Marylou: Hi everyone! It’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have the third part, I don’t know if you guys listened to the other two, but we are part three of this amazing document that came out this year with a collaboration between three companies and I’ll let William tell you all about that. William Wickey is here from Lead Genius. He’s the media and content strategy expert over there. Lead Genius for those of you who may not know is a B2B Lead Gen solution. They are the ones who fill our top of funnel with fabulous lead records that have higher probability of closing with high revenue potential but I’ll let him talk more about that.

Today, we’re going to discuss this guide that they released in 2017. It’s jampacked with information, tools based, it talks about how to select the tools and give you an understanding of its form versus function and we cover that in my book too about defining your process first and then align the tools with the process so, without the further ado, William, welcome!

William: Thank you very much, Marylou! I’ve been looking forward to chat with you and it’s great to speak with your audience.

Marylou: Yeah, thank you. Tell us about what brought on the need for a book like this? I know that when I visit clients, they have this thing called a stack. The stack may or may not be the right stack and it’s jampacked, not all companies but some companies have very conceivable tool known to man but your guide is the breath of fresh air and navigating through that landscape.

Tell us about what caused you to do this? How often do you do this? What your thoughts are on the problems you are seeing out there and how this guide will help solve some of these problems?

William: Absolutely, yeah. Again, thank you for the generous introduction. My name is William Wickey, a lead content media strategy over at Lead Genius. We recently teamed up with some of the kind folks over at Prezi and Ambition. Jeremy Boudinet wanted a coop on this ebook, it was on the podcast with Marylou recently so I definitely encourage you guys to all check out that interview with them, some great stuff in there.

The ebook we put together is call The 2017 Trends and Tech Guide for B2B marketing and sales, you can find it at b2btrendsandtech.com. What this book does is it outlines some of the big trends we see in the marketplace when it comes to the B2B industry as a whole, specifically focusing on sales and marketing teams but also getting into operations and even higher level trends than that.

From there, we talk about what does trends mean for companies? Some of the needs that arise because of these different trends. Finally, give some suggestions for some of the solutions you’re going to want to check out if you see some of these needs in your own company.

This is the second year we’ve done something similar to this. We did a Trends and Tech Guide last year. Myself and Jeremy have also partnered up on a book about account-based marketing, coverage and the gap, that’s a few months old now but I’ll tell people who are interested in account-based marketing to check that out, accountabasedebook.com. That is one of the trends we’ve talked about in B2B Trends and Tech here.

The reason we put it together the way that we did is that as you and your listeners know, there’s no shortage of trends and tech guides out there and I’m not going to try and convince people that this is an entirely unique concept. There’s a million of these floating around out there. What is a little bit different is the way we organize this. We wanted to do it really, really well. So far, we’ve had some great feedback from a lot of users in the industry and people have gotten some value out of this.

Normally, there’s a trends guide or something that comes out at the beginning of every year that says, here’s what’s big and what’s going on for 2017 or 200x, whatever it is. Then you’ll see a bunch of tech guides come out listing all the different things that you can use in your marketing and sales technology stack. They’re typically difficult to navigate, categories are overlapping when it comes to things like sales enablement. Those tools fall into a lot of different categories now. There’s no [00:09:34] tools that have analytics function, and have outreach functions and being part of putting together guides like this in the past, it can be difficult to figure out what goes where.

That’s exactly the problem that you are moving to when you say the technology stacks are getting heavy. We see that pain point with the customers that we worked with every day, the same goes for the folks at Ambition and Prezi. There’s a lot of technology to keep track of. It’s difficult to make sense of everything that’s happening in the market.

Often times, your marketing and sales team will say, I’ve got this one single need and I need to find technology that’s going to help me address it. They go out there, find the technology, that technology ends up doing a handful of different things, some of them they use, some of them you don’t, and it ends up getting pretty cluttered once you do that again and again and again over a couple of years and maybe over the process of a couple of different decision makers or one person and a single department adopts a technology that ends up affecting someone on the other side of the organization. It can get really complicated.

With b2btrendsandtech.com, we decided to take an approach where we say here’s the big stuff that’s happening, forget about the technology to start with, let’s talk about the trends, let’s talk about the needs that arise from those trends. And then, let’s give you a couple of the different solution that you might want to check out if you see those needs in your organization.

Marylou: Are there basically use cases that can help guide us? Because one of the things that I think is difficult, I have in my office right now a landscape picture that has icons for all the different vendors under all the different types of categories. It’s up to me to say, okay, email marketing, go look at the 10-15 little boxes over there and figure out from there what I should even start looking at. It would be nice if there are certain recipes that we can get started with. Does your guide give you a little bit of a nudge as to if your emphasis is here, then do this or what?

