Predictable Prospecting
Closing the Gap between Marketing and Sales
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Episode 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.