All the Tools you need to Sell From Anywhere

Hello everybody and welcome to the final episode of our Sail From Anywhere show in HubSpot. I'm delighted to be your host today. My name is Flavia Colombo. Hi, I'm Dimi, a sales director here in HubSpot and I'm actually recording today from my home in Ireland. I'm actually located in Bray, County Wicklow. For the ones of you who are not familiar with Irish geography, we are south of Dublin, surrounded by lovely mountain garden view and we have a seaside, so very nice spot to work from. So what we're going to do in the last episode, we're going to show you different sales tool that will allow you to put the concept that we covered during the previous episode into action. One of the recent conversations I had was with my husband. I was helping him to select the different sales technology that he can suggest to his clients that are moving into remote setup. It's not an easy decision to make. If you think about the top salespeople, 24% of them recognize their success is due to the sales technology that they're using. And 82% of them, they feel that using the right sales tool will help them to progress the deal to closure. So we're going to start and introduce our guest of today who is Viveka. And we're going to start the interview now. Let's dive in. So today I'm delighted to be here with Viveka Von Rosen, author and LinkedIn expert. She has been named in the Forbes Top 20 Most Influential list and she is the co founder and chief Visibility Officer of Ingreso. Welcome, Viveka. I'm delighted to have you here today with me.

It's my pleasure and I love that. I think you're in Italy right now and I'm in Colorado.

I'm actually in Dublin. Even if I'm leaving, you know, even better. So, Viveka, why don't we start to introduce yourself and Vengreso your company?

Sure. So I'm Vivica Von Rosen. Obviously we formed Vengreso about three years ago. It was interesting because it was. I'd been in the LinkedIn business for about 10 years by that point. And honestly, I was kind of bored. And it was about 2017. I was like, oh, I can't say one. I can't teach one more thing about LinkedIn. I can't do one more LinkedIn profile makeover. I've got to. I'm going to be like a personal coach or something like that.

And.

Who'S now our CEO Mario Martinez reached out to a bunch of us and said, hey, I'm thinking about creating an uber digital selling company. And I thought, you know, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, maybe I can, you know, join this, this new company and, and learn from my peers and you know, have a different audience and really kind of revamp. And that's exactly what we did. So, and I mean, it's been incredible. And in the past three years, we've grown Vengreso. We're the largest digital sales transformation company. We've, we've already taught thousands, thousands and thousands of people how to use LinkedIn through our selling with LinkedIn and selling with sales navigator and selling with video courses. And you know, we've got 30 employees now. I mean, it' nuts. I never could have seen the success that we've had. And so it's really exciting again finally to be able to work with salespeople and help them use LinkedIn really to find, engage, connect and create real business. And basically our tagline is creating more sales conversations and that's really all we help our folks do.

That's impressive. And talking about LinkedIn and your expertise, why should sales professional consider of using LinkedIn for social selling?

In most cases, your clients are more likely to be on LinkedIn than the other platforms. Which is not to say you shouldn't be using Facebook if your clients are on Facebook or Insta if you're, you know, clients are on Instagram. It really depends where your client base is. If you're B2B, you most definitely want to be on LinkedIn. But a lot of the, you know, a lot of what we teach goes across all the socials. But for us it's kind of be where your, be where your audience is. And now more than ever, you know, the things that we used to do, face to face trade shows, face to face conferences, you know, meeting people at Starbucks, on the golf course, all of those different things that we used to do with our, with our prospects, with the pandemic and everything going on, we're sitting at our desks and so now more than ever, it's a really great opportunity to utilize a tool with LinkedIn because there's really no limits. You know, you can, depending on how you use the different features, find, engage and connect with almost anybody. It's just doing it the right way.

That's exactly the point that I wanted to ask you. How, I mean, how can I as a sales professional make an impact in LinkedIn versus the others?

