How to Combine Account Based Marketing and Social Selling on LinkedIn

Thank you so much. Hi everyone, can you hear me? Okay, awesome. All right, so you are in LinkedIn on LinkedIn, how to combine account based marketing and social selling. I am Ty Heath, the global lead for market development at LinkedIn there. I'm focused on educating our agencies and partners. And I have to say I'm so excited to be here. I've been coming to inbound since 2012, so I'm OG inbound. This is one of my favorite events. So I'm so excited to talk with you today. Let me first share a little bit with you about how this presentation was born. So about a year ago I was having brunch in a cafe with my husband Brian. He is a salesperson and he happens to be a sales navigator expert. So we were chatting it up and I don't know if you do this, but we were talking about digital marketing strategy over brunch. Does anyone else talk about strategy with their boo or their significant other? Okay, so I'm not alone. I was thinking I was certifiably dorky, but clearly I'm in good company here. So anyway, we're chatting it up and one of the things we were talking about because I'm focused on our marketing side and he's focused on sales side, is wouldn't it be great if before marketing launched a program that we would spend time talking more with sales and understanding those insights that are so powerful to having a successful campaign. Wouldn't it be nice if we sat down together and came up with objectives and KPIs before moving forward? So maybe it was the mimosa fueled haze of that conversation. But afterward I went back to our house and I scheduled on my calendar three times a week for the rest of that year to spend a little bit more time understanding sales navigator. So I had dabbled in it a little bit because I worked for LinkedIn but hadn't really had an opportunity to focus in and think about how it might support me as a marketer. Right. So you can thank Mimosas for this presentation today. So, because you're in this room, I know that you know that account based marketing and social selling is likely a part of your go to market strategy. And if it's not, maybe you see it as something that could potentially become a key part of your go to market strategy. I also know that you know that it takes more than sales and marketing to make a powerful marketing strategy work. You need buy in from executives, you need buy in from product, you need subject matter experts to weigh in on content. So it really takes a village to build a powerful program that engages customers with a wonderful experience. So that's what we're going to talk about today. First, I'm going to start with some insights on sales and marketing alignment and what's possible. Then we'll talk about some effective content to get you rolling successfully on ABM and also social selling. And then finally, we're gonna look at LinkedIn and I'll share some strategies to help you get started. So we have about 45 minutes. We're gonna move pretty quickly. If you have any questions, LinkedIn is in the building. We have a LinkedIn lounge here. Also, feel free to shoot me a LinkedIn connection with a question, and you can also tweet at me Tyrona on Twitter. Now, there's gonna be quite a bit of information in this presentation. I want you to think of this as like a little appetizer before a larger meal, especially if you're just getting started with sales navigator and campaign manager. Don't worry, we have your back. Don't worry about getting all of the different things, of remembering everything here. We'll share this content as well. Sound good? All righty. So with that, let's set the record straight on a few things. So first and foremost, I want to understand who I'm talking to in this room. How many of you consider yourselves to be marketers? Do we have marketers in the building? Okay, a lot of marketers are here. How about salespeople? We have salespeople. Awesome. We also have salespeople. Now, how many of you consider yourselves to be hybrids? People that are both sales and marketing? Awesome. Okay, so hybrids are kind of like, I'm a hybrid. It's like an interesting vampire werewolf combination. Right. So we have some of those in the room. And I want you to know that the future of marketing is really blending the role between sales and marketing. Soon enough, marketers of the future and salespeople of the future will be expected to understand both sides of that coin. Marketers are expecting for salespeople to join them at that top of the funnel and help have those conversations that build awareness. And salespeople are expecting marketers to join them at the bottom of the funnel to help accelerate the sales cycle and close those deals. So more and more, I imagine maybe next year, when I ask that question or someone asks that question, everyone will be like, I'm a hybrid. Anyways, so to set the record straight, because I want to be clear, we're not just talking about ABM here. ABM leaves out salespeople we need salespeople to be a part of this conversation. What we're talking about is marketing and sales orchestration. So companies that fail to invest in orchestration often fail to launch successful account based programs. They also fail to realize the results of those programs. The main obstacle to that is change management. So a failure to invest in the change management required to move your organization into this new space. So what I mean by that is a failure to come together on common goals and KPIs, a failure to share the data and insights needed to provide a great experience for the customer. A failure to have stand up meetings between sales and marketing where you understand what's happening within accounts and you can iterate on your approach and continue to improve. So by change management, it's really time to think about how do we break down that silo. So I want to talk with marketing or folks that consider themselves to be marketers first. Now we have OD'd on marketing automation. I understand that there are advantages. It's effective, it's efficient. We would hate to think that our messages were in any way irritating or unhelpful to our customers. But the reality is when the core of the experience is a poor one, we're not doing marketing automation. We're doing mass alienation. So it's time for us to think about and revisit what is the connection? What is the engagement that we're having with our customers? And is it helpful? Is it timely? Is it relevant? And our salespeople? Let's have a talk. Sal. So we're still cold calling. So we say things like the next call will convert. It's a numbers game. But the reality is when only 3% of cold calls are effective, it's time to rethink that strategy. In the modern age of digital and social, there's a better way of doing things. And that's where social selling comes in. Does anyone in here use Sales Navigator already? So there are a few people that use Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator and Social selling done well can eliminate the need for cold calling. Our customers are navigating an increasingly complex environment, so it's up to us to connect with them and engage with them to give them the helpful information and provide guidance through that. And if we do that well, we can eliminate the need to have to do cold calling. And today we expect that type of experience. We expect a personalized experience and even in B2B marketing, right? So I appreciate the fact that Amazon knows I need nyquil when I'm sick. I don't like to suffer. I know. I appreciate they know I need lactate because I love gelato. I love dancehall reggae, and I'm glad that Spotify knows that and they made me a daily mix. I also appreciate that Netflix knows I love science fiction. Anybody else love Black Mirror in here? The Black Mirror fans. Yay. Okay, so we expect this engagement. And the reality is, at this point, we don't really have a choice. Our customers are gauging their experiences by the last best experience they had with brands that they adore. So we need to think about how do we create this personalized experience. One of the first steps in that process is having sales and marketing come together and think about what does that journey look like and how can we work together to make it a more powerful one. So I want to have all of you imagine, because we've got sales marketers and hybrids in the room, if I asked marketing to describe what does your experience look like, most likely you're going to draw me a funnel. If I ask a salesperson to highlight their experience, most likely they're going to draw a pipeline. And this is part of the challenge. We can't even agree on what this looks like. Is it a funnel? Is it a pipeline? Is it a punnel? Is it a pipe? I don't know. Right. A flywheel. Hey, I think he has some foresight into what's going on here. So we can't even agree on that. But the reality is that we need to figure this out because it looks crazy to our customers when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. So it's time for us to take a look at this. One example is, as marketers, we are focused on getting an MQL or an SQL Sales Marketing lead, marketing qualified lead. Once we do that, we hand it off to sales and we're like, bye. Not my concern anymore. Part of that is a breakdown in what's possible in creating a powerful process to engage the customer. So we really want to have that full support and come together on perhaps a flywheel. The other challenge is that sales and marketing, we're using different data sets. So on the marketing side, we have marketing autom.