, big deal. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing it the way you’re doing it because that’s spot on. Jeremey:       I try to play not just as a manager to just play that client because that’s an easy role. As a salesperson, you need real credibility that you need to be willing in those situations to get uncomfortable too. Even if you screw up as a manager in a role play, in some ways your people will respect you even more because they know you’re not on the phone every day. They know it’s been some time since you had to do that personally but they definitely respect that you’re trying. We try to keep fresh by having managers do their own cold prospecting every once in awhile just to maintain the rhythm. You said that all these lines are actually written in the book but you just mentioned something else that I think was another breakthrough concept that you have to reinforce for me as we work through the book which is this contact of time blocking. If I had to point to a single factor that probably is one of the key make or breaks in success, it’s time blocking. In the end, talking in the abstract about it and trying to think in the abstract about it was one thing but once we actually stared at the calendar and tried to figure out, “What are the exact time blocks and how we do this or what do we do?” What we landed on and what I’ve implemented is four 90 minute time blocks per day, that’s going to take up six hours total. You need those other times for people to be human obviously and for lunch and for the occasional meeting and so on.  We really hold those four time blocks to be very, very sacred. We don’t cancel them, we don’t book meetings on top of them. We try to give our philosophy, at least my philosophy is to try to give our STR who are sales professional a lot of control on autonomy. Our metrics is 20 meetings set per month so that we’re just one a day. It’s not a huge number. Believe me, it works to get a meeting in a high level qualified meeting per day that is work. Marylou:       It is. It is. I think a lot of this position, the block time can be used for telephone work. I have one client who’s actually using 15 to 20 minutes of that time to start teaching how to write a good email and the concepts of writing a good email. Everyone sits down and writes an email, and they share as a group. Then, they put the “winner” or the ones they think will do well actually into the sequence for testing purposes. As we said in the book, it’s assembling the network, it’s activating it and then optimizing. You’re always iterating. You’re always changing. You’re always making it better. That’s what allows us to do this Predictable Prospecting technique is that we’re continually looking and not satisfied with the results that we’re getting so that we can improve. Jeremey:       I’ll add to your point, there is no silver bullet. There is no perfect subject line. There is no perfect subject line. There is no perfect email. Even if you find something that’s perfect, the rest of the sales development community jumps on that so fast that the approach gets burned out. At the end of the day, that’s why the thing that matters the most is the personalization because that’s the one thing that cannot be, a lot of people will claim they can automate true personalization but I think that still requires a human being to really think through and synthesize the information. Maybe I’ll eat my words when artificial intelligence technologies reach the point when they truly seem human or more human than they seem right now. I think for now that that personalization by the human being is incredibly important. Marylou:       Like you said, there is a spot in the sales pipeline that personalization is a must. It’s when you’ve begun the dialogue, you’ve confirmed it’s the right person and now you are starting that sales conversation. As soon as you start the sales conversation and you’re trying to understand what challenges they have, the needs that they have at this time, and where they fit in the spectrum of offers that you offer, that’s the way you develop a relationship that builds trust, that builds rapport. Like the exit off the freeway and it moves to nurture sequencing, at least now you have those conversational elements so you know and you should be tracking what conversations led up to the point where you understood their pain and then you send them off into long term follow up or nurture with the track that resonates with them. You have a lot more intelligence so that you can use data that way. When you’re actually working in the active sales conversation, it’s proven over and over again that your conversion rights are going to be higher the more you personalize which means you’re working less records. Let’s look at the map behind it. You’re definitely working less records and they’re more quality. That’s the point of this whole thing is to send quality down the pipeline so that the clients that you close bring in the highest revenue potential and they’re the highest likelihood of closing. That’s what’s going to build revenue for to the company. Jeremey:       Yeah. I totally agree. I want to circle back around the training comment that you made on crafting email together. That’s the technique I love. We definitely use that. I was down a couple months ago at the conference for Sales Loft. Sales Loft is a… Marylou:       Kyle Porter’s company. Jeremey:       Kyle Porter’s company, yup. It’s actually, my favorite tool for sales development because it allows you to do that personalization. I was at that conference and I heard a great tip which we’ve implemented which is this, we stole the name, keep or kill. Whenever one of us gets a cold prospecting email or a prospecting email, we send it around to our business development or our sales development team. We all comment keep or kill. We actually don’t just say keep or kill with