Jen Spencer, SmartBug Media

Jen Spencer, SmartBug Media, SmartBug Marketing, SmartBug Marketing, SmartBug Marketing, SmartBug I'm Jen Spencer. I'm the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for SmartBug Media. We are an intelligent inbound marketing agency focused on helping our clients grow revenue. My session at inbound is From Sidekick to Superhero, the Digital Transformation of Today's SSE. And really the inspiration for the session was the fact that when I look at the way that traditional sales teams have been constructed and what the makeup of a sales development rep or a business development rep has been over let's say the last five years, that type of individual has really had to evolve due to the fact that there are tools that offer conversational AI, chat bots, customer expectations, what customers actually expect their experience to be when they're talking to someone in sales. Those things have helped reshape what an SDR should be doing. So in my talk I actually dive into very specific examples and kind of pro tips for what a good solid sales development rep should be doing today versus what he or she was doing even a year ago. So I think in the past when you hired a group of sales development reps you were thinking okay can this person sort of follow these rules, follow this script, this protocol, this playbook, you get someone who's okay this person's smart and they're driven and let's kind of give them this sort of blanket sort of notebook of like this is everything you need to do. But really that SDR has to be much more finely attuned to what that specific buyer persona needs. The training needs to be more focused on the customer and less focused on the product and qualifying that individual. So little things like providing your SDRs with battle cards by persona. So there are some people who love to get long very complex emails with a ton of information and a ton of data. I am not one of those people. If you cannot tell me what value you bring to me in two sentences or less it's like I'm done with the conversation. So there are other people who are more visual who would rather receive a video and be able to see something in action. There are people who want to actually try it and if you can dial into what your buyer persona is, how your buyer persona is actually like to consume information then empower the SDRs to actually communicate with those customers in that fashion. So we're not doing that because we are, and I say we, but like as a kind of sales society we're trying to keep everything very very process oriented and very rinse and repeat and it's not allowing SDRs to be flexible to really be the superhero for the customer because they're the first person in the company typically that's going to actually engage with that future customer. From a skill set perspective I think there are some soft skills that SDRs need to have when it comes to being able to communicate well, being able to listen well and being able to pick up on cues that they are getting both from what emails or what pieces of content are being consumed and what kind of social media activity a person is putting out there. So here's an example, I've heard SDRs complain, this person has opened, they've opened all of my emails and they've never responded to me, right? I don't understand, they keep going back to our website but I can't get them on the phone. If you're the SDR you can't go to that potential customer and with the data set in your head of well you've been opening my emails, who knows maybe it's automatically opening, maybe it's like their kid playing on their phone and it's opening the email. Look at the context of is there a trend in what communications are being opened? Do you find that the people who are opening these emails, there's a certain topic that's being covered and then focus on that topic in your reach out. Look to see is any of those topics, are they being mentioned or shared by that individual on social media? If someone's really active, you notice on LinkedIn then maybe a better way to get a hold of them is going to be on LinkedIn. It doesn't mean you just go all in on LinkedIn and that's the only place you spend time but it's about understanding where your customer is and then spending time in those specific channels. And the thing is that can totally vary. So someone can have my exact same job title at my competitor and we're going to still have different communication styles. And so that's where the SDR has to be more of a superhero because they have to be able to see through the brick wall. They have to be able to see into the DNA of that person and that's a different kind of individual, that's a different kind of team member that you're hiring. A couple of companies ago, one day I was kind of took a step back and I was looking at all of our customers, the newer customers and I was looking at the sales people we had. And it was so amusing to me because when we looked at the actual buyers, the people who were the ones who were our internal champions that we sold our product to, their personalities were very similar to the sales person that brought them on board because like attracts like. So think about who's your target audience, who are you selling to and you can read a bunch of books that tell you what kind of a sales person to hire and there's all kinds of, oh hire a former athlete because they're going to be competitive, hire this Navy SEAL because he doesn't know how to quit. Okay, is that reflective of the kind of customer that you have, right? And I think we need to actually start thinking about who we're hiring and making sure that it's actually mapping up with the type of buyer that we want to attract. So marketing and sales need to come together. I know this is like, this sounds like so old, this could have been a video from five years ago talking about marketing and sales alignment, but I think it's marketing's job, I believe firmly it's marketing's job to take all of your campaign assets one step further and empower your sales team, which you know mostly that first line is going to be the STRs with resources. So cheat sheets on like the new campaigns and content that you have. Figuring out what's the best way to communicate any kind of new marketing launches. So if you have your CEO is going to be featured in Forbes or you have a new ebook that's launching or you have a new video that you are, that you're going to be promoting, have you notified, properly notified your sales team? Are they aware of it? And you may think as a marketer, oh yeah, I let them know or it's on our Google calendar or it's in some public place, they can find