Predictable Prospecting
Understanding Buyer Behavior
00:00 / 00:00
1x
We’re here to talk about Marc’s experience with team enablement, how to get the best out of your top-of-funnel conversations, and finding the root of your buyer’s behavior. Episode Highlights:
- Introducing Marc McNamara
- What is a Chief Enablement Strategist?
- Understanding buyer behavior
- Generating meaningful conversations
- Finding the next step as a rep: Training and continuing education
- The nuts & bolts of building a repository
- How to track your best conversations
Resources: Connect with Marc McNamara on LinkedIn, through The Value Shift website, or by emailing him direct at mmcnamara@thevalueshift.com Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Hi everybody, welcome, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest is Marc McNamara. He is a sales knowledge architect and the title that I like of his is chief enablement strategist over at The Value Shift. Marc has a lot of experience in the term enablement. I know that’s a term that we hear a lot lately; sales strategy, sales enablement, sales knowledge, and I really wanted you to listen to Marc because he is approaching essentially the ability to generate predictable revenue top of funnel but he goes probably all the way to close. We’re going to concentrate mostly on the top of funnel with Marc today. I want him to share with us his experiences in readying the sales team so that you more consistently generate sales qualified opportunities, but also you’re building predictable revenue because you’re building a predictable lead generation engine. Marc, welcome to the podcast. Marc: Thank you, Marylou. Marylou: Tell us, this chief enablement strategist. I love that title. What does that mean to you? Marc: What it means to me and most importantly to people who work with me, is I commit and I help them think through how to actually enable their team to be more productive. It’s funny that you mentioned the whole concept as a word enablement because that’s not really a word, right? But when you look up the word enable, it’s really about helping, giving people assistance in achieving a goal or completing a task. What I try to do is come in, look at a customer’s environment, the context, the culture, and take the important work that’s being done around how to sell, the information and the knowledge and tools and put that into an architecture delivery system that ultimately will have sales using it appropriately. Not just being able to find it, but having the coaching built into it and having the trainings or learnings built into that and make them most effective at what they can do at their job. Marylou: We talk a lot about aligning our sales to the buyer’s journey which is a term or a phrase that’s thrown around a lot, but you really live that. Correct me if I’m wrong but you’re working with sales professionals to be able to articulate conversation, no matter where the record or where the person or where the buyer’s sitting physically in the pipeline, but also you’re taking it even deeper to get an understanding of behaviourally where people are in their heads, in their thought process, and helping the sales executive recognize, A, where they’re at, and B, what to say, how to say it, when to say it, with whom to say it. this is all done with leveraging technology, correct? Marc: That is correct. What’s interesting about what we do with technology is really about making it as flexible and responsive to the user. When you talk about the buyer’s journey, it’s grey and we’ve all been mapping that for a long time. I had a great mentor who told me once that selling is an art and a science, it’s not discrete. By looking at all of that data and saying here’s how the buyer buys, well maybe, right? But we know in sales conversations things may jump around and they may not be linear. You may have more than one party on the line and buyers may not all be in the same place in that journey. How do you effectively serve up that information or that knowledge to that salesperson during that conversation? Or wherever they may be, whether it’s in their car, whether they’re in person in front of a customer or on the phone presenting over the web. There’s a lot that goes into that to think about not just providing them in some cases, in Sales Force or some other tool, here’s the step of the sale or the journey or the opportunity and here’s the content that belongs here. There needs to be I think a broader context too to help educate the sales person and let them make good qualified decisions in and out of that and respond to their behaviors as well. Marylou: A lot of times, when we’re focused on top of funnel, we tend to be activity based. What you’re saying is the way you help people is to look contextually as to where things are and what the best decisions to make and activity follows but it’s not driven by activity. Is that a correct statement? Marc: Yes. Well, it’s driven by activity because you have to ask the right questions to know did I accomplish what I needed to accomplish. We write a lot of playbooks that say don’t go to this activity until this is completed. But to your point, I think it’s important to know that we’re not dealing with automatons, we’re dealing with people who we want to give them the right information and knowledge to help make good qualified decisions, right? That’s what we’re really responding to, to say yes, here’s an outline. But more importantly, we want to them to create competencies around recognizing where they are, not being told where they are. And know when they hear certain words