Dallas, Texas – Sales and marketing solutions provider, Lead Liaison, joins forces with the Sales Enablement Society, to discuss the the modern-day sales rep. The webinar will be hosted on Thursday, July 19th at 2:00pm EDT. Attendees can register for the event here.
Bob Britton is the President of the Sales Enablement Society, Dallas Chapter. With nearly 25 years of experience in sales and training, he’s honed in on his mission to improve performance of sales teams and innovatively focus on what moves the needle in sales.
Ryan Schefke, Customer Success Manager at Lead Liaison, will present alongside Britton. Schefke has over 20 years of sales experience and worked with the Lead Liaison team to develop their own Sales Enablement solution. The two hosts will be joined by special guest, Krista Kajewski, Director of Growth for Educated Change, a company dedicated to helping businesses balance technology, content, and social media overload.
“Educated Change is one of the companies leveraging AI in today’s increasingly complex selling environment,” says Britton. “They understand that technology is not the goal; technology is an enabler of human-to-human communications which are at the core of every sale.”
The team will discuss the characteristics and patterns of the modern day sales rep. Sales insight is in abundance, but it’s also important to measure the inefficiencies. Britton and Schefke will review the technology and tools that are helping to shape the future of sales, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and other sales enablement solutions, along with how to utilize those solutions without becoming a robot.
“There has to be a proper mixture of the human element and automation,” says Britton. “Automation should not be a solution, but rather the means to get to the solution.”
The panelists’ discussion will highlight the relationship between sales and marketing, and how that will affect tomorrow’s sales rep. They will also provide actionable steps that sales reps can take to keep up with the times.
“Bob and I have had many meaningful conversations about what businesses need to be doing to enable their reps to be successful,” Schefke says.” We’ve come to some really interesting observations. This webinar is intended to be a continuation of that discussion.”
To register for this webinar, and to submit your own questions for the panel to answer, click here. The webinar will be held on Thursday, July 19th at 2:00pm EDT.
About Lead Liaison Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).
About Sales Enablement Society
The Sales Enablement Society is a volunteer organization founded in January 2016 by a diverse group of like-minded sales and marketing professionals based in the Washington, D.C. area. The Society’s goal is to better define sales enablement functions and roles within organizations, and to solve the vast disparities which exist in the profession today. The SES’s overall mission identifies best practices for successful outcomes, clarifies the operations for the sales enablement function, and develops criteria for sales enablement roles within successful organizations. To learn more, register and contact your local chapter visit https://www.sesociety.org/home.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Lead-Liaison-Press-Release-3-e1529957926800.png320700Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-07-17 08:00:482018-07-16 15:55:31The Evolution of the 21st Century Sales Rep, Webinar Hosted By Lead Liaison and the Sales Enablement Society
I’ve had quite a few discussions recently about email deliverability. Most people seem to be aware of the basics; don’t use giant images, avoid spammy languages, and make sure that you have SPF and DKIM set up when using an email service. While that might have been enough 10 years ago, things get trickier when we talk about email domain reputations.
Email clients determine whether your message is any good based on your reputation. If you have a good reputation, you won’t have any issues getting your message through. If it’s bad, then you’re much more likely to end up in the junk folder. So, what goes into your email domain reputation?
Open Rate
Email services like Google, Yahoo!, and many others keep track of the open rate of emails sent from your system. If you have a very low open rate, then they interpret that to mean that you’re not sending good content. After all, if their users delete your emails before even reading them, they must not care about it very much. While a low open rate isn’t the biggest factor in determining your email deliverability, it can be enough to make a difference.
You can increase your open rate by sending relevant content to smaller segments rather than blasting a generic email to your whole database. People don’t really care about your organization; they care about how your organization can make an impact to them specifically. You can learn more about segmentation here.
Bounces
An email bounces when you try to send it to an invalid email address. Email addresses could be invalid due to them belonging to former employees, the inbox being full, or simply because the email was mistyped or made up. The more bounces you get, the more it affects your reputation. Why?
Bounces indicate that you haven’t validated your email lists recently. While that’s bad for a few reasons, it can be an indicator that you’ve sent emails to a purchased list. Never send emails to a purchased list, even if the selling company promises everyone is validated and opted in!
Unsubscribes
Email marketers everywhere fear the dreaded unsubscribe. When a person opts out of emails, you lose the ability to send them any kind of email communication. That makes your job of engaging and qualifying infinitely harder.
Moreover, a high unsubscribe rate means that people don’t care about the content you’re sending. Like a low open rate, this tells clients they might as well send you to the junk folder. Unlike a low open rate, a high unsubscribe rate can seriously impact your email deliverability.
You can avoid unsubscribes by sending relevant content to smaller segments. You should also make sure that you only send to people who have specifically opted in to your email lists. Just because they signed up for your newsletter doesn’t mean they also wanted special offers. And above all, don’t send emails to purchased lists!
Spam Complaints
Now we’re getting into serious territories. If you’re getting spam complaints, then you’re either sending to people who never opted in, or you’ve made it too difficult to unsubscribe. Either way, not only will spam complaints hurt your deliverability, they can also get you blacklisted. Worst of all, if you did send an email to someone who didn’t opt in, you could face serious fines and penalties per email.
You can protect yourself from spam complaints by making sure you only email people who have opted in to email marketing. Also, make sure you make the unsubscribe options clear and easy to find, and honor all opt outs in a timeline manner. And, like I said before, never send marketing emails to a purchased list!
Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses that are specifically set up to catch people sending emails to purchased lists. Organizations will leak these emails to list sellers. No matter what the seller says, spam traps are kept secret, and there’s no way they could vet them all. Even validation services may not protect you as the addresses are technically valid.
The only way they would appear on your email list is if you bought a list. Because of this, sending to a spam trap can impact your email deliverability more than almost anything else on this list. It’s basically a smoking gun proving you sent emails to someone who didn’t opt in. Hopefully we’ve already made this point, but don’t use purchased lists!
The Take Away
If you’re looking at this list and feel intimidated, don’t worry. Just do what you’re supposed to be doing. Send relevant content to segments, and only send emails to people who have opted in to the specific type of communication you are sending. Luckily, Lead Liaison can help you with this. If you’d like to learn more about how we protect our email marketing partners, sign up for a demo today.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/adult-business-businessman-1061588.jpg20003000Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-07-16 11:19:142018-07-16 11:19:14Email Deliverability in 2018
Are you wondering how to book more sales meetings? If you’re reading this, then you’re likely a VP of Sales and having problems with the reps on your team or you’re an individual contributor and looking for the upperhand. In this article, we’ll expose some eye opening statistics and give you one of the key ways you can solve this very problem to start booking more sales meetings.
A few months back I traveled from Texas to Georgia. I was traveling to accompany one of our sales representatives in a meeting with a potential client. When I sat down with the prospect, I asked him what he was hoping to accomplish that day. He answered my question by saying he wanted to see anything and everything in our software. In my mind, I thought this meeting would drag on and on unless I took better control of it. Most sales reps would feel a jolt of electricity in their chair if they heard their prospect say this very same thing. They’d be ready to whip out their box of candy and start handing it out like it was Halloween. Instead of throwing him tootsie rolls and lifesavers (or a full candy bar like those wealthy neighborhoods like to do), I turned the question back around to him. I asked, what is it you’re trying to accomplish in your role. He said, “I want to have more conversations.” Now, that’s helpful. Instead of going off on another dog and pony show that could cover things that didn’t mean much to him, we narrowed down the focus.
This sales rep was no different than the 2.7 million other inside sales representatives in the U.S. Their main goal is largely to generate interest and set up meetings. Unfortunately, most reps are inefficient at doing so and struggle with their approach. According to SalesWolf, Sales Development Reps (SDR) waste up to 40% of their time looking for someone to call. With the average SDR making 37.2 calls per day, that’s a lot of wasted time. There’s no secret sauce to booking more meetings; however, there’s one thing we wholeheartedly believe in. It’s quality over quantity and structure/process is not an option; it’s a necessity.
