INBOUND 2015 I&E: Jenifer Kern "Get Sales Jazzed About Inbound Marketing"

Thank you so much. So excited to be here. This has been a great morning so far. Hope you all are enjoying yourselves. How about that keynote this morning? Brene Brown. She was awesome. I'm a marketer. I love to know my audience. So I want to do a quick show of hands. Raise your hand please if you are a marketer. Woo hoo. Raise your hand if you're in sales. Awesome. Love you guys too. Raise your hand if you're something else. We got a few outliers. Okay, cool. All right, now I'm going to do something a little cheesy. I want you to turn to the person next to you, extend your hand, introduce yourselves and tell them if you're in marketing or in sales. All right, I'm on the clock. I'm on the clock. That's good. I want you to have fun, but not too much fun. Okay? This is what it's all about, right? We heard Seth Godin talk this morning about making connections. What I'm going to talk about today is all about connecting marketing and sales in a great way to produce awesome results for your company. And this is where it all starts. It's all being willing to stick your hand out, say who you are, talk about what you love to do, and get really excited about working together. So I have my presentation today is all about sales and marketing alignment. It's pretty much broken down into three sections. I'm going to first talk about some of the trends and ideas that are driving this sort of frenetic need for marketing and sales to work together, what's behind that stuff. And then I'll give you a little glimpse at our story at Solarity and how we built the marketing function there using inbound and outbound strategies. And I'll go over my top five. So a quick story to start. I know we all love stories. So I've had a bunch of open positions on my team recently and I've been doing a ton of interviewing labor of love. Right? It's been great. I've been able to meet tons of awesome candidates and most recently had an opening for a digital marketing manager position and again had some fantastic candidates. Had one woman in particular whose resume was perfect. Her background, her experience, her skills, everything just lined up perfectly for what I was looking for. Brought her in, started the interview, was really excited, seemed like a great cultural fit with our company. Again, her background was looking to match up and then I got to the portion, what I call the sales IQ portion, and I asked her what the current revenue of her company was. Where she worked at. Now she showed up, paused for a second, and then she threw out like, a range. And I was like, okay. Then I asked her what the typical deal size was for sale. Again, sort of a little flustered. Paused, threw out a range, but really wasn't sure. Third question. Is the average sales cycle? Like, what's the duration of your average sale at the company? Had no idea. Which made me think, if you don't like sales and you know absolutely nothing about sales, or you're not interested in learning anything about sales, you're probably in the wrong profession right now. This is a woman who had a really strong marketing background, but was siloed, unfortunately within a very large organization where she was simply working on cranking out marketing campaigns day in and day out and day in and day out and had absolutely almost no interaction with sales. It's unfortunate, but the hopeful side of all this today that I'd like to share with you, and I'll share some of my experience with it, is that I believe that marketers today have more power and opportunity than ever to rise to the top within their organization. I mean, let's face it, marketing today is drastically different than it was 20 years ago. And I've actually been in marketing for 20 years. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it. You're all supposed to fall off your chairs when you hear that, but I have been in marketing for 20 years and. And it is what Seth Godin said. It was about the brochures, right? Everyone laughed when he told that little story about the brochures. I used to spend all my days doing brochures and flyers, communications plans, direct mail pieces. But in the last five, 10 years, you hear all this excitement and this energy at HubSpot. All the tools that we have today through digital marketing enable us to really position ourselves as change agents within the company. We can truly be transformational leaders. And I've actually had the opportunity to completely reinvent myself thanks to digital marketing. It's been awesome. It's been super, super fun. And so my hope for all of you today is if you can learn to really understand and embrace sales, that you have so much opportunity to rise to the top and really soar in your profession. I know most of you are eating lunch or just ate lunch, so hopefully this slide fits in well. I. My designer, when she gave me this slide, I just. I was obsessed with it. I was staring at it and I'm like, is marketing the peanut butter or is marketing the jelly? Is sales the peanut butter or sales the jelly. So I mentioned this story to my husband, who's a veteran salesperson, and he said, you're totally missing the point. Nobody wants a jelly sandwich. And I was like, he's right. Nobody wants a jelly sandwich. So why do marketing and sales and need each other