and experience certain things, it can pivot quickly on that and be able to respond to it. I think you’ll agree with me, Marylou, that things can be lost and your effort can be wasted if you’re merely following a process and not recognizing the fact that somebody just leap frogged over something and you don’t have to go through that process. You may actually frustrate somebody. I’ve seen that in junior people. Marylou: When I reference the activity, I mean the number of dials, or the number, just the action of doing something as opposed to sitting back and thinking through where is this person that I’m going to have this conversation with or that I’m trying to having to have this conversation with, where is he in his head right now? What can I say that will get him to lean in and recognizing that all is not well, that we have problems, there are problems out there. Your tools allow the reps, once they are in the top of funnel. The premise is that we’ve identified the right person already when we start engaging with your type of work. There is some work that we need to do top of funnel to get to the right person and we have leveraged technology for that, we have a pretty good way of doing that. Where people are getting stuck, majority of my clients are getting stuck in the meaningful conversation. They don’t know what to say, what to do, how to say it, when to say it, and to whom to say it. That’s where think when I talk about activity, it’s not about the number of dials, it’s not about the number of connects, it’s not about the number of conversation, it’s about the number of meaningful conversations. Having a tool or having a process in place like you’re describing would give us the opportunity to have more quality conversations, thereby increasing the likelihood that we’re going to get from point A to point B faster and with more quality which is going to be a better return on the effort for the sales executive. Marc: No questions. I think I misunderstood your comment in the beginning but to that point, yes, I’m in 100% there that it’s all about the conversation. We have a process which results in something called the conversation coach which actually solves that problem. It gives people information at their fingertips to listen for and recognize and think about where that prospect is in their thinking and how to unstick them at any particular place. Don’t throw somebody away before you’ve actually explored that because we know we don’t want to waste effort but at the same time if we’ve taken the time with the number of dials to bring somebody in the boat and they’re clearly stating they have a problem, let’s make sure that we can give them enough to keep it moving along and recognize the value of what we can do for them because we’re there to help. Sales people are about helping customers. Marylou: Yes. I think to your point, marketing is spending a lot of time generating hand raisers for us. If we are good about our record selection and we’re targeting accounts, then theoretically by definition, anyone who bubbles up to the top is worthy of a conversation. We can’t waste that just because they’ve given us an objection or we haven’t been able to get a hold of them or we haven’t said something to them that gets them thinking, “Wow, I really should spend five to ten minutes talking to these folks because they hit me right in the heart of what my problems probably are. I never recognized it that way.” That’s where the types of tools that you provide come in so handy, and that’s where most of my folks get stuck. We can get people to bubble up to the top of at least responding to us but then you have to take that conversation to something meaningful. That’s where I see a lot of people losing those records and losing those leads into a bucket that we can never recover from. We become this sort of non-ending, revolving door of just getting leads in but the conversion rate from the lead to a qualified opportunity suffers. I’m not an expert in opportunity to close but I can only imagine that it also suffers there. Marc: It does. It even goes with the customer care. It doesn’t stop with once you close business, but particularly with SAAS companies and those who want to expand their relationships. I’m finding even working with customer care organizations that it’s problematic because they don’t have the right challenges and questions to ask and insights to give their customer to have them realize that there’s value in either something else we have or just changing the way you do things. Marylou: Yeah, that’s a good point because I know a lot of us are users of SAAS products where we have renewals sometimes after a year, sometimes two, depending. I’ve never been happy with getting a renewal notice where I haven’t heard from the company after I bought the product. I haven’t heard from them at all until it’s time to renew now. I think those are areas of improvement that we could see very quickly if we bring them into the fold of conversation that’s enlightening, that helps me do my job better, that helps me use their tool to get better results in my daily life. Marc: Yeah. Sometimes, I simplify it down. You said it so eloquently, we don’t need demoers, we need problem solvers. You have be able to go in and have this conversation about understanding the prospect customer’s problem and having a meaningful conversation to get them to go, “Yes, of course, that makes sense to me, let’s keep talking.” Instead, we see too many organizations, particularly in technology, where, “I got you on the phone, would you like to see a demonstration?” I think the