BDRs As Catalysts: Sandler's Key To Sales-Marketing Synergy | INBOUND 2024

Good afternoon, everyone. How is everyone doing? All right. Welcome, welcome. As you can see, this session here is BDRS as Catalyst, where we'll talk about how we at Sandler found our key to sales and marketing synergy, also commonly known as sales and marketing alignment. So as we get started here today, I'll give you a little bit of context to who Sandler is. Sandler is a sales performance solution organization. We partner with your company, really working alongside your sales team to assess where they are in their skill sets, their strengths, those opportunities to grow. We then recommend different training paths for your team, actually deliver the training so we can foster those best practices, best selling habits, and make sure that we're reinforcing those behaviors. And then we come full circle by using assessments to measure the performance growth that we've seen and make sure that you're seeing the return on your training investment. So, enough about Sandler, enough about me. Let's get to know all of you out here in the audience today. So how many of you would say at your organizations you're experiencing some level of marketing and sales misunderstanding, alignment by a show of hands. Okay, okay. I see a bunch of you out there, okay. So know that you're not alone. How many of you here have daily drama with your sales team or your marketing team by a show of hands? Okay, okay, great. How many of you are at the wrong session but are too polite to now leave? It's okay, I see you. I hope that you'll stay, but no hard feelings either way. Well, as you can see by the show of hands, sales and marketing synergy is a common challenge across all organizations, regardless of industry, regardless of size. And one of the questions that we really asked ourselves at Sandler as we started off this year was why? Why is it such a struggle for our marketing team and our sales teams to align? And what we really found when we looked at the heart of the issue was was that the error lied within our structures. So to illustrate this a little bit, I'm going to lay out for you the more traditional sales model or sales team structure that we see in a lot of organizations. Some of you here today might have this yourselves or some variation of it in terms of titles, but we at Sandler, when we started out this year, had this very traditional structure for our sales team. So as you can see, at the very top, we have our sales leader. Typically, they're focused on organizational growth, reaching revenue targets, and then also managing the actual sales team. And then as you can see at this middle tier, we have the Actual sellers, who on a daily basis, they're managing the pipeline, they're adding to their quotas, and they're actually sometimes trying to retain the clients that you already have. And then at the very bottom. And where we'll focus a bit today is on the BDRs. Now, what we observed about our BDRs is that they were wearing so many different hats, it was hard to define their role. Some days they were doing outbound prospecting, which is great. Some days they were working the leads that we brought in for them. Some days they were assisting the sales team. So their role really varied on a daily basis, and it was hard for them to get the time and attention from our sales leaders because they were already managing our actual sellers. There was a gap there, but we saw that as an opportunity to connect the dots between our team. What if there was a better way to structure our teams to make sure that we were having an impact and bridging this gap that exists within so many industries and companies today? So as we look at this model that we had, we were feeling a lot of pain points. We'll say we were experiencing a lot of challenges, and some of you might relate to some of the challenges here today. So, as you can see, the first area where we were struggling was we had conflicting goals, metrics and definitions. And as we explained in that traditional model, and each one of those tiers had a different focus. So we as a marketing team were struggling to figure out how we could align with all three of those tiers. We were feeling this unanimous consensus feeling of wasted resources and campaign efforts. It was hard to know where we were having impact. It was hard to measure that impact and create any sort of feedback loop. And then lastly, we were getting reports of poor lead quality and conversion. It was hard to know whether or not that was in fact accurate because there wasn't a clear line of communication between our teams. So as we look at some of these challenges, which I'm sure some of you can relate to here today, I can tell you that there is a better way, a better way to, in fact, achieve synergy, and that it is possible. So as we get started, my name is Emily Davidson. I am the Enterprise Marketing Director at Sandler, and I can attest that I have experienced every single one of those challenges there. And what they were for us was a trigger to take action. And we were facing drama every day. But we saw such an opportunity with our BDRs to make a change that was going to improve our alignment with moving into the future. So as we get started here, I have to quote the man, the myth, the marketing legend himself, Dogpool and Ryan Reynolds, who said you'd be hard pressed to find more drama in the days of our lives than you would in an average day on the job. And it's true. Every time you go into the office, it can feel a bit like a soap opera. You against sales, sales against marketing, sales against marketing, against the client team. It's everywhere. But by shifting the BDRs and their structure to underneath marketing, we found that there was a better way to align our teams. By making one simple shift, we were able to solve all of the challenges we were experiencing. So what does this new model look like? We looked on that first slide at the more traditional approach, but let's look at this new, innovative model of structuring