so much today? Number one, we all know marketing owns the customer data and the intel. We're seeing real time what our customers are doing online. And we're giving that feedback to sales and establishing that credibility for them before they even pick up the phone and call a prospect. And why does sales need marketing for that exact reason? Why does marketing need sales? They're out in the field. They're like the feet on the street getting that feedback to all this great content that we're working on. They actually help us improve our content offers. So that's the smarketing sandwich, and I am hungry. So it is all about the content, right? I mean, we're all here at Inbound. We know that the biggest part of Inbound is being able to develop that huge content marketing machine. I'm in the tech IT services business, and in our business, it's average of 14 pieces of content before a prospect is ready to make a buying decision. That's kind of overwhelming, isn't it? I mean, that's a lot of content you got to crank out, and you got to have a machine to crank all that out. But what this really means is that marketing is at the beginning and at the forefront of the sales cycle. We're out there with our content, seeing what prospects are doing with that content. And the buying process, as you all know, has changed dramatically. I think that the most recent stat I've heard is about 75% of the buying process is being done online before the prospect ever even talks to a rep. So that means that marketing is responsible for nurturing that prospect, making sure they have the right message at the right time to put in front of their buyers, and then again developing and establishing that credibility for sales. I have some metaphors in here, and I actually wrote a blog about this last week. Just small shameless plug about how marketing and sales alignment is so similar to jazz. And if you're in music or any kind of musically inclined person, I am not. Jazz is the perfect metaphor because of all the improvisation that happens. And what's happening now is everything's going on on Google. This is obvious, right? I mean, everyone's out on Google and they're looking up your products, your services, or they're just googling whatever they want to Find and it's real time and it's happening quickly. And that puts a lot of pressure on marketing and sales, right? To work together and come into harmony and tune with each other and to understand what's the next best thing to do. And so I love this idea of marketing being like jazz and jazz. I've been taught that the best jazz players actually listen for the sounds that haven't yet been played and then step in at the right time to contribute their music. And that's a pretty cool idea if you think about it. So what have I done at Celerity and what have we built there in terms of marketing? How did it all come about? About four years ago I was hired and started there. But the company was actually founded in 2002. IT services and consulting with some IT staffing on the side. Great group of very savvy entrepreneurs, extremely talented and opportunistic sales team. Not yet any marketing at the company, but from 2002 until 2009 they experienced 30% or actually 2002 to 2007 they experienced 30% compounded annual growth rate just based on this complete opportunistic die hard sales strategy. Some great entrepreneurs and smarts and really relationship selling. And so when sales folks were hired at Celerity, it was go out and call everyone you know in your Rolodex, right? Your neighbors, your friends, your family, your old clients. And so what happened was that worked really well for about seven years and then they started hitting some roadblocks. And what happened around 2009 was we had grown so quickly and, and we had about nine offices across the eastern seaboard, and every salesperson in the company was actually selling a different version of our company. And so the brand became really fragmented. We also were having challenges scaling. So from a client diversity standpoint, we had a significant amount of our revenue in our top four customer accounts and there was significant sales turnover. So when I got there, sales were coming in and out the door regularly. So those scaling challenges actually began to slow down the company's growth. So in 2011, they made the decision to bring in marketing and it was happily ever after. At that point. One of the first things I did was help rebrand the company. So starting looking at talking to our customers, how do they view us talking to employees, how do we view, how do you view what we're really good at, what are our differentiators, all the core marketing stuff. And worked on a really strong rebranding initiative to help bring that messaging back in line and help unify the Branding significantly. We then turned really quickly to content marketing. And this was end of 2011, early 2012. HubSpot was putting out tons of great stuff. We started a blog. People in the company told me I was crazy. You're never going to be able to do it. Where are you going to get the content from? Who's going to write content? We don't have any content. Did it anyway. We've been blogging now for three years. We post a blog a week and it's been a huge traffic generator for us. And then as soon as we had the messaging, the brand and all that