big challenge that I’m seeing, I don’t know where your observations are, but there’s high commoditization around solutions in the technology world especially. It’s hard to differentiate your value and that’s a big problem that’s happening. They don’t know how to express themselves when it comes to helping that customer. First, realize they have a problem that can be solved and then how to uniquely add value to them. Marylou: It’s funny, the information is there for the rep. If you’re in a larger company, chances are marketing has put together spec sheets, they’ve done a lot of different posts and blog posts and info graphics and this and that and these and those about all the product stuff. But to have it available at your fingertips so that if you hear some keyword that then immediately allows you to scan potential scenarios of how to help the customer or the prospect recognize that what they are talking about is severe enough so that it’s worth their time to continue conversation with you. That’s where people are just falling down. It’s not as if we don’t have the information, it’s just that the information is so vast and spread out in the corporation or we just don’t have it at our fingertips. If we’re not studying it on a daily basis, we’re just not going to have it engrained in our body language or just our body itself as to how to overcome all of these things. Having the ability to have a repository of result information at your fingertips, for a rep especially since we’re talking to a lot of people top of funnel, I think it’s just a great way for the reps to feel more confident, more competent, and they’ll be able to have these conversation with their prospect personas no matter what level of the organization they’re talking to. Marc: Yes. What you just said had me kind of sum up what we do in that regard in a couple of words. One is it’s a packaging problem, it’s a testability problem and it’s a reinforcement problem. What we do and what I try to architect is great packages of knowledge and learnings and content that are contextually oriented, and it continuously reinforces. Out of sight, out of mind, I’d have spoken to that person about that solution for months. How do I keep things fresh in my mind and how do we keep reinforcing that value proposition and that ability in the sales professional’s mind on a regular basis? Marylou: That’s why I think if you’re a sales manager listening to this call, I get it, they say training doesn’t work. People, once they’re trained, a week later they forgot it all. I kind of agree with that because if you’re not using it, you’re going to lose it. If you’re not constantly studying it, then you’re not going to necessarily be as sharp. And like you just said, if you’re talking to a prospect about product A and you don’t have any more product A conversations for the rest of the month, you’re not going to be as sharp. It’s impossible to retain all that knowledge and all those scenarios and all those kind of scripts and plays and what not in your head. I like the idea of what you’re doing in that you’re enabling the reps to have this information at their fingertips, their recall is very easy, and there’s also a what if condition set in and what’s the next step. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves that I see a lot with reps is that they don’t have idea of what the next step should be, they don’t have an idea of what they should be suggesting as the next step. Having these conversation kind of scenarios already set up for them, I think we should see a rise in the conversion rates. Have you experience that with your clients that once this is in place, because it’s there and it’s becoming enriched, I would imagine there’s an enrichment process where you are learning and adding more to the system as life goes on and you have more conversation but do you see a pretty good rise in the conversion rates all across the pipeline? Marc: We do and it’s supported in other research as well. When customers actually execute well and they support adoption, meaning up and down as a vehicle to do this, there’s definitely rise in conversion rates. One other point is CSO insights point out. We started this whole thing and the result is that those who have a knowledge culture compared to those who don’t in a fluid knowledge culture see a 25% differential in revenue attainment and quota attainment than those that don’t, there’s a lot of, just not my anecdotal research but other research out there as well. Marylou: Actual quantitative research, which is great. Let’s talk nuts and bolts. I’m a curious person, I want to know just a high level, how does one build the repository. When I’m working with clients, just to give you a background, we’re working on emails for our cold engine for example. We take the cold engine first to tackle, then we’re collecting a repository of whatever content, whatever surveys, whatever touchpoints, anything related to the prospect and customers that we can get our hands on, and then we dump it in this big pot. From there, we flip it sideways, we do some qualitative research on it to pull out keywords etc., and we come up with eventually an eight type sequence of emails that we think are going to enable people to raise the hand faster. What do you if you’re a manager sitting here thinking that this is great but we have information everywhere? What does the process to start collecting the data and putting it into the engine look like? Marc: Not dissimilar to what you just described. I know it’s funny how all things align. We start with typically looking at what somebody might