I recall a CEO of a company I used to work for saying to our inside sales team, “it’s a numbers game…just do more and it will happen.” While that could be true, sales leadership really never considers the burn out rate of an SDR after running them through the ringer. Bridge Group research sites there’s a minimum of 20% annual turnover in Sales, and up to 34% if you include voluntary and involuntary. To make matters worse, Deloitte found that Millennials are even more likely to leave their job sooner, as 25% said they’ll leave their current job within a year and 44% will leave within two years.
Now, consider the time it takes to ramp up a sales rep. ClearSlide and CSO Insights report that 71% of companies take 6 months or longer to onboard new sales reps; and at all companies it takes 9 months or more. If you do the simple math here, and consider best case scenarios, there’s a window of a year or two when a rep is fully up to speed and still working for your company. Why is turnover so high? Forbes states that sales reps don’t have coaches and mentors, and lack the latest sales tools.
Stop reading this if your company is not willing to spend money on the right sales tools. And stop reading this if you’re not ready to capitalize on the window of opportunity when your rep is ready to go, and still working for you! Why? Because you’re really not ready to have your sales rep book more sales meetings and you’re not open to adopting technology to assist. Some sales rep can be true superstars, but they can only do so much. Insidesales.com finds the average company spends $2,103 per SDR per year ($175 per month) on sales technology (not including CRM). Insidesales.com found the top five adopted sales technologies are, along with their adoption rate:
Social prospecting, 82.5%
List services, 58.5%
Email engagement, 55.3%
Phone, 43.4%
Sales cadences, 37%
Adopting these five core technologies into your sales team’s strategies will without a doubt help them book more meetings. It will also help them spend less time looking for things to do. All five of these approaches can be applied using a single software solution, that takes less than half of the sales technology budget ($175 per month in 2018 according to Insidesales.com). The solution also dramatically cuts down ramp up time so companies can maximize the window in which sales reps are ramped up and employed.
By using systems like Rhythms from Lead Liaison, Cadences from SalesLoft, or Sequences from Outreach.io, sales reps can build a blueprint of their sales plan. The blueprint can contain social touch points, drive email engagement, and schedule phone tasks all while ingesting a list of contacts that you source.
Reps use these systems by mixing offline and online communication over time to form their outreach process. The systems have both manual and automated tasks, working together to move the “suspect” through the prospecting cycle and into the top of the lifecycle funnel. The system keeps track of engagement and creates tasks that reps can work on in a systematic way each day – helping to keep them focused on the job at hand.
To learn more about Lead Liaison’s solution, called Rhythms, that help sales representatives book more sales meetings contact Lead Liaison today.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/agenda-appointment-business-1020323.jpg17552500Ryan Schefkehttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngRyan Schefke2018-07-01 14:24:462018-07-11 14:25:03How to Book More Sales Meetings
Sales enablement – a strategic, collaborative discipline, designed to add value to customer interactions and improve predictable sales results – is a business function that has grown rapidly over the past few years. In fact, when CSO Insights began its annual Sales Enablement Optimization Study in 2013, just 19.3 percent of organisations had a dedicated enablement function or programme, and that figure reached 59.2 percent in 2017.
In the end, sales enablement is about ensuring that salespeople, marketing staff, customer service reps and business leaders all understand how they can help meet customer expectations and maximize the amount of revenue the organization generates. In this article, we look more closely at the role that integration plays in enablement and explain some of the steps organizations can take to align sales, marketing, and customer service.
Setting Shared Objectives
For an enablement strategy to work, it is important to understand that, while different departments will have different individual aims and objectives, the primary objective of the sales organization is to maximize sales effectiveness, help customers and improve sales results. Ultimately, for sales enablement to be successful, the individual departments need to share those objectives and understand the role that they play in helping to achieve them.
This means that sales reps need to be equipped with the skills and knowledge to maximize success, the customer service staff needs to adopt best practices to deal with problems quickly and keep customers happy, and the marketing department needs to generate interest in the organization and highlight the company’s merits. Enablement leaders must then ensure all of those things happen, but that departments never lose sight of the core objectives.
“One of the major reasons sales enablement is so challenging is due to interdepartmental misalignment and a lack of ownership for enablement initiatives,” says Alyssa Drury, writing for Seismic. “Marketing plays an integral role… but it is often thought of as a sales responsibility, causing tension between the two departments. This alignment is [also] impossible if marketers aren’t thinking about how they support the sales force.”
Connecting Sales Coaching
While it is far from the whole story, a significant part of sales enablement is sufficiently training and coaching sales staff, so that they can carry out their role to the best of their ability. However, this requires integration, because sales reps need to be taught how to make use of content created by the marketing department and how to make use of CRM software, which links with the customer service department.
For sales leaders to achieve this, it is best to formally align their sales coaching and sales training processes to their sales enablement framework, so that all aspects are covered.
Yet, according to the CSO Insights 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, only 11.3 percent of organizations have a dynamic coaching process in place, where their sales coaching efforts are connected to their enablement framework. Nevertheless, when this does occur, average win rates stand at 66.1 percent, compared to the average win rate of 51.8 percent, representing a 27.6 percent improvement.
What this demonstrates quite neatly is that an integrated sales enablement strategy pays off in terms of enhancing sales effectiveness and improving business results. However, it requires leaders within the organization to take the time to connect coaching frameworks to enablement frameworks. Additionally, it is imperative that organisations take the time to equip sales managers with the skills to carry out that coaching.
In addition to coaching, the use of solutions to automate processes for sales staff, like Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution for prospecting, free’s up Reps time to be focussed on the activities that they can really add value to.
Establishing Buyer Personas
Finally, one of the best ways to make sure different departments are integrated with one another and on the same page when it comes to sales enablement is to establish buying personas. Essentially, these are generalised representations of your sales organisation’s customers, and these can be used to teach staff about why customers choose to buy your products, services or solutions and what affects their decision throughout the customer journey.
These buyer personas should be based on real research and the actual customers you attract and want to attract. Once credible buyer personas have been drawn up, these should be shared with all departments, so they can all gain a deeper insight into the different stages of the customer journey and better understand the role that their particular department plays in bringing a customer closer to making the decision to purchase.
“Essentially, a company must establish a buyer persona and then share that persona with all key players in marketing and sales,” explains David Reimherr, a content marketing expert and the founder of Magnificent Marketing, in an article written for Social Media Explorer. “That allows people to understand the stages of where their customers go for answers, what influences them to buy, and so on.”
Moreover, the marketing department and customer service department need to consider how they can help reps to improve their sales effectiveness. This may mean creating higher quality content, which is more likely to appeal to customers, or sharing customer information through CRM software, which could be used to make sales more likely.
Author Bio:
Monika Götzmann is the EMEA Marketing Director of Miller Heiman Group, a global sales consulting firm, helping organizations to create effective sales enablement strategies. Culturally savvy, she has years of international experience in B2B marketing on behalf of dynamic, world-class enterprises. She likes to share her insights achieving sales effectiveness.
To learn more about Lead Liaison’s solution for Sales Enablement as a strategy, click here.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/business-computer-hands-1181208-e1529943863747.jpg430800Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-06-25 11:12:502018-06-25 14:47:39The Importance of Integration in Sales Enablement
Dallas, TX – Sales and marketing solutions provider, Lead Liaison, announces they now offer their most recent add-on solution for sales enablement as a standalone license.
Lead Liaison’s sales enablement solution was launched in December 2017 as an add-on to their marketing automation suite. While its popularity has grown exponentially over the last 6 months, the solution was never offered independently until now.
“We saw the need to offer a software solution dedicated to salespeople,” says Chris Kipgen, Technical Communications Manager. “It’s our mission to be able to offer value across all aspects of sales and marketing. Sales Enablement is a core strategy that complements our existing offerings but also benefits companies as a standalone solution.”