one word. What we kind of do is we frame the feedback as build on or think about. The build ons are here’s the stuff that actually was solid. Every email has probably something good about it hopefully. The think abouts are the things that didn’t go well. When the subject line grabs you in a relevant and non-salesy way, when there’s a personalization, when they took time to show you that they knew you than when it was shorter rather longer. When it looks like it was plain text normal that some human being would type rather than some fancy HTML with other lines involved and all kinds of ridiculous stuff. We go through all those and just figure out. Even different techniques. One I think and I’m pretty sure we put this in the book as well. One great technique that someone used on me while we are in the course of writing the book, they sent an email. It’s an interesting technique. They wanted to get to me to sell their product but what they did instead was they went to somebody else in the organization at my level and sent them the first step email, this other person ignored the first email. Then the second email they sent, the subject line said, “Should I be talking to Jeremey Donovan?” Sure enough, they instantly forwarded it to me. It was just a brilliant technique. That one still works at least at the time we’re talking right now. Marylou:       Today is 2016 May. Jeremey:       Yes, exactly. I’ve started to see that same technique being used by other folks. It’s definitely starting the flow through the sales development community and eventually will burn itself off also. Marylou:       You designed that in chapter two of the book when you talked about the bulls eye for the buyer profiles, the indirect and direct influences. If you’re doing your research, you’re going to have the names of the indirect and direct influences of your potential buyer. You essentially outline that framework to do this type of email in chapter two. Jeremey:       Yup, yup. That’s exactly right. It takes patience to use that approach because STRs are so hungry to get a meeting with the person, with the decision maker right out of the bat that they think that’s the most efficient thing. This is a good example where I probably wouldn’t have responded or taken a look at that had it not come from another person.                     By the way, one of the most effective ways to do that getting at the bulls eye is you might actually send that email one level higher. Send it to my boss first, if my boss ignores it the first time when they get the second time when it says, “Should I talk to Jeremey Donovan?” You can be pretty sure that my boss forwarded it to me and just because it came from my boss I’m going to read it. Marylou:       Of course, the psychology behind that, yes. Yeah. Jeremey, tell us what’s next for you. How many books have you written? Share with the audience. Jeremey:       I write them to learn but I think this is probably book number six. What’s next for me, I don’t really have a quota for writing. Writing is painful. I mean really, any writer would tell you it does have moments of fun and flow and enjoy but I would say those are in between lots and lots of moment of frustration and pain. I’m sure I’ll write again. Right now I’m just focusing more on my family, focusing on work. When the music hits me again, I’ll do something. I have been fascinated lately by academic studies around what leads to performance at work, sales performance or other performance. That might be the next area. There’s lots and lots of books out there that aren’t really academic grounded, they’re really opinion based and yet there’s an incredible non-academic research that shows what really matters. I’d like to pursue that and popularize that. Also again, it’s about understanding, I want to understand for me and for the people I work with what’s going to help people be successful and happy. That’s an area I’m fascinated by. Marylou:       In closing, I know you’ve got a lot of different hats that you wear but if people wanted to reach out to you and talk to you more about some other things that you’re doing in your current work environment, how would they do that? Jeremey:       Yes. I guess two great ways, I’m super active on LinkedIn. You can always message me via LinkedIn. Based on those conversation, obviously a super authentic message is not just please connect with me on LinkedIn and try to sell me something immediately. Marylou:       Indeed. Jeremey:       Show me that you know me. LinkedIn is great or they can go to speakingsherpa.com. There’s a contact form there, I do respond to emails I get there as well. Marylou:       Okay. Then of course everyone, he will be at the ready when the book is launching which this is being recorded prior to the book launch and we’re going to be putting this out as a takeaway for people who pre order the book. If you are thinking around the fence about pre-ordering the book, we’re going to be putting a lot of different work sheets and intelligent guides and things like that for you to follow along because the book’s got so much in it. There’s a lot to learn. In fact, my team went through and pulled out Jeremey a lot of the different learnings page by page. We thought, “Ahh we’ve done maybe 50 that we can look at and maybe build content for there are over a 100 that they pulled out of the book. The book is only about 200 pages or something. Jeremey:       Yup, yup. Marylou:       There’s a lot of good stuff in there. I do really appreciate and enjoy tremendously working with you on this project. Jeremey:       Alright, It’s been a blast. It’s hard to write with other people. It was a pleasure all the way to write. I both enjoyed writing with you and learning from you. Marylou:       Very good. Thank you so much for your time, Jeremey. I really appreciate it. Jeremey:       My pleasure. Take care. Marylou:       Okay.