our team and show you visually what that looks like. So I like to refer to this as my sideways funnel just helps me. But as you can see here on the left hand side, we have the marketing team. We're putting out the campaigns at the top of the funnel, we're bringing in the leads. And then in the middle, we've shifted our BDRs to really own that middle of the funnel to bridge the gap between us and and the sellers. Now, this was great because we could then really get a feedback loop going with our BDRs. They were actually working the leads that we brought in. We were able to help them prioritize what to work on each day and actually optimize our campaigns based on that feedback. And then at the other end of the funnel, you'll see our sales team. They were super inspired by this because they felt there was credibility in the leads that were being passed to them because another seller, someone who had been in their shoes, was looking at these leads and confirming that they were quality. So this is the new structure that we've adopted. And this process really, really started with us looking at these structures and making sure that we could make this shift that would improve this alignment moving forward. Now, I know what some of you might be thinking. You're probably slightly scared, slightly confused. So let's go ahead and debunk a couple of these common misconceptions that there are about this new model. Some of the objections maybe that you could hear someone on your team presenting, and let's go into those and dig deep. So as we start, the first objection we heard when we started out was marketing doesn't understand sales. How on earth would the BDRs fall under our marketing umbrella? They don't get sales. Well, the reality is that we have more in common than we think. We oftentimes have shared goals. We're trying to hit revenue targets, build up the pipeline. And it wasn't until we took time to really communicate with each other and understand the challenges we were facing that we could find solutions together and perform a lot better. The next one that we heard a lot was more marketing will embellish the conversion data. Now, I'm sure we've all been on reporting calls where we have sales crossing their arms, fighting with us about what numbers are true, what attribution is true. But what we found actually is that by bringing the BDRs under the marketing umbrella, we were able to be much more accurate about what was truly converting, what was actual quality coming in and what was working for the sales team because it was translating into real deals that were actually closing. So working with the bdrs helped us be a lot more transparent and accurate than ever before. The next one that we heard a lot was marketing will just ruin the order of operations. Well, I can tell you that actually we all want to be giving our customers a cohesive journey. So from the time that they start as new prospects and they're starting to get to know us, moving down the funnel, we want to make sure that the journey they have, the communications that are going out to them makes sense. And what we found was that working closely with the BDRs, we were able to connect those dots. We were able to give them the campaign history, the activities, the engagement, and make sure that they were able to follow up with messages actually relevant to them at that time in their journey. And then the last one we heard a lot of was there's no way BDRs will ever embrace marketing. Well, the reality is, if you remember that traditional model, there oftentimes is a gap between the sales leaders at the top and the BDRs. It's hard. It's hard for the sales leaders to juggle the high level organizational goals and and manage their sellers and then also manage the BDRs. But by bringing them underneath marketing, we were able to dedicate time, energy into building structure and processes and actually listening to the feedback they were giving to improve what we were putting in at the top of the funnel for them to work. So we were able to build processes that are still in place to this day and have helped us immensely improve our conversion rates. Now, how do you do this at your company? So let's dig deep, a little bit into each one of these bullets here to decide Whether or not your organization should embrace this new model, maybe think about how you could enhance the role through marketing for your BDRs, and then look a little bit at what strategies you can use within this world of HubSpot to make this possible, to automate what can be automated, and to give them time back and build in those efficiencies. And lastly, how do you evaluate the performance of this model within your organization? So as we start, I'll give this in four steps. So step one for us, when we were initiating this new model, was investigating, what does that mean? It means taking a walk in the BDR shoes. Now, I don't know how many people here work in sales, but it can be extremely humbling. It was two weeks of me just truly trying to follow up, enroll in sequences, do video messages, enrich accounts, really trying to understand where they were maximizing their time, where they were wasting time, where they were struggling, what was hard and what wasn't. And it gave me a sense of empathy and understanding that I will forever appreciate all that they do for us because I know how hard their job is. And from that, we were able to see what was really working, what maybe wasn't working, what needed to be improved. We were able to see what was being measured today, what wasn't possible to measure, what we should be measuring, what was missing. And then also look at what could be automated and what had to remain manual and needed a little bit more personalization as you worked people down to the bottom of the funnel. So for all of you here today, I invite you to take out your phones and give this little QR code a scan. We've created a little bit of an ultimate investigation checklist. And the goal of this is to ask yourself a series of these questions that you'll get on