Companies continue to seek to improve their sales teams’ productivity. In 2017, there was an increase of 81% in organizations that reported sales enablement functions, programs, and titles over 2016 (registration required). And it’s not just about sales teams – sales managers seek empowerment as well. Lead Liaison’s sales enablement solution offers the tools needed to build repeatable processes and gauge performance of team members, thus enabling sales managers as well as their teams.
Lead Liaison knew they had a winner on their hands after surveying the competitive landscape. Companies offering similar standalone solutions lack the additional pieces required for a complete solution. They don’t offer an ideal integration with a CRM or marketing automation system. All the cornerstone pieces of a sales and marketing stack are still very disparate solutions. Now, Lead Liaison is able to offer companies a standalone solution for sales teams with the option to upgrade their marketing stack with one partner.
Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution is powered by Rhythms™, which can be succinctly described as sales automation. Reps can build out prospecting plans that help book more meetings and create more conversations.
Additional features of Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution include task management, email automation and two-way email sync. Two-way email sync allows reps to see all of their emails sent from any device in the timeline of a contact’s record. It supports all major email providers including Exchange, Gmail, Office 365, and more. Lead Liaison hosts the industry’s only unique combination of online and offline sales capabilities, like postcards and handwritten letters, which can be included in prospecting plans alongside scheduled tasks, SMS communication, and more.
To learn more about Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement solution, visit this webpage.
About Lead Liaison Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Lead-Liaison-Press-Release-3-e1529957926800.png320700Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2018-06-12 08:30:172018-06-25 15:45:02MarTech Up-and-Comer Lead Liaison Now Offers Standalone Solution for Sales Enablement
“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” These wise words from renowned business author Michael LeBoeuf fit perfectly well into the modern-day business scenarios. Whatever a business does revolves around one significant factor i.e. customer relationships.
An article on Fox Business says that customers are the lifeblood of any given business. If you have managed to build trust and establish strong bonding with your consumers, there is no looking back for you. However, to see it coming, you will need to focus on the quality of your product as well as customer service. Your loyal customers always remain with you. They publicize you through word of mouth.
This post underlines some the best practices that an emerging enterprise can follow to develop solid customer relationships.
Listen to Their Complaints
Whenever you meet and greet your customers, try to listen and understand what they have to say about your product. If you will genuinely show them that you want to listen to their concerns and experience about your product, they too will respond well.
Never make a complaint a prestige issue. Instead, take it positively. A complaint is chance to improve the quality of your service. Once improved, you know you are never going to lose that customer who had raised a voice in the first place.
Sometimes, they might have a suggestion for you. You can use their complaints and suggestions, and study their behavior to offer a one-level-up customer service. Do not close their complaints until they seem happy with the steps taken.
Rewards
Loyalty Reward is the term for bribery in the language customer service industry. You will either need to be a superhero or have a cohesive customer relationship management system that can remember how long a customer has been your customer. All you have to do is to take care of your old, returning customers with some loyalty rewards, which can be anything such as a personalized gift or a thank you card.
You can easily find an eCommerce company that offers to create customized labels for gifting purpose. You can get your thank you message written on the labels, and wrap those labels on the packaging, send or give those packages to your customers and make them feel special right away. This way also, you are going to make strong, never-ending relationships with your loyal customers.
Coupon Codes for Shopping, Restaurant Dining Vouchers, Baseball Match Tickets, Basket of Fresh Fruits, or your product, or anything you can think of can be a great reward idea for your loyal customers.
Make Them Feel Special
Despite the fact that making an existing customer happy is less expensive than searching a new one, you cannot always invest in gifts as this practice may cost you a fortune over time. There are many other ways you can make your customers happy.
With the help of your customer relationship manager (CRM), you can easily keep track of their birthdays and special occasions. A simple phone call from you or any of your representatives can make them feel special.
Why is it even important? Because, a happy client will most likely spread the good word about you and services. An article on Forbes.com insists that you as a business have to treat your every customer as your most important one, because you never know who they know or whom they can refer you to.
Employee Training
Train your employees for better customer service. Specifically if you are a B2C business, which is visited by a large number of customers on a daily routine, employee training on customer service is important.
An article on Choron.com advises, “Implementing customer service training with employees requires a solid understanding of your customer’s needs and expectations as well as being able to meet and surpass those needs and expectations through consistent, positively reinforced training.” For this, you will need to weight up your employees’ skills.
You can assess your employee’s skills from the feedbacks of your customers, and also by taking your employees through a customer service skills assessment.
Social Media
We are living in the age of social media. It is regarded as the fifth building block of the society we live in. Every business, including your competitors, makes an effective use of social network to promote their business, products, services, offers and events.
Why are you shying away from social network? You can create a group or a fan page for your business on Facebook, asking your customers to join you there. This way you can stay close with your customers virtually.
However, Facebook may not be a suitable tool for just any kind of business. That’s the reason why it is important to figure out the best suitable social media platform for your business.
Have the Best Customer Relationships
Your business is not just about doing your business. It is more, rather solely, about your customers. Nicholas Chachula, the founder of iCustomlabel, says that keeping your customers happy will help you lay the foundation for the future of your business.
Which are those two factors that bring a business success? The answer definitely has to be the quality of products and customer satisfaction level a business offers. Apparently, both the factors are proportionally related. Meaning, with a drop in the quality of your product, you shall see a drop in the acceptance of your product. Therefore, while you work on improving your customer service, you should not lose the quality of your products.
My office just received an order of company t-shirts that we intend on giving away to current and prospective clients, as well as wearing ourselves. It’s not the first order, and it won’t be the last. But, it got me thinking. Company shirts are a pretty standard category of “swag.” And, rightfully so. They can be used for employees (in both B2B and B2C businesses), current clients, and even prospective clients. But really, are company shirts worth the investment?
The “Pros” of Investing in Company Shirts
A well-designed company shirt can be extremely versatile, but the end goal is to create brand awareness. There are several avenues of creating brand awareness. While much of marketing’s focus is on your prospective clients, brand awareness is also important for your current base of clients and even your employees. Everyone wants to be a part of something great. And a t-shirt is an easy way to make a statement – heck, it’s a walking billboard! Company shirts can create a sense of unity amongst your employees, make new clients feel like a part of a really cool family, and spark interest with your prospective client. The more your prospects see your brand in day-to-day life, the more they will trust your business.
Local screen printers are easy to find, and your choices for a designer is not limited to your area. Our designer lives more than 800 miles away from our screenprinter. We live in a modern world; we are not limited by the location of our partners and vendors. Find a designer that fits your company culture (if you don’t already have one on staff), then choose your screen printer based on the quality of shirts they have available in addition to their reputation. And if you prefer to do everything online, companies like UberPrints.com allow you to design your own t-shirts in their online studio. They also offer free shipping (bonus!). We have lots of experience with thier work, and it’s great quality.
Company shirts, or marketing shirts specifically, can make you money. I love this article by Sujan Patel, in which he explains how giving away t-shirts made him over $500k in revenue. Patel says, “I posted to Facebook to see who wanted a few shirts and was surprised when I ran out just a few hours after I put up the message. Clearly, there was a demand for my shirts! Since my supply was short, I put together an email list of people who were interested and started sending out the shirts with personalized notes. Not only did this allow me to help capture people’s physical addresses for use in future t-shirt giveaways, my friends were so excited that they personally thanked me on Facebook and started wearing the shirts around town.” He goes on to explain how giving away all of those shirts made him money. The project helped him strike up business conversations, it helped him get into larger companies, and it helped him grow his brand recognition.
The “Cons” of Investing in Company Shirts
“Logo shirts” are typically the first to go in a closet purge (unless the quality of the shirt warrants keeping). If you’re going to do this project, you need to make sure you do it right. A high quality t-shirt and a modern, simple design will be the keys to keeping your shirts in rotation.