So, you know, there's a Lot of things you can do. Obviously the number one thing after having the right mindset and realizing it's going to be a little bit of a time commitment. Depending on, you know, what level of LinkedIn you get, it might be a little bit of a monetary commitment as salesperson, but once you've got that mindset that, okay, this is probably going to work, if I work it, the second step is creating a really strong brand. You don't want to start reaching out and connecting with people while your profile looks bleh, right. You don't want to walk around with a bag on your head essentially going, hey, buy my stuff. No one's going to do that. That's gross. So you want to make sure that you've got a really Powerful profile on LinkedIn. And @Vengresta, what we say is you don't want it to be a resume. And a lot of salespeople have resume type LinkedIn profiles, but no one cares about you right now yet. What they care about is how you can help them. So we always say, make your LinkedIn profile a resource. Speak to your buyer, what are their points of pain, how do you solve them? What resources can you give them in the featured and the media sections, you know, what posts can you share, what content can you share? What, what case studies should you upload, what checklists should you upload? Make that LinkedIn profile almost like a sales page that is focused on your buyer and what their needs are.

That's great, great advice. So I need to check my profile. Going back to LinkedIn as social selling, what are the basic principle of using LinkedIn as a tool for social selling?

Great question. So we actually take our learners through six phases and I believe every single one of them is important. So we already talked about, you got to have the right mindset, you've got to have a good profile and you need to do that before you do anything else. And I think the big thing that people do wrong is they may or may not have a good profile, but they reach out and start connecting to people they may know, they may not know, and they immediately go into a sales pitch. But that is not the right way of using LinkedIn. And that's why a lot of people think LinkedIn doesn't work, because they just go and do the steps wrong. So mindset profile and then engagement. Just like we would at inbound, right? We would go to inbound, we would see someone we want to talk to, they might be talking to other people. We kind of slide into the conversation Contribute a little bit. And then when the other people have kind of dropped off, we might say, hey, it's so great to meet you, my name is Vivica von Rosenberg. You know, I've been following you for a while or you know, I'm so excited to meet you here at the conference or whatever you want to say. Well, you do the same thing on LinkedIn. You find your prospect, you follow their activity, what are they saying, what are they sharing, what are they doing? You jump into their activity, you comment on their posts, right? You give them a kudos, you follow them, you give them an endorsement. So you engage on their activity and then once you've built that top of mind awareness and that positive sentiment, only then do you reach out to connect. But you don't go. You still go, hey, my name is Vivica, buy my stuff. Right? You're still reaching out. You want to kind of craft a conversation around your invitation, which is not a sales conversation yet. We call it the PVC method. You personalize it, don't automate, Please don't automate LinkedIn. You add value and then once you've earned the right, then you can go with the C, which is call to action. Whether it's a follow up call, whether it's, I hope you'll accept my invitation to connect. But that, you know, that comes after the engagement. You have to build that relationship with them first. And so after engagement you want to continue to feed your network with content. So you're sharing content through, you know, regular posts, articles, video uploads and private messages, which is cool because on your cell phone you can leave people a private voicemail or a private video message, which is a really cool thing to do that most people don't. But you want to continue to feed your network with, with content that you've either created yourself or curated from your company or some other source. And then the final step is you want to have a cadence, you want to do this in a regular way. And so that's really, to us, those are the tenants or the six phases of successful social selling, mindset, branding, engagement and then connecting, feeding with content and creating the nice cadence.

That's great, thank you for that. So I will definitely share with MIT in the PVC method. So moving a bit away from LinkedIn topic, started to see few offices, they are opening up and some aren't. So what will be few of the best tool for communication in a partially remote work?

Yeah, no, great question. So one of the things our whole team has so many tools so one of the tools that all of our folks have as well, all of our sales and marketing team have a sales nav. Naturally it's a step above LinkedIn. You have to pay for it, but it really helps to find the right people, engage with them. But as far as beyond LinkedIn, what are some good tools? Well, we use HubSpot and we've been using HubSpot since the very beginning. And what's kind of interesting is we didn't even realize all the functionality. We thought we were really good at HubSpot and then we just hired a designated HubSpot professional at our company to like do the marketing, do the CRM, do the notes. It's not my area of expertise, but we're just, our eyes are open. We're like, oh my God, we didn't even know we could use HubSpot for this. We didn't even know we could use HubSpot for that. And I'm not just saying that because I'm on this interview right now. It's really, wow, what a powerful tool. And some other, you know, it's our CRM obviously as well, it's our calendar tool, it's everything. Some other tools that we use teamwork to manage, to manage all our projects. If I opened up my sales stack right now, there's probably be 30 or 40 things. What I do want to say though, to anyone who's managing a sales team, whatever CRM you're using, make sure that you've got a drop down designation with all the tools in there and make your salespeople choose the different sales tools that they used in their process. Because that's a big thing that we did. And we found out we had two or three sales tools that we were paying thousands of dollars a month for that we weren't using. And so we definitely recommend whatever CRM you're using that you list all of your stack in there and make sure that your sales team is using it. If they're not, give them more training in it. If it's still not valuable, then get rid of it. And so that wasn't a question you asked, but I thought I'd dive down that rabbit hole.

