Make Buying Easy to Set Yourself Apart - Mark Tanner, Jonathon Blackburn, Kendra Berner - Revenue Today - Episode # 070

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

Jonathan, I mean, one that comes to mind for, or kind of along the same lines you just mentioned there, is around like who else cares about this problem and like kind of leaning in towards the supporting stakeholders to help your champion perhaps even access other budgets, right? Or just to get more on board for that buying committee. We've done that with a couple of deals here that it's a little bit more of a unique buyer. You have to position your product probably in a different way, like a different value prop, but Big problems for a company, multiple people will care about that big problem, right? And so finding out who those folks are is what's going to help you propel a deal forward also with more oomph too. Totally.

I think on my side, I mean, I think that, look, I'm gonna echo a few things, man. Like not to go all challenge a sale on everybody here, but like I think, you know, I do think that if you have a depth of understanding in a certain field and you can sort of push the buyer a little bit, be like, hey, like, You know, again, knowing where you win. Hey, we've worked like heaps of deals in this area and here are the impact. I bet, you know, sometimes it can be the case that you've worked a bunch of these deals and they're like, hey, you've brought up that there's problem A and problem B. We also often see problem C and problem D, you know? And I think that when people roll this out, they also say, hey, we also had benefit X or benefit Y. And I think if you, you should know more about this, right, than your prospect to some degree, certainly like all the possibilities that exist out there. And again, this is like, I remember what in like rep land, you know, people would make all these case studies and I'd be like, yeah, cool, whatever. And like at a certain point you like, you actually start to realize like there is gold in this. And if you go and spend time like really diving into the case studies, your like marketing team or your like sales enablement team or whatever else they're making and actually truly understand them, especially the ones that are, you know, in your wheelhouse, you know, those, the stats that live in there, if you can have them be able to quick to call to mind or be able to send one over and sort of say, hey, I think like, you know, this sort of— I think you might find that we've already talked about, yes, there's other things that are really important to you, but also here are some other things that could help sort of move things along. I think that can be, you know, quite potent. One thing, this is a little bit more for any RevOps folks or sales folks on the call. Something I heard of quite recently that I loved as an idea that we actually haven't done at Quill yet, but I think we should play around with it is a company was doing these auto emails that were sent out at different deal stages. And so not every deal stage, but at certain stages there was like a drip email email campaign that sort of went out to different folks. And basically they were like, what is the sort of— what are the common customer fears at different stages? And so like, just to pick one, when you got towards the end of the cycle, um, there's a sort of zone of like, oh, like, you know, is this implementation going to be sort of painful or whatever else? And like, they like sent out this like this email that sort of said— had a whole bunch of G2 reviews in there being like this was the fastest implementation, like this was so easy, and this sort of, you know, positive stuff there. And it was like customer voice, like building trust, um, but then also was like very much talking about like, you know, ROI or ease of implementation or like whatever the sort of relevant thing was there. And again, it's just like a little thing of like, you know, helping sort of move things forward and understanding it at different stages. There are sort of different sort of core concerns that people have, and they do shift throughout, throughout the process. And I think if you can sort of, you know, have some degree of awareness what they are, they can also help you shift gears as you're sort of driving this decision-making. Gears driving, anybody? No. Okay. All right. But I'd say, I'd say, you know, other than that, I'm just going to sort of be echoing, echoing the other fine folks on this call.

I love it. Yeah. Talking about kind of like the qualification in the beginning, but then the enabling towards the end of your sales cycle. And I think that's honestly a great transition for us when we think about You know, once we have a little bit more control of driving the decision-making, offering next steps that make sense towards your prospect based off of other customers that have similar pain points and are looking for the same outcomes, we start to get into, you know, what's gonna set yourself apart. Jean, I think this next slide would be great for number 5. That'd be perfect for us. So our next and final recommendation is kind of talking about like, how do we stand out from the crowd, right? It's a lot of the in-between moments that matter to become a vendor of choice. I think actually I'd love to start with a question here, which would be for Jonathan and Mark a little bit on the spot. But anything that you've bought for your teams, can you remember a time where a seller stood out as compared to others and like why they did?

I mean, I'll say that the— I think so. We had a realm a while back where there was— there are 2 that come to mind. One was a simple one, which is I'm sure people are aware of Sendoso and people like that, you know, getting a whole bunch of very personalized swag delivered to you, which was obviously from them sort of showing off what they could do for us. And I think that even includes some different customers of ours as this sort of thing which they'd grabbed from our website. And again, it was just a very personalized thing and a physical thing. I think that was a clever little moment. There was another time where a video company who was sort of pitching Quilla to do video work did like a fake Quilla video that's, you know, put in the effort. And they were like, it was so incredibly bad as a video. Like, and they were sort of, and they were playing on how bad, like, you know, like bad videos can be to do this and this sort of stuff there. But it was like, it was silly and quite funny. And it was the worst, like, sort of little cartoon animation thing you'd seen. But it But again, that's something that's like, that's a bit different. That's a bit memorable. It's a bit weird. And I think that does help you, you know, shows a degree of effort and a degree of care. And I think that it's the kind of thing that I think makes it easy to take a call. Totally. JB, what about you?

I'll share a quick story too. We recently bought a new tool, another kind of sales tech tool. I'll mention the name, a company called Drift. They actually began prospecting to us by signing up for Quiller on one of our free accounts, created a Quiller page, and then they sent that to myself and a couple other people. And it was really good. I mean, it stood out. I've never been prospected to with my own tool before, so I thought that was really interesting, unique. Funny enough, I think the process ended up being so easy and simple for them that now we're actually having a conversation with them around something very similar. But that definitely stood out and I give them major props for being creative. That was enough to get them in the door, but then kind of going back to some of the things you actually mentioned here throughout this call that I will give them credit for doing as well made it an easy decision for us to choose to work with them.

