Ryan Barreto, head of sales at Sprout Social, explains how to sell during lockdown: get prospects into your product fast. Over 90% of Sprout's revenue comes from people who tried it first. TrustRadius found that buyers trust product experience most, blogs and case studies least.
All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another sales assembly study break. I am Christina Brady, the president of Sales assembly, and I am here with Ryan Barreto of Sprout Social. Before we get started, I want to give a quick shout out to Vidyard, our sponsor, for the content and being here with us for another week and driving right in. Ryan, tell us just a little bit about you, who you are and what you do.
Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me. My name is Ryan Barreto. I lead the sales and customer success teams here at Sprout Social. We are a social media management firm here actually in Chicago, headquartered here, and happy to be here with you today.
Amazing. Thank you so much. And as a revenue leader, I know you have a lot of really great tactical tips. So if you were to give one really tactical piece of advice to your leaders and your ICs right now as to how they're navigating the world that we're in today, what would that be?
Yeah, the biggest focus for us right now is getting customers in the product, getting their hands on the keyboard. We know that certainly right now in this Covid situation that we're in, we don't have the same ability to build rapport and trust and meet with customers. And so we've got to find ways to quickly build that relationship. TrustRadius actually came out with a really interesting article a few weeks ago, and they were looking at the ways in which buyers build trust with with sellers. And when they looked at the list, the things that actually had the least amount of trust with buyers were your blog, your content, and collateral, your case study, sometimes even you as the rep. The things that actually drove the most trust were a customer's own experience with your product, a trial customer reference, a live customer reference, or a demo. So in that vein, we've been really focusing in on leading with the product, leading with our trial. Over 90% of our revenue actually comes from customers who actually get in the product and then convert. So I'd recommend for everybody out there, if you have the opportunity, find a way to get your potential customers in the product. Have them sell themselves before they actually buy from you. That's been the biggest differentiator for us, and it's a great way to build rapport and trust.
I love that. And trust is a big piece of it, especially right now, where we can't be in person and we can't see each other. We have nothing to rely on. But trust me. And the tactic of getting their hands on the product, I think is a really important one. And If I'm a sales rep, I'm wondering, how do I get my prospects right now to trust me immediately and allow me to get the product in their hands? How do you build trust very, very quickly?
I think the first thing is you've got to remove friction. So if you have the ability to show them the path to how quickly they can get on board with your product. And ideally, it's minutes or hours where a customer can get in. And then secondly, you gotta show them your why. So how is this going to impact them personally? How's it going to change their life? How's it going to change their business? If you can show them some of the ways in which you can add value and there's a frictionless way to sign up, you'll find that customers are willing to do this, especially right now, where we know money is tight. If I can get in and prove that your product works before I sign a contract or put my credit card in, I'm that much more likely to do business with you.
I love that. Well, thank you so much for sharing these amazing nuggets of wisdom. I know they're going to help people. Ryan, thank you. Vidyard, thank you once again for being here with us as our sponsor. And we will see you all again next week for our study break.