Episode 27: Planning Inbound Marketing Efforts through Thought Stages – Jay Abraham

Predictable Prospecting
Planning Inbound Marketing Efforts through Thought Stages
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Content is what moves a prospect through the sales pipeline. How do you know what content to create and when to deliver it? On this episode I discuss how to use thought stages to plan inbound marketing efforts. I believe that every sales conversation has the potential to provide valuable information. Tracking and using details such as prospect awareness and pain points helps fine tune content and increases conversions.
 
jay-abrahamEpisode Highlights:

  • Uncovering personality and pain points of ideal clients
  • How to learn from a “no”
  • The importance of a call to action
  • How to use immediate feedback
  • Identifying where a prospect is on the spectrum of awareness
  • Using thought stages

Quotes/Tweets: “You owe it to the right markets to really reach and serve them.” – Jay “Ask meaningful questions, not vanity questions.” – Marylou “All categories of buyers, all stages of buyers, they’re not all worth the same.” – Jay

Episode Transcript

Jay: This is going to be one of the most profoundly thought altering half hour discussions we do in this because we’re going to talk to somebody who is masterful at a dual skill thinking critically both about databases, about the selling cycle, about who is prime prospect, who isn’t, how to turn semi prime prospects into prime prospects and prospects into buyers and buyers into repeat buyers.She also is masterful at the human element which is the connectivity, how to have conversations with this levels of buyers’ prospects and progressive levels of motivation to buy and it’s just incredible. Her background is stunning, she was half of the team that helped salesforce.com go from tiny to mighty. She is co-author of a book that almost every high priced, intangible technology and service company has read called Predictable Revenue. It a takes a premise that I don’t want to try to explain myself because it will be disservice to her. She has worked with some of the most sophisticated and the most high performance fanatical corporations and entrepreneurs in the country and she’s going to share for half hour insight that to my knowledge nobody else really comes at and understands so, Marylou Tyler it’s a delight and a pleasure. Marylou: Very nice to be here, Jay. Thank you for inviting me. Jay: This is going to be wonderful. We have watching and listening, if you have any video problem, a broad spectrum of entrepreneurs representing everything from one person entities, professional services, large corporations, manufacturing distribution, retail, wholesale, you name it, they span the gamut. They are to their credit here because they want three things, they have a prejudice that they’re trying to understand on how to add more value and create more worth for their market, for their client, for their buyer but they don’t know how. They are striving to perform at much higher levels in every facet of performance enhancement but they really don’t really don’t know what those facets are. Today we’re going to be discovering the day that they have their epiphany. Why don’t we start by a little background but it’s going to be faster on who you are, what you’ve done, how you got to discover what you focus on now and some of the very interesting insights as you’ve made that discovery that will resonate with each of our audience because you’ll show them things they never have thought about that are immutable but nobody really grasped it, let alone acts on it, and anybody who does has great advantage and why don’t you just start to roll in then and I’ll interrupt you occasionally. Marylou: Okay. Sounds good. Thank you everyone, it’s nice to be here by words, video or audio. The way I got started in this business was purely from an engineering point of view. It was purely from trying to correct the code of how to have conversations with people we don’t know and to replicate those conversations in a way that we can create a consistent, predictable and hopefully scalable process to create new business and predictable revenue. As I was hitting into this framework, this process, this engineering mess that I put together, I realized that the data was starting to tell me things about the people we were putting through the framework. Not losing sight of the fact we are having conversations with people. I started to dive into that conversation and understand more about the why behind the pipeline lagging or why things are falling out. I realized that there are two components to this. There is the pipeline, velocity of the framework, the process of going from cold conversation to a qualified opportunity and beyond but there’s also the conversations within that process that help us move people through respectively, authentically and consistently. That’s how I decided to go through each step of my process and understand the people within that step and how we can better have conversations with them to appoint where predictably we can move them through. Jay: Great. I want to make a couple of points, everyone pay very careful attention that Marylou is talking about conversations, interactions, communication at a very, I’m gonna use the word intimate, meaning just one on one, that there are different levels of progression. There are sub conversations within it. When she says a pipeline that presupposes that you understand that you have target audiences, you are bringing them in from some means, whether it’s online, offline, co-calls, direct mail, emails, banner ads or in media, whatever you’re doing, they are flowing through. Theoretically, you have a systematic process that is advancing, enhancing them from whatever level of interest or commitment they have to the ultimate level of purchasing and then the ultimate level of staying or repurchasing, continue. Marylou: Taking further into Jay’s point, the first step to this is to really