solidified, quickly turned to looking at lead generation and digital marketing. How can we most cost effectively get this message out to the market? At that time, I actually signed up for Eloqua and used Eloqua for a short time and realized that it wasn't really the best fit for the small nature of the team and how fast we were moving, but really worked closely with sales to establish a lot of outbound strategies. Some of the things that the results that we've seen in the last three years, we went from 0 to 50% pipeline contribution in three years. So obviously before marketing, there were zero leads getting passed over to sales. We now pass over hundreds of leads a month to sales. And so the pipeline contribution of active opportunities that are being worked by reps in their pipeline somewhere in the funnel has risen up to over 50%. We've had a significant increase in margins and revenues, an explosion of net new customer accounts. We've reduced our sales turnover. This is the one I'm the proudest of. We've reduced our sales turnover by 40%. CRM adoption. When I got to the company, sales reps were keeping all their intel in notebooks or in Excel spreadsheets that they'd walk around with and then throw in their trash can. Today, I'm really proud to say that we have over 75% of our sales team actively using our CRM on a regular basis. And then our deal sizes have increased significantly. So that's my story. I'd love to hear more from you guys. We'll have Q and A at the end what your story is, but where does an inbound marketer start? There are so many tools out there available to us and it can be really overwhelming to know just where to make the beginning. So based on our experience, I'm going to share what I call the top five list. Top five ways to get your sales team really jazzed about inbound marketing. Number one, start at the top with your top dogs. Two, expand sales universe. Three, talk it up. Four, find the right harmony and tune. And then lastly, make it super fun and super easy. So number one, I don't know about your company, but at my company, our CEO is the most aggressive salesperson in the entire company. So. So that's where I started. I went to the CEO, I pitched Inbound. It wasn't a hard pitch because HubSpot gives you all these great tools and communications talking points. I talked to him about how this would help us in a cost effective way, drive more leads into the funnel. I tapped into his competitive spirit and it wasn't just working with him, but with the CEO, the coo, the co founders and the whole executive team, bringing them together and really teaching and educating on all the philosophies of inbound marketing and what it could mean for our organization. They ate it up. I mean, they absolutely loved it. And then the best part was, you know that these are really competitive people, right? I printed out our competitor's ranking report, which is in the HubSpot library or reports forum. And nine times out of 10, for all the keywords that are critical to our business, we were ranked lower than our competitors and that got them really mad. So that's a great way to start, tap into that competitive spirit that you know, your executive team has and that they want to be the best and they want to be at the top. Showing how we were ranking lower than a lot of our competitors for keywords was huge. And then focusing on the low cost opportunity, I mean, Inbound, other than having to help with content, it's fairly low cost and you can get a lot of bang for your buck and assembling your band leaders. Essentially, I partnered up with our VP of sales, Rob Smith, who he wanted me to mention his name. So there it goes. Rob Smith, he's awesome and he manages our entire sales team. So we made a commitment to each other that we had each other. We were going to have each other's backs no matter what. We support each other no matter what. We're going to do whatever it takes to drive successful results through digital marketing. I had his commitment and he had my commitment. We have each other's backs. He's my number one band leader. So I would challenge you to think about for yourselves. Who in your organization have you reached out to? Have you partnered with to really help assemble your band and really drive the results that you know, you can get for your company? When we transitioned to HubSpot just about a year ago, we had Three keywords ranked on page one of Google. It's not very many for a company that's been in business over 10 years. Right. It's kind of embarrassing. I was a little embarrassed about it. Today we're at over 52. And this is all simply by using the tools that HubSpot has given us through the blogging platform and all the great intel that they've taught us. A lot of these keywords are branded. Some of them are non branded. But we continue to look at these and monitor this and work on strategies where we can get found for the keywords that we want to be found for. I sort of created a monster a little bit with our CEO though. I told you the story about the competitive ranking and he now sits around and like comes to me with ideas for keywords that he wants to get ranked for, like branded keywords. Sort of like HubSpot's known for inbound. He's really tapped into the creative side of it and. And he's pretty jazzed about it. So it's fun. It's not a solo