William: We don’t go into recipes per se, you’re exactly right. If there is a prescription for exactly what you need, we have some content that is a little bit similar to that on each of our blogs but the ebook is a little bit higher level, it’s not a use case necessarily. The trends are speaking to things that are big shifts in the industry as a whole. Every single one of them isn’t going to necessarily impact your company or your organization equally.

In terms of being actionable with this type of guide, what we recommend is looking at the trends that you see affecting your company the most. Sometimes people don’t necessarily connect the trend to the need itself. For example, people might say, my CEO is telling me that I need to align my marketing and sales department, that’s something I keep hearing from the C Suite. Sometimes you hear that so much you forget where all that’s coming from.

What we do is we start a step back and we point to a large trend like the growth and importance in customer experience. Customer experience is one of the trends we have on ebook and customer experience. In many ways, it’s similar to a concept to full funnel marketing. Speaking to a customer from the time you bring them into the very top of the funnel, to the time that they’re talking with sales, to the time that they’re closes, to the time that they are experiencing the product and getting value out of it all the way through getting them to re-sign the deal and eventually become advocates. This is something that marketers have always had on their radar for a long time but it’s renamed this customer experience thing. That is a big shift we see in the industry.

If you see the need for alignment becoming of increasing importance, that’s something we point to as one of the reasons that’s happening and that big trend is also affecting some other things in your organization. If you see that, we suggest some different technologies that you should investigate and evaluate.

Marylou: I like that. I think we have been hearing some buzz words, some technologies, some methods, some ways of conducting business that really not changed, I’ve been doing this now for going on 30 years so, it’s renamed in my world, it’s repurposed.

But for example, what’s affected us at top of funnel is account-based selling versus lead. When predictable revenue was written, we talked about leads, we talked about contact records and now, we’re talking about accounts. If we look at the analogy of a house, we were talking about the house before or now we’re talking about the house with the people in the house, before we were talking about the individual person.

That hasn’t really changed with the way we communicate because no longer can we do a mass type of email engine and spray and pray out there which is wonderful, I think, because I’m a fan of getting as personalized as possible, given the record flow. That’s a trend that lends itself to different technology.

Like you said, you take it up a notch and you’re talking really about the experience of the eventual customer in our world, they’re not a customer yet or a client yet, but if we start off the conversation on the wrong foot, it’s going to make it a lot more difficult for us to get to close versus if we start the conversation with more respect and authenticity then we’re going to have a better shot at bringing these folks into our universe.

A lot of that is based on whether or not we’d leverage technology where technology makes sense. That’s where these tools are coming in now. We used to say when direct mail days that the mail was salesmanship in print and that was coined by the copywriters of the century there, I can’t remember the name of the guy.

Email for us is salesmanship in electronic, in digital. We have to make sure we’re utilizing the right tools that gives us the flexibility to customize where we need it but also help us with our workflow because a lot of times we’re still working with a number of records at top of funnel and we have to be able to reach people and do it in a way that is respectful. Your guide looks at that as a trend and the tools that we put together and assemble like Lego blocks, it reminds me of, you can do it wrong and you can do it correctly and I’ve seen a lot of bad assembly going on.

William: You’re exactly right. Account-based marketing is one of the trends that we have. Account-based marketing, coming of age, in fact, because it’s not necessarily coming on people’s radar for the first time, especially the people in your audience who are familiar with the industry. There was a lot of talk about ABM last year, it was a hot buzzword.

Marketers and salespeople love their buzz words and we’re not innocent in that regard. We try to make it simple and decouple some of these buzzy terms from their actual meaning, focus on the meaning. Account-based marketing without a doubt is coming of age in 2017. There was a lot of talk about it last year and now, you’ve got a lot of companies saying themselves, okay, from a operation and a practical perspective and even from a strategy perspective, how do I switch from lead oriented, lead generation engine to something that is account-based? How do I switch from contacts to accounts?

For people who are not as familiar with the differences between these two different approaches to filling a funnel, it might seem fairly minor, contacts versus accounts, why is that such a big deal? Once you get into the nitty gritty of operations and lead routing and scoring and how you set goals or rapport, it becomes clear that there’s a significant difference.

Companies are saying to themselves, how do I make this transition smoothly? How do I not lose the rapport on the things that I’ve been doing the past couple of years or longer? How do I not abandon the things that work? But then also shift towards this new approach to selling which is undoubtedly the way business to business deals are being transacted which is a decision-making panel. Lots of people are involved in decision making processes when it comes to B2B orgs, especially the larger the deal size, the more that product affects an organization, the more departments that are affected by that purchase and the longer the contract, a lot of people are selling yearlong contracts.