understand your strengths, your weaknesses, what opportunities are out there for you, and what threats you may have which we call SWOT. Then, we take that SWOT, we line it up against the type of companies who we think are the highest revenue potential for us with the highest probability of closing. Now, we have this lists. As Jay said, how you get the list, there’s many other ways to do that but it does consist of targeted companies or targeted people if you’re solo going after a consumer based market that you think will close quickly, that will also meet the profile of the perfect type of client. Then, if you’re in a corporation, you might have more people sitting around the table making that decision about whether to use your service or your product. Then, we drill down from companies to people and companies. All along the way, what’s happening is we’re starting to uncover the habits, the thoughts, the personal pain, the strategic pain, the financial pain that these people are having. What I’ve done is taken that conversation and encapsulated it in a form of a machine based communication mechanism called an email or a phone call, in some cases, and we take that conversation and allow people to self-select where they are along that spectrum of behavior. As an example, there may be people who are oblivious to what you have to offer and why you matter. There’s conversation that we start thinking about having that will move them from this oblivious and unaware state to a state of awareness. They may still be apathetic but we’re using the process and technology to understand exactly where they are along that spectrum. Jay: Let me ask an interruptive question. For everybody’s clarification, explain how you use just quickly the technology but explain the kind of conversations just lightly that you might have with that category, B2B, what you will introduce in a few minutes which is a more motivating category. Marylou: On a workplace for example, what we tested, again because I’m a process person, everything is tested and iterated and made better and changed so I really subscribe to the lean methodology of you put something in, you test it, you test it against something else and then you iterate and improve. Jay: I want to ask one more. It’s so ironic, this is a worldwide phenomenon that I’ve seen and you deal with corporations that are much more conviction based and predisposed towards this but people try to make decisions that affect their revenue, their sales, their very success like conjecture when in fact the data will always, always, always tell you where to go forward, where to stop, where to turn right, where to concentrate if you just ask it and understand the answers it gives you. Don’t you think? Marylou: I agree but you ask meaningful questions, not vanity questions. Remember, dials in the day is not going to tell you anything, really. Remember the meaningful conversation you have in a day, now that’s a metric that you drive predictable revenue. Jay: I love that because you have taken the generic concept of context or just discussions and you have really, I forget it. There’s just idle conversation, there’s patronizing, and then there’s meaningful conversations. You’ve taken it to mean something very differently. Why don’t you give us a one or two minute definition of your interpretation of what these should mean as far as the connection, the outcome, etc. Marylou: Okay. I’ll do it in the form of a metaphor? Jay: Great. I love metaphors. Marylou: Imagine that you’re on a freeway and you see an exit, that exit has a defined meaning. It allows you to get off the freeway. This is the same thing with the meaningful conversation. If you are at that exit, a meaningful conversation will either A) Get you off the freeway, B) You’ll decide not to take the exit and go further in on the freeway so you’re moving forward or it’ll actually tell you to inch forward maybe but you’re not quite sure if you’re going to go off or if you’re going to continue forward so you’re going to stand still, meaning you’re not going anywhere. Those three areas have advancement or out you’ll bleak out, you’ll advance forward, or you’ll stay where you are. That allows us to predict lag in the pipeline and also why things are falling out? Why did you take that exit? What was it about that exit that you decided to leave? We track all of those conversations that have the forward movement or movement out of the pipeline. Those are meaningful. Jay: An interruption, I don’t think many entrepreneurs and even many CEOs of a corporations and enterprises in Asia even think that way and I’m not demeaning them, I just don’t think you’ve been trained to look at, okay, if somebody takes the exit meaning they don’t want to go forward in the conversation or in the process. You have to question number one, is it an indicator of a flaw in your proposition or your level of what I’ll call gestation or progression or is it a question that you’re targeting the wrong audience, it tells you something. Marylou: It tells you exactly, yes. That’s what’s so exciting about this because you just mentioned two very different issues. One is skills based, you’re not able to tell the people your value. Why change? Why now? Why you? You’re not able to articulate that in a conversation. Versus they’re going out because you have wrong list, you have the wrong ideal customer. People are not interested in what you have because they don’t fit that profile that you’re really going after. How cool is that to be able to tell that after you hang up that phone call? Jay: It’s profound in the power it gives you. I’ve used this for a couple of other interviews. One of my partners, Carlos, you’ve heard from many times, has this very simple, he got a lot of really great, great perspectives. One is your goal as a value based competitive enterprise is to put matching advantage in your hands and move maximum disadvantage over to the competition. This is probably the ultimate way to accomplish that. Marylou Yes. You have the ability now to what