Marylou:     Evan wears a lot of hats. If you’re in a smaller organization, you probably know what that’s like. Developing a lead generation strategy, creating and managing a team of reps, and handing over the process as you go can be as difficult as they are crucial to success. Evan is the head of business development for VoxGen, a company dedicated to interactive voice response also called as IVR. His role has led him to have experience in growing both sales and teams. In this podcast, Evan reveals how making sure the process is right before handing off that coveted opportunity, the benefits of testing and reiterating your process which we also call optimizing, how to deal with difficult cultures in a multinational operation. Evan’s experience is in both Europe and US, and tips for defining your ideal buyer and using that data to start conversations. Okay everybody, I have a great guess this week, it’s Marylou Tyler, Predictable Prospecting and I am speaking with Evan Jones who’s the head of business development for a company called VoxGen. They are a global company located both in the United States and in Europe. Evan and I crossed paths a couple of years ago now, I think. I’ve been really impressed with the work that he has done in business development and I wanted to share his experiences with you guys so that you can hear from him first-hand what he’s been through, where he started and what he’s now implementing under the “business development umbrella” for his company. Without further ado, Evan, it’s very nice to have you on the show and I’m very happy that we were able to get this done. Evan:    Thank you so much for having me. Marylou:    Tell us Evan what it is that you’re doing with VoxGen now and how you got started in this role and what you’ve done. I know you’ve done a number of different things as you probably will tell the folks, you’ve worn a lot of hats in this company and other companies that you’ve worked with and really help our audience get an understanding of all of the levers that you had to pull in working for business development. Evan:     Sure. As the head of business development, we are not a big organization, about 40 or so or more people. But with that size, you have to essentially play a few different roles. The other thing is you pick up a lot of skills that go into the lead generation process, how you can refine a message. I essentially oversee all things related to lead generation, even in some marketing aspects and into post lead generation of selling, managing, some of our strategic accounts, bring on new ones and the like. I have a team of 5 SDR’s, VDR’s inside sales representatives, whatever term you want to use. We follow an outreach program focused on trying to find the right person and a sequence of an earlier process and structure of trying to identify the right people in the organization, gather interest whether it be through exploration or project or some of the work that we’ve done, pre-conversation. I really kind of going back to this, I’ve got my start along with my colleagues as an inside sales representative myself. Making the calls, understanding the nature of contact, understanding motivations of why they want to get on the phone with you or talk to you, anything similar, why they would reach back out. I don’t really apply that to some of the essentially the sales organization that we’re doing now. We’re going to talk about it throughout the length of this podcast but it’s really great stuff and we have the Predictable Revenue, Marylou’s process really to shine as the key example of how lead generation should be done. Marylou:    You mentioned a couple of things I want to share with the audience. One was all lead generation flows through you and you would do where a marketing path. You also mentioned that you’re looking for the right person which is the standard, the kind of out-of-the-box Predictable Revenue, what we’re trying to do is get an internal referral. Are there other things that you found now that you’re a seasoned veteran at this that you are deploying as part of your lead generation efforts over VoxGen? Evan:    The core to this is what you said, trying to identify the right person. We’re actually going into some other areas of just mixing things up essentially. Obviously the brutal truth that no one wants to talk about really is salespeople or lead generation representatives that don’t pick up the phone fail. The system really email focused and all that really needs to be supplemented by the phone and all that, that’s really important. But to your question of what else are we doing, we’re starting to incorporate texting, we’re trying to not necessarily use social, that’s really good for awareness purposes but we’ve actually had opportunities and meetings set out through the text channel. Really just trying to open up all the methods of contact almost in our business of how we preach and do our selling of channel preference and the like. I want to do the same thing to the lead generation process. There are some people that want an email and respond there, there are others that want to do a phone call and there are some that want to text you. It’s just being open and trying to adapt to the scenario of how we can best communicate with our prospect in the way they want to. Marylou:    Again, you mentioned your prospect which means you really have a good understanding of the buying personas, what will be called buyer personas or the people who are going to enter and exit through out the top of funnel for use. Whether they’re direct influencers or indirect influencers, you’ve spent a great deal of time mapping who these people are, how they prefer to communicate. It sounds like you’ve started looking into texting as part of that. But at the end of the day, you really need to get these folks on the phone in order to have that fit call, to have that AWAF what we call it, the are we a fit sequence. And then move them over to discovery and then qualifications. What role do you think the phone plays, because Predictable Revenue doesn’t really talk about the phone a lot. What have you discovered in doing this process for as long as you have in terms of the phone? When is it appropriate to start with the phone and when is it appropriate to blend the phone in to the sequence? Evan:     There are different touch