Predicting the future is hard. How do you determine how many of each size you’ll need? I’ll tell ya – this is probably one of the hardest parts of the t-shirt buying process. It’s hard to straddle the line between staying within budget, but also having enough shirts to cover your potential need. And, if you are buying t-shirts without the wearers in mind (like your employees), it’s impossible to know what size you need. My best advice is to hop on a LinkedIn group in your industry and ask. Also, go ahead and mentally prepare for the fact that your numbers will be slightly off. That’s okay! You can always order more.
Tracking ROI is hard. It’s difficult to quantify the return on investment to expect for each shirt you give away. RealThread.com helps quantify that. “According to the Ad Speciality Institute, the average giveaway t-shirt gets worn 4.32 times per month and earns 365 impressions per month, with an impression being any time the shirt is viewed or seen. Assuming that your t-shirt is kept for even just one year, that’s 4,380 impressions per t-shirt.” So, if your t-shirt cost is $9.00/shirt, your cost per impression would be $.002/impression. Not bad.
Tips
Sizing
Sizing will always be an issue, as I stated before. But it’s important to make an educated guess. The most common t-shirt size for adults is a Large. But this will vary based on your percentage of men vs women. It’s also a good idea to skew the sizes slightly to the bigger size, since it’s easier to fit someone in a larger shirt than it is to fit in a shirt that’s too small. This Quora article provides this simple ratio:
Small: 1
Medium: 2
Large: 2
XL: 1
2XL: .5
Design
Keep your design simple and do NOT skimp on quality. You want to appeal to a wide audience with your design, so the more simple the better. This guide from Bonfire gives even more tips and tricks to designing the perfect shirt. Try to keep the sales-y stuff out of your design. It’s 2018 – people know how to search for your business online. They don’t need your logo and your URL and your phone number on their clothing. That’s all too distracting. Remember, your main goal is to create unity and brand awareness. The rest will come.
You want people to be more inclined to actually wear your shirt, rather than wash their car with it. A cotton-polyester blend is pretty common and probably most suitable for everyday use. The cotton fiber makes it easy to care for and clean, while the polyester increases wrinkle resistance. And don’t forget to ask your t-shirt vendor for a sample. Most will decline, but if you call and ask, you might get special treatment. Remind them that it’s better to send a sample, than re-print an entire order because the t-shirt is unsatisfactory. Once you have the sample, wear, wash, and re-wear the shirt. Keep an eye on how much/if it shrinks
Ideas for how to use your company shirts:
Lead Generation
Offer a free shirt online, in exchange for contact information.
Give away a t-shirt as a reward for signing up for a webinar.
Use t-shirts to incentivize prospects to fill out a survey or quiz.
For Current Clients
Use company shirts to keep your brand in the mind of your best customers at all times (they are your biggest advocates, after all!).
Make a limited run of shirts that are only given to VICs (Very Important Clients).
Give away a t-shirt as a reward for a client completing an educational course on a subject in your industry. For example, we offer free educational courses on our software. We could give a t-shirt as a reward for completing a set of software training courses.
For Employees
Use company shirts to unite a team in vision.
Use company shirts to celebrate an important anniversary or other company milestone.
Give your employees a company shirt so that they can rep your brand outside of work.
[B2B] Use different color t-shirts to help employees easily recognize team members (the technology department wears blue, the finance department wears green, interns wear orange, etc.).
[B2C] Improve customer satisfaction by making it easy for customers to spot the nearest employee to assist them, thus improving their overall experience.
Take a group photo of all of your employees wearing the same shirt. This image can be used on your “Meet the Team” webpage, and will help prospective clients feel comfortable knowing that your company is truly a “team.”
An Extra Tip (…and Shameless Plug)
Marketing t-shirts can also be incorporated in your lead nurturing if your company uses marketing automation. Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ solution allows for direct mail actions to be included in any drip campaign (aka: an automation). This includes the functionality to send marketing material (like t-shirts, company pens, etc.) automatically to key Prospects (let’s say, with a lead score above 900). To learn more about this and any of the other amazing capabilities of Lead Liaison, request a demo here.
Few companies are fortunate enough to create an entirely new high-tech market, and even less so dominate that market. Many join at the right time once costs have dropped and the market is sufficiently inflated. So why do so many companies lose their way to becoming a market leader?
The potential answers to this are almost endless, wrong skill sets in the business, shortfall in capital, fallouts between founders, etc – These all play their part but I want to assume that everything internally is sound, good staff and resources. Why then do companies not hit the heights they once thought attainable?
The transition period from early adopters of the technology to the early majority can really test a companies dynamism. Their are so many pitfalls to contend with but the most prevalent is the change in customer type that too few fail to master.
Things to consider:
Early adopters are expecting to get a jump on their competitors and expect a discontinuity between their old processes and the new.
Early majority however, expect evolution, not revolution. They expect the tech to enhance, not disrupt their current processes.
Are you sending the right message to prospects? Have you looked at what technology they are using and segmented them appropriately?
New markets, whether vertical or horizontal can have totally different outlooks. If you are looking to diversify into an unknown market and are trying the same approach as you would with your established market, then failure will undoubtedly become your unfortunate ally.
Dislodging market leaders is an amiable goal and that of many five year marketing plans, but they have a much larger budget, more established product and more importantly a brand. Customers will forgive a brand for minor and sometimes major mistakes – for us mere mortals, this is a luxury we can’t afford. Depending on the lifecycle stage of the market, this might not even be a possibility.
What makes you stand out? A great product, great salespeople, and/or great support? You might have features that save the customer time, it might have a better user interface or it might be more cost effective and if you’re lucky it will have all of these.
The differentiator though is how you market yourself. Pick any industry and go to the websites of the top five companies. Some will portray themselves as ‘trusted’, ‘hip’, ‘technological’, ‘customer oriented’, etc. You need to find what works for you and then own it. Do it better than anyone else, be inventive, be unusual and get noticed. You don’t have to spend like a market leader, but you do have to be as creative as one. You’ll get noticed by your customers and prospect base, and it will make all the difference.
Technology has come a long way in the last few years to help make digital marketing in particular much easier and more affordable, so use tools like Visitor Tracking to capture your website visitors and then Marketing Automation to nurture leads into customers. These used to be tools that only market leaders could afford, but now the playing field has levelled out and small to mid-sized companies can match the digital marketing efforts of companies with budgets they can only dream of. We welcome the opportunity to show you how you can be a marketing genius and own the marketing lifecycle – without perforating your bank account.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/businessman-close-up-daydreaming-450212.jpg347998Bambeeq Bambeeqhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngBambeeq Bambeeq2018-05-23 11:01:122018-06-01 14:52:24How to Dislodge A Market Leader
Growth marketing software has commonly been referred to as a strategy that focuses on the entire funnel, as opposed to the top, middle, or bottom. Small to mid-sized businesses and startups need to think out of the box and not expend precious cycles trying to mimic traditional sales and marketing methods.
At Lead Liaison, we didn’t know about many of these solutions when we first started. Over time we either purchased these solutions or built them ourselves. Most of our growth marketing needs have manifested themselves as software that we’ve created to address a specific need in the overall growth marketing strategy. In addition to our own software, we’ve been using solutions from other providers to build what we feel is the ideal growth marketing software stack. One key aspect of this ultimate growth marketing software stack is that every single solution in the stack is web-based. All your team needs is a web browser and you’re up and running!
We adopted a growth marketing strategy in the early stages of our business; however, the stack wasn’t built overnight. It’s taken many years to put together this growth marketing stack. We hope you’ve coveted an article like this as it’s not easy to identify an ideal growth marketing stack. It’s our pleasure to present this stack to you in the hope that it helps your company either get up and running quickly or accelerate faster.