performance. What does this mean? Salespeople, for better or for worse, are kind of brought up to believe that it's all them. It's them against the world. And their whole life and their whole profession has changed too. I mean, we talk about all the changes in marketing. Well, the way sales performs has changed as well, right? I mean, they have to sing a different tune. They have a whole new song sheet now. So helping sales understand they're not alone. It's no longer a solo performance. You are in this with them. And the way that we did that at Solarity was just by helping them understand how we were going to work with them, how we were going to expand their universe of tools and capabilities so that they would have get more leads faster. What does this mean for sales? More money, more opportunities. We're not going to stop doing outbound campaigns. Our sales team loves outbound campaigns. But we're going to add the inbound to the outbound and we're going to focus on marketing's core mission is to provide warmer leads to sales to make their job easier. The hardest thing salespeople need to do is cold calling. It's tough. You got to pick up that phone. I mean, the sales people in the room know. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir. I mean, picking up that phone and calling someone with absolutely no information that they have about your company is really hard. So helping to educate sales, to help them understand that we're not trying to take anything away from them. We're actually adding to their toolbox. We're giving them so many more tools for being successful. So I kind of scripted this up because I thought it was an interesting way to look at sort of the old sales universe and the new sales universe. And I like to think about it that marketing has expanded sales universe the same way sales has expanded marketing's universe. In the old school sales, the whole mo was prospecting, cold calling, pounding out emails, making sure you're taking care of your clients and your customers, and then rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Now there's so many more things available to salespeople and we've done lead gen launches where we help educate sales on what does it mean to be an mql? What does it mean to be an SQL? My VP of sales looked at me and he said, you know what that is, Jen? It's a warm lead and it's a hot lead. So we call it warm leads and hot leads. When we talk to sales, we use their language more than we use marketing language. They still know that in the system we've got MQLs and SQLs. But we really try hard to use sales language and not get too technical about marketing speak. We talk about the inbound leads, we explain how we can research those and look in Salesforce and look in in HubSpot and see the genesis of those leads, the path that they've taken. We talk about content offers. That content is out on the website for a reason and it's to educate your buyers, to warm them up and to get them ready to talk to you. And then we talk about form submits. They love seeing all the form submits that come across and the buyer's journey. We went through the process of explaining how HubSpot takes the three stages of awareness, consideration and decision. And we broke that down. We started lining content into each stage and started explaining to them why you don't do outbound campaigns with a consideration asset to a new prospect. We talked about Personas and we've started doing Personas. And so there's just so much more stuff out there to make them successful that what sales rep wouldn't want to do this really? I mean, it's awesome. This one I actually really struggle with. Talk it up. I mean, I'm a huge communicator. Don't get me wrong, I love to talk, but my boss, the CEO of the company, was really encouraging me to kind of, you know, get loud about the successes that we had originally and the best practices and the things that we are experiencing. And it wasn't even always, you know, oh, look what happened. We did this great thing working with sales but also talking about some of the failures that we had. And so we've used a lot of different communications strategies and we keep it kind of fresh and we roll with it and we change it up as often as we need to. But we attend every single weekly sales pipeline meeting. And that's my entire team in marketing attends the sales pipeline meeting on a weekly basis. On a monthly basis. Marketing actually runs the sales pipeline meeting and we run it and we ask the sales folks to highlight their top three opportunities that came through marketing influenced activity. And then we get more granular and we ask them to explain if it was an inbound lead, what was the keyword that caused that to come in and we help them with their homework. I also have one on ones with the EVPs of sales. Once a month it's a brutal day but literally through a whole day sit with the salesperson and, and the EVP and we look at all their lead activity, their hot leads. Where do they need more to focus, more time and what's the marketing strategy that's going to help them meet their sales goals? We have tons of other programs we do. We love to do happy hours with sales because sales loves to party. Right? Right. Salespeople, do you love to party? Yeah. Yeah. Ok. It's really important also. And this is I want to introduce