4 Ways to Deliver Personalization at Scale Throughout the Customer Journey with Alyce

4 ways to deliver personalization at scale. Please join me in welcoming MK. Please take it away.

Darling, thank you so much for that introduction, and thank you to everyone who has dialed in. Those that joined early jumped into the chat and started sharing more about where they're calling in from and maybe some key takeaways from SASPer thus far. Other folks were sharing what they're getting up to this weekend. So I'd love to hear where you're calling in from and maybe a couple of fun facts about you. I'd like to spend some time actually talking a little bit about the fact that in today's world, I'm starting to feel like marketing is a bit like an assembly line. We have a process that tends to run a lot of our operational deliverables as marketers. Then as a result, the process seems to be running our marketing instead of our marketing running that process. And the impact of that over time has started to change and shift the way that marketing is being received by consumers. In fact, what I have found is that marketing, because of the process, has become a bit more impersonal, a bit less authentic. And I'm not alone in that. In fact, 66% of folks say that they are starting to encounter unpersonalized experiences. And those experiences, they're actually stopping them from making a purchase. I'd like to talk about, um, real fast, going back in time, going back to the '80s, back to, um, a time where we built our businesses based off of the people that we knew and the people that we wanted to do business with. When you think about the impact of working with those within your network You had a very personal connection with those folks, but your ability to scale and reach bigger audiences, that was few and further between. Fast forward to the next decade in the 1990s, what we call the smile and dial era, where automation started to pick up in telephone. We look at our ability to scale and reach folks during that era, but With scripted phone calls and with telemarketing, you saw that the, the personal that we once had in the '80s started to wane. Then the 2000s came along, what we call the automation era. And the automation era introduced an explosion of high velocity, high scale, high reach approach to marketing and selling. And again, though, we offset that reach and that scale for a less personal, a less meaningful relationship with the folks that we wanted to do business with. We then ushered in the 2020s where we all flipped our funnels and we started thinking about the folks that we wanted to do business with. We thought about account-based marketing during that era and where we blended scale and reach with the automation. We again continued to depreciate getting personal with the people we wanted to do business with. Now moving forward into 2020, we have all seen how much automation has started to distance our prospects, how much automation has really done, done a lot to help us scale our work. But what we now need to do is be thinking about how do we infuse what we learned in the '80s in that relationship era about using personal bonds to connect with the people we want to do business with, as well as blending in automation for that reach. As we move forward, I love this quote that talks about the role of experiences. In fact, many folks today have start— begun to realize that people, they're not focusing on the products. Product alone and the features alone, those are not the key differentiator. In fact, The experience, the experience that we build for our prospects, that is what sets businesses apart today. So in today's conversation, I want to talk about how we can use personalized experiences to maximize that reach, maximize the scale of our efforts while still retaining that touch of personal everywhere we go. Again, I love this session as a dynamic, almost conversational session, so please jump into the chat. I'd love to learn from and with you and hear some of your thoughts real time and on the fly as we go through today's session. I have my chat window open so I can see any live questions that come through. I'd love to make this just as valuable for you as it is for me. One of my first tips that I often recommend for folks who are looking to introduce more personalized contributions and experiences at scale is turning industry events into interest events. Now I recognize we are all here gathered today, assembled at an industry event, and I am by no means saying that industry events should be thrown to the wayside. But what I am saying is that if you have a persona, for example, Amira here, who only has roughly about 60 to 90 minutes a a day to be able to contribute to some external type of thought leadership. What better way to make that experience memorable than to introduce something to appeal to the person, not just the persona. So maybe in this instance, you might find someone within your network is really excited about cooking. A lot of us have spent some time, especially thanks to last year's pandemic, spending some time, more time in our kitchens thinking about how we can make new cuisines. So when you take those industry events and turn them into interest events, you are shifting something that goes from being general to something feeling personal and feeling immersive in the experience. Now I recognize a lot of businesses are going to be thinking critically about the role of both in-person and digital events moving forward. I'm in full belief that you should have both digital and in-person or virtual experiences in a hybrid format. But to be able to scale an interest-based events, there's a couple of tricks that you can have up your sleeve or to empower your team to use to deliver those personal experiences. The first step that I have is partner with the service that will