we call wrap up that meaningful conversation. Why I love that too is because here’s another sign post that you can hear in that corporation, maybe you heard some language from your buyer that marketing has no idea of. You’re going to wrap up that call with intel for your marketing folks to say, “Look, this guy is talking about why, we’re talking about zee, we need to change our marketing or at least incorporate this into our marketing.” That’s one area, immediate feedback. Jay: And then you can test it. Marylou: Exactly. You’re asking me about this unaware, oblivious state, what kinds of messaging do we use. Jay: Yeah, just example. Marylou: An example would be a tweet, a LinkedIn blog post, a LinkedIn group discussion message that you start a conversation that way. You put something out on your network, a LinkedIn post, challenging them about a particular topic. That starts raising that awareness that all is not well or maybe there’s something I should be thinking about that I haven’t done about, you might be curious or thinking about this, maybe I should too. The attention span at that level is about thirty seconds or less. It’s like a billboard, you’re going by the freeway 80 miles an hour and see you a billboard, that’s the messaging that we have to have at that level. Jay: But the strategic objective in this scenario is to get them a little further into awareness and perhaps interest. Marylou: We do that by utilizing technology in the form of what’s called a click through that if we give them a link to go to another piece of content, we have written that content so that we can determine where they are behaviorally. Are they in the interested state, are they in the aware state, will they consume this information? We keep feeding them these little nuggets, what I call squirrel feeding, we keep feeding them these little nuggets of consent until they’re just downloading that white paper or downloading that case study or reading an ebook or whatever it is. That gives you, as a business developer, the intel you need to give them a phone call now. They should go right into a calling cue when they get interested and evaluating stage. Jay: Yeah. You are a sophisticated client, you are very technology oriented or very, I would say empathic marketing oriented person and you are talking to people that may or may not be, should be but may or may not be, some of the language he’s using is abbreviated industry parlance but what it means is you should always be grasping intelligence from your markets that tells you what to do more, what to do less of whom to target and not to target, when they are right to be more aggressive in your efforts to really move them toward sale. It depends on what you’re selling but I’m just trying to give a little bit of commentary to what you’re saying. Marylou: Yeah. It’s like we’re on a big date. When we first meet somebody, we sit at the table, we’re not quite sure where the conversation is going to go, we’re unaware of what’s going to happen. We may place a request or we may ask a question that is designed to give us more information about this person. Then, they become aware of us, we become aware of them. As we start through dinner, we start learning more about what they like to eat, whether they like to drink and we become more interested in their habits. It’s no different with these messages going through to your buyers, you know who your buyers are. You know their habits, it’s just what we’re doing is we’re encapsulating that conversation into strategic points along our sales pipeline. That way, you can better predict who’s going to be signing up with us consistently and then we can scale our operation. Jay: Yeah. I’m going to go back to the beginning and make a point. You made a point. You know who your buyers, your clients, your customers, your audience is, but you don’t always know what you know so I’m assuming if you were coming into work with any of the people watching and would love to see you do that with the ones appropriate, I think the results could be profoundly improved. But the first thing you would do is have them figure out what they know that they don’t know they know about, who they’re best, who their specialized clients are, where they are, where they come from, where they buy the fastest to slowest, which ones have the most ongoing, lifetime value, etc. right? Marylou: Yes In fact a very quick story about a client I visited in New York recently, they established themselves in 1985 so they’re a large company. We went to do the exercises I do with everyone is, okay, who are these companies, tell me about them, what their size is, how many people, what kinds of roles are there. We came up with a definition that was completely 180 from what they thought they needed or had. He said okay, good. So now we looked at the people within the company and we came up with definitions there, we name. We always name our personas like Betty the bookkeeper, whatever, Betty. We found a Betty and we determined that there were 40,000 of these Bettys in LinkedIn that we can actually market to. When we looked in our database that we had, we had 400 Bettys. We discovered very quickly just by going through these exercises that we weren’t marketing to the right people all this time spending thousands of dollars every month buying catalogs and whatever for direct mail. Jay: To the wrong market. Marylou: To the wrong persons. Jay: To a market that was very, very suboptimal because there were only a small number, if any, Betty’s within there. Marylou: Right. The a-huh moment of the CEO was incredible. You guys are not alone. This happens in large corporations, everyone should go through this exercise. Jay: It’s fabulous. Can you share, cause I like to excite and stimulate people with the before and after possibilities without going through the other categories, I’m doing it a disservice but I think sometimes to sustain and expand and accelerate the audience’s enthusiasm if you give them a little bit of a taste of what the before and after can look