Each of these solutions and their benefits are explained below. We break up the growth marketing software stack into two parts, sales and marketing and operations.
Growth Marketing Software Stack:
These solutions benefit the sales and marketing teams. For most companies focused on growth marketing, their sales and marketing team will be less than 10 people. These solutions are highly effective and affordable, whether you’re a funded or bootstrapped growth marketing company this is the way to go.
Top of the Funnel: Rhythms™, Lead411, ZoomInfo, Hunter, MailTester.com, FullContact, Clearbit. Perfecting sales isn’t that difficult. It’s about establishing a process to see what works, then rinse and repeat. Sales can be systematic too. We use Rhythms™, which help our sales people get into a groove (dare I say rhythm) with their sales. It helps them establish an outreach plan, that’s ideal for business development reps or seasoned account managers. Reps add manual emails, auto-emails, phone calls, postcards, handwritten letters, and various tasks into a plan – giving them a blueprint for sales. When new reps come aboard they can easily adopt your company blueprints. It helps to feed Rhythms™ with fresh contacts. We like Lead411 for email-only contacts and ZoomInfo for higher quality data. ZoomInfo has the highest concentration of contacts with phone numbers and emails out of all providers we’ve found. This makes ZoomInfo the best solution for high-touch sales plans or account-based marketing. Your growth marketing strategy should be focused on quality over quantity though. Gone are the days of batching and blasting emails. That’s a quick way to sink your growth marketing ship. Spend more time researching and reaching out to each contact you pull from your source. Rhythms™ will help you achieve high quality sales campaigns. Hunter and MailTester.com help round out the prospecting solution to verify email addresses. Teams might also find FullContact and Clearbit useful for finding contact information.
Middle of the Funnel: Lead Management Automation (LMA)™. Once you develop your top of the funnel leads into engaged contacts they need to be nurtured and followed up with. Although some providers call these solutions “marketing automation”, we’re not a fan of that phrase. Marketing automation is a strategy really, and not software. There is software to better manage leads though. Qualifying, nurturing, prioritizing, and engaging leads are some of the benefits of lead management software. In addition, software like LMA comes with a suite of marketing tools such as an email, form, landing page builder, social posting and more.
CRM: OneFocus™™. Don’t waste your time on expensive and bloated CRMs such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics. These platforms are great for large enterprises, but if you’re reading this article and care about growth marketing software – then you won’t be interested in those CRMs anyhow. We might be a bit biased here, but we created OneFocus™, for companies like us that are focused on growth marketing. We didn’t need all the fat around the bone, we just needed the essentials of a CRM. Deal, task, contact, company management was all our sales team needed with an easy to use interface. They go it with OneFocus™. Other companies can also enjoy this light-weight CRM as it’s 100% free.
Sales Research: LinkedIn, Owler, Datanyze, BuiltWith. As your sales team scours the market for opportunities or finds new leads with ZoomInfo or Lead411, they’ve got to be researched further. Datanyze and BuiltWith have some nice plugins (our favorite is Datanyze) that help you visit a prospective company’s website, click the browser plugin icon, and all the company firmographics, social info, and technographics (what technology they use) is right there at your disposal. Owler is mainly useful for finding a company’s competitors, while LinkedIn helps you learn more about the Prospect.
Task Management: OneFocus™, Trello. There are 100s of task managers out there. Our two favorites are Trello and OneFocus™. Trello is a nice looking web application that’s very easy to use. Users can create different boards with tasks in the boards and share boards with each other. To complete tasks, users drag and drop tasks from one stage to another. Trello is great for general tasks and to-do items (even for personal tasks); however, OneFocus™ is ideal for sales and marketing tasks as it’s fully integrated into Rhythms™ and OneFocus™, solutions for the top of the funnel and general lead management. OneFocus™ has a slick task manager and task wizard making it easy for reps to make the most out of their day while staying organized and focused.
Growth Marketing Software (Extended):
We put this part of the growth marketing software stack together as these solutions complement the sales and marketing stack. Some of these solutions such as Screencast-O-Matic are lesser known, but super handy and affordable for sales, marketing, and support.
Business Platform: Google. Most companies go one of two routes here, Microsoft or Google. Many companies “think” they need Microsoft and still think of Google as a solution for personal use. When in fact, they couldn’t be more wrong. Google has a killer stack, which they call G-Suite. It is jam packed with value and around $5 per user per month. It includes Gmail (email), Docs (like MS Word), Sheets (like Excel), and Slides (like PowerPoint), and Drive (like Dropbox). For those that think they can’t live without Outlook, with a few tricks in Gmail, you can make it look like Outlook. Docs and Sheets are amazing. They allow companies to create Templates, making it easy to create sales and marketing material on the fly, that all looks has a common look and feel – for example, Order Forms, Master Subscription Agreements, Mutual NDAs, Addendums, and more. Try G-Suite, once you get used to this platform you won’t look back. Oh – and it’s backed by Google!
Support & Help: Screencast-O-Matic. This has been our little gem. For less than a meal at Denny’s, you get an easy to use screen recording software that instantly uploads videos to their cloud service (no extra charge) or YouTube (unlimited). We use Screencast-O-Matic to record help videos during the sales and support process. In seconds after a recording your video can be send to a cloud service of your choice and a link can be emailed. Sending links is so much easier than sending large files across the internet.
Zoom: Conferencing and screen recording. We used to use GoToMeeting until we got fed up with the quality and price. Zoom is much more affordable, gives us instant recording options with the ability to easily screen share from our mobile device (great for mobile apps) at half the price of GoToMeeting with better quality.
Communication: Slack, Dropbox. Slack is by far our favorite tool for communication. Prior to Slack we were using Google Hangouts on the sales side and Skype with vendors and contractors and some employees. It was a pain context switching between apps, all with different interfaces. Slack is the most amazing and modern communication tool we’ve seen. It’s ability to integrate with other sales and marketing apps to strengthen your growth marketing stack is unprecedented. Some of our favorite integrations include Jira Cloud, Google Drive, Giphy, and Dropbox. Dropbox is like a hard drive in the cloud for your company. It’s a nice interface and easy way to manage sharing documents across your organization.
Product Management: Atlassian Jira Cloud. Jira is used for managing product roadmaps, bugs, new features, and more. Product Managers and engineering teams can use Jira to run engineering sprints (short periods of work prior to a software release) and track overall progress.
Customer Documentation: Atlassian Confluence. Confluence is a cloud-based documentation platform. Use it to create different “spaces” for your organization. For example, customer documentation, employee handbooks, and corporate wikis to document process. Open your customer documentation up so you don’t require a password. That way you can easily send out links to your docs and user manuals.
Finance: Quickbooks Online. QuickBooks is an easy to use system to manage your books, create reports, track income and expenses. Most growth marketing software companies care hire someone part time for bookkeeping, outsource it, or give this to one member of the team as it’s a part time task and not a full time job.
We hope you enjoyed our take on the ultimate growth marketing software stack. If you have any questions on the above software solutions don’t hesitate to ask, we’d love to help.
To watch “An Introduction to Sales Enablement” in its entirety, click here.
Summary
Lead Liaison provides an introduction to sales enablement. Learn the definition of sales enablement, why companies use it, and how it can help your business. We also compare and contrast sales enablement vs. marketing automation and break down how these two technologies complement one another.
*Please note that this content was presented live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.