John. John, stand up and say hi. This is my first early. Give a round of applause to John. John. Hi John. You guys have lunch? After lunch Malaise. He was my first earliest adopter. He was new to the company coming in and he embraced all the marketing and sales programs that we were setting up at the time. And he's found tremendous success. He told me the other day he's the only sales rep that has gone repeatedly three years, consecutive years in a row on the president's trip. And he's found the success by working with marketing fearlessly working with marketing. He's made us look fabulous and we've made him look fabulous. So talking up those success stories, making sure people understand what you're doing. We also have some fun stuff we do. I know this is going to be a little bit hard to see, but we have our sales team in an email campaign. So every week or bi weekly we send out an email to our entire sales team which is now a little bit over 25 folks and we highlight all of our content offers. This is actually a template I stole from HubSpot. We highlight our content offers and then right in that email there are links to tweet the content offer, to post the content offer. On LinkedIn, we have all the links to the emails, the landing pages, all the assets are right there. So it's a one stop place for them to get all the information that's going on in sales and marketing. And I put this little phrase at the bottom. Don't be afraid to embrace corny slogans. Because what I really love about Rob, our VP of sales is that he loves these little corny slogans that he says all the time. And the title of this email is actually Revenue Showers bring May Flowers. So we're obsessed in marketing, right, with coming up with cool subject lines and you definitely need to come up with cool subject lines to get sales folks attention. I mentioned earlier the 2015 lead gen launch that we did. We also created this lead gen survival guide which again I meant to bring copies, but I can show, if you're interested in looking at it afterwards, I can bring it up. And it essentially was 11 by 14 laminated menu and explained all of the inbound concepts, the buyers, you can see the buyer's funnel there and, and just explain the lead scoring system. And we provided in a really easy format and very easy to digest all the different things that we were working on together. And this is something that they all post at their desk and they refer to all the time. We've got the lead scoring system on the back, the SLAs and all the different lifecycle stages as well. So how do you get in tune with sales? Too often I talk to marketing people and they talk about sales like this. They kind of are gritting their teeth and they don't really want to admit that they're gritting their teeth. But I can tell that there's this sort of tension that a lot of marketers feel when you ask them about working with their sales team, which is rather unfortunate, I think. And so I encourage marketers to get out from behind their desk, to reach out and walk a thousand miles in your salesperson's shoes, follow them around, go to customer meetings, sit in on prospect cold calls, listen to how they pitch their cold calls and how they pitch their messaging. Be creative. It's really important. I think that we can sometimes get stuck in a rut and forget that salespeople have a really hard job. So getting out there, following them around. One thing that we did that really helped a lot Was we moved our offices. So the marketing crew used to be actually in the operations side of the office. And about two years ago, we moved down and we actually. We had a chance. Everyone was moving offices. We had a chance to move. We moved. And we actually are sitting right pretty much in the middle of sales, which, it sounds like kind of a little thing, but it's that kind of little stuff that actually helps interactions and helps you have that ongoing dialogue that you need to have in real time, all the time with sales. And it's just done tons for our relationship. So find that right harmony and get in tune. Part of getting in tune and finding the harmony and understanding sales and embracing sales is I think it was Aldous Huxley that said, to know is to love, right? If you don't really know and understand them, you probably aren't going to like them. And mostly, I think we're marketers in here. We're obsessed with Personas, right? We love Personas. So I thought it'd be a fun exercise to put together a Persona of a typical salesperson. So this is just in my organization, although I'm going to go on record and say it's probably for most successful salespeople, this would probably ring true. Driven to succeed. These are incredibly hardworking, competitive, driven people. A good example of that is John told me a couple weeks ago that he had one prospect that he was chasing down. It took 27 touches before he got a meeting with that person. 