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing. Also to be such a great advocate for us. Thank you so much. And last, any other type of tools that you would recommend considering to invest in at this time?

Yeah, one of the things that we found really, really helpful for our, for our company and it's interesting, we have a selling with video course which ironically before the pandemic we only did live. So I don't know. So we had to pivot, right? And we took that whole selling with video course and put it online. And the key to that course, we use a tool called One Mob. Of course you can use any. There's Videolicious and BombBomb and Hippo. I mean there's a lot of great video email tools out there, but it's so powerful, especially since folks, we're not 100% open yet. And so that ability to engage with your prospect, they can see your face, they can see your excitement, they can get a sense of your charisma. Of course you include resources for them and then sharing that video through either an email or through a LinkedIn message or a Facebook message or a text, you know, really whatever channel you want to use. That's been really, really powerful for us. Our open rates, you know, go from about a 2 to 10 on 2% to 10% on average to some of our salespeople are getting like a 75% open rate. So that's like huge. And then the traffic, we can, you can track what resources people are opening, how long they were on your video, if they sent it throughout their buying committee and team. And we've actually closed a few deals and it's absolutely 100% because we use that video email tool. But again, like all things, you just have to make a fool with a tool is still a fool. So you just have to make sure that you're using the tools in the right way.

I agree with you. We've seen the same, you know, my reps, they're really leveraging the video message right now and we see a huge conversion rate from there. Viveka, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all your expertise and your amazing advice. So I'll take definitely them away with me. And again, thank you so much for everybody following the interview today.

Hey there. I'm Dane from the HubSpot Academy professor team and welcome to the sales forecast where we'll talk about today's sales climate with our benchmark data. This data is aggregated from HubSpot's global customer base of over 70,000 companies to help understand how metrics are shifting as companies grapple with the impact of COVID 19. As you can see see here, deals created are well above anything we've seen in recent months. And deals closed are above pre Covid benchmarks too, coming in at 5%. No surprises here as entertainment and travel are still creating the least deals, a trend we've been seeing across the globe. With the percentage of deals created increasing substantially, it seems that sales professionals are gaining more traction and cultivating some interesting the percentage of deals closed indicates that people are feeling more and more comfortable spending money too. Sales email sends are 66% above pre Covid benchmarks and while still notably lower, we've seen some improvement in email responses recently. Finally, sales calls have increased in the last week coming in at 3% lower than pre Covid benchmarks. Thanks for listening to this forecast. For more education, check out my online selling lesson linked in the description. Next up we have Flavia again who will leave you with a hands on resource to take home with you today.

The last thing I want to leave you today is a resource that I hope will help you to master a video sales call. We partner with Zoom to create a guide that's sharing the best practice of the things to do and not to do. To excel in a demo call we go through different things like being sure you know your audience that you identified your buyer Persona, how to share properly your content on the screen, how to set up the video and the audio, how to share funny background just to cheer everybody up and not all the time showing your living room wall or your basement and as well how to to record the demo and being sure you can share that with other key stakeholder in advance of the deal. So you can find the link to download your guide on the description below. Finally, unfortunately we are at the end of the last episode of this Sell from Anywhere show. We really had a blast to put all this together and we hope that you find all the content valuable for you. We invite you to look at the other episode. If you check our channel you will find all the links in the description. And finally we wish you and your family to stay safe till the world is still dealing with the COVID 19 impact. I want to thank everybody who contributed to put together this show and the series and I want to thank you for having me as an host until the next one. I wish you the best. Yeah. Hey what.