Slide #2
So let me cover three buckets. Bucket number one would be your company might be using email marketing. So maybe you’re using MailChimp or constant contact, or your even using marketing automation, which in a way it’s like version 2.0 of email marketing. But with number one, you might be sending out a bunch of emails. We just talked to client the other day, and they’re shooting a bunch of emails out through Mailchimp, and their sales team is hoping for people to respond and email them back, and their sales team is even following up on people that have just click links. That’s how they’re measuring engagement, just a link quick and taking action on that. So we like to say that those kinds of company, they’re just sending out email blasts. They’re doing very basic marketing around email but they’re blasting their database. But sending a generic message to your entire database, you’re not segmenting people. Bucket two is really companies that are using marketing automation for both sales and marketing purposes. Definitely sales can benefit from using marketing automation. A good philosophy there is that marketers are producers and sales people are consumers. But what you don’t want if you are falling on bucket number two, you don’t want to be using marketing automation to do your prospecting and do your sales outreach. You don’t want to be running your cold contacts through your marketing automation system. Bucket number three is where you carve out marketing automation and you dedicate that for marketers, and then you have a sales enablement suite, and your sales people use that. So ideally you want to be in bucket number three, and in that way, sales and marketing can kind of work in harmony.
Slide #3
What is killed enablement? Again 24%, 1 out of every 4 people here don’t really know what it is. So I’m going to throw a definition out there to everybody. Sales enablement means continually increasing efficiency of your sales ecosystem through the use of strategies, tools and process. What does it mean to be continually increasing? Well the main thing is that you can’t stop improvement, you can’t stop changing, You know, if I look at our own company, Lead Liaison, as an example of that, we introduced marketing automation in 2014. So four years ago, we rolled that out. Obviously, we want to be using our own software that’s how we’re growing our business so rapidly. So we like to say we drink our own champagne. We never say we eat our own dog food. I don’t like to eat dog food or be blasted, like I mentioned earlier. So the key is always continually improve. We’re using our own software, but we’re always making changes, we’re changing our qualified lead flow, we’re changing our messaging, we’re always refreshing the content, for tweaking how we do prospecting. Never rest on your laurels. Never be complacent because if you get complacent, I think that will lead to failure very quickly. So you’re continually going to make changes. Efficiency, well what does that mean? You got to really be using automation at the core to be efficient. You got to be really organize. So that again, you can scale your business. And in these last three words, I’m going to touch on the next slide about strategy tools and concepts, I’ll explain that. And by the way, sales enablement, you gave a lot of definitions out there today. You may have heard of sales enablement as sales automation, sales intelligence. It’s really all the same thing in our crew. It’s a bit subjective but it does have different means.
Slide #4
So you’ve got to have a strategy. You got to figure out, are you going to target certain accounts? Are you going to focus on specific industries or regions, and you really got to know who your ideal buyers are, that’s very important. Lead Liaison actually offers a particular document, it’s on our website under our resource library. We call it an SOA, Service Level Agreement. It’s a really good tool to use between your sales and marketing teams. It’s treated down those. You can get that again from our website. But here, just have an agreement or a template, define your buyers, define your sales plan, know who you’re going after, identify, you know, what is a qualified lead, what is the lead, define those things, make sure both teams really agree there on what that is. But, again, you’ve got to have a strategy. The tools, right, so again sales enablement is a bit subjective, but remember in the definition, I talked about providing solutions for that failed ecosystem, helping sales with everything they do, everything they touch. You got to have a CRM. It’s great if you have meeting automation. Send out a link, schedule a meeting, you could use solution bud call away. We’re also working on something to help automate the scheduling of meetings. But instead of going back and forth and working out availability for parties, send the link, they can click it, see their availability schedule. You really need stuff like visitor tracking that’s a great sales enablement tool to help identify businesses and people that come to your website, and give you key sales intelligence. And again sales automation engagement, sales intelligence, whatever you might refer to it, that’s kind of part of the suite, which I’ll go over in more detail. And then you got have a process. You got to document what you want your sales team to do. It could be in Google Docs. Within Lead Liaison we use a solution from atlasin, it’s called Complements, its kind of a Wiki. We use that for our public documentation and internal documentation. And then you got to train your sales team. So all of our demos, our client meetings, on boarding, we record everything. So we use notes, we use GoToMeeting, record everything, upload it into YouTube, make it unlisted, so that you can just pass out links to people as needed. But use that material to give back to your sales people to train them, to make them more efficient. And then the last thing is measure. It doesn’t get measured. It doesn’t get docked. So you have to have these strategies, tools and process to really do a good job at sales.
Slide #6
What you’re looking at is what I would call a super graphic, right, not just an infographic but a super graphic. Taking sales enablement tools is really difficult. By the way, the super graphic is provided by Scott HYPERLINK “mailto:Brinker@chiefMarktax.com” Brinker@chiefMarktax.com, want to give the proper attribution there. There are 5,381 solutions on the super graphic from 5,000 companies that is a lot. Can you imagine if, you had to pick from this 5,000 different companies. It’s impossible. And there’s several hundred just in sales automation which you see in that red box right there. In the blue box, on the bottom left, you see marketing automation. Lead Liaison fits into both of those buckets, we deliver solutions in both areas. The key is you want two things to be working together. You don’t want these to be dispersed solutions. Now, what you see here, this is from 2017. In 2016, there were less. So you know, so 2017, there were 39% more solution. So the sales and marketing ecosystem is just getting more and more complex. The good news is that I’m going to simplify that for everybody in our discussion here.
Slide #7
I’m really going to focus on sales automation and marketing automation. So just the automation piece. Number one, I’m going to give you again five differences, number one is really the obvious, which is the people, you know, marketing people should be using marketing automation, salespeople should be using sales enablement.
Slide#8
The second difference is where should these solutions be used. Now, what you’re looking at here is a very primitive funnel, suspects, leads, opportunities, clients. Your funnel could be more detailed, which is fine, but at the highest level, you have what we call suspects. What that really is, is basically just a person. They have no idea who you are. You got them from a list, you pull them out of the phonebook, it doesn’t matter. They are suspect. A lead is somebody where you may be engaged them, you’ve generated interest. They now know who you are. The difference here is in that minty color, sales enablement is at the top of the funnel. And by the way, this is not just the sales funnel. The world is moving to sales and marketing funnel. So you got both groups within a company contributing to your funnel. But sales enablement is at the top of the funnel. It’s really geared around booking more meetings, filling the top of the funnel. That’s the goal of sales enablement. On the other hand, marketing automation is, you can see, as you, in more areas of the funnel, it’s used to help nurture your lead. It’s used around opportunities, upsell, cross sell, things like that. And a lot of people just forget that marketing automation is really, really applicable to clients. It’s not a lead gen tool. Marketing automation’s purpose is to help you shorten the sales cycle, to drive bigger deals, and you do that for building strong relationships by communicating in a very relevant way. That’s what marketing automation can do is help you segment and communicate and have conversations, not blasting people. The key takeaway from this slide is that they need to complement one another. Again, earlier in the poll, we heard 5% of the attendees used marketing automation so they feel they don’t need sales enablement. It’s a little bit of the wrong approach there.
Slide #9
The third difference is in email. So again, I’m largely speaking about automation. The third difference is in how emails are delivered. Marketing automation is going to send your email through the provider’s network. Those emails must have an unsubscribed link, because you want to be can spam compliant, etc. Those emails will not show up in your sent box. The difference is that when you’re using sales enablement or sales automation, those emails are going to go through your own service provider. So it could Gmail, could be Exchange, Office 365. It’s basically just like going into Outlook or Google mail and sending an email from your email client. You’re going to see then your sent box. You don’t have to put in unsubscribe link in there, and you’d probably do get better deliverability of your emails. So the way that emails are sent are very, very different.
Slide #10
The fourth difference is in reply management. So your sales enablement tools are going to automatically manage replies. Again, it’s sales automation, it’s for sale people. So we really want to keep it very simple. If somebody engages or replies, you want to remove them from your flow, whereas marketing automation is more manual. You’re going to have to pull them out or set up some automated processes to remove them
Slide #11
And then the last thing is you know, simplicity right. We got to keep sales automation, sales enablement, very, very simple. We can’t make it complex.
Slide #12
Going back a little bit marketing automation. It is going to be more, I think difficult to use, right, because you just, you’ve got more options. So it can be confusing for some people. Those technical marketers I think really get it. But again, you got additional business logic. You can wrap around things. And so again, it’s more complex, more actions.