27. That's a lot. So there's a lot of persistence there. There's a lot of hard work. There's a lot of grit that goes into sales. They tend to have really strong family bonds and a lot of strong family loyalty. It's really admirable. These are people that put family first for the most part. Problem solver. They're very curious. They like a challenge. They like to figure things out. And so problem solving is, in our industry, very important because we're in IT services and consulting, and there's always challenging situations. One sale is never like the next sale. And these folks are super smart and really helping the customer move their business forward by coming up with unique solutions to their problems. Resilient and positive. This one I love because salespeople are fun. You know, they're not just positive and resilient, but they roll with the punches. The best example I can give of this is recently we had an inbound lead. It was actually a couple months ago, we had an inbound lead, the largest sports company in the world, and came in inbound, keyword, sight unseen. The rep rolled with it. We had a great proposal that we submitted. It was actually for an employee intranet. It was a really great opportunity and they had actually found it through an award we won doing an intranet for National Geographic. We were so excited about this. The proposal was top notch. Our creative team knocked it out of the park and we lost. I was devastated. I mean, I wanted to cry for like two weeks. I was so devastated. And the sales rep said to me, jen, don't worry about it. You brought us a great at bat. We're going to get another great at bat. And I was like, okay, but rolling with the punches and being resilient like that, it's really cool. We've talked about the competitive nature of sales folks. They tend to be, you know, athletic, outgoing, they love contests, they love awards, do contests and awards. We have lots of fun stuff that we do to help our sales team feel like they want to win. So we have contests for selling the first products, contest for selling the first inbound lead and closing it. So keep it fun. Easily distracted. We call this the purple squirrel effect. This speaks a little bit to the add nature of the sales rep. Right? We call it Purple Squirrel because we'll be having conversations a lot of time between marketing and sales and they just quickly change the subject and talk about some of the other. And then we say purple squirrel and there it goes. So it's on the bottom of your screen. They're on the move. They don't like to be sedentary, right? They like to be moving around. Think about this. When you think about your expectations for asking them to update their CRM system, you're expecting them to be sitting at their desk like we're sitting at our desk all the time, constantly updating the CRM. It's not going to happen unless you make it mobile friendly. So realize they're constantly on the move. Usually highly caffeinated as well. We were debating whether to have a martini glass or a Starbucks cup. Here we went for the politically correct Starbucks cup. And lastly, make it fun, make it easy. Get those one things we've done with our sales ops team. Sybil's here is she sat with every single rep and helped them download the mobile friendly versions of our CRM onto their phone or onto their tablets. They can update everything on the road, in their car, on the go. Everything's got to be mobile friendly. For the sales reps. We have tons of reports and customized dashboards. We have a hot leads report. We customize everything in Salesforce for the rep the way they want to see it again. It sounds like a lot of hand holding, but it's making their job easier and then they're in turn going to make our jobs easier. One story that I put Sidekick on the bottom here is that totally unbeknownst to us, we had a couple reps over the last few months go out and just download Sidekick on their own and start using it on their own on their phones. And they absolutely love it. We didn't ask them to do it. They went out and did it. Why anyone? It makes their job a lot easier. They love seeing these emails flying across their phone. You know, what happened, who clicked, who downloaded, who did this. It's been a great tool for them to make things easier. Thank you. Audience participation is good, so make it super easy. So to summarize, I talked about the top five. Start at the top. Engage with the folks that are running your company, that own your company. The key stage stakeholders in your company. Go to them. Sell your vision. Don't be afraid. Great things will happen. Number two, expand sales universe. Talk to them about all the tools and capabilities and how you're going to make their job so much easier. Three, talk it up. Communicate over. Communicate. We even got our salespeople onto social media. Some of them are terrified of social media. We got them on social media. We have them tweeting now. We've got them doing all sorts of stuff. We send chatter to them. Talk it up. Talk about your shared success. Fall on your sword when you need to. They love that. We fall on our sword when we need to be transparent and realize it's not perfect. Number four, help me out. What was number four? Does anybody remember? Find the right harmony. Get in tune with sales. Walk a thousand miles in their shoes. Shadow them, understand what they're doing for a living, and understand their sales Persona. And lastly, make it super easy and super fun. I believe that if you do these things, your marketing will not get the blues. And we have Q and A. I really hope that you all will ask us questions. My team's here if you want to ask sales questions and validate anything. I said you can do that here. Thank you. Hi. In the back.