points. The one thing that I’ve seen as I just mentioned a minute ago, some people want to communicate over the phone. There are individuals in an organization that will only talk to you via phone, they may never look at their email, they just get too bogged down or you email will go straight to their spam folding or something like that. They want to talk with you via phone and you’ll get them that way. You might catch them at the wrong time or anything similar but you will at least have a better chance of connecting with them that way. Same goes for email and texting and any other channels that you want. The phone will even drive email response reviews. Using the modern day VDR process or outreach processes, having the right tools in place is really important to understand and have the sequence really automated essentially, but having the insight into who’s viewing, who’s clicking, who’s responding and refining your message through continuous improvement type of process. Going back to phone, you will find in some cases that if you don’t talk to them or you leave a voicemail for that matter, it will influence an email viewer response or something along those lines. Even further when you ask what is the right message, how do you use phone, sometimes it’s not best to leave a voicemail every time. In some cases, you want to mix up and see what works. Call at the right time, don’t just call to call. Leaving a voicemail versus not, in some cases you may want to call multiple times a day because if you think of just your own personal lives of getting phone calls, if you get a phone call with just one you don’t recognize, you may not choose to answer. If they call later on in the day, same phone number which you have recall at this point from the prospect prospective or even the third time, of course you want to, you don’t want to, as far as being a pest or something similar. At that point you’ll be like this actually might be important, let me take it. It’s applying to those elements of okay how can I really get my prospect to talk to me and not in the manner that is going to piss them off or even put them where you’re starting in a position of weakness where they’re upset or anything like that, really coming from hey I was just trying to help, can you help me, that sort of thing, can you do me a favor, really kind of back into that. To drive email response, you’ll get the person on the phone or you could mix up and have some other areas of real recall to keep the conversation going or in their mind you’ll build awareness or something like that. Marylou:     That’s great. I think the underlying theme here is that you’ve obviously tested a bunch of different scenarios and have come up with a cadence and a sequence that works and that you are continually iterating and fine tuning. For those of you on the phone who are listening to this, one of the big key take-aways that Evan’s been successful, why he’s been successful, is because he continuously is testing and continually iterating his process for his folks. Most of you may not, he’s got European and US which are two different cultures that he’s also got to deal with. Can you share with us a little bit about that Evan, have you found differences in the way that you have to handle the sequences for UK, or Europe versus the Americas? Evan:     Sure, there’s a lot of similarities but there’s also some just little minor differences that just go a long way. Everything from writing to approach style and the like. Even the phone base, the way how they have their on the outreach they have a lot of switch board. When turn, you can actually get directives to the person you want without having to go through a gatekeeper of some sort, fairly beneficial fund wise. It is different, but there are a lot of similarities just in the form of being consistent. Circling back to what Marylou mentioned earlier was around knowing your customer, your prospect, your buyer, the persona, and defining all of that and understanding what their particular pain may be, both from strategic, financial or personal for that matter. Understanding what would this person be thinking about, what would get them on the phone, why would they want to talk to you and how can you really help that. It’s really important that we found across both markets that the prospects really choose to meet with you for their reasons, not yours. How can you really play to that and of course really be a consultant with a purpose is really what I like. You’re helping them, listening, really trying to help them solve their unique problems and challenges and of course not really advancing your own agenda but essentially you’re a salesperson, you’re working from that. They’re not oblivious to that fact, they know you are but if you can help them, you’re not coming from the position of equal strength versus others. Talking about the separation of US, UK, a lot of the same, just more cultural differences of approach or anything similar. Marylou:     Okay. Evan:    One thing I would like to mention, kind of edgy to talk about, and I would like to absolutely hear with Marylou in the form of analytics and understanding this and how you improve the process is really, really important. The good thing is there’s a lot of great data out there that’s probably available that organizations like HubSpot or insert marketing automation company here can put out for you. The one thing I’d like to say that it’s just best practice. Best practice doesn’t work for everyone and you ultimately still have to make it your own. When Marylou talks about the persona, defining your customer in prospect and understanding their pain, you can talk best practice all day but it’s really important to define those characteristics and continue to work to refine based off of you’re changing and adapting sales model in business to capture those and I’m sure that you’re always having the right message going to the market. In turn, your team is trained enough to be able to communicate that effectively. Just want to highlight that, it’s really important, one of the key take-aways that we really take from the Predictable Revenue book, and of course Marylou’s teachings. Marylou:    It’s interesting because I’ve been on kind of a rant the last month or so about personas because a lot of times when I’m in a sales organization and