specialize in creating these immersive experience for you. Right now, I've seen a lot of folks experiment with craft beer tasting. I've seen folks experiment with arts and crafts, things that draw the family together and build more of an immersive experience for the person and the people, not just the persona. I'm also a big fan of turning happy hours into activity-based hours. I like when people can make connections and can bond with one another. I call that the professional meet cute. When you were able to go to your trade shows and bump into someone in line waiting for lunch, or maybe just happen to connect with someone at a booth, you can facilitate those sessions and help facilitate bonds between attendees at those experiences by turning those networking social hours into something that's activity-based, like for example, a culinary class together. Also, if you are entertaining the idea of coming back to an in-person event experience, I highly recommend using a roadshow framework to host events in the cities in which you're going to be attending and/or sponsoring events. Make sure you're trying to triangulate as well the cities that are pop— most highly populated with your prospects and customers. The best part of marketing in today's era is that word of mouth is becoming a much, much stronger mechanism for helping to scale businesses. What better way for marketers to do their marketing than to have your customers do the marketing for you? So when you use a roadshow framework and invite your prospects and customers together to these activity hours, they can make meaningful connections with one another. And share their advice about maybe potentially partnering with your product, brand, or service. The last fun fact I have for you and tip I have for you about having, how to scale interest-based events is to not just blindly pick an event and/or an experience, but to actually ask your attendees what types of experiences would be meaningful or interesting for you to engage with. So for example, maybe a pre-attendance survey could go out giving people a selection about 5 to 10 things that they could choose from to get involved with. I've seen events host yoga sessions, some just light stretching at the desk. I've seen some other events create jewelry making, just something that with a little bit more tactile immersive experience. But if you prioritize the person over the persona through these experiences, you're going to see so much more engagement during those sessions. In fact, 68% of event hosts are saying that it is more difficult to keep folks engaged. If you are paying attention and you are engaged, please toss a little something in the chat. Give me an emoji in your, in your window just so I know that you are engaged and present during this session. But with that said, I think it's also really important here to take a look at what Amelia, who is the SVP and GM of Saastr, has to say about quality. The quality of the experience is ultimately what is getting folks to come back year after year after year and recommending attending your event to other folks. Thanks, Sandy, for paying attention. You're the only one that jumped in there. There we go. Now we got some folks. Hey, Tori. Hey, Celso. Hey, Katu. Hey, Dan. Appreciate everybody who is paying attention. Jumping in and engaging with me during this session. It's tough. And so again, when you get more personal, and you spend some more time thinking about the person over the persona, especially in interest-based events, things can go a long way. But that's not all. When we think about how you go about prospecting to your personas, your persona-based prospecting can feel a little stale, it can feel a little generic. In fact, Tracy, This persona of a chief information officer is tired of receiving socks. Some folks are big sock sticklers. I've had a lot of folks say, hey, you know, I love my Bombard socks. No hate for the sock game whatsoever. But if you are on the receiving end of a lot of promotional items like I am, the socks are getting a little stale, a little old. So when you start to think about the person, not just the persona, using gifting in your prospecting becomes a lot more exciting and a lot more engaging for the person on the receiving end. In this case, Tracy just so happens to be a Comic-Con crusader. Is anybody else a big Comic-Con fan out there? And so with Tracy's affinity in her personal life for comic books and attending Comic-Con events, why not send Tracy a gift that really maps to what she does when she hangs up her CIO hat at the end of the day, and things that revitalize and rejuvenate her. So gifting as an important part of prospecting, it's becoming a lot more popular using person-based gifting tactics instead of persona-based gifting tactics makes that engagement much more meaningful. And ultimately that experience that much more elevated. Couple of tips for folks on how to deliver personal gifting at scale. Now I happen to be a little bit biased here. The company that I work for, Alyce, we specialize in personal gifting at scale. So a couple of tips for you if you're considering gifting as a strategy for better, more elevated, and more personal experiences through prospecting. First and foremost, spend some time sitting down with your sales team, even your customer success teams, your marketing teams, to architect that customer journey and look for those critical inflection points in their journey for gifting moments. Moments are those times where a meaningful interaction on a one-to-one level can really accelerate the relationship. Once you've started to identify those moments, the next thing you want to do is couple in the meaningful gifts that really do elevate that experience. For example, you could use an AI tool like Alice to be able to find the gifts like the vintage comic books I have displayed