Thanks. I have a dilemma in that a lot of the sales folks that we have choose not to use the sales force, believe that they own the leads and see it as kind of big brother. And we've got to bring the whole sales team to the process of understanding. And I'm on the business development side that we're nurturing, but if I don't have any information or anyone has a similar situation, we can't really move forward in knowing where they are.

Okay. So we had a similar challenge. And what I did was I essentially did a business case. I calculated how much we were spending on our CRM per year, which was a significant amount of money. I took that to our CEO and I said, here's how much we're spending on our CRM and here's how many people are using it. We had three people logging in once a week, essentially, and we had 25 licenses. So I did a real short, sweet business case that was based around roi. And I said my strategy for getting sales teams to use the CRM more is to put something in there worthwhile seeing. And if they're seeing prospect activity and engagement in the CRM, then maybe they'll want to use it more.

Okay, thank you.

And that is effectively what happened. Thanks.

You're welcome.

Thanks for the question. Hi. Hi. In the introduction, they said you use Agile marketing. Yes. And we do too. How do you involve sales in the agile marketing process? Do they come to the reviews or do they help you prioritize your backlogs? Or how do you involve them? Yes, great question. I'm so passionate about it. Yeah, Love it, Love it. I love it. Actually, our sales ops manager is here. She comes to our daily standups and she represents sales in our daily standups. And so we do, you know, 10, 15 minute, every day standup, and we go over the sales pipeline, campaigns, everything that's happening with sales, and that really is the glue that helps keep us tied in with sales. And then like I mentioned before, I meet with the VP of sales every week, one on one. So he doesn't come to the standups, but he's part of that process. And then he also participates sometimes in the sprint reviews. Yeah.

I have a quick question. On the right. The other right. There you go.

Hi.

Hey.

Oh, my left.

Yeah, your left. So you mentioned your blog was an important traffic driver for your website. You said your blog was an important traffic driver for your website.

Yes.

Could you talk a little bit about subscriber growth and whether or not that leads to new leads and bookings from the blog?

Sure. Our blog stats continue to just go through the roof every year. They're like doubling and tripling. So I believe it's. Right now I have to check my. I think we're about. The blog is 30% of the traffic overall on our website, to be completely honest, in terms of tying that into leads. We haven't been able to produce significant like opportunities directly from the blogs, but we know that our prospects are looking at our blog. So it's more of a nurturing tool for us than straight out lead gen.

Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it.

Hi.

Hey there. I'm sort of stuck in which comes first, the chicken or the egg. So you're talking about this great first presentation where you sold your CEO on this idea and there was a question over here about that. How much did you have to prove that you had already achieved success? So our stakeholders, they want to see proof that it will work for us before I get approval to proceed.

Yeah. Yeah.

Any suggestions?

Yes. It's kind of a two or three part question, but what we did first was I built Outbound first and outbound was successful and that helped build the credibility from marketing to then try other strategies and more investments like an inbound and SEO. The second part of that that I'm losing. But I wanted to say, what was it?

How much did you have to prove concrete successes? Chicken and the egg, right?