we’re talking about personas and it’s a larger organization, not the people who wear multiple hats but there’s a director of marketing, a director of sales ops, a director of sales. Sales will tell me our marketing department does buyer personas and that really kind of gets the skin crawling in the back of my neck because as you’ve just said, Evan, the sales conversation drives the persona, the morphing of the persona. It drives the iteration of the persona. You’re on the phone, you’re learning language, you’re learning whether or not your pain points are resonating, you’re learning the priority in which you’re pain points are resonating and all of that may not get back to marketing. Sales really has to own their version of the buyer persona and they have to constantly change and update it so that it’s a working document as you get smarter and learn more as you go through the funnel whether it be where we are which is from cold to qualified. Evan, you also branched out into qualified to close one. There’s a lot of conversation and pieces that feed back into that persona development, do you agree with that? Evan:    I absolutely do. Just understanding the motivations of individuals. There’s a reason whether they respond to you by phone, text message, email, insert channel here. There’s a reason they’ve done it. Before you ever get on the phone with them, it’s good to try and figure out what that is. Defining the personas of understanding what their particular reason or motivation or pain or anything similar, understanding that helps you go a long way. Best laid plans can go totally different direction. I have a fundamental kind of belief of never really ask a question that you don’t already have a good sense of the answer to. I always start off all of my calls with of course setting the agenda to understand what the what’s expected of the prospect and really making sure that we cover all the key points of the call but I always open up with, out of curiosity what was your interest in the call, is there anything specific you want to talk about? That helps define what they want to get out of this and they’ll speak openly. Sometimes you got to claw it back and open it up and get it out a little bit. I’m not going to ask that question if I don’t, again, already have an idea based off their title, how they responded initially or anything. All that information of course goes into the persona of who this person is, why they are really on the phone with you. Marylou:    Yeah, that’s great. I think if one thing comes of the work that we are doing both in the podcast and my new book and things is to really get sales to start saying wow, we need to own that buyer persona, we need to really use that not as a document that’s produced once a quarter or once a year by marketing but it’s something that we constantly are updating because we’re learning and getting smarter as we start having conversation with people. Evan like you said, if you open that Pandora’s box, what would you like to get out of the call today and they give you a 180? You have to pivot and you have to be ready. Those wrap-up notes which I want you to share with the folks on the phone how you wrap-up these calls, if you do anything special or if you’ve taught your team to do anything special. Those wrap-up notes are just gold and putting back into the persona definitions, reworking your email body, sometimes redesigning your content and click through assets and things because you’re learning exactly what the hot buttons are. Let the email engine help you be smarter and get more people were more conversation that resonate because you’re learning more on that wrap-up. Evan:    Yup, I’m happy to answer that. I want to circle back for one second just to share, we’re going to talk about the personas and who owns it, marketing or sales or anything like that. There’s always been a talk whether it’s been published or not, there is almost always a finger pointing game between marketing versus sales in some organization. It exists, but when you talk about defining those personas and all that, it’s important that you guys work together because essentially your inside sales team SDRs, VDRs are the goods on the ground. They are hearing things and they represent the face of your organization in many cases. It is the first contact that will ever be had with some organizations. In turn, you want to make sure from a marketing perspective they are saying the right things and communicating the message appropriately. Also, it’s meant to be a two-way street. They’re the ones that get the best information that kind of goes to the next topic of wrap-up notes of sharing that with the marketing teams regardless if they own it or not because that further helps refine message and everything similar. Talking about that, what you hear from your prospect, as much as you can read industry reports or anything like that, alright this is where the market setting. Some organizations maybe they’re really as an early adopter but many organization may had been a little bit behind and are just getting to some of the places where you consider normal. Those are their problems, those are their issues and the pains that they’re looking to solve. You want to make sure that, of course, you are working towards the future as well but when it comes to notes and messaging and refining your own messaging for that matter, it needs to be based off of your prospect’s problems. The unique ones that they have while they may have similarities everything about them. It’s really important in your notes that you, through the call you demonstrate a sincere interest in listening to them, learning about them and their business and life and solving those unique problems. And then your notes, sharing those with your internal peers for message refiner or anything further. It also helps you later on the sales process where it goes past lead generation now further into a stale understanding that. You use all of this information to rewrite your sequences, the body of the email. You’re using terminology that your customers aren’t actually using versus what you use in your own business. For example, if anyone who’s worked in the restaurant industry may know what 86 means but if you’re a customer, your table, if you are like oh sorry the steak is 86 today, they don’t know what