Slide #13
So why do sales reps need automation? Well I’m throwing some very quick stats out at you, and these stats by the way are furnished by the TAS group or Task Group Marketing doughnut and brain shark. So 67% of reps don’t hit their quotas, 2 out of every 3 reps miss their quota. Half of all sales teams don’t have a playbook. You got to have a playbook. The third point here is to take an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. My take away there is cold calling really doesn’t work these days. You know, for me, I really don’t answer my phone. I do screen and I see the caller ID, I don’t answer. You got to try different approaches. The last point here is it’s very tough to on-board people. It takes about 10 months for new reps to really be productive and get up to speed. So that the key takeaways here are reps are increasingly unsuccessful, especially if they do not have a plan, and it’s very hard to reach people and ramping up new reps is difficult.
Slide #14
So what’s the solution? It doesn’t matter what your sales role is. Now you probably fall into one of these two buckets– account manager, business development reps. Now, some companies call them account managers, some companies call them major account managers or outside sales reps. The bottom line is you’re the person that probably build the relationship a little bit more. You might be traveling. You might be focusing on your 50 or 100 top-tier accounts for your business. You might be doing what they call ABM or Account Based Marketing, just focusing on specific accounts. You might be in that bucket or you might fall into the business development rep bucket, where again, you could be called a biz Dev rep, a sales development rep or an inside sales rep. There’s many names but you you’re typically in one of those two buckets. The key thing is you got to have a plan. You can’t just be calling. You got to have unique, multiple touch points, and you really have to create messaging across your organization that’s consistent so that you can, what we call plug-and-play with your reps. So if your reps leave, which that happens in sales, you get a lot of turnover. You want to pull in your new reps, you want to be able to plug-and-play and have them pick up where your reps left off, and have all that messaging be consistent. So Lead Liaison, to tell a real quick story here, we evaluated a number of sales enablement solutions. You know, we looked at various players out there, but we really found three problems. Number one, nothing was integrated with marketing automation. That’s kind of our history, we started visitor tracking and marketing automation, but we found sales enablement was really disconnected. You have to copy and paste data from one system into your marketing platform, and they just weren’t integrated. They were also a little complicated. Again, you want to keep them simple. And they were not multichannel, everything is just email only.
Slide #15
So I’m going to show you on our app what some these things look like, but I’m going to give you some screenshots. This is from LeadLiaison. Now, what this is sales automation. Other providers in the market, they might call what you’re looking at a sequence. They might call it a cadence. They might call it a flow. It doesn’t matter what the name is. For us, Lead Liaison, we call it a rhythm. We chose that name because sales is about getting into a rhythm. It’s establishing your momentum, your flow but diving and getting into that rhythm, getting used to things, that’s what it’s all about. You want to have that rhythm to really be your second thing. A few key things, you see on the left, when we designed this, we said, “Man, we got to make it multichannel.” What I mean by multichannel is not just email, right, but have the ability to send a handwritten letter. Have the ability to send a postcard, to schedule a unique task in the time. That’s really important. Make it multichannel. The next thing that’s really important is give the reps options. You want to have some multi-variant testing, not AB testing the ABCD all the way up, multi-variant, try different things but don’t make it too complex, if then, logic and things like that. We also want to be able to very easily add people into your rhythm. That’s important. We are working on, and integration with zoom info, we’ve partnered up with them. So that’s the key thing, you know, you want to be able to find and kind of target certain people, and then add them into your flow to then create that rhythm.
Slide #16
One more thing you really want is you want to make sure you’re organize, right, and as part of your process. So the most efficient reps these days, they stay organize. So you got to have a really good task manager. You want your reps coming in and not say, “What should I work on today?” You want them to click a button and “Hey, these are overdue. I got to make these phone calls or here’s what’s due this week.” So you want to have a really good task manager. We built that into Lead Liaison.
Slide #17
And then also, you want to make sure you can measure. If you remember what I said earlier, if it’s not measured, it’s not done. So in this case, how many people were added, finished, and how many people are engaged in your particular sales automation or your outreach.
Slide #18
So that that’s really about, again, those flows, those rhythms, those sequences, again, whatever you want to call them, but there’s really more to sales enablement.
Slide #19
Here I’m showing you on my screen, on your screen, sending an email from an iPhone, from an android device, from Outlook, from Google mail. You know what you really want is you don’t want to have to use an email address and put that in your BCC field so that it gets stored in your CRM. About six, seven months ago, Lead Liaison released a free CRM. It’s called OneFocus. The essentials are there to create deals and tasks and so on so forth. But one thing we realized is let’s not make it difficult for reps. We just want to make sure that no matter where they’re sending an email, they’re on the road, and God forbid, sending an email from their phone while they’re driving, they’re at their desk, wherever, it doesn’t matter. We want to make sure that email goes into the CRM. So that all that information can be shared in a central area.
Slide #20
This is what we call a prospect profile for us, but it doesn’t matter where those emails are sent, you want them all to be threaded, and in line, so that if another rep checks out this page, or the marketing person, everybody knows what is going on.
Slide #21
Here is sending an email from the application itself. So this is just native email. There is a bunch of different capabilities in there to help make reps more efficient.
Slide #23
This is the interface, you know, you can build out these different actions, I’ve mentioned these actions here on the left. Again, you want to make sure you’ve got different versions, if you will. You can add that. So either you’re different variants here. You want to make sure, again, that you can measure things again– added, finished, engaged.
Slide #24
Ryan Schefke: So here we can see, you know, how many individual prospects you are putting in, what’s the stag, or what steps are they at, and your overall flow.
Slide #25
Looking at your emails only, so you want to be able to take all your different action types and just may be drill down a little bit, and see how things are performing.
Slide #26
You also want to know what tasks have you set up for yourself. So you can see a tasks tab over here.
Slide #27
And then you got different settings. So again, when people reply, you want to remove them. These are called suspect statuses, but based on what happens, what you want to set their status to be, you want to set some goals, things like that.
Slide #29
It’s giving you a preview of what we’re doing here with zoom info. So you might want to pick from your own account, inside Lead Liaison, certain companies, certain named accounts that you might have or maybe do a general search, you want to find those people, put in your criteria, and then once you find them, add them into your rhythm. So making it easy to insert people in there to fill the top of the funnel.
Slide #30
I just want to quickly compare and contrast here, marketing automation. This is an example of marketing automation from us. So you can see these individual actions, you got way more actions, changing data values. You don’t just have sending an email or sending a handwritten letter, things like that. You’re tagging, your moving things around inside the system, you’re adding different conditions around your actions. You are creating your business logic. So it’s much more complex with these kinds of system. And you’ve got different pipes typically. So you can see here, we offer, four different variations. So much more complexity, if you will, but with the complexity comes more power, more options in things that you can do.
Slide #31
This is the task manager. So if you’re a rep, you come in, you want to make sure, “Hey, I got my path. I know what I’m working on.” Maybe you get an email reminder that you got overdue task. But the key is, pick your task, pick the start button—
Slide#32
–begin working on your tasks, you can see one through four, and this is your task manager, that entire timeline right in here of what’s going on all the leads or the prospects engagement here and the actions—
Slide #33
–the ability to take quick action—
Slide #34
–you want all that your sales enablement system.
Slide #35
Also to keep it simple, you know, depending on again, if you’re an account manager or if you’re an inside sales rep, you know, maybe you want to build your rhythms or your sequences, whatever you want call them, and then keep them in a certain folder.