So the way our leaders work is they want to look at what the competitors are doing and what some of the leading companies in the industry are doing. So I think getting together those use cases of what like bleeding edge companies are doing and bringing that to the table really helped as well. And that's something that I did. I went out and I said, it's clear our competitors are crushing us in SEO and inbound. Crushing us. It's not even funny. We are so far behind. And so you have to be very diplomatic. Right. But you also have to be a little bit manipulative. Right. Because you have to make them realize in a gentle way without embarrassing them or making them feel bad that this is an area that needs investment. Our competitors are doing it. Leading industry companies are doing it. Here's the results that they've seen and we had to go blindly on that. Initially I had my sales reps from Eloqua and HubSpot give me the results that some of the companies in very similar industries to us, same company size, had seen. I hope that helps. Hi. Hi. I am a mid level marketing manager and I see awesome. I love mid level marketing managers. I see the need for the handshake between sales and marketing. There is a big fracture between our VP of marketing and our VP of sales. They don't even meet on a monthly basis. So pushing things forward, how do you suggest I drift that upward to make them kind of mend the relationship a little Bit more because I need buy in. Because when I go and report on things, she doesn't, she doesn't want to hear about sales. She doesn't care that I'm meeting with them. So just kind of those things. Right? Create your vision, create a plan. I mean, if they're not getting together independently, that's in itself a problem. But that doesn't need to stop you. Honestly, I would encourage you, same way Brene Brown did this morning. Like be uncomfortable, but go to them and sell something, whatever strategy you think it is that's going to move your business forward. Think like an entrepreneur. You own that company. What is going to move your business forward and go and pitch it. If you keep getting resistance, then there's other companies. Hi. Hi. So I'm quite lucky in that the senior management is really bought into this whole process. And so I just started at my company two months ago to build it in. What I'm concerned about is that these kinds of things take time. And so I have a sales team that's sort of kind of excited about what it is that we're putting together. But it goes a long way from having completely cold calls, you know, to actually getting MQLs. It takes time to nurture the database. So what sort of time expectations did you set as you were pitching these ideas and campaigns and the whole process? So early quick wins are important, small wins, but early quick wins are important in terms of timing. I think it's really important. I mean, this all is not. There's no magic bullet, right? There are. There are some silver bullets, but there's no one magic bullet. And it's going to take time. So I think it is important to set expectations that it takes some time, particularly with the inbound stuff. It takes time to propagate and rank in the search engines. Outbound can be a little faster. We had some really quick early successes with Outbound and that helped build that credibility to give them the faith to continue on with us. So I think setting expectations is really smart. I think a year, you should say a year before you're going to close a major deal. But we found some pretty early successes and we would jump and shout and clap just about setting meetings and getting new opportunities through those deals. So again, make sure that you're promoting yourself as you're getting those small wins and that will help lend that credibility. Thank you. Yeah, good luck. Thanks for the presentation. I had a question on the salespeople you mentioned.

You have warm leads and hot leads.

And salespeople like Hot leads, but they don't always follow up on warm leads. And I was wondering if that's been an issue for you, how you've dealt with it and if that's the same.

Role that calls on warm leads as.

Hot leads or if that's different roles at your company. Do you want to answer that one? So John is our director of sales, but we just went through a transition. We have kind of like inside sales folks that are more like, we call them account managers and then we have senior sales executives. And so yes, we do have different roles, but not based on MQL and SQL. We use the more junior account managers to call on more of the MQLs, but they're going to call on SQLs as well. We actually don't have a lot of problems with sales following up on leads. I mean, they'd like to follow up probably before they should. Like they follow up on everything. And we love that too. We encourage that. But we don't separate out like an MQL from an SQL. And who does? Which one? I think that might be like too much minutia. But we do have SLAs and so we ask for MQLs that they call an MQL within 48 hours and an SQL in 24 hours. If they don't do that and they don't update the CRM with customers contact attempted, there's an escalation procedure that we go through where eventually I'm notified, the boss is notified that there's a lead that has taken a significant amount of activity and they haven't been followed up on and it's in so and so's name. So yeah. Thanks, Big Brother system. Thank you. I work with a sales team that's totally afraid to use new tools. We just recently got marketing automation in January. They don't want to use it, they don't want to use social media. And the VP of sales has even said like she doesn't want her sales team doing any marketing if they're not doing sales or not doing their job. Trying to see if you had any advice or encouragement in a situation like that. What's the question? The question is, I guess, addressing a sales team that's afraid to harness inbound tools and they're afraid to use new tools. You know, we have a CRM, but they don't want, they hardly even use that and they don't want to use the marketing automation. They don't want to use social media. Go to the top. Okay. Go to the top. Okay. Thank you. It feels bad. You got to rat them out a little bit, but you got to go to the top and say, here's the opportunity. Here's how much you're spending on a CRM. No one's using it. You know, here are the tools we have that you're investing. I assume you're investing in some tools, and they're not being used, so, yeah, that's what I would say. Thank you. You're welcome. Sorry, folks. You can come up and ask more questions. I'm happy to answer them. I'll be here for two more days, so if you see me in the hallway, stop me, talk to me. I like to connect.