call a playbook or more importantly getting underneath that playbook and looking at what we call a value conversation inventory. I think it’s a lot of the work that you do that I get excited about. These messages, these insights, these questions have all been thought through relative to how you’re going to engage both from a prospecting and then even further down the pipeline. Flesh that out, does it exist? Some cases, I’m going in organizations and none of that material is available. Marylou: One thing that I find is that I go through blog posts, they may be the competitor’s blog post or they may be the client’s, I look at any type of reviews that I could find and I dump everything, as much as possible to get the language, I dump things into a database. From there, create a qualitative analysis and almost like a sentiment database that allows us by persona, we try to break it up by persona too because we want to segment down to the person. Sales is a person to person dialog; it’s not company to company, it’s not sales rep to people, it’s rep to client, it’s one to one. We really look at how these people are talking because it’s different. If I have clients maybe sell to IT, maybe sell to sales for example, those are two different language sets, it’s like two different languages completely. We’re constantly looking at trying to glean information whether it’s there or not and come up with the value that we bring to the table. What the dos are, what the product does that’s maybe different or an outlier or something different, a lock out they call it, that we can say, “Yes that’s great that they do that, but this is how we do it and this is why it matters to you.” We collect all that and put it in. In our case, we have worksheets, we have trees, we have different types of matrixes that we use in order to be able to generate the email engine. It is similar to what you are saying that you guys do. Once they get it in there and actually start having conversations, is there a way for us to track the conversation that are gleaning the fastest pipeline velocity with the highest quality? Are there mechanisms that are built into the document engine so that we can see which conversations are yielding more revenue more quickly and of more lifetime value? Marc: Yes, that’s really dependent on what their CRM is and how they’re tracking their own records. Let me explain, we have a system, our technology works with something called the XAPI which tracks all the interactions with content whether you’re sending something to a customer or you’re you’re consuming it yourself. Part of our architecture is to go in and say okay, what CRM are you using and how do you want to relate what’s being used here to seeing how it’s affecting your pipeline. Is it enough to do is as if you’re doing pipeline management inside of your CRM, we then match the result to the activity that you’re performing to each individual record and then take that back. We can give you some very good analytics on how well the performance support is assisting in the close of the deal or moving it faster from the velocity perspective. Marylou: Cool. I don’t want to overwhelm everybody. We’ve kind of gone through a good discussion to at least get them exposed to what’s out there in terms of helping sales professionals have better conversations that are more meaningful in nature with their prospects. With the goal of creating a fan base of clients who would recommend you to other companies if you’re selling B2B and also a longer life time value. I hope that this podcast has gotten you guys kind of thinking, “Wow, this is a cool thing.” Marc, how would someone get a hold of you to have further discussions around the assembly, the activation and the optimization of a product or a service like yours? Marc: You’re welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn or go to our website which is thevalueshift.com. My email address for everybody out there is mmcnamara@thevalueshift.com, happy to reply back or have a conversation if anyone’s interested. Marylou: This is a scenario where we can provide you with all the technology to get velocity in terms of records at top of funnel, but where the rubber hits the road is that you guys have got to be able to have meaningful conversations with your prospect and gently pull them through the pipeline in a way that’s going to increase the velocity to close. The way you do that is by working harder and understanding why change, why now and why you? This is a tool that allows you to get there faster because we’ve been encapsulated all of the potential sales conversations in a tool. It’s also designed to help the team know which conversations are causing people to bubble up faster, which ones are responsible for higher close rates, and which conversations are going to yield clients who are going to stay with us longer. It’s really the next step, especially if you’re a process geek like if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are, you are. This is one of the tools you’re going to want to look at because if you’re on the fence about training and knowing that periodic training is not the way to go, this is everyday training. This is intra-day training that’s available to the reps, and they’re only going to get better. I think that in terms of tools to help enablement, a tool like this that allows all of the sales conversations to be in a repository for easy access is going to be the next level of getting predictable revenue. Marc, thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it. Marc: Thank You Marylou, Thanks everybody for listening.