like in any and all levels, whether it’s time, whether it’s personnel, whether it’s reallocation of resources, dollars, yield, anything that would just get them excited. That would be worth them appreciating the power of this and perhaps them appreciating the power you have in your hands and in your mind. Marylou: Okay, the first one I’ll tell you is more in line with the solo entrepreneur. I had a young guy from East Coast again who read the book. He placed an outreach call to me directly saying, “Marylou, I’m one person, I have this great idea, I don’t have any tools, I don’t have any technology, I have Excel, can you help me?” And so I thought, “Sure, I can help you as long as you know that we’re going to be going through a process, it’s one tool, I want you to do other things to reach out to your potential clients but this is one area that we’ll focus on.” We started out at zero. In one year, with him following my advice, just using Excel, he generated $2,000,000 in revenue. He had a great products. He was just a great student. He had that desire but he also had what I call habit. Whenever I asked him to do something, he would it and he would do it in the block times we have established and just heads down, go. He was amazing and he ended up getting funding for his company because he was able to show them the venture capitalist, that predictably he can generate this many quality conversations in the pipeline, so they funded him. Jay: I have to make a repetitive statement. Marylou: Okay. Jay: The universal thread that travels continuously within your commentary and your expertise is a word that most people inherently want but never really reconcile. Predictable revenue, predictable, what I would call, progression, closing, knowing maybe not exactingly but with outrageous certainty that if you target a certain market, a certain way you deal with these and I haven’t let you identify all the different categories between not knowing and not interested all the way to ready to buy, that you can predict not just today, tomorrow or next week, next month, and you can adjust depending on any vagary in the market from economic to different media, either yields or dilutions, it’s pretty damn powerful. Marylou: It is. It’s really focusing on a number of components but the one that comes out the most is the habit of continuing to look at the results that are coming from your work, fine tuning, tweeting, enhancing, getting rid of what’s not working, pivoting it if you have to but never giving up. Jay: I love that. Marylou: That is an important part of this whole thing. Jay: I’m not going to do you a service and I adore your work. I just find what you do so powerful in its logic and what it delivers. Let’s talk a couple more successes, we had the young man that generated $2,000,000, let’s take something sublime just so people can see the scope of what you’re dealing with just by understanding and harnessing this really, really elegantly, obvious, logical and immutable power force. Marylou: Another example is, fast forward to a now $50,000,000 company, who had multiple offices throughout the world. They had, that I will call, bunch of long walls. Their sales team were generating, they were prospecting, they were closing, they were servicing. What we did was one simple change and that is we separated the roles. What that means is we took a sales person, we found out what their love and passion was and we put them into either a lead business development role, we put them into a closing role, or we put them into an account management role. We shifted the entire sales organization to more specialists and specialized. It was a painful thing to do but we went through that with them, and within three months they were cranking out this predictable stream of qualified opportunities. The people who went into business development, there was a little bit of shifting going on there because it is having conversation with people we don’t know and trying to drive them through the pipeline to a qualified opportunity. It also had us looking at once again, the ideal customers, they did not have the ideal list. It was very obvious when we went through these simple exercises that they were also calling into the wrong organizations. The main reason why is because their marketing department was casting this wide net out and people who came in through the website may not have been a good opportunity. They were small, they didn’t have the right technology in place, so we were able to then take that list and fine tune it and target it, add to it using list purchases and then create this machine. Each now region had business developers that generate the qualified opportunities. Jay: The developer is the first level, he or she, his job is to uncover and initiate conversation and then move the qualified or the seemingly appropriate people over to the next level. Marylou: Right. And they work as a team so the closer really works very closely with the business development person to decide where in that hand off should take place. Some closers like more control, some closers are fine with the business developer taking them further into the pipeline. We are very respectful of that. And because it’s a process, we were able to track where the optimal hand off was. Very soon after we implemented and activated the process, we were able to come up with a pretty solid playbook so that we can onboard new people. If they said to me we need $2,000,000 in Germany, we knew exactly how many people we needed to put in place to generate that $2,000,000. Jay: That’s the power that is unbelievable. Let’s go through real quickly the four or five categories that you have identified that will exist in virtually any selling environment no matter whether it’s extraordinarily expensive, intangible, multi-state selling, multi decision maker or it’s something, it’s single. Step in single buyer, what are the stages? Marylou: The first stage is this oblivious or unaware stage where the intended buyer that you’re looking for doesn’t know