this guide. And what I want you to do is just be honest with yourself. And if you're struggling to answer any of the questions on here, then shifting the BDRs into this new model might be a solution for you. It might be a fit, and it's something that took us a little bit of time to really analyze and be honest with ourselves on. But I promise that it was a switch that made all the difference in how we've aligned and performed this year. As we go into step two now, we think about how shifting the BDRs underneath marketing has helped us enhance that role. You might remember back on that slide about the traditional model where we said that the BDRs were wearing so many different hats, it was hard to define what their roles were, what their priorities were, where they should be spending their time to truly work and grow the business. So as we took them underneath our marketing umbrella, we were able to really give them what they needed to shine. And the first part of that was ownership, empowering them to really take charge of the middle of the funnel and understand that they played a key role in bridging that gap between marketing leads and sales leads, and then also giving them assurance. I think there's always that fear that if they come under marketing, are they going to be pushed past capacity, are they going to be overworked? Is there going to be maybe a shortage of leads and they'll be responsible? So we gave them assurance that we were stuck still really openly engaged and accountable for lead quality as we moved forward, and then also partnership that we can't do this without them, they can't do this without us. So we're stronger together in reaching these goals and finding solutions that are really going to grow our business. So, as you can see here, we made quite a few shifts in how we previously defined this role and how we now define it today. So, as you can see in this little summary, we've changed them from being reactive to waiting for folks to tell them what they were supposed to prioritize, what to do each day, to proactive. They know what their priorities are. They're able to use their prospecting dashboards, they're able to check their alerts each day and stay on top of the new leads coming in and feeling good about doing outbound in their schedules. And we also shifted them from just being inbound focused to expanding out to outbound. And it's been amazing to see how many outbound leads we've gotten in addition to inbound this year by just giving them the structure and the processes to do that. And then lastly, instead of having a combative environment like we used to, we have so much more collaboration. We're able to talk each week, get their feedback in real time, and update our campaigns in real time so that we're actually hearing each other and making a real difference. And then step three, how do you actually implement this in this HubSpot universe? So let's talk about how we can leverage the different parts of marketing hub and sales hub to make all of this a reality. So, as you can see here, the first step for us was scoring. And we used a combination of HubSpot's lead scoring feature and a very simple workflow. So for us, we decided to define an MQL as someone who has a score of 50 or higher. And what that means is once someone reaches that score, they get converted to an MQL. We then rotate them amongst our different BDRs so they each have a fair opportunity to work them. And then from that we also send them an email so they have an update in real time when a new lead is available for them to work and we assign it as a task. Again, going back to that Prospecting dashboard, it has been huge in giving them their list of to dos each day and making sure that they're checking off all the boxes, which is a great segue into that feature itself. So if you're not using Prospecting Dashboard today, I would strongly encourage checking it out. It's been immensely helpful in how our bdrs structure their day, look at their activities, and for us, it gives us visibility into the volume that they have, into the calls they're having, into the meetings that are taking place, and also getting a sense of what they're doing and their impact on actual pipeline and deals. And then the next piece for us was personalization and really enhancing this. So you heard me mention earlier about a feedback loop and it's been really difficult for us before this year to understand what was working with our leads and what wasn't. So what we decided to do was get a small feedback loop going and started out very simple, just one property which was lead status. All the BDRs have to do is update that lead status each time they work on a lead and it helps us know what's going on with that lead and also make sure that we enroll them in a nurture that's relevant to them. So as you can see, if they are in progress, we put them in a general nurture. If there's an active opportunity going, we make sure they have a reinforcement nurture happening. So we want to make sure that what's going out to them is meaningful and relevant to where they are in their buying journey. And that was all through one place property that helped us create a really impactful feedback loop. And then as you can see up here, we love sequences. We love using the personalization tokens that HubSpot has available. Those have been amazing for us in making sure that we are really resonating with those that we're reaching out to. But in addition to these very personalized messages, we like to vary the channels of communication. We love using Vidyard, which is a video messaging tool, and we'll create 20 to 30 second introduction videos that really make the prospect feel special. By using their name, by giving a face to the email signature that they have. So it really makes that humanization of a message so much stronger when we have elements like this in our sequences. And then additionally you can see that we have a couple of different emails, a couple of different ways that we structure our content. So for us, sequences can be based on