here to be able to delight and surprise and recognize the person over the persona in your prospecting efforts. I'm also a big fan of using custom cadences and allowing those solutions for gifting to have your sales reps while they are prospecting gift directly from the workflows in which they reside. The ability to gift from those experiences really does augment, it really shifts the email-based prospecting or the LinkedIn-based prospecting, or even the cold call-based prospecting. It feels more authentic. It feels more relatable. And thus your prospects are gonna be so much more inclined to lean in and engage in a conversation with the members of your team. And last but certainly not least, if you are considering gifting as part of your prospecting solution, Make sure you're selecting someone that helps with both reach and the relationship. Gifting in and of itself is a really valuable strategy, but gifting that allows you to scale your efforts and still build bonds simultaneously, that's the sweet spot for you to use that persona, uh, person-based gifting strategy instead of that persona-based gifting strategy. If anybody is using gifting in their strategy, I'd love to learn from you in the chat what has worked for you. So feel free to toss that in there as well. As well. Tori has a question though, it asks, do you have best practices or thoughts on when gifting is a good spot in the cadence and strategy? So classic marketing consultant, as I used to be, it depends. I know that's not the best term to use in there, but it will depend, especially it'll depend on what exactly you're targeting in that person and that persona. I'm a big fan of opening up the aperture of the conversation by prefacing the gift with maybe an email, a LinkedIn connect, and a LinkedIn engagement is also really meaningful as well. And then a gift makes a lot more sense. That impression that you've had in those first few interactions does make that gift a little bit more emotionally resonant with the audience that you're gifting. I'm also a really big fan. I know we're talking about prospecting here, but I love gifting as a mid-cycle accelerator. If you're already in conversations with a prospect and they're a little further along in your sales cycles, a gift that is strategically timed to that next conversation, that goes a long way to show and build trust in the sales process. Trust is really hard to come by in sales and marketing these days. So gifting does help to unstick that relationship in those friction points of selling. Great question, Jared. I know you've tossed in a question as well too. And your question was, when is it appropriate to send any gift with your company logo? And how do you think about that? I have a lot of thoughts about using your company logo and branded swag as part of the prospecting experience. And I think about this from the perspective of the receiving end of conversations. I like to use the metaphor of going to a bar. We're here. Nobody wants to talk to the person at the bar who's only talking about themselves. That's a, that's a very one-directional conversation. And what most people gravitate to when they go to a bar is someone who's than to have an actual bidirectional conversation. So there is a time and a place to use branded swag when you're trying to initiate the conversation. I actually think at events like this one is a really good time to give someone something that's a little bit memorable about your brand or service. And we'll talk about this in my next advice about how to scale personalization, but juxtaposition in gifting with your branded swag goes a long way. I was just talking with another CMO just recently, who said the best swag that he ever used at an event when prospecting for folks was oddly a pair of boxers. Boxers, of all things, would be so creepy and so weird to receive directly from a sales rep in the middle of their sales cadence and sales cycle. That item that feels a little too intimate, feels a little creepy, was a hit, a massive hit at an event that they went to because of the juxtaposition of receiving a pair of boxers at an event that was branded to the company handing them out. So the power of juxtaposition with branded swag goes a long way to create those memorable moments. And again, that meaningful gift along that customer journey that really does help elevate the experience. Experience goes a long way. I'm also a really big fan of using branded logos and swag for your devoted fans. I think a lot of folks realize this as well too, but again, folks who are huge advocates of your brand are more than happy to go out there and start repping your brand and rocking your swag wherever they go. So I think it's great for both presale when you have juxtaposition and you have something engaging as well as post sale when you have your advocates out there helping you by doing your marketing for you. Great question. Love that. I also love this result as well too. The team over at Salesloft were huge fans of what they do to help elevate the engagement through the sales process. But 20% of the personal gifts that they sent out using a tool, that resulted in net new opportunities. And so I think that fundamentally comes down to why this works so well for Salesloft is because part of their ethos, part of their culture is about having empathy for a person. And, and Sydney Sloan, the CMO over there at Salesloft, shared a little bit about the fact that they don't just think about the persona, they also think about the person. And so using personal gifts to complement their sales outreach does help to make that bond and make that bond more meaningful than it would be actually a repellent, like a lot of other types gifting strategies do. I also love content. I'm kind of a content nerd. I think that personalized landing pages really are the next era and