The decision-making panel is what you want to target for a number of different reasons. We try and point people to the right tools when they see that that trend is something that is happening not only in the industry, but as a need that is happening in their organization. Where should you go start looking for adapting the right tools to support that strategy?

Email is a big piece of that. The same email tools that you use for, to stay at the top of the funnel and email marketing tool doesn’t necessarily fill the same need as when you prospect to an organization with very personalized simple emails, that’s another trend that we’re seeing. Personalization is something that is huge in 2017 to a large degree. I see the more content perspective and marketing perspective, usually the B2B industry following the B2C industry when it comes to things like personalization. They’ve had a right in B2C or been at least few steps forward when it comes to personalization for maybe a year or two now and this is the coming of increasing importance on the B2B side.

Personalization though in a B2B context typically doesn’t have all the flashes and flare that you sometimes have when it comes to the personalization on similar websites. It often takes the form of a simple email that speaks directly to an individual, their role, where that role fits within their organization, their needs and plain simple e-mail we see being super effective. Getting the right data in order to send that e-mail, having the right data in order to target, to segment, get that person into the right campaign is tricky. We have some recommendations for tools that people should try and check out. Those are things you want to accomplish for either a marketing team or a sales team.

Marylou: William, before we end, I want to ask a question that you may or may not have a strong opinion about it but I’m curious. You’re a marketing guy, I’m a saleslady, and there’s ops, sales ops, the people who track all these wonderful data for us and help us make more informed decisions. If we were to gather up folks in our company, sit around the fire and look at your book, your guide book, who would be the people that we would want to do this together, in your opinion?

William: What’s interesting I think that’s happening with all those roles that you mentioned is that there is that process of holding on the fire happening whereas in the past it actually hasn’t. That’s kind of a scenario that was not really happening in a lot of worlds a couple years ago and now you’ve got marketing teams and sales teams doing weekly syncs, sitting down with those marketing ops and sales ops people and hashing a lot of things out in customer success and product when it comes to a lot of these trends.

Especially account-based marketing, it really is a full team effort required to execute on a lot of this. A lot of teams and a lot of B2B companies, especially in recurring revenue based models, have most of their income coming from upsells and coming from existing customers. It’s really important that marketing and sales are highly coordinated with customer success and product.

I think that in a lot of organizations, this is something we’ve done at Lead Genius, there’s sort of a defined ‘revenue function’ that is coordinating the efforts between marketing, sales, customer success, demand generation, and product. Companies are bringing in CROs, Chief Revenue Officers, and I believe that their main function in most capacity is to align all those different departments and get them rolling in the right direction. If it was who to get in the room and read this book, it’s all of those people.

I would recommend marketing and sales people to get this book, see if it aligns with their goals, see if it aligns with how they’re seeing the marketplace, take a look at the way we put together b2btrendsandtech.com and then, share that with the people in other departments like customer success, product, if there’s a defined demand like new revenue function that incorporates a lot of these different aspects and demand gens. Share with them as well. They might not be quite as up to speed as you on some of these other elements.

In many ways, the purpose of this document is not just to inform the marketing and sales audience, it’s put a piece of collateral in their hands that they can use to help align the other folks in their organization, start pulling in the same direction, get everyone in the same page. That’s the biggest thing that all these departments can do when it comes to success and predictable prospecting in 2017.

Marylou: That’s great. For those of you who are at smaller companies, they heard all those roles and they’re like, wow, really? This will work in all companies, all sizes. It’s just as you move up market, you’re going to have a few more roles that are doing certain liaison activities.

The thing that I love about this is that it does open up the discussion between the different areas with the end goal in mind which is in many cases more revenue, more consistent revenue, better forecasting, for those of you who are answering to a Board of Directors, you owe it to yourselves to align the organization so that it’s a smoother running pipeline with less gunk in it and less duplication of effort.

To maximize return on effort starts with getting a book like this, a guide, sitting down with your colleagues, hashing out these and those types of things, the what-if scenarios and coming up with a great plan because planning doesn’t cost anything. It’s with when you start executing, you start purchasing these tools, if you don’t do it right, you’re going to see the result of that very quickly that you didn’t take the time to plan which means involving everyone who touches the customer, the client from prospect through close and beyond.

Thank you so much William for your time. I really appreciate it. Now, I’ll put on the show notes for everybody the links to the website that has the guide. If there’s anything else that you want to include, we’ll go ahead and put it on the show notes for your page so people have easy access to get the guide download it and then the other tools, calculators whatever you have that you want to put out there, we’ll get that out there for our audience. Thanks again.

William: Thank you Marylou, great speaking with you.