Slide #36
You might have like an industry folder, whatever that might be or your top 50 accounts—
Slide #37
And you want to put your rhythms and keep them organized and put them in certain folder. I do want to highlight again the two-way sneaking stuff that I talked about. Here’s an example of a profile inside Lead Liaison. You can see that in the timeline here, this is a two-way email thing. It doesn’t matter where these messages are sent from, you know. We want to basically take all that communication automatically put it into the system, inside the profile, and that way you can see the entire contents of your message. And that can be shared with your team. And then also, you can take direct action that you could reply, and do something on that message, if you needed to. So let’s say I’m in the profile, to give you a quick example, you got different options when you’re sending email. And again these are built to help the salespeople. So maybe you talk, in this case, I talked to Mike, we have a great conversation and he says, “You know what, let’s just touch based in about two months.” Well, probably I’m going to forget or I’m going to get busy and I won’t come back to it. So the key is, right after I get off the phone, I can write my message, I can schedule sort of a certain day, in a certain time, and then I can set it and forget it. I can send it out. So I don’t have to worry about that. So let’s just send later future. By the way, there’s also an undo. So maybe I sent something and I go, “Oh oops, I shouldn’t have said that or I should have added something,” There’s the ability to undo. You might have those plug-ins inside your email, client that we build out, they can write into Lead Liaison. You can add a reminder. So maybe if the person doesn’t reply after a certain number of days or after a certain time, have your system send an email or create a tasks for you, again, that you could manage in your task manager. You want to be able to create sales template in the platform. You know, create your messaging ahead of time, and then insert those easily, put in snippets. For example, if I wanted to insert a little snippet about your company, now that’s a great used case to be able to insert that so that everybody is consistent. And then you got option two, you know, have dynamic signatures, put those in, so you have merged fields to track your open, track your clicks. That’s all sales enablement here, again, having the ability to send email from a profile and then having these different options to make things efficient for you.
Slide #38 and 39
How do these systems need to work together? So what you’re looking at here is what Lead Liaison calls a lifecycle funnel. These are the different lifecycle stages right. I mentioned earlier, sales enablement, kind of on the top, you know, marketing automation towards the bottom. We have these fixed lifecycle stages. You see suspect on the very top. If we were to take the suspect stage, and we were to expand it, and sort of blow it up a little bit-
Slide #40
Then you might have these different status. New suspect statuses. So as you’re working with your sales automation system, you know, you’re putting people into those rhythms that I talked about, depending on what happens, if they reply, if it bounces, you want to automatically update their suspect status.
Slide #41
One of the keys here is that you are managing everybody you know all your prospect in your town pace marketing, that’s happening in that suspect stage. But when somebody engages, they move automatically to engage. And that’s where your marketing automation system can kick in, and maybe nurture those people for the long run. That’s really again where the two systems complement one another.
Slide #42
Once you have that again, you got harmony between marketing and sales, sort of bringing everything together.
Slide #43
I do want to give you a couple of references here. Number one, we do have some training which is open to everybody on sales enablement. So you can access that training by going to salesandmarketinguniversity.com. You can learn more. There are three particular lessons in this training course, and you can apply. So just click, once you go to salesmarketinguniversity.com, click that apply for course, one of our trainers will accept it, and then you can go ahead and watch some of those capabilities to reinforce the learning here today.
Slide #44
Ryan Schefke: The other thing I mentioned is I’m starting—we start a service level agreement. So you can get that from the resource section on our website.
Slide #45
Ryan Schefke: Here I am on our website. And here if you go into resources, resource library-
Slide #46
And free tools, you’ll see the SLA over here. And then again, here’s the courses here in sales enablement. You just want to click on that, and then click
Slide #48
This is our pricing. I figured this was just easy to show to this to everybody, not trying to push Lead Liaison here, just trying to help you understand how we group things. The last two columns, these are really the sales enablement solutions. We do have sales pro-user seats. You see the rhythms that I talked about. Those rhythms are not available yet. They will be released at the end of March at the current plan. But you know, we do have all those other capabilities, that two-way email think, scheduling emails later, the undo, all of those things in that particular package. Inbound is really about visitor tracking and picking up more sales intelligence for your team. But again both of those solutions are sales enablement.
Q&A
Q: When is the Lead Liaison search email available?
A: We do have sales enablement today, again, you’re going to get a lot of those features, which will be that two-way email think, again, no matter where you’re sending emails, they’re going to show up in that timeline and be shared with everybody else. You can send later, you can undo, you can use sales templates, you can use the snippets, there’s going to be tracking of all those emails—all of that is available today, right now, from us, and again, end of March is when we expect to be GA, which is general availability, with our rhythms.
Q: Sales enablement really for business development managers or account managers?
A: Yeah, it’s really for both. If you’re doing business development, you’re probably targeting more people. Now, you know, the important thing is, even though all of those emails are sent through your exchange server or through Google, or Gmail, you still need, there are limits right. So you can trip thresholds and you got to be careful. We’re actually building in some throttling capabilities to throttle that. But again, if you’re more of a biz that person, you might be dealing with a larger volume of leads wherever you got those. But I think it’s still important to really not focus on quantity but to focus on quality. So our rhythm feature is really meant to allow reps to be very hyper-focus in a certain area. It’s typically a best practice to be jamming contact through the system. You know, I would say the smaller the better, the more targeted, it’s definitely quality over quantity there. You know, if you’re an account manager, you are probably dealing with major accounts. Like I mentioned earlier, you might have 50 accounts, 100 accounts, but this is perfect because with the rhythms, you know, keeping an account manager, is like I mentioned earlier, not just making those phone calls because it can take eight phone calls before you can reach somebody. I’ve actually seen stats that have better double that. So 15, 16 phone calls. You know, for me, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over. So we don’t want to just be doing phone calls. You know, your reps are going to get tired. They’re going to want to quit. So you got to have some variation. You got to have that multi-channel. You got to sprinkle in some personalized communication. You got to sprinkle in postcards and handwritten letters. If you’re an account manager, you’re probably focusing on bigger size deals, high value, tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps. And why not spend $6, $7 on a handwritten letter to really make your attempt at penetrating an account very effective. So there is the difference. It’s really, they’re intended for both account managers and business development reps.
Q: How does sales enablement work with Salesforce.
A: We also have that for Microsoft dynamics. We do in integrate with I’d say another half a dozen CRMs. Of course I mentioned we have our own essential CRM, some of the basic things in there, and we’ve got back, you know, that had allowed us to integrate with a bunch of other CRMs. But going back to the question, really sales enablement should be focused, you know, in the platform itself right. As I mentioned earlier, the two systems do complement one another because sales enablement is filling the top of the funnel. We really don’t want to do is you don’t want to, you know, load a bunch of stuff into salesforce and just, you know, muddy the water and have a bunch of contact data. You just want to be working these individuals through your sales enablement system. I do understand that, you know, that requires a rep to you know not use salesforce but to use a system like ours or something else, but you know, uses the sales automation system because it offers all those capabilities. When somebody becomes engaged, at that point, that’s when marketing automation takes over and marketing automation can help automate that process of pushing people, you know, into your CRM, like salesforce.com and then kicking in nurturing and things like that. So I’d say really, they work together very well, but it’s really about just making sure that you put qualified, interested people, people that engaged into the CRM.
Q: Can I use sales enablement on its own, so without using other like marketing automation?
A: So at the moment we do not provide sales enablement standalone. You do need to be using marketing automation from us, at this moment or some of our other solution. So at the moment, we do not offer sales enablement standalone. We might be changing that in the future. If we do, we probably will require a minimum number of users, you know four or five, something like that to get rolling. Those are the things that we definitely are considering, just because we’ve had a lot of demand it in terms of what we’re doing so far.
Dallas, Texas – Sales and marketing solutions provider, Lead Liaison, joins forces with the Sales Enablement Society, to discuss the the modern-day sales rep. The webinar will be hosted on Thursday, July 19th at 2:00pm EDT. Attendees can register for the event here.
Dallas, TX – Sales and marketing solutions provider, Lead Liaison, announces they now offer their most recent add-on solution for sales enablement as a standalone license. 