wave of content creation and the evolution of creating not just persona-based landing pages that are generic, they're a little bit one-to-many. I think that using a pers— the person-based landing page experience is the next era. Of creating those experiences. We at Alice have actually started using these very personalized landing pages for our named accounts where the business development rep or the account executive on the account will have a video welcoming their guests to the page and talking to them about the pain points and challenges that they have found while researching their business. It's a much more elevated experience, and it allows someone to get to know the person behind all of the emails, the LinkedIn requests, and the gifts. There's something about getting to know someone's tonality, getting to know about who the person is that helps again to build that rapport, build that relatability. And the sum of the parts of rapport and relatability ultimately are trust. And that's what our job now as marketers has become. Our new KPI has been the Triple T, or the time to trust. When you create interest-based experiences, gift-based prospecting experiences, and then toss in a personal message on your landing page, you're now creating an experience that really immerses someone into who you are as a brand, but also simultaneously recognizing who they are as a person. Couple of tricks for delivering that custom content at scale. Scale. I always think that great content starts by having a well-documented buying journey. With that buying journey really well architected, you'll know what kind of content is going to best serve to help alleviate those friction points in your sales process. About those friction points, though, you need to make sure you do know where your sales processes are starting to have some of that lag. And drag. And so by documenting that journey and then highlighting where in that journey you have those friction points, use this personalized content to unstick someone as they're going through that journey. I also know that tech bloat is a real thing. We as marketers, we love our technology. We spend a lot of money on it. But make sure that if you are going to use a piece of technology to help with that custom content at scale, you are using that such that it fits within your tech stack and it doesn't jar or disrupt that experience. You are ultimately trying to reduce those friction points in that experience, and your tech stack in that experience does have to make sure that it's not creating any more unnecessary friction for folks on the receiving end and also on your end. Make sure that you have that strategy architected first before you find the technology to deliver that experience. That way, you can report on it, and the members of your team can spend time learning from it. And of course, you gotta get your sales team involved. Sales and marketing alignment is tale as old as time. So make sure that when you do use content to help increase and elevate that experience, 86% of folks using those relevant videos are going to start to see an increase in conversions. And Tyler Lessard, who's over there as the Chief Video Strategist at Vidyard, he knows that video, video is that key to unlocking the personal in your content experiences. The last trick I have for you is about using video to connect with those prospects. So don't just use video on those conversion points in the landing pages. And don't just have a video that talks at your prospects. Create a video experience that talks to the person, talks with the person about things that are of interest to them. I got some more tips for you here about entertaining storytelling at scale. Make sure that you understand the people underneath this so you can start to tell stories in partnership with them. I love what Mailchimp is doing right now to create their Mailchimp Presents series, where they spend some time using juxtaposition, as I've outlined here, to start a dialogue, start a conversation talking with their participants. And also, if you don't have an in-house media production company, please highly recommend using a medium production company and outsource that relationship. And of course, influencer network. Spend some time interviewing and talking with folks that are in your network. Getting close to my time here, folks. But one last stat for you is that 51% of marketers say that video is the best ROI. Video doesn't have to be talking about you. It can be talking about, talking with your prospects and customers. And of course, word of mouth, that today is driving the, is being driven by those experiences. So I want to just leave you with a couple of final thoughts about using this personalized momentum. When you create those moments, it does drive momentum in the sales cycle. And it matters. It really works. When you put in personalization and you use it at scale, you're boosting your loyalty, you're boosting your revenue and retention, you're thinking about pipeline to spend with a lot more economic efficiency, your customer cost of acquisition is starting to be influenced that much more effectively. And of course, your conversion rates are going to improve because people are more inclined to engage with you. So that's all I have today for 4 ways for you to deliver personalized experiences at scale to help you grow revenue and more importantly, grow closer and more meaningful relationships with the people that you want to do business with. If you want to reach out to me, feel free, you can chat with me here, you can connect with me through the SaaS environment or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks, Nina. Thanks, Tori, so much for hanging out with me.

Thank you so much, MK, for that great session. We have a lot more great content today for you guys. So we'll see you guys in the next one.