anything about or haven’t really thought about what it this that you have to offer and why that affects them, why change? They don’t even know the why. Jay: It could apply to selling a generic product or service, it could be a disruptive product or service, it could be an alternative. An example is maybe they take supplements for weight loss and you’re trying to sell either better supplements or you could be selling membership to a gym or you could be selling a personal trainer just as an example. Marylou: Yes, or just recently here in Des Moines where I’m located, I take my dogs to a play area. She has a van that can take you to and from. I was not aware of it, I was oblivious to that, that would make my life so much easier but I had no idea. It could be that level. Jay: First is whatever you call it, oblivious, unaware and uninterested. Marylou: Yes. Unaware. The next one is awareness but apathetic. Jay: It’s not really moving. Marylou: No. You’re not ready to go, you’re just hands on hips, show me, in that kind of mode. You’re not really engaged to the why change. Why should I make a change? It doesn’t affect me. That’s the next state. The state after that is called thinking about it or interested. Now, you’re thinking okay, I’m sitting a little bit forward in my chair, this is sounding interesting, maybe I want to know more about it, maybe not, but maybe I do, so I’m going to consume more content at this stage. What I want you to understand is that as we’re going through these different stages, the content is driving where they are positionally because we’re able to do that by how we write this content and how we get them to move to that next state. The last state is where we all wish all of our clients were, which is the herding and evaluating stage. That’s where most of the content that’s out there today is written for and that’s why we have trouble predicting sales. We have trouble consistently moving people through because we’re not respectful of where they’re at. We think they’re interested but they have no clue. We need to be able to create content for them at every one of those thought stages and then help guide them and gently pull them through by clicking through the content that is probably longer, probably explains more about the why, and then gets them engaged so they’re now sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for us to contact them. Jay: You like metaphors and I’m stuck with haunting metaphors from marketers that have been mentors of mine for years. He had the greatest metaphor that I think can be applicable to this. He said, “Did you ever think about how a tug boat connects to a 20 or 30 story tall oil tanker?” If you think about it, there’s a little tug boat, it’s one story tall, and it has to connect at the top of 10, 20 stories of huge, supertanker. How do they get that rope that’s that big and probably weighs I don’t know how many 10s or 20s of pounds for inch or foot over the bow of that boat. I was very fascinated but the way they do it, it’s an analogy and a metaphor for this, is they shoot a very small cord over the bow. It goes over the bow, little one, attached to it is a little larger one, attached to it is a little larger one, attached to it is a much larger one. Ultimately, at the end is the big one but that’s the only way they can do it. That’s a good metaphor because I don’t think people have ever thought about these categories and it’s very important. We’re going to only have a few minutes but let’s go through a little bit of a montage of just the couple of the vehicles once you understand the differences in the meaningful conversations and the way they can be meaningful whether they are literal, meaning a person talking to somebody, or virtual, meaning a communication that is occurring on a website or or a white paper or a webinar or a seminar or a sample or whatever it is. Just some examples of people so can see what is possible. Marylou: Okay. At that oblivious unaware, we talked about tweeting, about reaching out to your network while I call a first in ten. If you are connected for example on LinkedIn and you have 20 people who are connected to you, you send those 20 people a thought provoking email, one question. Quick Question is the title of the subject line. “Quick question…” That starts getting people aware to the awareness state. The differences with all of our communication, at this top part of pipeline from cold conversation to qualified opportunity. Everything we write has a strong call to action, meaning that we want that person to do something. Whether it’s clicking through to a meatier piece of content, or to our client, to our email or it’s giving us a call. Everything we write, we don’t just put it out there without some action on their part. Why? Because the action tells us as a signpost where they’re going to go because we’re telling them if you go here, we know they’re going to be more of an aware state or if you tell them to go to a case study and actually go to the case study, they’re probably more interested state. Jay: Yup. Marylou: We’re spoon feeding them the path and the map that gives them to a plan where we’re ready for that conversation with them. As of the oblivious unaware state, when you get to aware, maybe you published a should ask questions lists. Maybe you do a frequently asked questions, maybe you do a one page wireframing, just one page, a case study that contrasts before and after and that’s it. But in all these pieces of content, there is a sign post saying, “If you want to know more, go here.” Once they get to the interested state, then everyone knows what we do there because that’s what we see all the time, it’s endorsements, it’s testimonials, it’s case studies, it may be some industry paper that you chunk down into three to five slots to put on slideshare. And then the last stage is that evaluating stage where now you’ve got to put the testimonials and endorsements in the big way of why you. Interested, that state, we just talked about is why change and why now and