I love that. Yeah, it sounds like kind of in both those cases, There's an element of creativity that really sets the seller apart. But then also, I mean, we know this is a common stat, like most prospects don't feel like the person who's selling them really knows their problems nor knows them, right? And so the next layer of really setting yourself apart is truly understanding the pain from your prospect. And then also a lot of the little moments that exist in a sales cycle, having all your— Communication resources in one place that's easy and makes the buying process easier sets yourself apart. Speed of response, as well as really digging down into, you know, understanding the process to get something approved and enabling your champion, your economic buyer with the right resources at the right time so that they're not also feeling like they have to do this work on the side as a part of their evaluation process. I know that at Lattice we use really like kind of a hub and a resource to communicate with our clients to share resources. I think one of the reasons why I love it is going back to that mutual action plan. We use a resource where we can actually like communicate about a mutual action plan with a client together, back and forth, adjusted accordingly so that both parties really feel bought into the mutual action plan versus a mutual action plan getting pressed on a prospect that may not even have real buy-in. Right. I know, JB, we had talked about this, obviously, of course, with Quiller. Would love to get your perspective around how you think of Quiller as like a one-stop shop and really effective.

Yeah, totally. Well, I think I'm probably just going to echo a bunch of the things that you just said, but being someone who obviously leads the sales team, but then also someone who makes buying decisions, I don't make decisions in a vacuum myself either. Thinking back to the tool that we recently bought, I think there was about 6 people that got involved in various points in the conversation with that, and then being able to share the right information with them. Made it significantly easier. I think there's also something to be said around making it easier for your buyer to actually buy from you. And that means different things to different people depending on your sales cycle, your sales length, your ACV, a lot of other things. But I think that's also really important. And as a buyer, I'm sure anyone in any role could probably kind of relate to this, I'm doing a lot of stuff and buying something or evaluating something is really one small part of my job on top of the other things that I'm consistently doing. And so being able to use a resource or have something to tie back to say, what was our last conversation about? What did we discuss? What have we looked at? And I have to begin every conversation with that. And then also being able to share those resources with other people who are involved in the process, incredibly important. But at its core, I think it's just, you know, make it easier for people to work with you and buy from you.

Yeah, I plus one to that. I mean, I think like, listen, sorry, we've gone all this way. I'm the founder of Quiller. I've got to put the Quiller hat on at some point. But I do think like one of the things that we sort of see at Quiller and like, you know, a whole ethos that we sort of have, you know, around at Quiller generally is like, you know, our goal is not just to build something that's a tool that's wonderful for the seller, but that is wonderful for both the buyer and the seller. And we really do think that the B2B buying experience is like, can be a bit junk, to be honest. If you look at it versus like how we sort of live our world, you know, in our sort of in-consumer buying experiences, it's so nice, it's so seamless, there's so much information provided. And I think it can, it can really feel a bit not like that in B2B to some degree. And I think one of the things that we've been sort of, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff we sort of work towards on this side about having a hub for everyone to come together. And I think One of the things that we've loved, you know, Quilla pages are web pages. So as you sort of create them, you can do a whole bunch of interesting stuff. You can do interesting ROI calculators, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like one of the ones we've sort of noticed recently a lot of is a lot of just like Gong videos being embedded. And I love this sort of thing where people are taking, they're recording the product demo or the service demo, the core thing there. And yes, maybe you've got 2 or 3 folks on the call there. But when you send out your sort of, you know, this little hub in Quilla, or it's like, you know, maybe something of a proposal, but it's also got those other parts in it. Being able to embed that video, maybe you snip it down to like the right size where it's just the product, you know, just the 20 minutes you're sort of really going through the product. But like the CFO joins the thing, he doesn't really know what's going on here. If he can just quickly, you know, go in here, or maybe there's like the CEO is there and she just wants to, you know, have a quick look and understanding, like this ability to very quickly say, what's all the information you want to get up to speed on here? Like, oh, there's some links to case studies, or there's this thing here, or I can see the pricing. Oh, it's actually interactive. Or do we need this or that? And I can play around, understand that all of these sort of areas, whether it's in Quillr or some other hub, like I do think that that's the giving, making it easy for the other parts of your buyer to get up to speed quickly and easily in a really nice way. Like if it shines through, you know, sort of Kendra said earlier about like, you know, quick response times, whatever else, like all of these little moments you do, they give a flavor of what it's like to work with your company. Right? Like, and if you are slow to respond, it's hard to get information out of you, no one knows what the right thing is, or blah blah blah, whatever else, it just makes it feel like working with your company is going to be a pain. If it's a delight to work with you, people are going to feel like it's a delight to work with your company. Hopefully it is a delight to work with your company. Um, and I think that, you know, I think that that's, um, that effort really does shine through, and, and never more so than in times Times like now.

Totally. I think also just from the rep perspective, like, I know which deals I felt like really, really strong in, right? Where you just had the right deal, the right movement across the deal, the right information at the right time for the buyer. And those are the deals they're usually most proud of that then carry or like propel you into your next series of growth with bigger deals. It brings you confidence for those bigger deals. And yeah, the more you can practice that, Obviously, the better outcomes you're probably gonna see too if you're running more deals like that strategically.

100%. Okay, I think, team, we think we're out of time here and we're gonna flip over to a live Q&A with John and maybe some others as well.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in RevGenius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in RevGenius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.