it if they want it. It's not good enough. You have to actually talk to them, sit down, have coffee with people one on one, find out what's the best way I can help you get this information because it's going to make your marketing campaign more successful if you're bringing that sales individual in and make it kind of part of their delivery too. It's the littlest things, the littlest things. Even like one of my biggest lessons was at my last company, I had an STR say, can you just let me know what time this campaign is launching? Just like an announcement of a new piece of content, we had an ebook. Sure, okay. He then blocked out a half an hour on his calendar at the time that that campaign was going out. And in doing so, what happened is at that time, all these people were coming to our website to consume it and he was getting notifications, okay, these people are on our website, they're consuming it and he had a much higher connect rate when he reached out to them because they were actively engaged in the content at the time. Simple, I mean just a simple little thing that makes a big difference to someone who is compensated based on the number of connect calls he has and book meetings he can get. Video is an extremely powerful tool because it transcends what you're able to, what you're capable of doing just with a written word on a page or even just a basic static image. But I think the same goes true for anything else that you're doing for your customers and your future customers, right? You need to be communicating with them in the way that they want to be communicated with. So you're going to have some customers and some buyers who want written format content and you're going to have some who are going to want more visual, more engaging content. I used to be a high school English teacher. I would have to flex myself and present information, present content in different ways because I had students who they all learned a little bit differently and something that would resonate with one wouldn't resonate with another. And so do I believe that video is going to be the answer to all of your problems for every single buyer you have? No, no it's not. But if you're not doing it, you're potentially missing out on at least a third of the people that are in your database that most likely actually want to engage with you on video. So my advice is produce videos that don't have to be super fancy by any means but then keep track in your database, in your marketing automation platform or your CRM, look at that engagement, keep track of who consistently is engaging with your videos, is watching your videos. Then you can start to build, you can segment those lists and now you can start to create campaigns just for those people and have deeper engagement with a smaller group of individuals than trying to boil the ocean with everyone in your database. I've used video for kind of reconnecting with individuals, for introducing myself to individuals. Very simple personalized one to one videos I think can be extremely powerful. And I think in the world of total automation and all this mass communication, if you can do things that show that you put a little bit of extra care and time into your approach, I think by and large they're going to be appreciated. So I've done it, I encourage my sales team to do it and I think it has the opportunity to be very, very powerful. Where I see people kind of stumble or take shortcuts and where I want to kind of jump in and make adjustments is just relying on video to do it all for you and it's not going to. So rather than sending someone, let's say you have a recorded webinar, like simplest form of video, you have a recorded webinar that you did and you want to share that with someone who wasn't on the webinar. A salesperson might say, oh yeah, I'll send them this video and here's a thumbnail they can click on it and they can watch it. Go the extra mile and actually point out to that person, I thought of you at, it was around this slide, at this time stamp, this really resonated with me based on our last conversation. I would love to know, I'd love to continue this conversation with you. Now if I get that email, I'm thinking well I better watch because that was time that someone put into connecting and there must be something that I'd set, I mean it gives it context. Yes, at SmartBug we try to produce one webinar a month and feature different members of our team who can share their expertise. It's interesting, you might think no one's doing webinars anymore, who's going to spend time and time after time I am just astounded by how many people will carve out 30 minutes of their day or sometimes an hour of their day to engage. So I find that webinars are extremely impactful when they have a very niche topic, you're very, very focused, you're going to, you're going to go for maybe a smaller segment, you're not going to have you know maybe thousands of people on the webinar, that's okay because if I would rather have 30 people who are actively engaged for a solid 28 minutes than 5,000 people who have it in the background and they're not really getting much value out of it. The webinar will give you that content, gives sales teams kind of a talking point to continue engaging conversation, it gives marketing teams the opportunity to nurture that individual and follow up with content that's related to the topic that was being covered. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for it to be kind of an anchor in a content campaign. So we're here at Inbound and HubSpot has announced that the funnel is gone and it's all about this flywheel where you have your customers at the center and they're keeping kind of sales and marketing spinning and moving and that's what's coming, that's really what is next. We as marketers and salespeople are going to continue to give up control over that sales process and over what drives someone to buy and we're going to, I believe what we're going to see more of is customer driven initiatives. I think about our company, probably half of the inbound leads we get are some kind of customer based referral in nature. So when you make your customers wildly successful, they want to share that with the world. They want everyone else to know what they're doing that's amazing unless they're like super secretive and they don't want anyone to know. There are a few of those. But mostly people want to share their successes and the best thing that an organization can do today is identify ways that you can fuel that kind of customer evangelism because that's what's going to be driving more revenue for your business moving on into the future.