then why you is that evaluation stage. The content is driven more towards the successes that your clients have had as the result of working with you. We continually systematize that and we’re respectful to do that for the Bettys of the world or the Nathans who are in IT or depending on your people sitting around the table making that decisions. We customize the content for each of those people. Jay: I can translate for you. There’s no right or wrong. You as a company, you as a entrepreneur, or CEO, you can decide you want to have 10, 20 different target audiences that you’re pursuing for the same or different variations of your product or service mix. The key is you gotta target them differently and once you figure out who they are and where they are in both terms of how you reach them but also where they are in their mindset, there’s plenty of inventive ways to get access to them. Most people don’t even realize that there’s plenty of ways to do that. The first thing is who are you trying to reach, why you’re trying to reach, what level interest communication and viability do they represent? Marylou: Correct. You get into the head of how do they consume content. Are they a Sunday morning after the kids are fed, do they read their email, do they look online, do they go to an industry or website? Think like that when you’re trying to get your content out there. Don’t just go one spot, don’t just use email. Use three to five different methodologies. Shame on all of us now because the internet allows us to be huge marketing houses if we want it to. Jay: With very little risk and cost. Marylou: Yes. Not the way it used to be where you would send a letter out and cross your fingers that they got it right. We don’t have that now so it should open up this just desire to create and try different things until we reach a level that we can say, “You know what? This is becoming consistent for me. This is great.” Jay: I’m getting us three more questions just because I’m going to run out of time. One is not going to be a question, it’s going to be an observation. In case it’s not critically and clearly evident, what Marylou represents is the ability to take time, effort, market access, whatever, eligible capital, money capital you have and make it work harder and harder for you. It’s terribly important you grasp this if you truly have the superior products, service or value proposition because you owe it to the right markets to really reach and serve them secondly and then you can comment Marylou. This is very important, all categories of buyers, all stages of buyers, all distinctions of buyers, the Bettys and the Toms, they’re not all worth the same, meaning, some might deserve and justify a lot more time, attention and resource investment and some might not. You’ll never know that until you understand what you already know and you really let the data help you. Marylou: The other thing to tell you is I’m sure some of you are thinking about it right now, well Marylou, that’s a lot of content that I’m writing. What I want to tell you is this, I just finished working with the $60,000,000 company. They had 14 pieces of content for a $60,000,000 company. We took one to two pieces of that content and we repurposed it for each of those stages I just talked about. We looked at the emotional pieces that came out of that content and we looked at the logical pieces that came out of that content. We organized them in a way so that we hit the people at their different stages of thought. When you’re unaware, and when you’re aware, things are more emotional at that level. We wrote the consent and rewrote, repurposed the content so that it addressed that emotional state. Then, we took more logic as we moved down and had more specificity around proof points and differentiation and why us. We took one piece of content, we wrote it five different ways. Jay: Yes. That’s wonderful. Two more points and then we’ll conclude. The first one and this I think is very, very important and that is when you’re communicating, it’s important that if you’re sending 50,000 tweets or you got this massive machine that’s driving thousands of people to your website or you’re sending out a thousand white papers a day or a week or a month, you always remember that they are being received and they’re being consumed by one human being at a time. How you communicate to one person is a lot different that people trying to talk to a million. You want to comment on that? Marylou: No, I think you hit the nail in the head. What this is all about really, if you want to study the greats, Jay is one of the greats in direct response. The theme of direct response is I’m having a conversation with someone across the table from me. Each of your emails, each of your correspondence must be respectful of that. But if you can leverage technology and leverage the database to help drive those conversations in a systematic way, that’s the difference now. Jay: That’s great. You have such a wealth of knowledge and ability and experience that  it can transfer and translate to any kind of a situation and it’s universal. My work transfers to Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Italy, all over. If anyone watching or listening wish to contact you, how would they do it? Marylou: They can go to my website which is maryloutyler.com and there is a form on the website, you can contact me there. I also have the ability to do conversational calls and that’s also available from the website. Jay: If there is any material that is appropriate that you would like to send to me, I can get it translated and distributed there just to help them even have a greater grasps, so if it’s something like that. It’s been a pleasure. The only regret I have is that I don’t have more time to spend interviewing you because the knowledge that resides in your brain and into reality, the ability to understand the technology piece and human connection piece and meaningful conversations is profound but thank you very much. Marylou: Thank you Jay. Thank you everyone.