the pain points we're seeing them struggle with or what search topics they're looking at. Sometimes it's based on industry and what those trends are at the time. So really making sure that your sequences are diversified to have the most impact and resonate with your prospects. And then as you can see too, we love using LinkedIn and other channels as other methods of communication. Using different channels just helps reinforce your presence and making sure that they have all the means of contacting you as much as possible. So I did want to kind of share this. I know we have AI to do a lot of things for us nowadays, but for me, I love getting other people's sequences because it just helps me see what is actually working for other organizations and what is not. So I invite you to skip scan the QR code and take a sample of our messages. And again, they are very sandlerized, but feel free to customize them. Look at them, look at the way that they're structured. And these are our best performing sequences this year. So they have been tried and tested and we've seen them really perform. So if there's a way to tailor them to your organization, you're absolutely welcome to do that. And then as we go here, you'll see again that feedback loop that was really one of the missing pieces. Before we made this structural shift, we never felt like we could trust the feedback we were getting from sales because sometimes it was verbal, it was hard to follow the trail within HubSpot. I know many a night I was looking at notes on different company records, on different contact records. There was no consistent way to measure where these leads were going and what was happening to them. So when it comes to a feedback loop, I really recommend keeping it simple because A it will ensure the likelihood of them actually following a process. But then two, it keeps it simple for you and easy to automate and route. So as you can see, we focused on 4, 4 properties to help us know what's going on with the leads that we send to our bdrs and, and where they are going in their journey. Whether they're being passed to sales, whether they're becoming SQLs, whether they're actively being worked, whether they've been disqualified. You can see that each one of these properties gives us a clue as to where these leads are going and we're able to accurately report on those and make sure that we're optimizing our campaigns based on the feedback that we get. And then lastly, how do you measure the success of this? And there's a couple of different ways you can do that. Whether it's attribution, if that's something that your team is struggling to really dig into when it comes to the active pipeline, whether it's your conversion rates or just getting those rates up from where you are Today, from your MQLs to SQLs, I'd like to share a little bit about what this model has actually done for us. So, as you can see, we've had an 80% increase in marketing pipeline attribution, which is huge. Last year we knew we were a small piece of the pie, but this year we have seen that grown exponentially, all tracing back to the marketing and BDR efforts and how they've been stamped in HubSpot. We've seen a 60% increase in MQL to SQL conversions, which was unheard of before. And again, it goes back to that confidence that we're having confidence in our BDRs. We know that they're following the process, that they're working these leads, and sales knows that they're working them too. So they know they're getting quality and we know that we're getting quality feedback fed back to us so we can make sure that our campaigns are performing to their most potential. And then you'll see here too that we have 60% percent increase in SQLs per month passed. Again, this all goes back to tracing that down to our BDRs, knowing that they're having those discovery calls and making sure that those leads are getting passed and ultimately turning into real deals and real business. And then you'll also see that as of six months into the year, the halfway point. So it's a little bit, little bit outdated, it's higher now, but as of six months into the year, we had 6.8 million in active pipeline attributed to the efforts of the marketing and BDR team. So being able to measure this has been huge. It's one thing to make a shift and kind of take a risk in this new approach, but we can see that it's having real measurable impact. And then lastly, finally getting 100% access to the full client journey, understanding where they come in, where they start, how they've worked their way down the funnel to where they do turn into a new customer. And that's helped us so much be able to be more predictive in our marketing tactics and make sure that we can repeat those cases and learn from them. So it has been immensely successful. So if you are thinking about whether this new approach is right for you and your organization, I hope want to be very realistic with timelines and how it took us to roll this out. So I would say that it took us five to six months to really get this engine up and running. But the beautiful thing about it is even as you're building these processes, optimizing them, measuring them, reporting, changing, you're still going to see actual growth in your pipeline, actual impact in your business. So you can see three months into the year we had 3.2 in pipeline attribution and that almost doubled by month six. So even as you're building this out and making changes, you're still actually having an impact on your organization. Now as we wrap up here, I know we did a bit more of a case study with HubSpot because it has been central to our sales and marketing ecosystem. So I know it isn't quite posted yet, but feel free to download the slides, make sure you scan a copy of this QR code and the HubSpot Sandler case study will be available probably in the next day or so. I'll get it reviewed, I'll get it in, don't worry. But I do want to thank you all so much for being here and thank you so much. I hope you do give this a try and I hope that it does help your businesses as well.