Focus on the 40% Who Will Look at Your Product - Danilo Nikolich & Nick Bennett - Revenue Today - Episode # 092

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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. Danilo, like with you.

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, I'll touch on what Nick touched on first, right? That alignment is absolutely key. And, you know, whether it's a structural alignment, you know, that, you know, Nick talked about, you know, or just aligned goals, right? So I'll tell you, you know, my counterpart on the marketing side, sure, she'll— she's going to get super excited you know, about a campaign that's doing well, but a day doesn't go by where she's not checking the appointment channel. How many meetings did your team book? You know, oh, do you see this opportunity moved to proposal? Right. So it's really understanding your counterpart's goals and, you know, making sure that you're driving them. Right. Because, you know, look, she's not going to be super excited about what's coming out of her team if it's not translating, you know, to the SDR realm. And to, you know, the, the, you know, sales org. The same thing for me. If I'm booking a bunch of meetings but they're not turning into, you know, later stage opportunities, that's something that I take personally, right? So I, I want to make sure that, you know, I'm going back to my team, seeing is there anything we can do better, right? So that alignment, I think, is— Nick, you hit, hit, uh, hit on that— is spot on, right? In terms of the handoff, I'm gonna plug Alice for a second there. We use a gifting, you know, strategy for, you know, internally, right? So it's not just about, you know, for example, you know, that handoff of, you know, here's, you know, an MQL or an MQA, 'cause we do hand off MQAs, you know, we call it sales ready, you know, is our term for an MQA. But, you know, it's the— you know, help that we need to get those over, you know, uh, uh, the fence, if you will, right, to, to the sales org. And a lot of times, you know, we use, you know, outreach.io. We'll see the opens, we'll see the clicks, right? We'll see some heavy engagers, but for some reason they're not, you know, replying to us, right? So using a gifting strategy, for example, you know, funds that are coming from, uh, coming from the marketing organization to help us do that is Absolutely crucial, right? Also, Nick talked about expanding the footprint within some of these organizations. So that could be a content syndication strategy, that could be, you know, heavy for us, you know, we eat our own cooking, right? Ads, right? So from an execution perspective, just to kind of get more people at that account aware of what's going on, right? So we can actually start to get that multi-threaded approach, right? So, It's, you know, constant, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't stop.

Now, what, what I'm curious about is, I get it, y'all are both sales and marketing going after targeted accounts. Are there some triggers that are set to marketing like, like this, this account hasn't been moved from here to here over this time? You mentioned outreach, they've had X number of opens. Like stuff that, that, and now, you know, we're, we're in a world where sales development and demand gen, depending on the org, are very interchangeable. Um, so like, is marketing looking at stuff like that? Is that, is that sales development? Like, help me understand. Or is it a, or is it a conversation? Every Monday I speak to marketing and I say, here's my list of 50, and, and some of the people listening That's probably what they're doing, right?

Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, so I mean, look, you know, I, I think this is where technology is making our lives easier, you know. So we have this, uh, uh, you know, our own product has this ability to create journey stages, right? And that's what you're talking about, right? It's if you think about a set of accounts, whether it's 500 or 5,000, right, you want to understand out of those accounts how many are you know, completely unaware. We have no idea, you know, what's going on with those accounts, right? So marketing, please help us, right? Like, let's warm those up. To the ones that become aware where perhaps they haven't filled out a form, but they kind of get a sense of who we are. Maybe they visited a few webpages, right? To basically that MQA status. And then we have engaged in work and so on and so forth. So, you know, the key I think when it comes to this type of stuff is get a platform that's gonna allow you to customize those, right? Thoroughly and really work for your business. Because the one thing is, you know, I think Nick touched on this in the beginning, is everybody sees ABM a little bit different. Everybody does things a little bit different. So find a platform that's going to be customizable, and it's not like you need to accommodate your process to fit with the technology. It should be the other way around, right? And so that's what we do, is exactly what you just said, uh, Jared. We'll sit in the room, we'll take a look at those target accounts and get a sense of like, how are we progressing those, you know, through the funnel, right? How are we moving those accounts around, right? Or any of them regressing, right? That sort of thing. So, you know, it just gives us a much better view of each other's worlds and how we're aligning, right? Our technology will incorporate both sales activity as well as marketing activity. So we have like, I want to say, 7 or 8 different touchpoints that we can customize. and align on, right? Because I'll give you one example and hand it back to you. But like, you know, when we're creating a marketing qualified account, we call it sales ready account. You know, we do want to make sure that we're not creating false positives, right? I mean, that's, you know, from a sales rep perspective, you know, that's something that's really frowned upon, right? You see a couple false positives, you kind of give up on it, right? So part of what we actually built into our scoring is the sales activity. Meaning that if we do see an account that we think is, you know, marketing qualified, right? Marketing qualified account, that could be website activity, that could be, you know, G2 Crowd, third-party intent, whatever you want to actually structure it as. We do want to tie that with the sales activity. So if we do see a certain amount of sales activity, that could be 3 people or, you know, a certain number of sales touches. For example, let's say 15 to 20 in the last 30 days. We do want to actually take that out of a sales-ready stage and actually move it to a work stage, right? Because I don't want my SDR going in and looking at the account saying, hey, you know, I did everything I need to do at this account. I'm reaching out to all these 3 people. You know, that, that's the key of like minimizing those, uh, those false positives.

Yeah. You know what? And we went in this direction already, like where I wanted to go with the next question, because we're talking about like alignment. So like the obvious topic is bringing qualified prospects in or going outbound to get them. And Danilo, like, so masterfully, like, started weaving this in. So, you know, just want to— is there anything else you want to add? Like, how does ABM support your outbound motion?

Yeah, outbound is absolutely critical, right? So I, I can't say this, stress this enough, right? Because I used to have a sales leader who I worked for back in the Symantec days, that was just my hero, right? He was just like, no, we got to get these deals that are in motion, right? And then after that, let's get into the 40%, right? And I'm like, well, what do you— back up a little bit. Tell me, what are you actually talking about? So he had this vision of this is our pie, right? And he broke it into 3 different categories. He called it deals in motion. And, you know, that today just, you know, is, is due to, you know, third-party intent and engagement platforms and so forth. You know, we do have a better vision of what those accounts are. Right. But in his view, it was like, look, that's only about 15 or 20% at the most. Right. If you're early, early, you know, and you're trying to develop a market, maybe it's only 5 or 2%. Right. If it's more of a commoditized market, it's maybe closer to that 20%, 25%. And I'm like, okay, well, so what are you talking about the 40% then? Well, he's like, the 40% is the folks that are not showing any sort of intent. They're out there, they're not looking for something, but they can be convinced to look at your product, right? He's like, that's where we need to get into, right? And I said, what's with the rest? He's like, ah, the rest, you know, they're probably gonna buy at some point, but they probably won't buy this year. So that bucket of 40%, that's what people forget about. Everybody's like, oh, you know, they're showing intent or they're engaging or they're doing this and that. Don't get me wrong, that's absolute gold and that's where we're gonna prioritize our efforts. But when you're done with that, where do you focus after that? That's that 40% you need to focus after that. And that's where basically marketing can help, right? By basically getting new names, right? By doing field marketing that Nick talked about, right? That's huge, right? Inviting them to a ballgame and so forth and providing that air cover, right? So what we do here internally is ads. So we'll essentially start running ads and then we see which accounts are actually getting clicks, right, on those ads. And then you gotta get super sophisticated when you're doing ads. For example, when you're doing your message out there to hit on the right pain points. So that way, when you do see something out there from an outbound perspective, you know exactly what to personalize. So that's how we kind of warm it up here before the SDRs actually go after those accounts.

I love that. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank 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 Rev Genius, 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.