that means, that doesn’t necessarily help them, you are not communicating effectively to your own prospect. You use all of this to rewrite, use their language, use their terminology that’s going to help you establish a better connection with them because you feel like you’re already talking their language for that matter. In turn, it will only improve your success and everything throughout. This will go through click throughs as well. Using that as your call to action to drive to the website or particular piece of content or anything similar. It’s a combination of these things sharing within the organization, making sure you have the notes because you will find that the work that you do upfront whether it be the first or second call or anything similar will set the tone all throughout the entirety of the sales process. It’s really important to make sure that’s been shared, and of course you’re always circling back to it. Marylou:    That’s great. It has a number of different uses for wrap-up. As you mentioned, it feeds the email sequence so that you can improve your response rates, you can improve you click through rates, the click through to open rates, you can improve your subject lines. That’s one aspect of it. It also feeds back into your role playing. If you want to be training on objections that came up or how to start conversation so that people are leaning in and excited about what you have to say, all of these things are really fed by good wrap-up, call wrap-up. I’m happy that you’ve taken that and really extended that. As you’ve said, it also help you as you further go into the pipeline which Marylou stops at qualified op but there’s definitely going through the whole proposal process and the presentation process and all the other things that you have to do once it’s an opportunity to close. Those notes that were taken above are invaluable. Another use for that, and I know Evan does this, is if somebody falls out of the pipeline and moves into a long term follow up or nurture status, Evan now has the ability to create an email sequence for nurture that is organized by Top Pain Point. When they’re ready to actually come back in, they have now been armed with all the reasons why this pain should have a higher sense of urgency. There’s a lot of goodness that comes out of wrap-out. We are getting ready to wrap-up this call Evan, was there anything that you wanted to share with the audience in addition to what you’ve been so gracious in sharing about your experiences as the head of business development? Evan:    Yeah, a few points as a part of just reaching out. Just saying I’d like 15 minutes of your time just because I’ll learn more about you and your company works surprisingly well with a lot of prospects. Once you get on the phone, because you want to spend time working with them. Another one is ensuring that you’re organizing your day into, or your team’s day into distinct time blocks with specific activities and concentrating focus on those activities, eliminating those distractions within those blocks is really essential to increasing performance. If you do the same thing every day, it’s just the one thing you have to not worry about in the form of planning your day or anything similar. Depending on your sales organization, lead generation activity and the things that you’re doing just for lead generation until you get to the qualified op can take 90 plus days to really payoff and relentlessly each working to fill your own pipeline through a mixture of telephone, in person, email, social selling like through LinkedIn or Twitter which is really more for awareness, text messaging, referrals, networking, in-bound leads or even trade shows is really important, really diverse. Don’t be stuck on one particular channel and the like. This is kind of more into the selling side or anything similar but this helps with some objection handling. There’s a universal log human behavior that you really can’t argue another person into believing that they are wrong. There’s some great elements out there such as for Challenger Sale but it is how you really do it. The more you really push the other person, the more they dig their heels and they will really resist you. There really is a better way. Rather than attempting to overcome by defeating or prevailing over your prospect for that matter, really disrupt their expectations and their thought patterns when they push back with a no. The key really to a disruptive statement or question that turns them around as they lean towards you rather than move away from you. For example, when they say they’re busy, instead of arguing with them into how you will only take a little bit of their time, say I figured you would be. They won’t expect you to say that and it really disrupts their thought pattern. Or when they say just send me some information, tell me specifically what you’re looking for. You’re calling their bluff, you’re forcing engagement and everything similar. If they say I’m not interested, that makes sense, most people aren’t. Their brain isn’t ready for you to agree with them. In turn, you have a chance to really kind of put them again not on their heels but more leaning on to you like okay, why did you say that, that sort of thing. I got to be honest, I really, really am a big proponent of what Marylou, her teachings and the process as she is a process expert. I love what she does and the teachings that she has are really essential for any business. I really commend Marylou for all the research that I know goes into putting this stuff together, she’s been doing it for years but it’s really been great, I really appreciate it that you have me on. Marylou:    Well thank you, Evan. I’m sure people are going to want to know how to get a hold of you, can you give us contact information? Evan:     Sure, honestly I’m on LinkedIn, Evan Jones, VoxGen. You can email me ejones@voxgen.com hopefully with a lot of praise for this great podcast. I’m not afraid if anyone wants to call or text, my number is 813-453-7479. I’m here, feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or anything as regards to business development or lead generation, I’m happy to help. Marylou:    There you go. You’ve heard three ways to reach Evan. Evan, thank you so much for your time, it’s been wonderful speaking with you. Evan:    Thanks, Marylou.